fxl.blog()

Breaded Chicken

2009-02-24T05:14:14Z

I am getting much happier with my own cooking lately. I am starting to cook the way I used to, back when I still lived at home.

I made a breaded chicken breast tonight, with much success. No recipe, just instinct.

I made the breading out of about a half cup of some leftover bread crumbs, added some freshly chopped parsley, freshly chopped thyme, finely chopped/minced 3 cloves of garlic, about a table spoon of minced onion, a few squirts of lemon juice for moisture and flavor, and some lemon pepper.

I beat some Dijon mustard, about a table spoon, and a little flour into an egg for the egg wash. Stole that from a breaded pork chop recipe that I tried recently. It creates a thicker breading that sticks better, and adds extra flavor.

The rest was just a typical 3 step breading. Cut the breast into two in order to make two servings, rolled it in flour, the egg mixture, then the breading. 375 for 30 min.

It was excellent. Christine said it had lots of flavors, which I took to be a good thing.

My new Twitter account

2009-02-19T11:07:41Z

inoah had an interesting idea last Saturday night. Create a Twitter account that spews nonsense, based on the input of users it follows.

A day later, I created the Twitter account named BlaBlaBloblo. Originally, the code was a shell script that called dadadodo but I soon after implemented the whole thing in Python in order to be better suited for 140 character output, and renamed the twitter account to DinDaaDaa, giving it a name that had more meaning to me.

So now I have dindada.py, a program that accesses a Twitter account, uses the tweets of those it follows to form a Markov chain, builds one or more sentences from the chain, and posts a tweet back to Twitter. Tweets that are read are accessed through the Twitter JSON API, and saved to a local pickle, as to help build the Markov chain over time. Words are weighted by frequency in order to produce better output over time.

The funny part is that this account already has 21 followers.

I now wonder if I should create a new LiveJournal account and do the same thing.

Harrison Ford

2009-01-15T03:19:36Z

Just in case you are ever curious and need to check: Is Harrison Ford Alive?

Yacht Rock

2009-01-03T18:55:05Z

My friend Rachel pointed me to Yacht Rock recently. There are only 11 episodes, and it does not look like they are making anymore, but it is seriously funny stuff, if you have ever listened to any "Yacht Rock".

I am up to episode #3.

Edit to Add: Also found "The Bed and Breakfast Club" on the same site.

For more debate watching fun...

2008-10-15T22:25:29Z

Don't forget to print out your Presidential Debate Bingo cards before the debate tonight. You can usually fit two cards on one sheet, and if you have people coming over, you can print a whole bunch at one time.

Enjoy!

McCain on Health Care...

2008-10-06T21:34:07Z

“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.” - John McCain

If only our health care was as solid as our banking infrastructure.

See: Health Care Destruction and the referenced article: http://www.contingencies.org/septoct08/mccain.pdf

Looking for beta testers for a silly web application

2008-10-05T20:15:42Z

If anyone is interested in testing two new features of Buzzword Bingo Game, reply here or send me an email and I will send you the link.

This is a feature I wrote about 3 years ago, but due to mostly accounting issues, I never felt comfortable releasing it until today.

Thanks in part to a nasty cold I have had this weekend, I have had a chance to clean up the code a bit, and fix those pesky accounting issues.

For more debate watching fun: Presidential Debate Bingo!

2008-10-05T00:56:25Z

In preparation for the next debate I have set up a few more Buzzword Bingo Cards:

If anyone sees any errors, or has suggestions for new phrases, please let me know.

Also, I finally activated buzzwordbingogame.com so that there is a version of the site that is work/kid friendly.

For your debate watching fun...

2008-10-02T22:30:53Z

Sarah Palin Debate Bingo

Enjoy!

Vacation

2008-08-27T10:04:06Z

Almost ready to head out on our vacation. We are heading to Hartford, CT to visit with Christines family, and for her sisters wedding, then off to NY for 2.5 days for sight seeing.

The bags are packed.
An excellent friend has agreed to stop by and check on our cats while we are gone. (I can not even describe how much this puts my mind at ease.)
iPod is loaded up with enough podcasts and music to keep me entertained and maybe even sane on two 8 hour flights, including a few episodes of FLOSS Weekly, An episode of No Agenda, and 2 episodes (13 and 14) of Mixed Blessings in case I start feeling too sane. Also bringing about 12 hours of audio and video lectures from the Stanford section of iTunes U.
Flickr Account upgraded to a pro account so that I can upload photos during the trip (I was already at my limit for the month).
Boarding Pass has been printed.
Alarms set for Way:Too:Early AM (And why am I still up?)

