Author: matthew

Note: Due to the size of this thread and the difficulty navigating it, I have closed it to new comment entries. Thank you for understanding.

For those of you who are only interested in getting to the moral of the story, there are two:

• Be extremely cautious and conservative buying stuff off of eBay
• Anything which sounds to good to be true probably is.

The other day, my wife’s passing hand, combined with some static buildup, managed to shock my aging, decrepit laptop enough that the network card and PCMCIA slot failed to work for the next hour and a half. Eventually, they “came back” on their own (several reboots later), after a great deal of monkeying, shaking, powering-off, unplugging, removing batteries, and general hair-pulling and curse-slinging.

I realized then that my old, reliable Sony Vaio PCG-Z505SX had seen better days. It never has really been a “desktop replacement”, but much more a “desktop adjunct”. The thing I really like about it is the size. It’s small — only a 12″ screen — and the keys are in intuitive locations. It has a positive “feel” why you type on the keyboard, and that’s 90% of what I do: typing. Well, if you exclude mousing.

When I want to play games, I go sit in front of my big desktop computer and play. I also use that same workstation to record music, and frequently I’ve found that drivers or updates which I need to play a given game conflict with what I need to run my digital recording gear. It sucks, but recording wins out over games. I have a few still sitting in their boxes because I found that, in order to run them, I had to upgrade drivers which would then cause my recording rig to not work right. Darn. They remain unplayed.

Anyway, I got laptop-hungry. This laptop broke, and I realized that it was last mass-produced in 1999. That’s a good run for a piece of hardware, and other than having to replace the hard drive a year ago, it’s been really good to me. All good things must end, and I suspect this recent ethernet/PC card failure is the first of many failures to come. Besides, it can only fit 128MB of RAM. I have more RAM than that on the video card of my desktop PC. It does make it a somewhat slow, frustrating experience to use, ameliorated only by the fact that I have it running GNU/Linux, which handles aging, under-sized hardware much more gracefully than Windows XP.

Here’s where the real adventure begins. I spent some time early this morning, over lunch, and this evening investigating laptop options. I checked out the most recent models, read a bunch of reviews, and decided what kinds of features I wanted. Initially, I really wanted an Apple PowerBook, but I abandoned that plan. As much as I love my Mac upstairs, I realized that I could replace my 4-year-old recording rig with a new laptop. I don’t want to re-invest the money in a Mac-based recording rig, really. It was too expensive, and took too much time to build up, for me to want to do it all over again on a different software platform.

Besides, there’s that whole learning-curve thing. I’m comfortable with Cakewalk Sonar. I really don’t want to learn ProTools if I can avoid it.

I found some great deals on eBay. Being somewhat naive about these things, I followed the instruction on the posting which said, “I have a buy-it-now price for this auction; contact me at b_blancoo0@yahoo.com for the price”.

I did so. Here’s the e-mail exchange. I quickly became very leery. See if you can spot what’s wrong with his responses…

From: Me To: b_blancoo0@yahoo.com Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 19:27:30 -0700 Subject: Buy it now on Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD

You mentioned to write you for “buy it now” pricing on the Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD . What is that?

Thanks,

Matthew P. Barnson

From: Miser <b_blancoo0@yahoo.com> To: Me Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 18:42:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Buy it now on Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD

the buy it now price is$825 with shipping included reply me asap!

From: Me To: Miser <b_blancoo0@yahoo.com> Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 20:19:37 -0700 Subject: Re: Buy it now on Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD

I apologize for my incredulity, but that seems to be about $1,000 less than competing similar laptops. How do you sell them at such a low price? Is this simply a great deal for the ethically-challenged?

In addition, your eBay account seems to have been suspended due to your request for offline “buy it now” requests. Do you plan to reinstate it? I would feel more comfortable making a purchase knowing that your account is in good standing.

