Monthly Archives: May 2006

Tower Rhyme

Posted on May 31, 2006 by Kelson

I thought this pair of posters at a Tower Records was appropriate:

Album Posters: Jewel (Goodbye Alice in Wonderland) and Tool (10,000 Days)

Jewel and Tool, together… a…gain?

Posted in Music, Signs of the Times | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Building a Better Walk Signal

Posted on May 30, 2006 by Kelson

Walk button with raised arrow.I recently took a walk through some streets that have only recently opened to traffic. One of the things that struck me was that the buttons for triggering the walk/don’t walk signs had a new design. Instead of a tiny recessed button, or a larger rounded button, they had a ~2″ flat button with a raised arrow.

My first thought was, why the extra arrow? It’s pointing in the same direction as the sign. And it means you have to press the button carefully instead of just whacking it with your hand. The answer hit me later in the walk. I was leaning on the button with my hand when the light changed, I and felt the button vibrating. Of course! It was for blind pedestrians!

The raised arrow makes it easier to hit the right button, rather than just hope that the buttons have been placed in standard orientation. And vibrating the button makes it clear not only that it’s safe to cross, but in which direction it’s safe to cross. That’s one thing I could never figure out about the chirping walk signs in San Diego. It tells you the light’s changed, but if there’s any indication as to which light is green, I’ve never noticed it.

Posted in General | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Drazi Effect

Posted on May 29, 2006 by Kelson

Despite growing up in Orange County, I never managed to go to Medieval Times. It’s a dinner show with knights on horseback staging a medieval tournament. Last month in Las Vegas, Katie talked me into going to the Tournament of Kings at Excalibur, which is the same type of show.

[Knight from Excalibur'sTournament of Kings]When you purchase your tickets, you’re assigned a country. (We got Hungary, which seemed appropriate for a dinner show.) This determines two things: your seating area, and which knight you’ll cheer for. People got really into it, cheering on their own knights, booing others, all from a random assignment. About halfway through the show, I realized it was a Drazi scarf situation.

The Drazi leaders.To explain: The Babylon 5 episode, “The Geometry of Shadows” features a conflict among an alien race called the Drazi. Two factions have been fighting each other on the station, and the crew wants them to stop. The Drazi ambassador explains that every few years, they put a bunch of green and purple scarves in a barrel. Each Drazi reaches into the barrel and pulls out a scarf. Green Drazi form one faction, Purple Drazi form the other, and they fight until one side wins, becoming the dominant political force for the next few years.

The episode was clearly meant as commentary on politics, but here in the dinner tournament was an actual case where nothing but random chance determined allegiance. It wasn’t even a random draw for a team, this was just the cheering section! For a scripted show!

[Pirate]Last weekend we went to the Pirate’s Dinner Adventure for Katie’s birthday. It’s a similar setup, only with pirates instead of knights, a smaller arena so that you can actually see the actor/stuntmen’s faces, and a more interactive setup. (There are contests where they get willing audience members to participate, kids get to be sworn in as members of the pirate crew, etc.) Again, you’re assigned a color when you get your ticket, and that color corresponds to one of the pirates. And everyone gets a colored headband. Not too different from those Drazi scarves.

Posted in Babylon 5, Politics, Travel | 5 Comments

Spam Target Breakdown

Posted on May 28, 2006 by Kelson

It seems obvious that different email addresses get different types of spam. I recently noticed that even addresses with nearly identical exposure sometimes end up with wildly different collections.

A number of our spamtrap addresses are “seeded” by hiding them on websites. Put it somewhere that no human visitor will notice, ’cause the harvesting bots will see it anyway. There’s a whole set scattered across this domain, for instance, and even the spamtraps hidden in different areas of this site attract different types of spammers.

My Flash site is the most high-trafficked section on here. Spamtraps there seem to pick up mostly ads for dubious pharmaceuticals, and occasionally mortgage offers. It’s also the most heavily linked-to section, so this is probably the target of spiders that jump from site to site.

The remnants of my Les Misérables site wouldn’t seem to be terribly popular with spammers, but it turns out spamtraps on those pages pick up quite a bit…mostly in Chinese. Back when the site was active, it got linked to by a lyrics site in Taiwan. When it went more-or-less offline, the link stayed.

Spamtraps rotated through the top page of the site seem to collect mostly porn. I’m guessing there’s a class of bots that just look for valid domain names and hit the home page… and they’re mostly used by porn spammers.

The last area of the site that gets lots of spam is this blog. And it seems to collect all of the above.

Posted in Spam | Tagged , | Leave a comment

It’s Mmm-Mmm Good!

Posted on May 19, 2006 by Kelson

Found on a corner in Buena Park:

Sign proclaiming: Now - Beer Tortilla

I don’t know about you, but I think I’d need one of those Sam Adams Smoothies before I ate a beer tortilla.

Then there was this truck parked across the street:

MMM Carpet

Now, primed with the beer tortillas, what comes to mind? <Homer Simpson voice>: “Mmm… carpet!” And from there, it’s a short leap to…well, licking carpet. At this point, whether you get the joke should tell you how dirty your mind is. Update: It looks like we’re not the only ones to find this funny.

Posted in Signs of the Times | 4 Comments

The Trill of the Chase

Posted on May 19, 2006 by Kelson

Some recent bizarre-but-true spam subjects:

Dinky $ch001girl$ of the universe

Obviously trying to avoid keyword filters (not that it helped), but come on—”dinky?” When was the last time you saw that applied to a person? And what exactly is a “schoolgirl of the universe?” It sounds like a new anime series or something, with schoolgirls and jet packs, roaming the galaxy to defeat evildoers.

trill boxing

It’s the fight of the 24th Century! In this corner: Curzon Dax! In this corner: Odan! Who will win? All I know is it won’t be my free time; when I looked up the names, I found Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki with waaay too much info. And there’s all kinds of stuff that’s happened since I stopped watching in the mid-1990s.