For this trip, I am trying something new. I am going with out a single laptop. Just a phone, iPod, and camera. Lets see how long I stay sane with out an actual computer, for 6 days.. I will be using a microSD card in the camera via an SD adapter so that I can put the card in my phone, and upload to Flickr along the way.

I am cheating a little by bringing a bluetooth keyboard, so in a pinch, I can write a longer email, or blog post if I feel like it, but most of my posts for the next week will be of the 140 character Twitter variety.

Methods of payment at Mi Tierra in Oakland

2008-08-05T01:57:42Z

One way to tell that the economy is going down hill:

Lost Boys 2: The Tribe

2008-08-03T21:32:10Z

I made the mistake of renting Lost Boys 2: The Tribe last night. Here is the review I posted to Netflix:

I went into this movie expecting it to be bad, based on the fact that it went straight to video. I got what I expected, in abundance.

For starters, the description of the movie is very misleading when it says "Corey Feldman and Corey Haim co-star in this sequel to 1987's Lost Boys". Corey Haim has less than 30 seconds of screen time in the movie, and those 30 seconds do nothing to further the story. The only explanation for that cameo is so that they could advertise the movie as having 'both Coreys'. I also suspect that based on the last name of the main characters, that this script may have been re-written from an earlier version that had more involvement by the Corey Haim character, as his last name was also "Emerson" in the original movie.

The story, if you want to call it that, is not a continuation of the first movie and there are little to no references to it. In some ways, it might as well be a rehash of the original, in a new time, with new people. The whole thing is very predictable, to the point where I guessed specific details about ending very early in the movie.

There was one surprise in this movie: The "head vampire" is played by Angus Sutherland and he does bear some resemblance to his older half brother Kiefer Sutherland of the original Lost Boys movie. There are no attempts to capitalize on nor explain this in the movie.

One thing that could make this movie better would be if Corey Feldman used a normal talking voice, and not some made up voice that is a cross between a 50 year old biker/smoker, and a stoner. The voice is phony, laughable, and very distracting.

Again, I knew this movie would be bad going into it, but I was lured in by the expectation of two Coreys, and the possible continuation of the original story. I was disappointed on both counts. Save your time and skip this movie. I gave it two stars.

Irony

2008-07-15T17:54:18Z

Went to a 1.5 hour meeting this morning. Turned out to be a rehash of a 1.5 hour meeting I went to exactly one week ago.

The general themes were:

Employee utilization
Productivity
Cost Cutting

I wish I were joking. Sometimes I feel like I live in a Dilbert strip.

A typical home project...

2008-07-07T00:17:57Z

This is a day in the life of a typical home owner wishing to install a ceiling fan...

Decide to install ceiling fan in office. The goal being more airflow, and much better lighting.
Decide that a fan with multiple directional light units would be best, for focusing light at desk, and laundry machines.
Go to OSH and pick out fan that will look good in the office. Ensure that selected fan uses standard bulbs so that using CFL bulbs is an option.
Return home.
Remove ugly old ceiling light.
Note that old ceiling fixture is loose and wobbly and thus not appropriate for a ceiling fan. Also note that it is attached, badly, to the side of a beam.
Go to hardware store and buy a new 1/2" pancake light fixture (right), a 16" medallion (left) in order to cover old 4" hole in ceiling, and a sheet rock knife for use in cutting new 4" hole in ceiling, below beam.
Return home, cut new hole in ceiling, solidly attach pancake box to beam using 3 - 2" screws.
Start installing new fan.
Attach fan harness to pancake box.
Start attaching electrical wires to fan motor housing.
Detach electrical wires.
Remove fan harness from pancake box.
Install 16" medallion.
Re-attach fan harness to pancake box.
Start attaching electrical wires to fan motor housing.
Mount fan motor housing to harness.
Lose screws in fan motor housing 3 or 4 times. Each time, remove motor housing and shake vigorously until lost screw falls out.
Wrap motor housing in plastic in order to cover holes so screws will stop falling in.
Attach motor housing to fan harness.
Suddenly decide to double check light unit, notice that it uses candelabra bulbs, not standard bulbs.
Detach motor housing.
Detach electrical wires.
Detach fan harness.
Box up all parts as well as possible and rush back to OSH, before they close in 20 minutes.
Learn that the display model is an older version. The current version is what we purchased.
Return fan as there are no other models meet our needs.
As it is now 9PM and all hardware stores are closed, go to K-Mart and Target in hopes of finding a replacement.
Give up, go home and watch movie.
Wake up Sunday morning and go to a different OSH, in hopes that and older version of the fan we had chosen is still on a store shelf somewhere.
Get extremely lucky in finding said older version. Open box at store and confirm unit is correct.
Return home with fan, and celebratory candy bar.
Start installing new fan.
Attach fan harness to pancake box.
Start attaching electrical wires to fan motor housing.
Detach electrical wires.
Remove fan harness from pancake box.
Install 16" medallion.
Re-attach fan harness to pancake box.
Keep plastic bag on motor housing in order to prevent screws from falling into it.
Start attaching electrical wires to fan motor housing.
Mount fan motor housing to harness.
Attach fan blades.
Attach light unit.
Install CFL bulbs.
Turn on light switch and confirm that light and fan operates correctly.
Note that ceiling now needs to be painted to hide evidence of old light fixture location.
Log in to IRC, and LJ to document follies.