From: Miser <b_blancoo0@yahoo.com> To: Me Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 19:26:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Buy it now on Alienware Area51m 3.2GHz P4 1GB RAM 60GB HD

sir i have a problem with my account and i stop the auctions and ebat will resolv this problem i sell at this price because i need this money for my soon life reply me asap and tell if you make this deal with me

Yep. 100% criminal. Important tip for would-be criminals: if a customer asks why something is such a good deal, telling them the price is good because “i need this money for my soon life” is probably not a good gambit. This would be laughable if it weren’t for the next closed-bid seller whom I contacted regarding the sale of a laptop who was so remarkably similar.

From: Emicrox11@aol.com <Emicrox11@aol.com> To: Me Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 22:46:53 EST Subject: Re: Question for item #5567966663 – BRAND NEW ALIENWARE AREA-51M 7700 3.2, WI…

HI First I want to tell you that my laptop are brand new, unopened box all accessories included and also an international warranty . My price is the best you could get: 900USD(not euro), including the shipping and insurance taxes. We will pay them because the package will be delivered from Europe. As delivery service we use UPS2days air service or overnight (with insurance and 15 days return policy), because it’s the faster. And if you will have a quick payment, we must also have a quick delivery. So that’s why we use as a payment method Western Union money transfer, the fastest and also very secure way of sending money. I just open a electronics company here in europe If i will make with you a good deal,you will recommend me ,maybe ,to your friends or to other persons.For me it is very important to have permanent deals on ebay, any negatice deal will not make good to me,That explain the price So, if you agree with my terms I’m sure that we can close the deal as soon as possible. Waiting your quick answer right now, THANK YOU

Another important tip for would-be criminals: Asking people to send money internationally via Western Union is almost a sure tip-off that this is a version of the Spanish Prisoner, a.k.a. the Nigerian Scam. Of course, hundreds of people fall for this every year, to the tune of thousands and possibly millions of dollars…

I did not purchase from either seller. I value my money. Here are my suggestions when you make ebay purchases:

1. Check the seller’s history. Not just their feedback rating, because these days so many accounts are getting hijacked, but actually what they have sold, how much they’ve sold it for, what their payment requirements were, etc. For instance, the feedback history on the second seller was great. But all he had ever sold were sporting goods, and he had only ever accepted PayPal. This is a sudden, out-of-character change. Even if it were legit, that sudden of a change would leave me leery.
2. No Western Union or Money Orders out of the country. It doesn’t matter how good the deal is, it’s not a good deal when they walk away with your $1000 and you have nothing to show for it.
3. As much as I hate to say it, check their grammatical habits. “Nigerian Scammers” have a peculiar writing style. It’s an immediate red-flag to a potential ripoff. On the other hand, someone being smooth and well-spoken is no guarantee of truthfulness. That’s why con artists do so well in this country, too.

I despise criminals. My greatest concern is simply that I’ve given these scammers my real-life email address, and I’m really not that tough to locate. Ahh, well, there’s no such thing as privacy anyways.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Of course there’s no reason for it, it’s just our policy.

So if you, like me, have been watching the DVDs of Firefly lately, and have been wondering what the actual translations of the Chinese curses used by the cast are, well, wonder no more.

If you actually like this kind of stuff, well, you’re probably right up there with the people who use Klingon to swear at their mommas. But hey, I’m going to learn a couple of these, so that I can use them instead of my more mundane curses! I mean, why settle for a simple “Crap!” when you can say “Da-shiong bao-jah-shr duh la-doo-tze!” (Explosive diarrhea of an elephant) instead?

(Hey! You! Chinese Language Purist about to rip me a new one because you can’t figure out what is said above! Why not read the site — linked above as “wonder no more” — before getting on my case? I’m just the messenger, and have absolutely zero interest in learning how to do anything in Chinese other than mutter unintelligible curses.)

I arrived a full hour early for the interview. I had forgotten that the small campus of this potential employer was only thirty minutes or so from downtown Salt Lake City. I sat in my car, listened to the Laugh USA channel on my XM Radio, fired up my laptop, did some geeky stuff with a Linux kernel (a diff in order to see if I could back-port a USB definition for my Tungsten C, but no luck), read some of my Linux Journal, and waited until there were 30 minutes before my interview.

