Lee.org

I’m buying a laptop for a client.

I’m shopping on the Dell website, trying to find out how much the laptop is going to cost with a particular feature-set and I can’t do it. There’s shit like:

Right now, double your memory FREE (1) when you purchase ANY Dell system or select Dell servers! OR, choose cash back instead of more memory and save up to $200 on select servers or $150 on select systems, after mail-in rebate!(2)

(1) Double memory offer can not be combined with mail-in rebate. Maximum memory is 256MB with Dimension 2400 desktops and 512MB with Dimension 4600, 4600C and 8300 desktops, all OptiPlex desktops, all Dell Precision� workstations, all Latitude notebooks and Inspiron 1150, 5150, 300M, 600M, 8600 and 9100 notebooks. Maximum memory is 1GB with Dimension XPS desktops, Inspiron XPS notebooks and all PowerEdge and PowerEdge SC servers

(2) Mail-in rebate excludes Dimension 2400 and 2400 n series desktops with an Intel Celeron processor. Offer valid on orders placed between 05/20/04 and 05/26/04. Cannot be combined with free memory offer. Rebate must be postmarked within 30 calendar days of system ship date. Rebate checks are ordinarily processed within 8-10 weeks. Go to http://www.dell.com/smallbizrebates for rebate details.

When you cut through all the shit above, it comes out to: When you buy a computer, extra memory costs extra.

Of course, it also means that when you’re trying to tally up the price, you get shit like what you see at the far right. How am I supposed to feel confident about pushing that Continue button when I can’t tell how much the (rather expensive) item costs!? All I do know from this page is that my purchase is not going to cost $1226 or $1201. I might (or not) be eligible for any one of 7 advertised specials on this one computer. The list of specials takes up the entire right column of this journal entry! And each and every special has convoluted rules (see quote above) that has to be thoroughly understood before being embarked upon. What a nightmare.

I stole the CSS from Boxbackup. It’s journal6.css in my random cycling. Perty, ain’t it?

Every month, Paypal’s policies become nastier and nastier. I’ve read many stories at NoPaypal and a couple other sites. Now I’m starting to believe them. Freenet just reported that Paypal cut them off because they didn’t like them.

17th May, 2004 : Paypal suspends Freenet donations account
Paypal has frozen the account we use to accept donations over the web, they refuse to give any reason other than “use of an anonymous proxy”, which suggests that someone at Paypal took a dislike to the goals of our project, since I have never used an anonymous proxy to access Paypal (this being the activity I assume they sought to prevent). It is fortunate that Johann Gutenberg did not rely on Paypal to fund his work on the printing press, which also allowed anonymous publication of information, since his account would probably have been frozen too.

If you are concerned about whether your account might be at risk due to your political opinions you may wish to speak to their PR contact Hani Durzy at (408) 376 7458. If you are an investor and you would like to see what other political opinions Paypal doesn’t like, you may want to speak to their Investor contact Tracey Ford at (408) 376 7205.

They have said that they will refund our outstanding balance ($550) by check, but all of the projects subscriptions have been canceled which is a significant setback. Other means of accepting donations, including E-Gold, are still active. Anyone wishing to make a donation by check should email me directly. Unfortunately neither of these methods are as convenient as Paypal, but we will do our best to find an alternative ASAP.

E-Gold and the somewhat related digital monies are starting to look pretty darn good. E-Gold fees are about 1% of the transaction while Paypal is about 3%…. a 66% discount.

If you have ever accidentally deleted your web site, you might find it cached on the web with one of these tools

* Archive.org
* Do a Google search for your web site like so: allinurl:mysite.com site:mysite.com

(thanks to Uptimebot and Google for that second pointer)

I’ve been keeping these sounds on my Pocket PC for a long while now. It’s time I put them someplace ‘useful’

First, some foreign language profanity

Shysa by Laura Hanna

Stragna by Jasna

Merde by Shara

Tim Reynolds with his classic Wavexpress line

John Tesorio’s classic line, and the other one.

Simon Tidman really wants to know…

http://habeas.com/ I still don’t totally understand how this company uses the power of haiku to defeat spammers. But I think I like it.

I think it works thusly:
- If you promise not to spam people and sign up with them, you get 8 points subtracted from your SpamAssassin score when you use the Habeas header in your emails.
- If you (illegally & inappropriately) use the Habeas header in your email, then when the Habeas people catch you, they’ll tell SpamAssassin that the IP address that sent the email gets 8 points added to their spam score.
- If you illegally use the Habeas header, they’ll sue your ass off, but quick, for copyright infringement (the poem), defamation (their header would never voluntarily associate with spam), and license infringement (you didn’t sign up for the Habeas service).

Nice. Of course, a distributed offshore email relaying scheme can probably get around it. Forged headers might also be able to get around it. The battle continues…

(For reference, using the phrase “WIN FREE VIAGRA!” in the subject field of an email costs the message only about 4 points. A difference of 8 points will almost definitely make or break an email’s spam threshold in SpamAssassin. I’ve only every been marginally happy with SpamAssassin’s performance. I set it to a threshold of “8″ and it catches about 10 spams a day (that’s 40% of the spams I receive recently). If I set it any higher, it starts catching legitimate mail. Still, SpamAssassin from my email hosting company and Cloudmark Spamnet on my client have been working together to do an excellent job recently.)

Thanks to Dada Mail for pointing out this Habeas thing to me.

Oh and I also just noticed….

Vispul’s Razor (the source code for Spamnet) is open source. The plug-in for MS Outlook (the Spamnet service) isn’t.

The Vispul’s Razor / Spamnet collaborative filtering servers are located at cloudmark.com.

That’s an interesting collaboration between open source and not… The unix folks are free to develop the brains of the system in an open source environment while Vispul is (hopefully) making money off the gazillions of Windows clients. If you had unix at home, you’d be able to get the service for free. But hey, Vispul is only charging $2.00/month for the service. It’s well worth it for any individual client to buy the service. Everyone wins. Open source seems to work.

I was parked in a parking lot on the NJ Parkway on Feb 23rd. As I was walking toward my car, I pushed the button on my keychain to unlock the door. To my surprise, that caused the alarm on a car just across from mine to start beeping. I unlocked my car again and the alarm stopped. BEEP BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP BEEP. I’m thinking that there aren’t enough radio code keys out there!

And that reminds me of a story a friend told me recently. (Gosh darn it, I can’t remember who told me this story! It wasn’t PPG…. so who was it? AAARRRGGG My memory!

My friend gave her car keys to an attendant to fetch her car from the lot. A few minutes later, the attendant drives up with the wrong car. Some discussion ensued. It turned out that her car had been parked in the wrong space. But the kicker is that her car keys fit the car that was in her space! Not enough key combinations!

Grrr.. My front brakes need replacing. $227.

Grr*3.9 My air conditioner died, the compressor isn’t compressing. $895. Jeez, for that much I should just buy a lot of dry ice and leave it in the trunk.

Grr*.44 It’ll cost about $100 to fix my tape player… I’ll hold off on that expense ’til next month.

And the worst part is, I bought a 50,000 mile extended warrantee on the car. Things didn’t start going wrong until 52,000 miles.

at 52k, there was an overheating problem
at 59k (now) the front brake pads and rotors need replacing (the rotors not from wear but rust), the a/c needs serious repair, and the tape player is sick.

Moderately good news: The people at Johnson Chrysler rotated my tires going front to back. But the manual says to cross-rotate the tires. I raised my eyebrows at this discrepancy. I’ve asked around and gotten mixed answers. The guys at the oil change place though it was wrong. Mike at On The Move Auto said that front-to-back rotation was fine and that 1 in 1,000 tires fail when cross-rotated. So I guess I’m not so unhappy about Johnson Chrysler not cross-rotating.

This is a photo of Julia B. Boolia on the Merry Go Round at the Hackettstown Spring Festival. Nice photo, eh?