CrimeView Incident Map

2008-06-28T08:00:13Z

I just learned about a service that Oakland offers called CrimeView Incident Map.

The service allows you to see a map of an area up to one mile from a given location that highlights all crimes that have taken place with in a specified period of time. Each crime is displayed as an icon, and clicking them gives you more information as to what the crime was.

They also have a service called CrimeView CyberWatch that provides automated email alerts of recent crime activity for a desired area of interest,

This is useful/interesting information for anyone who lives in Oakland. If you live in the area, it is worth checking out.

EDIT: Also interesting is: SpotCrime, as it is based on Google Maps, but the data does not appear to be as complete.

Firefox 3

2008-06-18T15:45:48Z

Installed Firefox 3 yesterday. It seems fast so far, but the loss of various extensions, and features is making me want to go back to Firefox 2.

Extensions I miss:

AdBlock: Adblock Plus is ok, but I prefer the UI for AdBlock
Add N Edit Cookies: I have found no good replacement for this
Linky

Tabbed Browsing Changes

Previously, if you middle clicked on a folder of bookmarks, or right clicked and selected "Open All in Tabs", Firefox would either load them in new tabs appending these new tabs to your currently open set, or close your current tabs, and create a new set. The preference "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" controlled this behavior.

In Firefox 3, the default behavior is to always appened new tabs when selecting "Open All in Tabs". To options that contolled this feature have removed, and the about:config option "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" is now ignored.

Mozilla Team: Why did you remove functionality?

Voting today

2008-06-03T15:45:20Z

I voted yes on 98, no on 99.

I personally do not like rent control, nor do I think it is fair to landlords. I also believe in a free market.

I also think it creates incentive to increase rents yearly, at the maximum allowed rate, vs following market trends. My last experience living in a non-rent controlled apartment was a $50 rent increase in 8 years. I saw more than that living in SF in 3 years, where rent controls existed. Also during the 8 years I lived in Alameda, I saw neighboring buildings jack their rent prices up during the boom, only to find half empty buildings a year later, while my building maintained a much lower rate of turnover, most likely due to the limited rent increases. This leads me to believe that a free market works the way it should.

That said, 98 does not remove the current rent controls that many people enjoy today, as long as they continue living in the same place.

My main reason for voting yes on 98: 99 only protects single family homes, not businesses. Single family homes are not usually the target of such actions, except when it involves Freeways, etc, and that is still allowed under both 98 and 99.

98 also protects business owners. I have seen Alameda use eminent domain to destroy a business and give the land over to a private business at least once, and there is a small bar that may lose its property so that a Toyota dealership can expand onto it. Those are not good uses of eminent domain, and something that 98 works to rectify.

For the record: I read the full text of both 98 and 99 before voting. My head hurt afterwards, but I felt that it was the only way to make an informed decision. I will not read advertising for any measures as I find it to be the worst source of accurate information, and the radio advertising for these measures was very misleading on both sides, almost causing me to just vote no on everything.

PayPal

2008-06-01T21:10:18Z

Today I closed my PayPal account for reasons that are very similar to why I closed my eBay account: Too much SPAM/phishing email that is spoofing their domain.

Although I use SpamAssassin to filter out most of my SPAM, PayPal has made it very difficult for their users to determine which email is legitimate, and which email is SPAM. PayPal has implemented an SPF record (view it), but it does not specify that all email must come from their designated servers (-all vs ~all) . What PayPal is saying through their SPF record is:

We might send email from other servers, we just do not know and we are unable to plan ahead. We might add a mail server in the future and forget to add it to our SPF record, so we are afraid to lock our SPF record down. Please do not block emails that say they are from us but do not come from our mail servers, and just ignore the fact that we set up an SPF record at all.

Since PayPal users can not use the SPF record to filter out the spoofed mail, they must also use a white list entry, to ensure that legitimate email from PayPal does not get filtered. The SPAMers/phishers know this, and as such send all their SPAM from this whitelisted address (service@paypal.com). For these reasons, most of the SPAM that slips through to my in-box is spoofed PayPal email.

Now that I have closed my account, I can remove the white list entry, and assume that any email from PayPal is phony.

The big question is: Does anyone actually use eBay or PayPal any more?

Asking for a lower interest rate

2008-05-24T21:35:41Z

When ever I read financial advice blogs, such as The Simple Dollar (thesimpledollar), one suggestion comes up over and over again: Call your credit card companies and ask for a lower rate.

It sounds like a great idea, but I suspect that most people do not really believe that it is as easy as these blogs make it out to be.

Currently, my American Express Card is the only non-store credit card I use or carry a balance on. I signed up through Costco, and use it mostly for larger purchases that I may want to spread across a couple pay checks, or purchases that I want purchase protection on. I generally try to keep the card paid off, and at most have had a balance equivalent to 14% of my available credit line.

Many might find it silly to make a purchase on a credit card, or to carry any balance at all, while having funds are available in savings to make such a purchase, or to pay the balance off. I find it to be a way of protecting my savings account. If I were to pull money from my savings, there is a risk that I would never put it back. Sure I might pay a small interest fee here and there, but since I hate paying interest fees I use them as motivation to keep the cards paid off, while maintaining/growing my savings account.

I also have store cards for Home Depot and Mervyns. In the past I have tried to get the interest lowered on the 2 store cards with no success, and as such I do not carry balances on those cards, and only use them when doing so saves money on a purchase. For instance, Mervyns will often give you a 15% discount coupon that is only good when you use your store credit card, and as long as you pay off the balance with in 30 days, there is no interest charge, and as such the savings is real. I find my Home Depot card as mostly useless, as their only special offer is 0% interest for 6 months for balances over a specific amount, but I keep it around in case of a home emergency.

Today while reviewing my American Express Card bill, I noticed that my interest rate was higher than I am comfortable with, and decided to see if calling would make a difference. I spoke to a representative who immediately told me that my account was eligible for a rate reduction of about 1%.

I find it to be fascinating that a card company might flag an account for a lower interest rate, but has no incentive to automatically give the rate to the consumer, or notify the consumer that the rate is available to them just for the asking.

When asked if I wanted this new rate, I expressed my concern that it was not as low as I thought it should be. I told the representative that I was looking for a rate of 8 or 9%. At that point I was put on hold for about a minute so that the representative could "discuss my request with his colleagues". My guess is that in reality the representative spent this time re-organized the items on his desk. He returned with an offer of a rate that was 2% lower than what I am currently paying. Not as good as what I asked for, but it is much closer to those numbers than I was previously.

I found his next question to be quite amusing: "Do I have your permission to apply this rate to your account?" I have just been told that I can pay 2% less interest, and for some reason, there is a concern that I might want to continue paying the higher rate? For the life of me, I can not imagine a reason that this question was necessary, but I answered yes to his question while wondering what comedy might ensue if I answered with no.

In the end it took me 6 minutes and 39 seconds on the phone with American Express in order to lower my rate by 2%. It was time well spent. Now I wonder of my mortgage company would be as open to lowering my interest rate? :)

So if you have a few minutes to an hour to spare today, I challenge you to call your credit card companies and ask for a lower rate. Some of them may have already decided to give you that new lower rate and are just waiting by the phone for your call.