I sauntered into the building.

The signs in back looked nothing like they’d looked the last time I was here. Oops, wrong suite, one more down!

I walked in, talked to the nice older receptionist by the name of Carol, she handed me an application, and I Sat down to fill it out. I noticed a thirty-something guy filling out an application at the counter. He appeared to be another candidate. He was smartly dressed in a gray business suit, sported a shaved head, was lean, and had that kind of rugged, chiseled, outdoors-y look to him.

I glanced down at my small, but steadily advancing, pot-belly. No tie. Some business-casual slacks, long-sleeved red shirt, and black leather jacket. Damn, I am such a geek. I keep thinking I need to hop back onto my exercise regimen and get back the glimpse of six-pack that I’d almost had a year ago, but it keeps being pushed back for things that are more fun.

“It takes all kinds”, I thought to myself. In this kind of tech company, the contents of one’s brain was much more important than the fat content of one’s abdoment. I looked around at the people moving in and out of the entrance, and in typical “technology company” fashion, there were all manners of dress: ties, dresses, business suits, jeans with sweatshirts and sneakers. You name it. Good, I really wasn’t too far out of the norm. However, I ran out to my car and fetched a tie so that I was slightly more presentable. You never know.

I finished filling out the application. I really wish more companies would move to electronic methods for this stuff. My hand always cramps up because I write by hand so rarely. Give me a typewriter, and everybody will have a much easier time reading the darn stuff. Not to mention, it would be much easier for me to write it.

A few minutes later, I watched the interviewer, Rick, come up and introduce himself to the other candidate. “I’m Rick Soandso. Right this way.” He escorted Chiseled-Feature-Man down a short hallway and disappeared into what seemed to be a small conference room. I intentionally sat with my back to the short hallway, so that I would not see who was going in and out. I’ve found that things go most smoothly if I introduce myself for the first time having not actually seen someone, rather than having watched them float back and forth while staring at them repeatedly.

The first interviewer reappeared about forty minutes later, ten minutes after my scheduled appointment time, and introduced himself to me. He explained he was running a little late, and thanked me for my patience as he explained he had a bit more to do before seeing me.

A few minutes later, the other candidate emerged from the short hallway. He futzed with some business cards on the receptionist’s desk. When Rick showed up again and made a formal introduction with me, he asked Rick for a business card. Rick asked Chiseled-Feature-Man to hang around for a few minutes, and he’d provide him one.

Chiseled-Feature-Man (CFM) looked nervous. He was extremely self-possessed going in, and yet came out looking very anxious. Not a good sign.

Rick and I made small talk for a few minutes, after a somewhat less-than-graceful half-joke on my part about competition for job positions. He explained the company’s organization, what the role was of the position I was applying for, and some of the technology in use while caveating, “I am a manager, not a technical person, so I may not know what you are talking about”.

Eventually, the next interviewer was summoned. Brett, his name was. We chit-chatted about some of the same topics covered with Rick, then he began asking some historical questions about my background, mixed with a few technical questions. We chatted about Linux and technology for about 30 minutes, before summoning the final interviewer.

“Nate’s interview may be more interesting,” Brett informed me. “He has the legendary laptop.”

Now, I’d heard about this laptop. Rick had mentioned it to me, as how they evaluate the basic technical capabilities of candidates. I was a little nervous.

Nate entered, carrying the notorious machine. We spoke for about 5 minutes, covering much of the same ground again regarding my background and interests. I learned a little bit about him too.

“So this is the legendary laptop,” I segued, “why don’t we dive in?”

“OK,” he responded, shutting the unit down. “It has a problem with X. You don’t know the root password. See if you can fix it.”

I powered the machine up. After the usual BIOS screens, I saw the grub prompt (grub is a boot-loader regularly used on GNU/Linux systems), pressed “a” to append to the kernel execution command, added “single” to the kernel arguments so that it booted to single-user mode, and booted.

It went straight to X11, flashing an NVIDIA logo at me repeatedly. “Well, I thought you were going to single user,” Nate began, “but this is the problem. I think the last guy really messed it up.”

Since it was obviously stuck in an infinite loop (darn Redhat, and their policy of setting X to “restart” via init in runlevel 5, rather than “once” like it is on Gentoo), I powered the machine off, made a joke about hoping we were running a journaled filesystem, and then powered it back up again.

“Let me give you a little help, because this isn’t the problem you’re trying to solve. Add ‘init=/bin/bash’ to the end of the kernel invocation argument.”

I did so. Within a few moments, it reported a kernel panic and crashed.

“I think I need to find another laptop,” Nate informed me, then bustled out. He returned a few minutes later with another box, booted it up, typed in a single command, and then powered it off again. “Try again,” he asked.

I booted to single-user mode, changed the root password, added a nonprivileged account, gave it sudo privileges, went to init 3, and logged in as the unprivileged user. I like to have a log of the commands I run as root, and “sudo” provides this. I use it all the time on the laptop I’m using to write this blog entry.

I went through several things. I tried a “find / -atime 1 >~/find.log” to see all the files changed in the last day. I chatted with Nate for a few minutes while the hard drive churned. I opened another virtual terminal to check the status of the log, and it had found nothing. I realized later that I’d provided the wrong flags to “find” to actually have it find which files had changed in the last day. Oops.

Anyway, I tried starting X and redirected stderr and stdout to log files. “startx 2>error.log 1>out.log”

It hung. I hard-rebooted the system since I couldn’t get to a virtual terminal.

“This is an evil little problem,” Nate informed me. “Nobody in the last two years has been able to fix it in an interview.”

The machine rebooted. I again went to single-user mode, set the default runlevel to 3 instead of 5 (console mode, rather than X), and checked my logs.

“Could not find default font: fixed” the error log from X reported to me.

“Huh,” I thought, “I wonder if this uses a font server?” I don’t use a font server on Gentoo, preferring to specify the fonts in the X server configuration file since I get a small speed boost from that. On my aging 366MHz Pentium 3 laptop, every speed boost I can get, I use.

I checked /etc/rc5.d. Sure enough, the X Font Server wasn’t set to run. I checked if it was running (ps -ef | grep xfs), and it wasn’t. I changed the name of the symlink from “K10xfs” to “S10xfs”. I fired it up with “./S10xfs start”. I changed the link in /etc/rc3.d as well, just to cover my bases in case I tried to start X from init runlevel 3.

I typed “startx”.

It worked.

I said, “Looks like it’s working!”

Nate added, “Well, you’re not quite done.”

I removed the unprivileged user account I’d created, along with his password and group allocation. I cleaned up the sudoers file so he wasn’t in there anymore. I rebooted, made sure X came up, and ran “chkconfig –list xfs”, corrected it so it ran in runlevels 3, 4, and 5 with “chkconfig –level 345 xfs on”, and then Nate said, “NOW you’re done.

“I think, actually, one other person has managed to fix it in the last two years. And it used to be harder; there was a change to the font server that eventually Redhat fixed.”

I smiled. I realized with satisfaction that I’d won a round of the interviews. And I thought Nate was a pretty cool guy and had enjoyed his interesting, but somewhat tricky, problem. I think I’ll like working with him.

This is a company I’d love to work for. They have a solid reputation in the Linux community, and are working on some seriously cool cutting-edge stuff. They’re a startup, so there’s some inherent risk involved, but if they can meet my modest salary requirement, I’m certain that we can get along.

I called the recruiter on the way home, and left him a voicemail to inform him that the interviews went well. I think I was slightly overconfident, assuring him that I think I’d like to work there, and I’m certain my interviewers would like to work with me. Darn. I should keep that tendency toward overconfidence in check.

Regardless, I feel like I scored a home run. What a great feeling after my disaster of an interview a few days ago. Very cool stuff.

