Category: life

where everything else happens

AOL Feedback Loop … Love/Hate.

I just received an AOL SCOMP feedback loop email a few minutes ago. Well, actually I received several hundred of them, which happens all day long, but one in particular stands out:

To: abuseaddressATchuck’srealjob.net (note, this address is not real)
From: scomp@aol.net
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:50:14 EST
Subject: Email Feedback Report for IP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
X-AOL-INRLY: barracuda.XXXXXX.net [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] scmp-d21
X-Loop: scomp
X-AOL-IP: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

This is an email abuse report for an email message received from IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX on Fri, 17 Nov 2006 10:50:38 -0500

Note the two timestamps. Today is Tuesday, November 20, 2007. The mail in question being reported as spam was sent …

…THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTYEIGHT DAYS AGO!!!

I’ve grown accustomed to a certain amount of lag in AOL’s feedback loop, but I never would have expected it to grow to OVER A YEAR!

Mind you there is a lot to love about this system. Carl & his crew built a wonderful tool for netops to monitor-by-reflection what is going out of our networks… but the user-generated nature of it tends to rear its head in ugly ways. Mostly it serves us in locating the occasional web forms that are being exploited by spammers, which was the case in the above example. But the firehose of legitimate mail being tagged by AOL users as spam far outweighs the trickle of actual tinned-meat smelling stuff. Mailing lists, ecommerce confirmation emails, morons who forward *everything* (I eventually will hunt every one of them down and .. sigh), and honest-to-goodness personal correspondence makes up 99.999% of the feedback loop from AOL. It truly provides insight into the feeble mind of most AOL users.

We have setup a mail filtering system that files away all the vast majority of legit stuff based on sender, and it leaves the oddball stuff for human parsing. This one above ended up for me to parse, and I just had to say something about it in public.

So there, I have.

A fine solvent for cleaning out your car!

I’d always heard that BioDiesel had a tendency to clear out the accumulated crud in your fuel tank and system. Now I know it for a fact. Last weekend Sue called me from Skagit county complaining of a significant loss of power. I’ve had her Jeep Liberty CRD running on about a max-B20 mixture for a while. I had noticed my B50/B90ish VW Jetta TDI hesitate now and then as well. I considered the possibilities. Clogged filter? Or have I brewed up a batch of crap?

I drove up to Skagit in the TDI and took her car home to experience it for myself. The car started and ran fine, but when you really got on the throttle, merging onto a freeway for example, it just bogged down and just… would… not… go… Very frustrating. I got off the freeway and went the rest of the way home on back roads so as not to cause an incident. I noted that if I gradually accelerated it would be fine, up to whatever speed I wanted. But if I laid into it, or climbed a steep hill it acted as if it was towing a huge load. I parked the Jeep in the garage and went into town later to the NAPA store to buy a new fuel filter cannister. Being a Diesel it uses a big honkin’ filter combined with a water separator. In fact it has all sorts of sensors attached and even had a “water in fuel” idiot light on the dash to tell you to drain it. The NAPA didn’t have one and in fact it had to be shipped from out of state. They said 3 days – in the end it took a week. They did have one for the Jetta so I grabbed one of those, just in case.

I look like a genius in hindsight because later in the week I went to start up the Jetta and it took some serious cranking to get going. It also bogged a bit a couple of times when underway at freeway speeds. The “check engine” light also illuminated. Great.

So the Jeep filter finally arrived today and I started the process to change it. The Mopar Morons routed a power steering hose and several electrical wires all around the filter cannister so it was a royal PITA to get off. The water sensor disconnect can only be reached from directly underneath so I ended up soaking my arm in Diesel while trying to get it off from under the car. Grrr. If I had miniature hands I could have done it from above I guess, but being born with Y chromosomes I have big meaty mitts that could only get to it from below at full arm extension. =\

Car designers should have to work on the cars they make!

The one bit of forethought they put into it was a handy spring pump on the housing and bleeder nipple to prime the filter with fuel without a mess. Too bad I was already soaked in Diesel anyway!

Sue of course took off in the Jetta before I was done wrestling with her Jeep. Sure enough she calls me from Stanwood. The Jetta conked out on her while on the freeway. The Jeep unfinished, I jumped in the old pickup truck we keep in the barn for lumber and hay hauling duties (retired from trailering when she sold the horse trailer) and drove up there to rescue her. The Jetta drives fine for me all the way home but I figure I’ll swap its filter too.

I finish the Jeep and take it out for a test drive. It runs like a top. Lots of acceleration and no hesitation whatsoever. I take it out on the freeway just to be sure and decide to drop it off for Sue at the horse place and take the pickup home. I then swap the Jetta’s filter, which is an under-5-minute job, unlike the Jeep’s. No priming pump, so it is a tad messy, but I already reek of Diesel so who cares. Fire the Jetta up in the garage. Starts right up and no check engine light anymore.

Just out of curiosity I take the filters out to the barn, grab a hacksaw and open them up:

The Jeep's clogged filter.

Here is the Jeep’s filter. It started out as a very light beige color (you can see a little bit of untainted filter element at the top right.) As you can see it is filthy.

The Jetta's clogged filter.

Above is the Jetta’s filter. It was even worse than the Jeep’s. It has big gloppy sludgy bits in it.

I guess I’ll buy another pair, or maybe four of them to keep on hand as the tanks clear out their accumulated sludge.

No iPhone for me.

Chucks Old & New Phones

I finally retired my worn out, beaten, and tired Treo 600 a couple of weeks ago (yes, that is electrical tape holding the antenna on!) Did I get an iPhone? Nope.

I was at Moscone Center for the Macworld Expo keynote last January when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. I’ve been to many keynotes and basked in the Reality Distortion Field enough to have built up a strong resistance. I like the iPhone, I really do. I’m certain that it has a fine future. So certain I bought AAPL stock during a lull last spring when it was well under $100. But would I buy an iPhone for myself?

I seriously considered it. Here is what my decision came down to:

* I loathe AT&T.
I’ve been an AT&T customer before, both as a cell phone consumer, and as a corporate customer. Their billing and account management systems are probably the finest example of Soviet-style bureaucracy you will ever find in the free world. They make dealing with the Department of Licensing seem efficient by example. The lock-in deal that Apple made with AT&T was probably my biggest RDF let-down of the keynote. The more I thought about doing business with them the more I was put-off by the idea of buying an iPhone.

Yes, I know, I could have joined the (miniscule) ranks of the un-lockers, but I’ve grown old enough that I have lost the desire to hack *everything* around me. Some things I just want to work, and a telephone is one. The bricked phone people can whine, but honestly, they should not be surprised.

* I can’t go alone.
I was on a shared plan with my spouse, and it made sense for us to stay on one. In fact I started looking for plans that would work for my whole family. Chris is of driving age, and Nick is of “I need to be driven everywhere” age. Nick in particular was tiring of borrowing phones to call whichever of his two parents was coming to Track, Cross-country, or whatever practice/meet/lesson he needed to be shuttled to and from.

Sue & I had a 2100 minute plan from Verizon. I used about 120-175 minutes and she blabbed her way through the rest. We never went over and usually used almost all.

AT&T’s family plans don’t match up well with our usage and I could never get a straight answer on how they meshed with the iPhone.

T-mobile offered a family plan that seemed to fit us like Goldilocks’s “just right” porridge.

* Coverage and Technology
This issue is what completely sold me on T-mobile and the phones I chose, and eliminated the iPhone from contention entirely. T-mobile offers UMA phones. “UMA” stands for “Unlicensed Mobile Access” which boils down to yet another VOIP system, but this time using 802.11 as the Layer 1/2 protocols. T-mobile offers an option they call “Hot Spot @ Home” that includes a wifi router, and GSM/UMA phones to go with it. Sue wanted a small, “flip phone” type handset, so for her and the boys I selected a Nokia 6086. The killer features for Sue are small size and voice dialling. The handset I chose for myself is a RIM Blackberry Curve. The killer features for me are:

1. The ability to easily sync my contacts from my old Treo to it, a task slam-dunked with a side-grade of MissingSync from Mark|Space. I’ve been a happy user of their Palm product since my old trusty (and original “brick-phone”)Kyocera 6035 (… man I miss that phone… sigh.) It was trivial to get my years and years of phone address book entries into the Blackberry after purchase: hook it up to the Mac via USB and click. Presto!

2. Reasonable-cost data access.
I never actually used a full data plan on my Treo as Verizon’s data plan rates were particularly usurious whenever I looked at them. I was content to use my Treo more as a PDA (calendar/contacts/to-do lists/etc) than a full-blown communications device. I did use the excellent PDATraffic application to get traffic data for my commute, and paid $0.15 per kilobyte to do so (happily I might add, as the app was very lightweight in its usage.) T-mobile’s unlimited data plan seemed very reasonable and works both over the EDGE network (just like an iPhone) and over WiFi. (But unlike the iPhone I can make voice calls over WiFi too.)

