Arthur and Melissa’s Notes on Everything

My car has been sitting dormant in the garage for a month or two, waiting patiently for a new battery. The old one finally decided to crap out, leaving some interesting crystalization around the top of the battery. Arthur was going to be a Good Husband™ and take my car to Walmart, but alas, the car was too dead to start. Thus began the quest to replace the battery. (Cue dramatic orchestral music)

Arthur went to Walmart on his way home from work today and bought the battery. By the way, since when is it ok to just arbitrarily charge someone money to ensure they bring the old battery back? In addition to the $32.99 for the battery, Walmart charges $7.00 for an “old battery disposal deposit”, which you supposedly get back after you lug your old, crusty, possibly dangerous battery back to the store. Smart.

I could make the actual replacement of the battery sound all dramatic, but really it wasn’t too bad. The worst part was contorting ourselves around various parts under the hood just to get the bolts off of the battery holder. Of course each bolt was a different size, and two bolts had threads that went the wrong direction. Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey didn’t really work in this situation. Who designs Saturns anyway? Sheesh.

Overall, the experience wasn’t too bad, and I learned a few things along the way. It was funny when Arthur took the car out for a test drive. Let’s just say he’s been driving a hybrid a little too long. All those little clunks, bonks, and squeaks that are normal in my car seemed so out of place to him. Oh well, at least I can drive again. Yay!

And on another note, I find it quite funny that Google‘s AdSense seems to always update the ads being displayed on the same day that I happen to post a new item, so the ads are perpetually based on the second posting, not the most recent one.

Fax machines should die. All they do is put a barely reliable wrapper around a simple procedure – scan a document, transmit it, then print it out again. What’s sad is they aren’t particularly high quality images in the first place. What really sucks is that they depend on a boring old traditional analog phone line, which, for a growing part of the population, is a hard thing to come by! Seriously, I can scan a document (in color, no less) and send it by email through my high-speed Internet connection in less time with much better quality than a fax machine, and it goes directly to the intended recipient. Contrast with faxing, which, well, I can’t, looks worse, and requires a sneakernet. I have no analog phone line, and the T.38 standard for faxing through a VoIP connection isn’t implemented by my company’s provider.

Then there are the companies which should be convicted of conspiracy to impede progress, namely any company which flatly eats email containing images or zipped images, which is of course, the sensible way to send a document image these days… It’s one thing to bounce a message because your IT policies are ignorant of the fact that people might need to get their work done some day, but silently eating a message is even worse – it’s a violation of the standards defining how mail is exchanged over the Internet. The moment your server acknowledges receipt of the message, you’re obligated to deliver that message or notify the sender why you didn’t deliver the message. Mail filters that silently eat messages break the mutual trust needed to ensure that things just work. Seriously, if that’s the mindset of administrators running mail servers around the world, then why shouldn’t I just write a mailer that sets the optional receipt flag in every message, and continuously redelivers the same message over and over until a receipt is received? It’d be complete chaos if everyone started doing random crap like that. Ugh!

It’s been four months since we submitted our websites to Google for indexing in their giant tome of all Internet knowledge. Today at last, the Googlebot is paying us a visit, and boy is it ever visiting! Unlike their competitors (Yahoo! and MSN Search, in particular) who indexed our sites early on when we submitted them for inclusion, Googlebot started looking at us at 3:15pm today, and is still pulling down pages as I write this. The other search engines pull three or four pages at a time, then wander off for another six hours before requesting more. Not Google… it appears that Googlebot has been pulling almost non-stop this whole time. Who knows, maybe we’ll finally show up in the all important Google searches now?

The whole reason I’m excited, yet thoroughly annoyed about this, is that we launched the Holiday Gift Forum website last year with the expectation that we could get it indexed in the major search engines, and have some messages posted with great keywords to draw in searchers as well as land some great ads, thus generating ad revenue from a mere three or four hours of work. Knowing that Google claims to update their system every 6 weeks, August should have been plenty of time to get indexed for the Christmas shopping season, right? Bah. The only Google traffic we ever saw was from the AdSense server looking to see what ads it should insert in our pages. Oh well. We’ll be ready for next year! Hopefully with the addition of the site in Google’s index, we’ll blow past this season’s paltry 20 hits per day (almost all of which were from people searching for the Spongebob Squarepants Krabby Patty Station).

Oh, and why have we never mentioned the Holiday Gift Forum to anyone we know? Simple – all our Dirty Santa gifts are given away in there, since Melissa couldn’t resist the urge to share the awesome deals she scored with anyone else who might happen to search for Dirty Santa help.

My mom forwarded this bit today and asked, “Is this just another bunch of hooey or is there a chance that it could work?”

This only applies to cars that can be unlocked by that remote button on your key ring. Should you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are home, and you don’t have “On Star,” here’s your answer to the problem!

