Category: Hmmm

First John Peel, now ‘Fluff’. RIP

I just checked in (online) for my flights back to Seattle on Sunday. I’m due to depart Boston at 6:00am and land at IAD (Washington Dulles) at 7:49am; allow a few extra minutes to taxi to the gate. Meanwhile my flight from IAD to SEA is supposed to start boarding at 7:50am, and to push back at 8:20am.

Oh yes: the BOS-IAD flight has an 87% on-time record.

Wish me luck….

Yes, of course I knew that Seattle was notorious for its rainy climate. But this is ridiculous:

“Rivers in at least nine of the region’s drainage systems are expected to peak at levels up to 20 percent higher than anything on record”, said Johnny Burg, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Seattle… [D]uring a typical November, an average of 5.9 inches will be recorded at [SEATAC]… Not even a full week into the month [they’ve] recorded 7.38 inches at the airport — including about 3 inches that had fallen between midnight Sunday and 5 p.m. Monday.

Coyotes on Beacon Hill?

I just received an email on my Gmail account. It was an odd email, apparently from Microsoft, but that’s another subject. As I often do with suspicious emails, I checked out the full headers, and the To: address was wrong. My Gmail address has a dot in it, and this address was dot-less. Next to the address was the comment:
(Yes, this is you. Learn more.)
So I clicked on the link, and this is what I read:

Am I receiving someone else’s email?
Google Mail does not recognise dots (.) as characters within a username. This way, you can add and remove dots to your username for desired address variations. Messages sent to your.username@googlemail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@googlemail.com are delivered to the same inbox, since the characters in the username are the same.
Keep in mind that hyphens (-) and underscores (_) cannot be used in a Google Mail address. In addition, usernames are not case sensitive. Therefore, it does not matter if you enter upper case or lower case letters.
If you created your account with a dot in your username and you wish you had not, you can change your ‘Reply-to address’. To change your reply-to address:

1. Click ‘Settings’ at the top of any Google Mail page.
2. Enter your username@googlemail.com without a dot in the ‘Reply-to address’ field.
3. Click ‘Save Changes’.

When you log in to Google Mail, you need to enter any dots that were originally defined as part of your username.

This seems utterly clueless to me. Not only does it ignore the spirit (if not the letter) of the relevant RFCs, it also violates the principle of least surprise. In every other email system that I know of, the strings “first.last@domain.com” and “firstlast@domain.com” represent different addresses. To Google, these are the same address. And they aren’t even consistent, as the final sentence makes clear.
Case-insensitivity is fine. After all, everything after the “@” in an address is case-insensitive, and we’ve got plenty of experience with Win/Mac file names. But ignoring punctuation? Of those folks who try adding or subtracting dots, how many will realize that it only applies to the left of the “@”, and only with Gmail? And just think of how many systems require you to use your email address as a username. I’m pretty sure that Amazon.com isn’t going to allow you to add random dots to your address when you log in….
I’m still thinking through the many different ways in which this sucks – with spam, digital signatures, inter-system forwarding, whitelisting/blacklisting schemes, etc. Once you screw with the identity function in any system, bad things are likely to follow.
Sorry, Google – you just lost about 6 INT points (and a couple of CHR as well). What a stupid design. Even though it will be a tedious chore, I think I’m going to dump my Gmail account and switch to Yahoo! – they allow punctuation characters and don’t mess around with them.

Apparently I’ve moved from the third gayest city in the US to the second. Who could tell? It’s certainly a friendly place. I imagine that if it wasn’t for the folks on the other side of the Cascades, Seattlites would be able to enjoy gay marriage, just like Bostonians.

Those who know me well will confirm that I loath guns. I cannot imagine any situation in which I would allow a gun in the house, much less own one. My personal creed is Be part of the solution, not part of the problem, which definitely applies here.
However, I now find myself making the extraordinary admission that I might make an exception….

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In case you’ve forgotten, WETA is the amazing outfit that did the special effects for “Lord of the Rings” and “Kong”, among other films.

I hesitate to post this question, because I’m not sure it’s in my interest for things to change, but anyway….

Why is it that 99% of the blogspam comments that hit this blog begin with the words “Nice site”? Surely the spammers realize that such predictability just plays into the hands of the spam detection engines like Akismet. OK, I realize that the most likely explanation is that everyone is using the same spambot, and the “Nice site” is boilerplate which they can’t change. But it’s still pretty dumb….

(We’re talking a lot of spam here – Akismet has caught 7,130 spam coments since I upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2 in March.)

I took another look at the 25(!) IKEA boxes in my apartment, and I’m beginning to think that the rational approach is going to be to hire someone to do {some|all} of the assembly. craigslist has a couple of possibilities. Does anyone have any suggestions, experiences, cautions, recommendations, or horror-stories?

In brief:

• Saturday: Getting stuff for the apartment: 5 hours at IKEA (most items to be delivered on Tuesday), 2 hours at Macy’s, 1 hour at Office Depot.
• Sunday: Recovering from the above: playing Civ3, exploring more of Seattle, and getting my Amazon laptop to play with my WiFi.