Overall though the deal closer for me was the UMA/WiFi calling. We live out in the boonies. In the Cascade Foothill surrounded by hills and trees. Thick, tall trees that (occasionally fall down) contsantly and utterly destroy a cell signal. We’ve lived there for a decade and never have been able to make or receive cell phone calls. In some ways this is a blessing, but it is growing tiresome in today’s reality. Getting in touch with us by phone was always location-dependant. Now it doesn’t have to be. So for the first time ever, if you call me on my cell at home, I can answer. So can Sue, and now, so can the boys.

* Other Considerations.
I considered just replacing my Treo. I had collected a small number of useful PalmOS apps over the years and I really had grown fond of some of them. In the end I could not justify staying with the platform. It is really old and showing its age. I can’t bring myself to jump to Windows Mobile… it is just such a kludgey environment. Sort of the worst of PalmOS coupled to a bad WinCE UI.

The iPhone really is attractive. I suppose I will likely have one at some point in the future. But it is still an immature product with a long way to go. Apple had to compromise a LOT of things to get it shipped. The AT&T lock, the lack of features, the the lack of software. It all added up to a “not yet” for me. At this point in my life I’m content to hang back off the bleeding edge and let the early adopters work out the issues at their expense. I’m sure that by version 2 or 3 it will be what I am looking for. I’m happy to grab a mature, evolved product like the Blackberry Curve, and use it for all it is worth while the iPhone makes its way beyond infancy. I like my technology beyond the diaper stage right now.

So far I’m quite pleased with the Curve. It is small, thin, lightweight (especially compared to my Treo) and has some really nice features. I’m loving the way it handles email. My office mates constantly chide me for not checking my email often enough (shocking, I know to those of you who know me… but I have my mail client set to check every 30 minutes… not fast enough for my peers it seems!) So now I am notified in a very nice manner what my inbound mail queue looks like via my phone. If there is something important to attend to, I can. The chat clients are nice too. I only really use AIM, but I could branch into some others too now that I have a unified client (no, I don’t use Adium on my laptop.) The camera actually takes pretty reasonable pictures, so if I’m caught somewhere without my Olympus at least now you’ll have better shots here. It plays music much better than my Treo ever did and made a nice “extra iPod” on a recent set of long flights. I LOVE that it uses a standard USB cable, the same as my camera, to connect, charge etc. No goofy proprietary cable to carry! yeah! I’ve found some useful apps too. Google Maps (though the traffic feature is nowhere near as good as PDATraffic. 🙁 ) and a few others. The voice dialling is excellent, with no training required. It is the best voice dialer I’ve operated since my old Kyocera 6035.

Overall I’m happy with the choice. No iPhone, but at this time I’d rather have useful than just good looking.

What is your Mechanical Aptitude?

which direction

Go here and take this test.

My advice: read the questions very carefully. Literally observe the illustrations. Take your time.
The terminology with regards to directions is relative to position, so LITERAL observation of the illustrations is required. Don’t overthink them as that is how I screwed up. 😉

Let me know how you do in the comments.

Ford. Chasing away their own customers with lawyers.

Long live the XKEdata.com calendar!

My friend Roger, who runs an enthusiast/community website for old Jaguars received a cease & desist letter from Ford asking him to stop selling calendars. Mind you from what I gather he sells only a few calendars a year. I buy a few myself, one for me, one for my dad, and one for Geoff, the guy who rebuilt my engine right (after the bozo’s in Texas bodged it.) It is just a cool little way to mark the passing of the year. The image above is actually on my office wall this month as it is “Miss October” this year.

Why would Ford want to shut this down? First of all, the E-type pre-dates Ford’s acquisition of Jaguar by a couple of decades. Nobody ever looks at an E-type and thinks, “Nice Ford!” Ever.

But Jaguar is a Ford asset (at least until they can find a buyer) and I guess they’d rather punish their enthusiast community rather than say… support it? Hello! Can somebody please tell me why threatening legal actions against your most ardent fans is a smart business move? First Ford destroys the Jaguar brand, now they are trying to destroy what little brand loyalty is left in their customers.

Smooth move guys!