It lets a woman ride you like you’ve never been ridden before!

Sent to a spamtrap with a woman’s first name. Sure, you’ll reach a few who might be interested, but statistically speaking you’re better off targetting men. Or, if you take it literally instead of figuratively, horses. Last I looked, though, there weren’t too many horses with email. Unless you count pwnies, I suppose.

Posted in Humor, Spam | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Thank you, Captain Obvious

Posted on May 19, 2006 by Kelson

OK, I appreciate that eBay has a dedicated email address for reporting phishing attempts. I appreciate that their abuse department is a lot busier than I am, and therefore has to rely heavily on form letters. And I appreciate that they’re making an effort to educate the public on how to spot phishing and avoid getting caught.

But when I forward them a message with the comment, “Here’s a sample of a blatant phish,” is it really necessary to reply with the full two-page notice explaining, “This is a spoof, we didn’t send it, here’s how to avoid it, blah blah blah” and the entire body of the original message, complete with the links to the phishing site?

I’d think in this case a simple, “Thanks for the report, we’ve notified the authorities” note would be sufficient, especially since the “how to spot a phish” stuff is already in the auto-response. All it takes is giving their abuse staff an extra choice for the form letter.

And under no circumstances should they be including the full, original text of the phish. At best, it’s asking for the response to get lost in a spam box or blocked outright. At worst, it’s a security risk waiting to happen (since this copy really did come from eBay). Somewhere in the middle is the risk of mucking up adaptive filters as they try to reconcile the original message, which was spam, with the new message, which isn’t.

Posted in Annoyances, Spam | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Pick a city, please!

Posted on May 12, 2006 by Kelson

A few days ago I was remarking on the signs by the side of the 405 indicating where to find the Cal State Fullerton El Toro Campus. This is odd for several reasons, namely:

  • The signs went up years after the city of El Toro changed its name to Lake Forest.
  • Having the two cities in the name makes it sound like “University of California, Colorado Campus.”
  • From what I could tell, it wasn’t even in El Toro/Lake Forest—it was in Irvine.

Today I noticed that the signs have been changed to read “Cal State Fullerton, Irvine Campus.” That takes care of 2 out of 3, and the remaining one is at least logical, even if it sounds a bit odd. I mean, it’s a satellite campus, what else are you going to call it aside from the school name plus the location?

As for why they started out calling it the El Toro campus: it turns out it’s on the grounds of the former El Toro Marine Base.

Posted in Strange World | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Play, Play, Repeat

Posted on May 9, 2006 by Kelson

The recent controversy over Star 98.7′s decision to drop their morning talk show (since reversed) and try out a new format brings up one of those great mysteries of the ages: Why do so many radio stations play the same small list of songs over and over?

I understand the desire to play popular songs frequently, since it should improve ratings. I know record labels still pay radio stations to make sure their songs get played, even though it’s technically illegal. (They use intermediaries these days, but I don’t think anyone’s fooled.) But it seems to me that there must be a limit to the effectiveness of playing the same song over and over.

Heck, even Star, masters of the binge-and-purge playlist, got pissed off at Ryan Seacrest once when he played the same song 5 or 6 times in a row. This was probably 3 or 4 years ago, and I caught a few minutes of him saying that he didn’t understand what management was so upset about. “They’re always telling us to support the music,” he said.

Is that what it takes? Playing the same songs 10 times a day is OK, as long as no one song gets played 10 times in a row? Even though it takes up time that could be used to play more songs that might, radical as this might sound, get listeners interested in a new artist or album? That they might actually go out and buy?

In the late 1990s there were several LA-area radio stations that would play deep cuts off an album—songs that hadn’t been released as singles—or the album versions of songs that had. All gone. A few years ago, there was a station that had a policy of no repeats between 9am and 5pm. Gone.

Is it just the push toward the lowest common denominator, spurred on by the rise of giant radio conglomerates? (Clear Channel owns a huge chunk of LA radio.) Maybe. There’s a lot more room on satellite radio, and whenever I’ve been in a store or restaurant that plays satellite radio, I start hearing those album cuts and songs other than the Top 40 of a genre.

Of course, the way cable TV has gone—with former niche networks branching out for that lowest common denominator, giving rise to the lament of 500 channels and nothing on—this may be only a temporary renaissance. The same cycle of homogenization seems to hit all media, turning vitality into banality over and over.

Posted in Annoyances, Music | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Know Your Holidays

Posted on May 5, 2006 by Kelson

Sports bar and grill advertising 'Cinco de Drinko'

Now there’s someone who has their priorities lined up. You can tell they’ve got a deep understanding of the true meaning of the holiday. Forget all that Mexican military victory stuff—it’s all about getting drunk on tequila and cervezas.

Actually, now that I think about it, that probably is more or less how most Americans celebrate May 5. The northeast has St. Patrick’s Day. The southwest has Cinco de Mayo. Suddenly, the similarities between the Irish and Mexican flags have taken on an entirely new significance.

As for this event, I think I would’ve gone with “Drinko de Mayo.” It fits the original phrasing better. But as Katie pointed out, that sounds too much like drinking mayonnaise—not something that’s going to bring in too many customers.

Posted in Signs of the Times | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments