Flashes of Panic

Big day for a little guy

Today is a big day for our nephew Magnus. He’s had way too many such big days for someone as young as he is, but the kid keeps bobbing back up like a cork. That said, he’s still on our minds.

ETA: Looks good so far.

Posted by pjm at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)

Baby Brezza with blades that won't turn

(This is one of those posts which will only be of interest to the few people who find it via a web search.)

We received a Baby Brezza baby food maker for Christmas. Basically it’s a small combination steamer and food processor, since the goal of most baby food is to be cooked until soft and then chopped small.

Unfortunately the blending part didn’t work on the first run. The motor was clearly spinning, but the blades were not. This review on Amazon—which is the “most helpful negative review” only four days after posting—observes that apparently many of the units are shipping with a misaligned belt which doesn’t carry power from the motor to the blade axle. I suspected we had such a dud.

If you have such a dud unit and found this page via web search, you have two options. You can start taking the unit apart until you can realign that belt, or you can take the unit back wherever it came from and get one which works.

If you should happen to follow the first course (as we did, having pears already diced and steamed and not wanting to throw them out), here’s what to do:

• Take off the canister and drain any hot water before starting work. This should prevent any messy or scalding surprises.
• Turn the unit over and look for the five phillips-head screws which are recessed in the bottom. These are not the ones holding on the suction-cup feet, although they are nearby; they are larger. You will need a screwdriver with a long shaft, because the screws are set quite deep inside the unit. Note that the fifth one, in the very back, is a long way down and may be difficult to see, let alone turn.
• Get as many of those out as possible (preferably all).
• Turn the unit right-side up again. Slowly lift the top away from the bottom. This will be relatively easy if you get all five screws out; I didn’t.
• As you’re separating the top from the bottom, look for the belt running from the back of the unit (where the motor is) to a big wheel directly in the center. That’s the drive wheel for the blades. If the belt isn’t snugly around the teeth of that wheel, use a screwdriver or some other such tool to adjust it so it is.
• Once the belt is in place, put the top and bottom pieces together again, and replace the five screws.
• Verify that the fix worked by putting the canister and blades back on, perhaps with some water in the canister, and running then “blend” setting very briefly. It should be obvious if the blades are turning now.

I know these instructions aren’t perfect, but if you’re brave enough to open the unit in the first place, they should keep you from following any false trails.

Posted by pjm at 9:21 PM | Comments (0)

Indirect brute-forcing passwords?

I am still in the process of reading James Fallows’ article on his wife’s Gmail account being hacked, but I was struck by this statement:

For reasons too complex to explain here, even some systems, like Gmail’s, that don’t allow intruders to make millions of random guesses at a password can still be vulnerable to brute-force attacks.

Let me guess: this margin is too small to explain how this works. But I would love to know; in my world, the definition of a brute-force attack requires millions of guesses at a password.

Posted by pjm at 9:27 PM | Comments (0)

Unsubscribing the easier way

As usual, only after I did all the work the long way did I find the easy way.

Halfway through November’s stack of catalogs, which I promise was huge (six inches high at least, maybe eight), I got a response (from Patagonia, thank you) saying, “We use Catalog Choice, maybe you should submit a request through them.”

Sure enough, Catalog Choice was exactly what I needed. I could fill out an initial form with name and address (and specify “name variants” at the same address, so I can cancel catalogs being sent to A, H and A too) and then find each catalog in their system, fill in a customer number and key code from the mailing label (if they’re there) and click a button. They then take care of formatting and sending the appropriate email message or submitting the correct form. In some cases they forward you to a form on the company’s site, which is fine; basically what they’ve done is automate as much of the process as possible.

These are the companies I was able to submit requests for through Catalog Choice:

• L.L. Bean (addressed to H)
• Crate & Barrel
• Shutterfly
• American Girl (twice)
• Grandin Road
• CP Toys
• HearthSong
• Magic Cabin
• Target (confirmed fairly promptly)
• World Wildlife Fund
• Crazy Shirts (responded immediately with a nice email confirming removal)
• Frontgate
• Exposures
• Mindware (my third request, actually; I’ve emailed them twice and missed their response to my first one)

Then these companies I requested removal the long way:

• Vermont Country Store by site “contact us” form; responded promptly and nicely.
• Garnet Hill by site “contact us” form; responded promptly and nicely
• Land’s End (Kids catalog) by site “contact us” form; responded promptly and nicely.
• Young Explorers by site “contact us” form
• One Step Ahead by email
• Patagonia, as mentioned above, needed a few emails but was ultimately very helpful
• Wine Country Gift Baskets by site “contact us” form; responded promptly and nicely. (I wonder how I wound up on that list.)
• Giggle by email
• Mile Marker Sports (my SportHill dealer) by site contact form
• Ballard Designs by email
• Eddie Bauer by email
• Title Nine has a very good contact preferences form on their site
• Prana via site “contact us” form
• Home Decorators Collection has a “catalog unsubscription request” option on their contact form
• Athleta by email
• Sundance and Company Store have responded positively to my requests back in October, but they haven’t kicked in yet; remember, these things get queued up weeks in advance.
• Cricket by email
• B&H Photo has a form on their site; put in your catalog number and you’re off the list, poof!

