Zhanga: October 2009
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 (8 comments)
I got a voicemail today. Google Voice's transcript is as follows:
Hey David, this is trust at it. I'll wait just came out a from the digress. Under I'm not sure where you are if you can case that you need to call me again water are not having to the Hard Rock Hotel. Alright, see you bye. So, 859.
I'll mail a check for $1 to anyone who can figure out what this actually says. Hint: It begins with, "Hey David, this is Charles dad" and does actually end with "Alright, see you bye." ("So, 859" is background noice.)
I think it's interesting how far we've come in the past few years in terms of technology. 15 years ago an answering machine was genius, and now we have free text transcripts of voicemails. Granted, the above was not that accurate, but even after losing most of the words and phrases it still got the point across: he came out from somewhere, can't reach me, and wants a call back. And 859.
Google Voice is genius. One of the best things about the voicemail transcripts is that it never gets numbers wrong, so when someone says to call back at 555-1234 I can pretty confidently click it without worrying about it dialing the wrong person. (If you don't know about GV, the best feature is how it gives you a number that rings all your phones simultaneously, so one number reaches me whether I'm at home with my cell or at work where reception is awful or on Skype because my cell died or whatever.)
I have a few invites left, btw, if anyone wants them.
3:09AM
Monday, October 26, 2009 (1 comment)
Amazon is one of my favorite places to buy things online because it has pretty much anything I'd ever buy, and most things on there are cheaper than any reputable competitors. Even when it's a little more expensive, the free shipping on orders over $25 is nice, and also not worrying about crappy service or slow shipping is good too.
Anyway, enough with the Amazon ad. A couple of days ago, I was buying some stuff and the total came out to $24.36. So I needed 64 cents to get free shipping (otherwise shipping would have been $8 or something). There is of course a site for that! I couldn't find anything worthwhile so I just got some batteries for $1. One of the items I actually wanted was out of stock though, so Amazon told me the entire order wouldn't ship for two weeks unless I paid extra. (I didn't.)
Today I got an email saying my order shipped! I was so excited! Until I realized only the $1 batteries are shipping, but not with any of the other stuff that was in stock. Thanks, Amazon... I still love you, though.
P.S. living in Washington sucks because I have to pay 10% sales tax on Amazon purchases. It's free elsewhere.
2:03AM
Sunday, October 18, 2009 (10 comments)
I saw this image today and thought:
Ha, ha, this probably came out of 4chan and some retard is trying to make fun of optical illusions by making one that's clearly not true and then putting a random big cylinder there just to be funny.
Then I inspected those pixels' colors and my mind was blown.
In other news, I saw some Microsoft IPs on this site a few days ago. Based on the comments left by Gene and Ronjon, my coworkers probably think I have retarded friends. And they'd be right.
11:39PM
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 (2 comments)
Here's a interesting graph (to me, at least). I run my mail server so I have access to its stats...
Received emails are those that reach my inbox. Rejected emails are ones that are cast into the void for being obvious spam. My spam filter is not aggressive at all — it doesn't even look at the content of emails, only the headers, so you can write v14gra into the email 50 times and it will still be received.
Average figures for this period were 17.8 received/day and 430.9 rejected/day. I love spam.
7:14PM
Sunday, October 11, 2009 (6 comments)
The great thing about a salaried job is that I get paid for 40 hours whether I work 40 or 70.
Wait, no, that's pessimistic. I get paid for 70 hours whether I work 40 or 70. There! Better.
7:09PM
Thursday, October 8, 2009 (9 comments)
I work on the Bing mobile program for Windows Mobile phones. My boss's boss is this Indian guy, 40 or 50 years old, who let me in on the secret of why Bing is better than Google: apparently, if you turn safe search off, Bing's relevance is much better. Especially (?) on the image search.
If it doesn't work an advertised let me know the actual results and expected results and I'll file a colorful bug... (E.g. what was displayed and what you would like to have seen.)
And in other news, I think Seattle drivers suck. Atlanta drivers seem to always be in a rush, cutting you off all the time, and that problem seems a little better here. They also drive slower here. When the speed limit's 60, people drive 60 and it's hard to go above 65, while in Atlanta you get people riding your ass if you aren't doing >75.
But anyways, I digress. A while back, I was switching lanes to the right on the interstate. I put on my blinkers, looked around, and started going to the right. Halfway through my lane change, a guy in a pickup two lanes to my right and about 3 car lengths behind me decided to move to the left. So what does he do? Not turn on his blinker and then gassed it into the lane I was halfway in. I swerved back into my lane and almost hit the guy to my left.
Couple of weeks later, I was on the highway again. Changing lanes to my right again. This time, there was a minivan two lanes to my right but this time it was directly to my right. So I put on my blinker and slowly drifted right. Once I was fully in the lane the minivan quickly took over my lane, apparently without even a cursory glance to its left. Of course it goes without saying that this driver was also above using blinkers. Again I swerved into the lane I was previously in. The passenger in the van looked back at me with an apologetic look.
The sad thing is that if I had hit a car on my left while avoiding either of these cars, it would be considered my fault and more than likely, the guy causing the accident would have gotten away.
Full disclosure: I scraped my car against my garage recently. Seattle has made me a crappier driver too.
12:58AM
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