James's Weblog

An Abbott and Costello moment at a Wal-Mart where I was buying a 377-type of watch battery for my mom:

“Hi, I need a three seventy-seven watch battery.”
“Okay, that’s three seventy-seven.”
“Right. Three seventy-seven.”
“Three seventy-seven.”

By then I had realized that she meant that the 377 battery coincidentally cost $3.77, although the clerk seemed kind of oblivious to that and to her ambiguous wording. Or maybe she just got a kick out of confusing customers.

I swear, someone on NBC’s Heroes must have the power to make everyone stupid.

(Some spoilers are below.)

The season had some hints of grand designs, but unfortunately the writers’ strike obviously made the later episodes rushed and a bit incohesive and made the finale totally anticlimactic. It was missing much of the excitement from the first season, I guess partly because there weren’t any compelling villains: Adam just didn’t seem very threatening, Sylar was impotent, the Nightmare Man was a big loser, and the Company was in shambles. One would think that Adam would have accumulated at least as much power, knowledge, and influence as Linderman over the years.

I wonder how long they’re going to milk the “I went to the future and saw the apocalypse, now we need to stop it” pattern.

Damnit. A couple of Stanford jerks stole my idea for online speed-dating.

Or maybe I should be saying, “Woohoo, now I don’t have to implement it myself.”

Addendum:
Okay, I should be saying, “Phew”, because apparently they filed for a patent on the thing five years earlier, so as Mitchell puts it: “Our laziness saved us some legal fees.”

My mom has been receiving a lot of email from Borders. I don’t know why. Anyway, rather than setting email filters, I generally prefer attempting to unsubscribe from newsletters when they’re clearly backed by legitimate commercial entities (they are, after all, accountable and suable if things go wrong). Setting mail filters takes work, and I prefer stopping the email at the source over letting it clog the tubes.

Unfortunately, unsubscribing from Borders’ mailing lists is a challenge. Each email contains an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom, but the link takes you to Borders’ website and requires you to log in to set your account’s email preferences. My mom says she has no account—and Borders’ website confirms that no account exists for the email address they’re sending email to—and therefore she can’t unsubscribe.

I eventually resorted to contacting their customer support. They said that they’ve removed her address, but we’ll see.

People running mailing lists should make unsubscribing really easy. There should be no hoops. Users shouldn’t have to remember log-in information. The easier it is for people to escape, the more willing they’ll be to try out the service in the first place. Annoying users who already are annoyed with you has no benefit. This doesn’t apply to just mailing lists. Netflix understands this and gets my business. Earthlink doesn’t, and I’ll never do business with them again, and I tell most people I know my Earthlink story so they will never do business with Earthlink either.

Sometime in the past few months the Fremont BART station started requiring people to pay $1 for parking. While the fee itself isn’t so bad, the system seems pretty ill-conceived.

Rather than using a normal paid parking system with parking meters or with entry or exit fees, riders are required to remember their parking space number and to pay at a machine inside the station. The system is so confusing that there are at least three extra employees to guide people through the process: one person in the lot shouting at people to remember their parking space numbers, another person inside the station directing people to the parking validation machines, and a third person to explain to people how to use the machines. And that’s not including any people needed to enforce the parking dues.

The parking machines also introduce a bottleneck since everyone entering the station must wait to use them. No longer can I have a spare ticket handy in my wallet and dash straight from my car to a departing train.

Admittedly the parking lot at the Fremont BART station wasn’t designed for this sort of thing, but I wouldn’t expect retrofitting it to be too costly since the lot has limited entrances and exits, and areas of the lot are designated for buses and for passenger drop-off and pick-up already.

Surely to the dismay of my coworkers, I have been remarkably unproductive at work during the past few weeks. I suspect one factor (or a convenient scapegoat) is that VMware recently started a shuttle service that has a stop near my house. I’ve been taking it to save what I estimate to be about $1500/year on gas, but I think it has significantly fouled up my daily routine:

• I used to wake up at around 10 AM, do about an hour of web surfing and responding to email, head to work between 11 AM and noon, and eventually return home at around 10 PM. Now with the shuttle, I’m forced to wake up earlier, and since I end up rushing out the door, I do my morning web surfing ritual when I arrive to work at 9:30 AM. This means that I actually start working at 10:30 AM, an hour earlier than before, but I have to leave by 7 PM, three hours earlier than before, yielding a net loss of two hours from my normal workday.
• When I drove home, I used to think about problems I was in the middle of working on. Consequently, when I returned home, I was ready to (and often did) continue working remotely. My brain was active, and driving increased right-brain activity which supposedly can give different insights. Now that I spend the commute on a shuttle, I’m sleepy and end up trying to nap or vegetate, and by the time I get home, I’m totally disengaged from whatever I was working on, and I don’t feel like doing anything else.

Of course, some people will say that maybe I was working waaaay too much before, but my claim is that I have to do that to keep up with all my smart coworkers. Sigh.

I received papers from Sony today saying that the USPTO actually approved some ridiculous patent application that my then-coworkers dragged me into filing with them four years ago.

I think it’s just further evidence of how overwhelmed the patent office is, of how ill-equipped they are to evaluate software patents, and of how software patents are usually lame. It’s another example of how large corporations flood the patent office with anything and everything to try to build up their patent portfolios, and not because they think they’re good ideas worth pursuing, but because they want things with which to defend themselves in case someone else sues them for patent infringement. Stupid patent cold wars.

It saddens me to think that my name is associated with that dreck. On the other hand, my name’s all over the dreck that I call my weblog, and as we already know, it’s not an uncommon name anyway.

My claim: a set of 2000 people has a greater than 50% probability of having someone else with my name.

VMware recently hired someone else named “James Lin”. Today I received four separate emails for him. I wonder if he’s receiving any of mine. Maybe he can fix some of my bugs.

And it happens to be on the 7th day of the week too (at least by the American calendar).

All the pregnant women having Cesarean sections today are cheating.

In other unrelated news, the power supply to my ReadyNAS seems to have failed, so most of my data is inaccessible. Grumble.

Several weeks ago, I received two bills from Sprint on the same day. The first was our usual monthly bill, due on May 23rd. The second was addressed to my dad’s estate. It listed no due date. (I have a photocopy of the bill as proof.) It was a bill for the unpaid balance on my dad’s account, a balance I had tried to pay when it was originally due, except Sprint closed the account on the due date, so I wasn’t able to pay it online as I normally do.

I paid both bills last week. Today I received another bill addressed to my dad’s estate with a late fee applied; apparently the previous bill was due on May 14th.

I wonder if I should bother refusing to pay. It’s probably not worth the $3, but the principle riles me.

Update:
For once dealing with Sprint was relatively painless, and they agreed to waive the late fee.