raleighnet.org

The web may not be the best medium to enjoy something like the Leather Face Journal. Even when you zoom in, a lot of the text it tough to make out. It sure does look nice though. Via.

I dropped my camera on Thanksgiving. It turns out expensive cameras don’t stand up to physical abuse as well as I might have expected. I look down and I see pieces. My heart breaks. Then I realize the pieces are just the camera and the battery which popped out. For a moment, I had hope. But when I put the battery back in and powered it on with dread, it didn’t take long to see that the camera couldn’t focus any more. A camera that can’t focus isn’t worth much.

On the positive side, it means I get to go shopping for an all new, better than ever camera. I found it with the Minolta Dimage A1 5MP.

This is such a sweet camera. 5 mega pixels, 7 x optical zoom, manual focus control. It doesn’t have the split body design of my old Nikon Coolpix 995, but even the Nikons don’t have that design any more. It must not have been very popular.

I also picked up a 512 MB Compact Flash Card. Does anybody know if the faster Compact Flash cards are worth the extra price tag? I like the thought of not having to wait so long for my camera to finish writing to the card, but it sounds like voodoo. I’m not at all sure that it would be a noticeable difference. I went cheap this time around, but at 5 mega pixels, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up buying a few more cards to go along with the few I have.

I can’t wait to get it. I was tempted to pick it up in the store when I went to make sure I liked the feel of it. It was $200 more in the store than on Amazon though (Amazon’s price is seriously awesome!!!), and while I’m impatient, that’s just too much spend for the instant gratification.

Update: I did manage to get a few Crappy Pictures before breaking the camera.

1759 - Mt. Vesuvius errupted and killed many
1859 - Darwin published “On the Origin of Species”
1874 - Joseph F Glidden patented barbed wire
1963 - Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald
2003 - I ate a dry slice of carrot cake*

On This Day

* Purchased at a soul eating Super Walmart that rests in the midst of the desolate sprawl that is suburban Omaha “Oh My God It’s Cold” Nebraska, just a few miles and a few and 30 years from the point of my first breath.

Wow, I talk about copyright a bunch over on MetaFilter. Of course, I always knew this, but it’s strange to see it thrown back at me in a summary that is even more incoherent and nonsensical than my normal writing.

Oh, and loading the entire MeFi user list into a drop down list == bad idea. I’m amazed my browser didn’t crash when I stumbled back to the home page to find myself. Thanks.

Update: Looks like the summary they serve up changes each time you refresh the link, so you might not get any copyright/DRM ravings if you follow the link (but you probably will…).

Chucky doesn’t have anything on bastet3239.com. Those are some creepy looking dolls!

There is a new game with which to drive myself stark raving bonkers. I haven’t even managed to complete level 1 yet. As in all other things in my life, I think maybe I’m rushing it too much.

A little like Lunar Lander, but with obstacles. Via

I often struggle with whether I should use the word farther or further. I even looked them up in the dictionary a few times, but couldn’t work out much of a difference. Now, I’ll always remember.

Funny re-enactment of what guys are thinking in bed.

I’m not one to post links to The Onion. I mean it’s funny and all, but most of the time I don’t even go there to read it. It loads slow as a dog and it’s just not worth it. But, Wired of all places linked to this, and well — it’s just too funny not to post:

“God, my links alone contain unlimited fodder for Mom’s neuroses,” Widmar said. “She’ll have access to not only my life, but the lives of all my friends who have web sites. She’ll have the names of all the places in Minneapolis where we hang out, which she can—and will—look up. With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is fucking serious.”

On-line banking is a fantastic feature that has really come a long way since I started using it about 8 years ago. I don’t know that writing out checks by hand and mailing them would really take any longer or be too much more cumbersome, but I certainly hate doing it.

I know that even today, there’s a bit of man behind the curtain involved in it. When I started doing it, I would enter the amount of money I wanted to pay, and “somebody” in the bank would write out and mail the check. It was an absurd but expedient way to give the customers the features they wanted. I think that still happens with some of my payees, but I also think they’ve gotten better about it.

Credit Dispute Resolution (at BOA at least) also seems to require a lot of off-line paperwork. I submitted a credit dispute about 5 months ago, and they lost it or never received it. I submitted it again a month later and this time I submitted paper as well. This time they got it, but a few weeks ago, I found they had closed the inquiry (I still don’t fully understand why though it seems to have something to do with not getting yet another piece of paper). This is annoying and frustrating particularly as I continued to rely on the on-line customer service to determine how my inquiry was proceeding, but on-line customer service was totally out of the loop and only able to respond with templates. I guess that’s good for the business if your customers are constantly coming at you with the same frequently asked questions, but it’s a disservice to the customer not to be able to integrate and escalate concerns more dynamically. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody somewhere in the company knew this and understood this but didn’t have the resources to address it.

So those things I grudgingly accept. It is really surprising in this day and age to see interface problems. My account was locked up when I went to login this morning. I was using Mozilla which suppresses pop-ups, and their error message wanted to be displayed in a pop up. I went through the same cycle 3 or 4 times before brining up IE to see if it was a cookie or browser quirk kind of problem. At that point I got the error message.

What a horrible user experience that is. I know it isn’t possible to support all browsers, but Mozilla is if not common at least not super-fringe. Plus, there is no reason at all to put the error message in a pop up. They were also redirecting in the main browser window. Why the hell didn’t they include some text to explain what the deal was?

They gave me a link to select a new password (they’ll only allow 3 unsuccessful attempts at login as a security measure). This page asked me for my ATM card number and my PIN number. I know that’s one other set of information the bank has that can allow me to prove I’m me, but that seemed like spectacularly bad security. I studied that page for about 4 minutes trying to make sure that it was in fact being served from Bank of America. I’m always unsure of whether the actual URL should be www.bankofamerica.com or www.bankamerica.com. I think they both work, but I’m often a little paranoid that some squatter somewhere would put up a mirror copy of the web site and start harvesting user names and passwords.

Ultimately, I decided not to put in my card and pin number. It felt too much like a scam. I called, and one of the customer service reps was able to reset my login for me. I don’t know. I guess what they were asking for was “safer” then having a new password sent in a clear text e-mail. At least here everything was secured. Given that there are so many scams out there though it seems like a really bad idea to train your people that you might one day need to ask them for that information through some generic web page.