All this represents a stack of glossy paper that weighs almost as much as one of the babies. That’s paper that has to be harvested from trees, processed, bleached, etc. etc. and then shipped across the country so I can dump it in our recycling bin. I hope Catalog Choice lives up to its promise so I can stem that flow a bit.

Posted by pjm at 8:09 PM | Comments (0)

Unsubscribing

Just as our email inboxes become choked with offers and “newsletters” from companies we once did business with, I’ve been reminded that there are still bunches of companies out there who do things the old-fashioned way and send us paper catalogs. I’ve been unsubscribing from the emails recently and decided it was time to do the same for the paper catalogs; it is, after all, catalog season.

Why bother? Ecology. We’re sufficiently busy that most of our catalogs go directly in the recycling bin, unopened. They’re not going to landfills, fine, but why waste the energy needed to make the paper, print it, and mail it long distances when we’re just going to drop it in a bin to be pulped? Better to reduce the stream.

(This is related to the philosophy Noah quoted a few months ago: “I used to put out fires all of the time. I finally figured out that it was better to get rid of the arsonists.”)

The spam legislation I’ve long derided has done one thing for us; email from legitimate companies tends to have a link somewhere at the bottom which makes it easy to remove yourself from the list, and it tends to work. Paper catalogs lack this convenience. I thought it might be worthwhile to document the hoops I’ve had to jump through in reducing the paper load to our mailbox.

Here’s the first batch of catalogs, and what I had to do. N.B. When I say, “requested removal,” that means I politely asked to have our address taken off the list, and provided the full mailing address on the catalog they’d mailed us, along with any codes which looked like they might help some hourly-wage service employee find our address and delete it. Everything was phrased as though I was asking them a favor, i.e. intended to make them feel good about helping me.

Also, every company makes the point that their mailings are often prepared months in advance, so getting our names off the lists might not mean an immediate cessation of paper. They are very apologetic about this so I have to assume it’s true.

If I used a web form to request removal, 99% of the time that means there was no indication on their site of how to get off the mailing list (although 100% of the time there is a link to request catalogs!)

• Mini Boden: Requested removal via web form; got a robo-reply.
• Company Kids: Requested removal via email (no form on site); no response yet.
• Hanna Andersson: Requested removal via web form; got a polite, apparently non-automated response telling me it was done (with the usual caveats)
• Tea: Requested removal via web form: no response yet.
• MindWare: A FAQ on their website led me to request removal by email; at least they had that in the FAQ list! No response yet.
• Sundance: Requested removal via web form; got a polite response but not done yet (this was early in the process and I didn’t provide enough information)
• The Land Of Nod: This crew cracks me up. To remove yourself from their catalog, you send your name and address to their contact address with the subject line “KNOCK OFF THE CATALOGS”, as described in their FAQ. I got an automated response, but they get extra points for having a bit of whimsy in their process; they might not have a web unsubscribe form, but they do understand that someone will want to do this and they’re extending their corporate communications thinking that far.
• Pottery Barn Kids: Turns out Williams Sonoma Inc. has a “catalog mailing preference form” in which you can unsubscribe yourself from catalogs from Williams Sonoma, West Elm, and all Pottery Barn brands. As far as one-stop shopping goes, Williams Sonoma, Inc. wins, because I’m sure PBKids wasn’t going to be the only catalog we got from them. No confirmation by email, but that’s OK.
• Grandin Road: From best to worst. According to their website the way to be removed from their mailing list is to call their 1-800 number (which is, by the way, 1-888-263-9850). Uh huh.
• Orvis: In line with their sustainability philosophy (although that philosophy doesn’t actually include this), they have an unsubscribe form on their website. No confirmation email, but again, that’s OK.
• L.L. Bean: I sort of cheated here. For one thing, unlike the other catalogs, I didn’t actually get one to have in front of me, but I’ve been getting their catalogs for ages. Second, I have an account on their website, so I was able to log in and then go to “My Account” and find “Catalog Mailing Preferences” in the left navigation bar… but I can’t link you there. I suggest signing up for an account and then setting your preferences to get no catalogs. Still, thanks to Bean for making it possible to make that request online.