It’s not glamorous, but it’d be a good job with a company with a solid rep. That sounds like a lot of fun to me.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Alcoholics Anonymous is when you get to drink under someone else’s name.

As most regular readers have been able to tell, I’ve been running Google AdSense on the right-hand column of barnson.org for the last couple of weeks. It brings in about $1.38 a day, which is enough that, when they cut me a check after earning my first $100.00, it’ll cover the costs of running the site. Almost 🙂

My question for you as a reader is, all things aside, are the ads too invasive? They’re kind of big and kind of blocky. Do you think they work, or should I get rid of them?

I’ve been supporting the site out of my pocket for the last three years, and that’s probably not going to change soon. One generous member pays me $10.00/month to host his web site here. And really, the only thing he gets here that he couldn’t get for free elsewhere is lots of space, no bandwidth limitation (effectively… I’m limited to 40GB a month total for all my sites and have rarely approached it), and responsive tech support 🙂

But I keep wondering if folks reading the site regularly think it’s too much. I value your opinion; let me know!

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Nice guys finish last, but we get to sleep in. — Evan Davis

So I went down to the coffee shop inside the building where I’m doing some short-term contract work, sat down with my laptop, and waited for a phone call.

And waited.

My nervousness grew. This was going to be an important job interview. They were ten minutes late, and my bladder was growing full.

And waited.

Finally, at about fifteen minutes after the hour, the phone rang.

“Hello, this is Matthew.” (my customary phone greeting)

“Uh, hello, is Matthew there?”

“This is Matthew. Is this Earl and Verl?”

“Hello, Matthew. This is Earl. I’m here with Verl and Bob.”

“Hello, Matthew,” said voice 1.

“Hello, Matthew,” said voice 2.

(Names have been changed, of course.)

I could tell right away this interview would be interesting. One of the interviewers spoke English clearly, with only a moderate Indian accent, but the other two were very difficult to understand. To make it even more fun, there was a very high, whining noise in the background, and a constant rush of air as if someone were working on a server while on the phone.

“Hi Earl, Hi Verl, Hi Bob. Nice to meet you!” I responded.

There was a long, pregnant pause. I heard the faint shuffling of papers.

“Matthew, are you there?” came the voice of Earl tenatively over the phone.

“Yes, I’m here,” I replied, my nervousness mounting.

“Ah, Matthew, thank you for taking our call today. Let’s start with telling us a little about yourself.”

Wow, that was abrupt. Usually, in an interview, I’m used to exchanging a few pleasantries beforehand, getting to know them a little bit, and that kind of thing. “Well,” I thought to myself, “perhaps they are short on time.”

Now, I’d been prepped a little bit by my recruiter, Louis. She’d informed me that these guys had found candidates who had a wide variety of UNIX experience, but had always fallen flat trying to find someone with sufficient Linux administration experience. I figured they’d be tough, but I was ready.

“Well, as you know, my name is Matthew Barnson,” I began as I launched into my thirty-second, canned ‘get to know me’ introduction which I use for interviews. “I’m a career UNIX and Linux admin with experience in diverse industries. Not only am I a systems administrator, but I’m also a professional musician, having recently released…”

“Matthew? Matthew? I cannot hear you. Can you speak up?”

Crap. I had heard from a previous caller that the microphone on my phone wasn’t loud enough. Guess it’s time to replace the phone.

I spoke up.

“Yes, sorry, is this better?” I asked in a much louder voice.

“No” chimed a chorus of three voices from the other side. “Can’t hear you.” “Too quiet.” “Something wrong.”

“I hear a high-pitched whining noise in the background,” I replied, “that’s quite loud on your end. Is there some way to quiet it?”

“Let us call you back in five minutes from a conference room,” replied Earl, “then we won’t have the background noise anymore.”

“OK, talk to you then,” I replied, and hung up.

Now, for those who aren’t familiar with interviewing, this is not an auspicious beginning to a job interview. Not auspicious at all. Phone problems prejudice it from the start. I was nervous, I was off-balance, and I had just biffed my introduction.