If some one has access to the spare remote at your home, call them on your cell phone (or borrow one from someone if the cell phone is locked in the car too!) Hold your (or anyone’s) cell phone about a foot from your car door and have he other person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the phone.

Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other “remote” for your car, you can unlock the doors! (or the trunk, or have the “horn” signal go off, or whatever!)

(Editor’s Note – It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a cell phone!)

The answer here is clearly, “You’ve been had.” The first line of defense for checking out probable hoaxes is Snopes, which has already torn this one apart. However, suppose some poor schmuck was the victim of this prank, and it actually worked. What other possibilities exist that might have triggered the car to unlock? Before I checked Snopes, I had already devised three theories of how this might possibly work. Two require some really far-fetched conditions. But the third isn’t bizarre at all, is quite simple, doesn’t even require the car’s remote entry transmitter, and therefore by Occam’s Razor, must be correct.

If there’s an RF Engineer in the house, please open your reference books now and examine this theory:

1. The terminally curious in the audience, as well as those who have put their cell phone down in the wrong place, already know that cell phones emit a wallop of energy when they are transmitting. GSM phones (Cingular and T-Mobile, but not Verizon or Sprint) make this very obvious because they transmit in bursts which induce loud and scary buzzing noises in any audio equipment within some inches of the phone. Similarly, if your phone is near a CRT and begins transmitting, it causes the picture to go all screwy. Thus, we know a cell phone is able to induce a current in a nearby circuit.
2. Any car with remote entry controls has electronic door locks. That’s just the way things work.
3. Therefore, could a cell phone held next to a car door induce a current in the door lock circuitry, triggering the unlock circuit?

It seems to me, not being any kind of RF specialist, that this can’t be ruled out completely. Thus the question – is there a magic spot on a car (probably model specific) where you can hold up your active cell phone and induce a pulse in the unlock wire, triggering the car to unlock the doors because someone inside the car “pushed” the unlock button? The existence of such a spot seems very unlikely, since the metal body panels will reflect and diffuse the RF radiation coming at it, presumably allowing only a small amount of unfocused energy through to the wiring. However, cars with plastic body panels probably don’t have this line of defense between the outside world and their lock wiring.

I’ve got some experimenting to do in the parking garage now.

For those who don’t have an ear to tech or European news, the European division of Lycos officially launched the Make Love, Not Spam site today. It’s a neat idea, and it’s nice to see a major company with the guts to stand up and fight back. Unfortunately for those of us sitting on a Comcast network, we’ll probably never see it again. It appears that some time yesterday afternoon, Comcast decided that their users should have nothing to do with Lycos’s anti-spam campaign, and are actively blocking traffic to that particular server. Sheesh. If they didn’t want to be involved, they could at least be civil about the matter and just block the anti-spam client instead of knocking the whole site off the face of the Internet. Yet another reason Comcast sucks… they still don’t understand that when you pay for Internet access, you expect to get Internet access.

6:30pm – Wow, I can finally reach www.makelovenotspam.com again. People have reported that sometimes you get a hacked response to the effect of "this is bad. you’re bad. You will be monitored and reported to the authorities." When Comcast answered my support submission, the responder wrote this little gem:

I’m sorry, I have personally checked that web address and it seems to be a bogus web site used by spammers. I suggest not browsing to that site as it seems to have some type of tracking function and my result in additional junk advertising popping up on your computer.

Wow. What ignorance. Every website has the opportunity to record your computer’s address… otherwise you’d never get the page you requested. Duh.

I admit it, I’m crazy. When I created this blog, I figured we’d dash off some random bit of stream of consciousness babble, get a few laughs from family and random people on the Internet, and collect a few ad clicks along the way. Boy was I wrong. I’m way too obsessive for that to happen. I’ve tried, I really have, but there’s no way I can actually click that "Save" button down there on a quick brain dump. Something in my head prohibits hitting that button until I’ve edited and revised the new entry three or four times, at least. I’ll even start with something brief, simple, and unstructured with every intention of just getting it down and posting it, but sure enough, 45 minutes later I’ve edited out every bit of spontaneity that was originally written and turned it into a proper English essay, however short it may be. Take this, for example. I realized I do this while in Brookwood for Thanksgiving, and thought to myself, "Self, I should post an entry about this. Someone will get a laugh out of it." Now consider the content of this blog entry. It’s certainly not a quick jotting down of the observation that I can’t quickly jot something down and post it. Sigh. I must be crazy though, since I’m entertained by the whole process. You’d be surprised how much amusement you can find searching for random phrases on the Internet. (In case you’re wondering, I spent 6 minutes writing the inital version of this, then another 12 revising and adding links.)

For lack of anything significant to write about for the last few days (not to say that I haven’t thought of things and forgotten them long before I ever had a chance to write them down), I’ll go ahead and stick in a shameless plug:

If you’re in Tuscaloosa and advertising something, check out Telephone Tamer. You can get a temporary voicemail number which emails your messages to you.