Tuesday, November 05, 2013

Brilliant or sociopathic: you decide

Got an email from someone at work, and it included a number of attachments. Turns out there were no real attachments, just all of the images that this person includes in their email signature. I turn to my neighbor and ask "Am I a crotchety old fart if I don't like seeing all these images pasted into email signatures? Doesn't anyone read RFCs any more?". He did tell me I was a crotchety old fart, but he did agree it was kind of ridiculous the number and size of images in signatures these days.

Then, inspiration struck. Stick a google display ad in your signature. Stick an Amazon affiliate block in your email signature. Clickthru rates will stink, but think of the pageviews!

Monday, June 03, 2013

Huffington Post is just as stupid as Vallejo

So I was reading about the guy who painted a crosswalk in Vallejo and got arrested for vandalism.

HuffPo had an article.

Some yahoo made a comment about it:
I hate to be the sole voice stating that I feel the sentence for painting an unauthorised cross-walk was well deserved. There must have been a reason why the City did not paint one at that location in the first place, especially when there are three others. Maybe there was a visibility issue, a curve in the road, different elevation, bushes, anything that makes it harder for approaching cars to see pedestrians at that location. A crosswalk ( basically lines painted on a road) would not give any protection to the pedestrian if the driver of the car can't stop in time. Look at it from this point of view : What if some unfortunate child stepped onto a unauthorized crosswalk, thinking it safe, but was invisible to the driver?
I tried to post a reply:
I took a quick look at google maps for that area, and if you look at this stretch of Sonoma Boulevard between Nebraska and Curtola Parkway, it's as straight as an arrow. Furthermore, there are a total of seventeen intersections in that stretch of road, all with crosswalks. Fourteen of the seventeen have all four crosswalks. Only two of the seventeen don't have crosswalks over Sonoma. This intersection at Illinois has one crosswalk over Sonoma already. Seems to me that the painter was just making Illinois consistent with 80% of the other similar crossings. 
He was clearly doing both his neighborhood and the city a favor.  
However, HuffPo's implementation of using twitter and/or G+ to log in is totally broken. I have no idea if I've actually authorized HuffPo to recognize those credentials, because it's totally broken and I couldn't post my comment.