It really is that easy.

LoudTwitter

2008-04-14T01:32:07Z

I have noticed that a good number of my friends are using LoudTwitter in order to post a daily batch of Twitter postings to their LiveJournal account.

I was curious about how this works, since I recently signed up for a Twitter account. It seems that you have to give your LiveJournal account user name and password to the folks who run LoudTwitter, and that gives their system access to your LiveJournal account in order to make the daily post.

What this means is that the maintainers of LoudTwitter, could, if they wanted to, access the LiveJournal accounts of the people who have signed up for their service. They could then access private/friends only entries, if any, and/or make random posts. I can see a good number of people signing up for something like this without thinking of the possible ways that this could be abused, but I tend to know a good number of people who are more security conscious, so I assumed that LoudTwitter must have a pretty good privacy policy.

This is the privacy policy / TOS:

All your base are belong to us
We're not affilited with twitter
[ ] <- you allow me to use this blank with anything

I wonder how many people read that before signing up.

There does appear to be an option to post via email, and that only requires a post-only pin to be provided. I am testing that now with my own account, but I wonder how many people that are using this service supplied their LiveJournal account name and password.

Edit 2008-05-02: nattotastic contacted LoudTwitter about this issue, and as a result, the TOS was updated. While it is nice to see that they have updated the TOS, I still do not plan on giving them my password.

Incompetent email administrators

2008-04-03T05:32:58Z

What is the deal with companies hiring incompetent mail administrators these days?

On August 28th, 2007, I posted about how ServePath sent me a very important account notification, but that it was marked as SPAM. The reason it had been marked as spam was that somebody at ServePath decided to send the email from SalesForce.com but failed to update their SPF record before doing so. As such, my mail system flagged the email as SPAM, since according to ServePath's own SPF record, mail from gw2-sjl.salesforce.com (204.14.234.14) was not legitimate email. It appears that ServePath has since updated their SPF record to include servers owned by SalesForce.com, but unfortunately, they are still having a few issues with it.

Last month, while reviewing my email server configuration, I noticed that I was rejecting email from oaklandlibrary.org. I asked Christine if she was expecting email from them, and she said that she was, so I looked into the issue further. The problem was that the server was identifying itself as millennium.oaklandlibrary.org, but there there was no DNS entry for that host name. Since I live in Oakland, and my wife uses the services of this library, I thought it was a good idea to let them know about this issue. It should come as no surprise that my email to postmaster@oaklandlibrary.org bounced, as did my later email to abuse@oaklandlibrary.org. I finally located an address that did not bounce, oplweb@oaklandlibrary.org, but there has been no response.

Just a few days later I noticed that I was rejecting email from Twitter.com. The reason this time was that the Twitter mail server that was connecting to mine had an IP address (128.121.145.168) that resolved to mail.twitter.com. Unfortunately, mail.twitter.com does not resolve to 128.121.145.168) but instead resolves to 207.7.108.85. Anyone can set up an IP address so that it resolves to any domain they want, but in order to be legitimate, it needs to resolve in both directions. 128.121.145.168 fails that test, and as such my mail server rejects, as it should, all notifications from Twitter. Just like with the Oakland Library, I tried to let them know, but email to postmaster@twitter.com, and abuse@twitter.com bounced with messages such as: "<postmaster@twttr.com> (expanded from <postmaster@twitter.com>): User unknown in virtual alias table".

A few weeks ago I tried to sign up for an account at DoubleTwist, but again due to their DNS issues, my mail server is rejecting their email. They are sending mail from 74.86.83.218, which resolves to doubletwist.com, but doubletwist.com resolves to 67.228.121.123 not 67.228.121.123. At least mail to their postmaster address has not bounced, it has simply been ignored.

I could go on and on about companies that are experiencing DNS issues. And no, I will not modify my mail server settings so that I can accept email from mis-configured mail servers. I will not open the door to all that SPAM. Why should I accept email from people who have already demonstrated their incompetence?

I suspect that part of the problem is that there is no such position as "Mail Administrator" at most startups. Email is just an afterthought lumped in with other IT duties which are also an after thought. Even though email can be critical to the success of a new company, it is never given the attention nor respect that it rightfully deserves.

Who is running your email server, and how do you know it is configured correctly?

Edit (2008-04-04): Twitter has since fixed their DNS. It appears that the issue with Twitter was related to their move away from Joyent. Someone just forgot to update their DNS in the process.

Edit (2008-04-06): DoubleTwist has since fixed their DNS.

Why people fall for phishing attempts

2008-04-03T02:35:28Z

The company I work for uses Anthem Blue Cross for our health benefits coverage.

The other day I got an email from "Anthem National Accounts" <anthem.communications@anthem.com> asking me to "Please click here to complete my "coordination of benefits questionnaire and return it to us within fourteen days of receipt.". As I moused over the link, I noticed that it was "http://cl.exct.net/open.aspx?Globally-Unique-Id-Removed-For-This-Post". A URL like that, sent from a health care provider should immediately raise a red flag for anyone, not just those that are security conscious.

My next step, one that most would not do, was to take a look at the mail headers. This email was received from: xtinmta02-111.exacttarget.com ([207.67.38.111]). Another warning sign about this email is that the mail was not actually sent by anthem.com. I now see three separate domains. The envelope address (anthem.com), the link address (exct.net), and the mail server (exacttarget.com), and the more I look into this, the "phishier" it gets.

The next thing I did was to check the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record for the domain anthem.com. An SPF record for a domain will list the mail servers that legitimately send email on its behalf. A company will often add a third party email provider to their own record in order to prove that the companies do have a relationship, and that the third party is permitted to send emails on their behalf. Unfortunately, anthem.com has no SPF record, so there was no way for me to validate that this is a legitimate email.

For the purposes of this post, I clicked on the link, and it redirected me to a link at http://www.surveymonkey.com. The page was branded with the Anthem Blue Cross logo. It wanted me to fill out information such as my Anthem Member ID, My full name, and the names of all of my dependents. To make matters worse, this was not even a secure (HTTPS) page. Now I am sure that SurveyMonkey.com is most likely a legitimate business, but looking at that company name, the first think I think of is silly "What StarWars Character Am I Most like?" quizzes, not the sort of place that I want to send my personal health care information to. I do not know this company, and I do not have a relationship with them. I do not have any reason to believe that a company running this survey should also be responsible for my personal information. BTW for the record: I am most like Han Solo.

So what is a sane person to do? The only correct course of action is to delete the email at the first sign of it being "phishy", and so far I have counted five.

Unfortunately, I have had quite a few dealings with Anthem Blue Cross in recent months, and most of them have not been pleasant ones. I know Anthem Blue Cross to be just the sort of company that would demonstrate such a blatant disregard for its customers personal information that it was entirely possible that this was a legitimate email.

My solution was to forward the email to the human resources manager at my company and ask her if this was legitimate, and if I should worry about filling this out. Now here is the scary part: It was a legitemate email! Her response was that during the middle of last month, an announcement was sent telling everyone that this email was coming. She agreed that this email looked funny, and that they should do a better job in the future. For the record: I refused to fill out the survey. I will do so, if required, when the survey is hosted on an anthem.com based URL.

Keep in mind that I understand that it is reasonable, and normal for a company like Anthem Blue Cross to rely upon a third party in order to handle its email communications. In fact, I work for such a company. But there are ways to do this right, so that the person receiving the email does not have to question its validity. For instance:

Create an SPF record for your domain, and keep it updated. The later is just as important as the former. I have a few instances where companies send out important notifications from a third party that is not listed in their SPF record, and then wonder why their clients filed it as junk. Having a bad SPF record is worse than not having one at all.
If you are going to have a third party send a large amount of email on your behalf, it might be worth the extra few minutes of effort to add a DNS entry for your domain, that points to the email server(s) of your provider. For instance, anthem.com could add an entry for exct.anthem.com that points to 207.67.38.111. The third party would need to dedicate an IP for this customer, and give it a matching reverse address.
Links in your emails, if you are sending them or not, should point to your own domain. If you need to redirect to a third party at that point, you can, but honestly, it is not recommended in this day and age.
If you must use a third party for collecting information from your customers, you might want to spend the extra few minutes to an hour and work with the provider and your IT staff to set up DNS so that it at least looks like a host in your domain, such as surveymonkey.anthem.com or sm.anthem.com. If the provider wants your business, they will be more than happy to help you set this up.

None of this is very hard, or very complicated. Any company that is worth doing business with will be able to handle such a request, and setting up SPF and DNS records is only a few minutes work for a well trained IT professional. Then again, it seems that Anthem Blue Cross does not hire well trained mail administrators.

My point to all of this is: If a supposedly legitimate email from a reputable health care provider can look this bad, how is Grandma Mae supposed to spot the phishing attempts that say they are from HSBC Bank? The second you tell a person to ignore the common knowledge they have been taught, such as not following links in strange looking emails to servers you do not recognize and not entering sensitive information on to non-secure pages, then why should they think any differently when they get the next phishing attempt or Nigerian email?

Edit to add:

I sent the URL of this post to the Anthem email address above, just to be fair, and give them a chance to acknowledge the issues. Unfortunately, the email bounced. It was first accepted by smtp.wellpoint.com[162.95.222.12] but shortly after, an email was sent back saying "User anthem.communications (anthem.communications@anthem.com) not listed in Domino Directory".

I would normally send such a thing to postmaster@anthem.com, but as you can see, that address does not work as anthem.com violates RFC 2821 Section 4.5.1.

At least I did my best and tried to let them know

A Nice Day

2008-03-17T05:59:31Z

Today was a busy, but great day.

First I mowed the front lawn, pulled weeds, washed the car, cleaned up backyard a bit, and separated our garbage/recycling for the week.

Then I took Christine to Crown Beach in Alameda so she could do some more bird watching. The tide was very low today, so we were able to walk about a tenth of a mile out from where the water usually meets the beach. This also gave us the opportunity to walk directly from Westline Drive / Shoreline Drive over to McKay Avenue in Alameda.

During the walk Christine would point out birds of interest and I would try to get close enough to take a picture with my little Cannon A510. One thing became clear... I need a better camera soon.

After we made it to McKay Avenue we decided to head over to Central Avenue and Webster to eat at the New Zealander Restaurant. The New Zealander is located in the historic Croll Building, and is known for its excellent New Zealand Pub Pies. A pub pie and soup is about $9.00 and is a filling meal. We could not leave with out sharing a New Zealand Pavlova for dessert.

After the food we walked back to the car, through Washington Park stopping at a small duck pond for some more photos. While there we watched a hawk catch a small duck. I was able to get close enough to take a few photos of the hawk eating. It was breath taking to watch.

Over all it turned out to be a walk of about 2 miles in a circle around all of Crown Beach and Washington Park. I uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr account.

I am now exhausted, yet very content. It was a good day.

Netflix or "Sharing is Caring"

2008-03-08T00:37:50Z

Netflix has a feature that allows its users to maintain multiple queues, movie ratings, and friends per account. This feature has been present since early 2005, but I only became aware of it this past week, after seeing an Add Queue link on the queue page.

The way this works is that you assign your quota of DVD's to each sub account. If you have a 2 DVD account, you would assign one DVD to up to 2 sub accounts. When user A returns a disk, a disk is shipped from user A's queue, and when user B returns a disk, a disk is shipped from the user B queue.

Each queue becomes its own account with its own user name and password. From what I have seen so far, the master account or owner can log into the sub accounts with out a password, but the sub accounts can not log into each other, or the master account. This would allow a parent to assign queues to their children while still maintaining some control over what the kids watch. Limits can also be set as to what moves are allowed to be added to the queue.

This is a great way to share, and be fair, with a Netflix account. This is also nice since although Christine and I have very similar tastes, we do not always agree 100% on how good a particular movie was, and as such, our movie ratings did not accurately reflect on either one of us. It is not with out its flaws. For instance you can not watch on demand movies from the sub accounts, and some of the friends management features are not available such as changing alias/nick names for those users.

Christine and I have added two new queues to our account. We will be keeping the old queue for stuff we both like, and then using our own queues for stuff that just one of us is interested in watching. Since we have a 3 DVD account, we have assigned one disk to each queue. We are still in process of moving our queued DVDs to our individual queues, and transferring over our ratings, which is currently a manual process.

If you are interested in seeing my personal movie queue and ratings, the invite URL is: http://www.netflix.com/BeMyFriend/PeCba0J6JfFLVQbHERsD . If you had previously added our shared account, feel free to remove it if you like. If you would like to invite me to add your Netflix account, feel free to post the invite URL as a reply to this post. Comments will be screened so that your invite URL is not made public. Just let me know if you want the URL, or your comments to be made public.

I am very impressed with Netflix for adding this feature. I have often commented that many products/services fail to realize that sometimes people, especially those who live together in the same household, like to share accounts. When people share accounts it is also important to have a level of individuality. The only other services that come to mind that offer features like this are internet service providers who offer multiple email accounts for a DSL line that is shared.

For instance, Christine and I share a collection of CDs and recently imported them into iTunes. We also buy from iTunes once in a while. As a married couple it makes sense that we would want to share the ripped music and purchased tracks but as of today, Apple does not make this easy for users to do. Even if the collection is stored on a shared file server, as ours is, only one person may manage the collection at one time, and all management must be done from the same copy of iTunes. And while there is the ability to listen to tracks contained on another copy of iTunes, and to authorize three other computers to play a purchased track, remote tracks can not be added to a local play list, and are only available while the other computer is present. If the other copy of iTunes is on a laptop, it might be asleep, or out of the house much of the time.

A feature like this is also a benefit to security as shared passwords are never a good thing. Passwords I share with Christine are never held up to the same standards I use for my own accounts, since my own passwords are based on md5 hashes of components such as a user name, a company name, and some secret salt). A feature like this allows multiple people to login to an account with their own user name and password, and change the password as needed. Banks and Credit card companies already issue individual cards with unique numbers for each account owner, but currently I do not know of any bank that issues separate login accounts specific to each account owner.

Netflix has provided an excellent example of a family account, and the best example I know of to date. I hope that other companies and developers will think of this when implementing their own products.

Edit 2008-06-20: I have been informed by Netflix that this feature will be discontinued as of September 1st. This makes a lot of sense. A company supplies a useful feature, then revokes it. As a result, I am switching from my $17/month account to two $4.99 accounts.

Edit 2008-06-30: And as of today, Netflix has announced that they are keeping profiles after all. I guess they got enough feedback to let them know that this feature was worth keeping. Or, Netflix may have realized that 3 single disk $4.99 accounts costs less than one 3 disk $16.99 account, and thus they were about to lose a significant amount of money, as everybody downgraded their accounts.

Broken Web Sites

2008-01-13T20:59:12Z

It seems that lately I am getting increasingly frustrated with broken web sites.

Today I was trying to rent a pickup truck. It seems that doing so on a Sunday is impossible, but I did get to find out how broken some sites are.

Enterprise

Entered todays date, noon pickup time, 9pm drop off time, and my zip code. Enterprise tells me that it "could not find 94603 in US". Odd, since there is an airport in the area. I entered "OAK" instead and was told that it could not find it. Enterprise could not find a major Airport in the US... NEXT

I did try once more using tomorrows date, and was able to get listings, so the failure of Enterprise is in its error messages. "We have no cars today" or "We do not rent cars on Sunday, try renting tomorrow" would lead to a much less frustrating experience, and save me from trying all the variations of location, zip, city, state, airport code, etc.

EDIT: Thanks to some detective work by caladri , I have been able to determine that Enterprise requires your pickup date to be at least 2 hours in the future, other wise it wont be able to find your location. Again, I thing the issue here is a lack of helpful messages to the consumer, such as "Please try a pickup time that is at least 2 hours from now", or automatically adjusting the pickup time for the consumer.

Budget

Went to the site last night and found that it was down for maintenance. It was up again today.

Entered info on home page including zip code, click "Continue", wait.... nothing happens. Click "Continue" again, move to the next page in order to find that only the zip code from the previous page stuck. The Date/Time is listed as "still deciding". Attempted to click on "Rent at this location" next to a near by Budget location, nothing happens. Well, not nothing, the status bar changed to "javascript:chooseLocation('OA1', false ',' false ',' false ',' false ','....". While I am sure that is useful to the web developer who wrote this broken application, it is not to the customer.

Avis

Went to the site last night and found that it was down for maintenance. It was up again today. Avis does not allow you to enter your zip code. You have to enter your city name, and select your state from a pull down list. I always find this annoying.

Upon entering my information I was greeted with this error in red text "Cars are sold out at the selected time and place. Please try changing the dates or location.". I am pretty sure that what the message really meant was that I am trying to rent a car outside of their hours, but at least this message suggested a good solution, try a different date or location.

I never rented a vehicle

In the end I never rented a vehicle. The IKEA couch will have to wait for another day.