Maybe I’ll post another one of these when the next batch of catalogs comes in… maybe.

ETA 11/1/11:

• Uncommon Goods, “the gifts they’ll want before they know they want them,” also has a contact preferences form. It’s a pop-up so I can’t link to it directly, but go to their home page, scroll to the bottom and click “Contact Preferences.”

Posted by pjm at 7:40 PM | Comments (0)

Hands full

The reason you aren’t seeing so much here recently is that A and I have been busy with twin girls since the end of March. I haven’t closed up shop completely, but there are definitely many things higher on the priority list at the moment.

Posted by pjm at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

Is there a limit to network-effect benefits?

In recent months I’ve been finding Stack Overflow and the related Stack Exchange network sites to be a tremendously valuable resource for resolving technology problems. It’s not that they can always answer my question, it’s that frequently someone else has had the same question before, and I can piggy-back on the answers they got. Searching Stack Overflow, in other words, is often more useful than asking Stack Overflow.

The value of Stack Overflow as a Q&A site is the huge number of people using it. For any given Ruby on Rails question, for example, there’s a pretty good bet someone among the thousands of users scanning those questions will have an answer. Things get a little thinner when you get to very new technologies like SproutCore (for a while I was among the top 20 answerers for SproutCore, which says more about the traffic in that tag than it does about me).

However, as Stack Overflow grows, the number of questions seems to be overwhelming the number of answers. I’ve posted two questions in the last two days, and as of this writing neither has been “viewed” by as many as ten Stack Overflow users. This isn’t because the questions are unanswerable, I think; it’s that there are so many other questions to answer, mine have been buried almost immediately.

We always say the value of a network grows with the size of the network. But Stack Overflow is suggesting to me that there might be a limit to that rule. If the network becomes big enough that messages get lost, the value of the network may begin to fall as it gets larger.

The Area 51 site where new Stack Exchange sites are suggested, debated, and spawned seems to aim at building a critical mass of users to make each new site valuable and useful. There isn’t an internal control for sites which get too big and therefore lose value; I wonder how that could be created? Is this a big enough problem to bother?

Posted by pjm at 8:01 AM | Comments (0)

State by State

There are a lot of things I could be writing about right now. This is warm-up (although the main event may not be published here).

At some point when I was in college, I learned on the Dead Runners’ Society listserv about SEXY-LU points. I don’t remember now what the abbreviation stands for, other than that the S stood for the last name of the person explaining this scoring game to the list. (He shall remain googlenonymous here, but Ed, I do remember.)

A runner would accumulate points for a given span of time, generally a calendar year, although I imagine one could accumulate lifetime points as well. Each state and/or foreign country in which one ran in that time counted for at least one point. The actual score for each depended on how much one ran in those states, basically boiling down to the exponent needed when expressing the number of miles in scientific notation:

• 1-9 miles: 1 point
• 10-99 miles: 2 points
• 100-999 miles: 3 points
• 1000-9999 miles: 4 points

A serious runner would generally pick up four points for their home state (I doubt anyone has scored five) and one or two for most places they visited. A good year for me when I was doing a lot of track traveling would be in the mid-20s. In 2010 I think I hit 16 or 17, and I may have done as well in 2009. (I don’t recall if different Canadian provinces counted for extra points, but that hasn’t mattered for me since 2001, the only year I visited more than one.) I haven’t tried to calculate my lifetime score, but I started thinking about it when I read this post by Scott Douglas.

The drawback to this program is that a weekend in Japan counts for the same number of points as ten miles in Connecticut, but on the other hand, a quick run in the Denver airport can pick up extra points as well.

Posted by pjm at 8:18 PM | Comments (0)

The car is sold

It’s tempting to try to ascribe some kind of significance to selling my car on Valentine’s day, but really it was just the way the calendar worked.

I’ve driven the same vehicle for a bit less than fourteen years. I took out a loan to buy it in March of 1997, a very lightly used ‘96 with about six thousand miles on the odometer.

I paid the loan off in about three years, and just kept driving. (Quicken might be able to tell me the lifetime TCO of the car and help me suss out a cost per mile, sometime.) It got pretty good mileage. It got hit once or twice, by objects ranging from softballs to Lincoln Continentals (and including one pop-up canvas “garage” at one of our apartments).

I replaced the trunk lid to get rid of the spoiler. I didn’t replace the stereo, even though for the last few years if you turn the knob right or left it’s anyone’s guess whether the volume went up or down. I fixed some things and not others.

I think it would be stretching things to say I loved the car. I think it would be fair to say we were pretty used to each other. I did not relish the idea of shopping for a new car, and the annoyances of the old one did not add up to wanting to get rid of it.

The tipping point turned out to be car seats. You can’t get car seats into the back of a two-door car—at least not this one.

So Sunday morning I put it on Craigslist. I fielded a lot of emails and made a few phone calls. Tonight I had a family come by. They looked it over, looked under the hood, kicked the tires, took it for a drive. Then they counted out some hundred-dollar bills and I signed the title over.

They’ll come back in a few days with new license plates, and it will be someone else’s commuter car for the next few years. He sounds like he knows how to keep a car running. I suggested that he’d get it to 200,000, and he responded, “I’m going to get it to 300,000.”

Posted by pjm at 9:42 PM | Comments (0)

Door hanging redux

We’ve decided to contract wallpaper removal and painting in the dining room and two bathrooms to a professional; having proved we could do it competently (he pretended to be impressed with the two bedrooms we did ourselves) there’s nothing left to prove there. But the closet doors remain an ongoing battle.

I have two doors hung now on one of the closets. The problem now is that the doors fit the frame a little too perfectly; if one is closed and the other is not, the closed one needs to be opened a bit to allow the open one to close. With both doors shut, there is practically no space between them; in our bedroom, there’s about a quarter-inch gap between the two doors.

The universal solution to doors which are too snug is to plane some material off the edge of the door—in this case, about an eighth of an inch, to make that cumulative quarter-inch gap. That’s proving challenging; my block plane, a replaceable-blade Stanley affair, is maddeningly difficult to use, either not biting into the door at all or trying to take slices too thick to effectively peel away. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that this is because the door is cheap wood, but it’s also likely that my plane is lousy. I’m not quite sure if I should be renting (or buying) a better plane, maybe a power tool, or if I’m just so unskilled with the one I have that I just need to learn how to do it better.

Bonus door-hanging tip: it turns out that getting the hinges lined up accurately is a lot simple when you drill the pilot holes for the hinge screws before you chisel away the space for the hinge. I don’t know why I didn’t notice that in the instructions earlier.

Posted by pjm at 5:51 PM | Comments (0)

Windows 7 and an Airport Extreme wireless network

We recently upgraded A’s laptop to Windows 7 after a little too long tolerating the excruciating mess which was Windows Vista. For the first few days everything was fine, because she was plugged in to an ethernet cable at her desk, but when she unplugged and tried to use the wireless network, things went haywire. She could see our network, but not join it, even though she was providing the correct password.

The answer turned out to be changing the encryption settings on the network. Instead of using WEP encryption, which was our previous setting, we needed WPA2 (or at least, switching it to WPA2 solved the problem).

Ironically, the reason we were using WEP instead of WPA2 to begin with was that her previous Windows systems didn’t support WPA2.

Posted by pjm at 5:44 PM | Comments (0)

Hanging doors

I’m hanging doors. Actually, I’m failing to hang doors.

In the two bedrooms we’re prepping, there are three closets. All three had bi-fold, louvered doors which were negatives for a whole bunch of reasons. (Hard to paint, for one; also very not-child-proof, as bi-fold doors are a high pinched-finger risk.)

In the master bedroom, the closet doors are regular six-panel doors with “inactive” knobs (this just means they don’t turn; they’re just handles) and magnetic catches, two doors per closet. I figured this for the replacement.

There are six appropriately-sized doors in the basement now, where I’ve been painting them. I have hinges, knobs, and catches. (Magnets will screw into the door frame and attach to metal plates on the doors to hold them shut.) But I’m running in to two problems.

1. In order to attach the hinges to the door, you need to use a chisel to cut away enough door and door frame that the hinge is flush with the edge of the door. (This means the flat plate of the hinge, not the axle.) I have a chisel, now, but I don’t really have the chisel skillz to get the hinge attached flat and square, which seems to be necessary when you visualize two hinges pivoting on essentially the same axis.
2. The rooms are carpeted, and therefore the doors might fit in the frame, but they are about an inch too tall to actually swing. Which makes them not so useful as doors.

I’m toying with the idea of getting out the circular saw and just chopping an inch off the bottom, which is the usual way of sizing doors to fit, but I’m also thinking it might be time to enlist professional help.

ETA: A helpful employee at the store that sold us the doors observed that cutting an inch off the bottom might expose the hollow part of the door. “3/8-inch, tops,” he said. So I took 3/8 of an inch off both the bottom and the top with a circular saw, and aside from an absurd amount of sawdust in the basement, that problem seems to be resolved. Sandpaper and a little more care got the hinges attached squarely; now it just remains to get them on the door itself. Considering this has already taken a day’s work, I wonder if doing the remaining 5 by myself is a practical idea.

Posted by pjm at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)