How do I do that again without it sounding canned? I didn’t know. I guess we’d just plunge into technical details.

Seven minutes later, the phone rang again. I’d relocated myself to a more comfortable chair in the lounge of the building, and planned on speaking loudly. Well, it turned out I wasn’t speaking loudly enough again, so I relocated to outside where I could shout into the telephone.

I still heard a very loud hissing coming from the other end of the line. I suspect that was our basic problem, but who am I to tell them “move again! Your building is too loud!”

We began simply enough. “Describe how you create a filesystem on Linux,” he started, with no further preamble.

I walked him through the steps: fdisk. mkfs. mount.

“What flags would you give to mkfs to make the ext3 filesystem?”

Stumper. I don’t remember those flags off the top of my head; I just run mkfs, it lists the options, and I use the ext3 option. And I didn’t have a Redhat box in front of me. “I really don’t know offhand, but I’m certain if I were in front of a redhat box right now, I’d see the option quickly.”

That turned out to be the theme of the rest of the interview.

“Describe, in detail, how to create a Flash Archive Image on Solaris.” “What is the name and path of the file which stores MAC addresses for use during a jumpstart on Solaris?” “What is the location of the configuration file you’d edit to change a bind zone on Redhat?” (I knew what to use, but didn’t know Redhat’s exact path) “Describe how to create a multiple disk filesystem on Linux kernel 2.4” “How would you repair a bad superblock on a mirrored drive for a Solaris system?” “How would you clone a Redhat box?” (knew this one, after I described the process, he incredulously asked, “you’ve tried this and it works?”… Obviously, it wasn’t the answer he wanted.

We went on in this vein. I was batting about .500, nailing the answers that I’d worked with regularly, but I sensed stress from the tenor of the conversation. We made frequent requests on both ends to repeat the questions or answers due to the loud noise in the background. The fact was, that I flat didn’t know the command line arguments for a few dozen separate utilities which they apparently used daily.

The interview was not going well.

I realized that I’d spent far too much time in Gentoo, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and had not kept up with Red Hat and its derivatives, so I couldn’t answer some questions competently.

We finally got to the “what questions do you have for us?” part of the interview, and I asked a couple of lame questions about the business. I knew it was a formality at this point. I could have asked some more technical questions, but my goal was really to just get out of the interview fast. I haven’t choked during a tense situation so badly in years.

The worst part for me was, there were a few questions where I knew that I once knew the answer.

And I couldn’t remember them.

I don’t know if it’s old age, disuse, or something else, but that was the most troubling thing of all to me. Knowing that I once knew something, but could no longer remember the specifics. The panic from that was worse than all of the other nervousness put together.

Is that a normal thing that I shouldn’t worry about? Maybe I should just go into some sort of soft-ball profession where that kind of total recall isn’t expected anymore. Like sales. Or belly dancing. Or a circus sideshow.

So I’m hoarse from shouting into a telephone for an hour. And I’m tired from having to stand (actually, walk around outside, randomly) for an hour while explicating UNIX details.

And I don’t think I got the job.

Man, life is disappointing sometimes.

There’s an interesting story unfolding, about which I’m of two minds. Should a judge who is legally married to only one woman, but “spiritually married” to two others, by whom he has sired many children, lose his job due to being a polygamist?

If you’d like more background from a balanced perspective, please visit the Utah Polygamy Chronology. In summary, the federal government and Utah wrangled for years over illegalizing polygamy in exchange for statehood. Eventually, the practice was repudiated, statehood granted, and the territorial government of Utah was transitioned from a theocracy to a secular democracy.

Heirarchical polygamy, however, continues among some 30,000 people in the western US to this day.

Fundamentalist — read: polygamist — Mormon groups have received a great deal of scrutiny in recent years due to widespread welfare manipulation, poor health care, child marriage, incest, and child abuse (see this article about the Kingston Clan’s holdings and foibles). Utah’s passage of Proposition 3, which defined marriage as a union between “one man and one woman”, was widely perceived as an “anti-gay marriage” amendment. However, it was also hailed by some anti-polygamy activists as another tool in the arsenal to fight polygamy.

The case of this judge seems, to me, to be a test case of Utah’s Prop 3 and anti-polygamy constitutional wording, and important in considering the future of polygamy in the United States.

George Q. Cannon’s 1879 statement upon the conviction of George Reynolds (the polygamist who’s case went to the Supreme Court) seems to summarize the defensive stance of the judge being tried:

Our crime has been [that] we married women instead of seducing them; we reared children instead of destroying them; we desired to exclude from the land prostitution, bastardy and infanticide … Let it be published to the four corners of the earth that in this land of liberty, the most blessed and glorious upon which the sun shines, the law is swiftly invoked to punish religion, but justice goes limping and blindfolded in pursuit of crime.

Do you think the judge should lose his job for being a practicing polygamist? Why or why not?

Will his argument be more credible in today’s environment of greater religious and sexual tolerance than it was a century and a half ago?

Of course, the really interesting story underneath the story is that the attorney general has declined to prosecute him…

So today, I decided to just throw out a few jokes rather than a serious, thoughtful, or insightful blog. Feel free to add your own. The theme of the day seems easy enough to discern; please keep comments as clean as possible 🙂

A firefighter is working outside the station when he notices a little girl in a little red wagon with little ladders on the sides, a garden hose coiled in the middle, and wearing a firefighter’s helmet. The wagon is being pulled by her dog and her cat. The firefighter takes a closer look.

“That sure is a nice fire-truck,” the fire fighter says with admiration.

“Thanks,” the girl says. The firefighter notices the girl has tied the wagon to her dog’s collar and to the cat’s testicles.

“Little Partner,” the firefighter says, “I don’t want to tell you how to run your rig, but if you were to tie that rope around the cat’s collar, I think you could go faster.”

The little girl replies thoughtfully, “You’re probably right, but then I wouldn’t have a siren.

And today, as a special deal, you get a bonus joke!

What do you name a dog with no hind legs and stainless-steel testicles?

Sparky.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: No extensible language will be universal. — T. Cheatham

So it appears that someone took some potshots at a railcar full of toxic chemicals, resulting in the evacuation of some 8,000 people (at least, according to my Mom’s report) from businesses and homes in the area.

According to KSL News, “The chemicals involved are hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid and nitric acid.”

Now wait a second… didn’t we play with reasonably-large quantities of this stuff in high school chemistry class? I mean, not a railcar’s-worth, but plenty enough to pose a danger if we weren’t wearing safety equipment. Obviously, several tons of this toxic soup spilling from the side of a railcar in the middle of a metropolitan is a different story, but wow, it shut down a lot of roads.

And we’re just about to head to Grandma’s house, which requires us to go right past the area. Time to find an alternate route, I guess 🙂

What’s the largest non-lethal disaster you’ve had in your area in recent memory? I think this will be the biggest news in Salt Lake City since the tornado hit downtown several years ago. Or maybe the Olympics, though those were kind of a snoozer. But a disaster, nonetheless.

Throughout our married lives, Christy and I have made a few expensive purchasing decisions that, although we frequently needed or wanted to buy something like the thing we ended up buying, was not really what we should have gotten:

• We walked into a piano store one time, “just to look”, and walked out owning an expensive digital piano. Knowing what I know now about sales techniques, we were totally “gamed” into buying it. I often think that I’d have been perfectly satisfied with a piano that looked less “nice” and had a lot more functionality, synthesizer-wise. It’s water under the bridge now, but I still feel conned, nearly ten years later.
• We bought a used car that was overpriced and under-performing. We’d had an immense amount of car trouble with a particular ancient Buick, Christy was many months pregnant, it was summer, and the salesman took advantage of the situation. Again. We ended up trading that one in, and the value was so far underwater that it took us a long time to ever come close to breaking even on value on our subsequent vehicle.
• We attended a timeshare presentation, and got pressured into buying that evening. Although I don’t regret the purchase (much) since it’s been a source of a good deal of family vacation time, I often look at how low the prices are from people selling their shares online and think “if I’d only known that I could buy them used, I could have saved an awful lot of money”.

Finally, last year I read a very good book. Inflence: Science and Practice, by Robert Cialdini. He details what the patterns of influence are in society, and the principles behind so many of our automatic responses to certain situations. That free popcorn and hot dogs at the local furniture store isn’t truly “free”, because in eating it, you invoke a very deeply-programmed response to act charitably toward those who have done a favor for you without thought of recompense. This increases your buying probability.

It’s not something that works all the time, but it works a large enough percentage of the time. Think about some of these situations which are very common today:

• The door-to-door cleaner salesman offers to clean your toilet for you, absolutely free. That act of cleaning your toilet indebts you to the cleaner salesman, thus improving your chances of buying.
• That same salesman will often give a sob story about he/she is from “the ghetto” and “working to pull myself up by my bootstraps”. They thus invoke every person’s fundamental sense that they themselves are a good, charitable person, and that buying this guy’s cleaning product is the way to reinforce that self-perception.
• The car salesman, before committing to a price, tries to get you to put a signature on a piece of paper, with a question like, “is this a price at which you’d buy this car?” This reduces your chances of backing out, even though you know that signature is nothing legally binding. It’s often on a vaguely official-looking “form” that says nothing at all, really. But once you’ve put your signature down, to back out after putting a name in writing makes one appear inconsistent. Humans have a very deep-seated need to be consistent in our past and present actions; to be very inconsistent or unpredictable in behavior is one definition of “crazy”.

Learning from poor purchasing decisions has radically changed the way I now approach any large purchase. These days, I look at what it is I want from something (feature-wise), figure out exactly how much I’m willing to spend in order to get those features, after a great deal of online research, and then begin hunting down vendors who will sell to me at that price. We’ve bought two vehicles using this method, avoiding “salespeople” until we’ve already made the decision to buy at a particular price, and have been pleased with the outcome.

Learning to say “no” has been a long and difficult road, but very personally rewarding.

There’s one purchase that is much larger than any of the others, that many of us have already embarked upon: a house. Christy and I own our home (well, really, we own 9% of our home… the bank owns the rest). That decision worked out for the best, though I think not getting ripped-off partly luck at that clueless and gullible stage of my life. We found a home in our modest price range, got a low-pressure sales presentation by a local builder, and after looking at a bunch of homes decided to go with this particular seller. Though it hasn’t been all roses (particularly, our home’s resale value was in the toilet for several years due to the depression of 2001-2004), we’ve been pleased with our little home.

Unfortunately, even in the home-buying market, there are enterprising realtors who do not hesitate to “game” you into buying something you can’t afford and don’t want. The real-estate industry has its share of hucksters who will do anything they can get away with to get you to buy one of their homes.

If you own a home, how did you go about making your home-buying decision? If you were to do it again, what would you do differently? If you haven’t bought one yet, how do you plan to approach it?

So in the recent spirit of making things “new and improved” around here, I’ve enabled a chat-like interface for barnson.org. It’s called the “Chatbox”.

It’s sort of like Instant Messaging, but I’ve found that, where I work, IM mostly doesn’t work, while viewing web pages does.

So now we have three ways to communicate here:

• Blog postings (the traditional format). One-to-many communication method.
• Private Messages (available via the “view inbox” link when you are logged in). This is one-to-one communication.
• Chatbox: This is many-to-many communication. However, if memory serves for other web sites, real-time chat tends to be slightly under-used.

Anyway, for now I’m allowing anonymous users, as well as those who are registered, to use the chatbox. So if you have important information to relay, don’t use chatbox, but instead send a private message so that only you and the recipient can see it. However, it might be useful for just dropping in and saying Hi if someone else is online. Let me know if you like it, or use it.