mcgees.org

Do check out PaperBackSwap.com.  Trade books — for free! — with other book lovers around the country.  There is a sister site for CDs, but that costs money.

My good friend Marcus has a site selling philatelic covers.  It is Naval Cover Shop.

The designer of the site has mad skills, BTW.

You may have noticed the widget on the sidebar linking to Last.fm.  They bill themselves as leading the social music revolution.  I’ve tried a one month paid subscription.  The basic subscription (with lots of features) is free.  Check it out.

When buying products from GoDaddy, always choose, initially, the smallest-possible duration or unit size.  Then wait for them to offer you a special price for a longer term via a checkbox.  This will not only be lower than the smallest-possible unit pro-rated, it will be lower than the price you would have gotten by choosing that duration or size in the first place.  Make sure you use the checkbox they offer you.

Yes, it’s slimy, but all of GoDaddy is slimy.  People don’t use them because they’re classy.  They used them because they’re bloody cheap.  So if you don’t mind feeling like you have to delouse, go ahead and game them back.

Hmmm.  Amazon: 92% reassuring, 8% not at all reassuring.

University of Wisconsin — Madison: Go for the cheese, stay for the white girls.

More here and here.

OK, I’m a dumbass.  A dumbass in a hurry.  I needed a Federal Employer Identification Number, for which you can apply for free online.  Problem is, the site doesn’t work with Firefox, at least Firefox 1.5.0.4 in Linux.  But I didn’t know that at the time, I just thought the online process didn’t work.

A workaround?  One of the Google Adwords advertisers who bid on “EIN” was federalnumber.com, who claims to be able to get you an EIN in minutes for a fee.  Now, I know that the IRS allows an agent to apply for an EIN on your behalf.  So, I figured, what the site would do would be to collect your information, collect your money, then submit it to the IRS as your agent, using a compatible user-agent or API.  And surely they wouldn’t charge you if they couldn’t successfully retrieve your EIN.  Reasonable, if you’re in a hurry.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  The whole site is a scam.  The site just charges you, then prints out what you entered with the main number for the IRS to call and arrange to get your EIN.  The site is run by one Alexander Kleyman, formerly of Forest Hills, NY and now apparently of Hallandale Beach, FL.  He’s been arrested for a similar scam in the past, that time against the Social Security Administration.  Interestingly, however, the registrant information in the whois entry for the domain lists what appears for all the world to be a residential condo address.  So I may actually have his home address.  If you’re interested, it is 1850 South Ocean Drive #3504, Hallandale Beach, FL, 33009.

He gave a contact phone, and my call at midnight went to an answering service with a real live person.  I’ve requested a refund, but fat chance of that happening, so I’ve also contacted the bank that issued my credit card for a chargeback.  When I was last scammed online, I had to have a document notarized, which cost something like $15, but it’s going to be worth it just to spite Fuckhead Alex.  Fuckhead Alex with my social security number and credit card info.  As I said, I’m a dumbass.  And haste precedes fuckups.  I could have done the scam research first.  So keep a couple things in mind.  There are a lot, a lot of fuckheads like Al out there, and a lot lot lot of them advertise on Adwords.  The Google don’t-be-evil thing doesn’t extend to its advertisers.  And if you see on the news that A-Kley gets run over by a commuter tram in Florida, keep in mind that he had it coming.  If only the universe really worked that way.

From a Snapfish email:

Add fun mystery text and a photo to a puzzle for you’re a loved one (will you marry me? and photo of a ring)

This does actually mean something.  At least if you insert a comma after ‘puzzle’.  And some quotation marks.  And maybe a colon.  Just nothing like what they intended.

Err … nice.  I hope the system’s just temporarily offline.

eBay Pack Your Bags & Win It Contest Rules: “All random drawings will be conducted on or about 12:00 pm, P.T. by Strobe Promotions, Inc., the independent judging organization, in Hicksville, NY … As a condition for receiving any prize, winners who are residents of Canada will be required to correctly answer (unaided) a time-limited mathematical skill-test question.”

What?

Enter the contest.

Check out magiccards.info for advanced searches on Magic: The Gathering cards and a cool random card feature.

Do autocard links like this: http://magiccards.info/autocard/Forest.

“As a thank you to our great customers, we are happy to announce that all snipes entered on our site [Auctiva] from 12:01am PDT to 11:59pm PDT Friday, May 26th will be free!”

Google has a new calendar function.  Predictably, it’s really slick.

Also, try texting stuff to 46645 (GOOGL).  Try define sherried, for instance.  (Fun, huh?)  Or 1 furlong per fortnight in parsecs per microsecond.  Or 1 usd in gbp.  Or price squeezebox.  Or lakers.  Or gdp of norway.  Or the proposition 91775.  Or translate “this is impressive” to french.

So, I’m looking at my referrer logs (or, in Apache-speak, “referer logs”) and I see this page on a site called StumbleUpon.com: http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.html.  A page that clearly couldn’t have referred anyone to me.  So it’s spam, right?

Well, technically.  StumbleUpon is, in fact, forging the referrer header.  But the mass behind it is real, and the referrals are real.

It turns out to be a social-network Alexa.  And it’s really cool, and highly reliable.  You download a toolbar, tell it your interests, hit the “Stumble!” button, and find great sites — great sites that people with similar interests liked.

I have to go to bed, but I’ve been having too much fun stumbling on “Atheist/Agnostic” sites.  They are wonderful.  Haven’t hit a bad one yet.  And that’s only one interest category I’ve explored (Maybe the rest aren’t as good.  But I expect they are.)

Check it out.  It’s really good.  And check out this, this, and this for fun.

The page people were raving about at mcgees.org was Postal Cancel Art, by the way.

For several years, I have had a primary, private intellectual guiding principle.  I have called it Joshua’s First Law.  It goes as follows: “Everything is more complicated than it first appears.”  Or, with a nod to Hofstadter’s Law, “Everything is more complicated than it first appears, even when Joshua’s First Law is taken into account.”  And I’ve sometimes attached the revision, known as Joshua’s First Anti-Corrolary, which reads “Except when it isn’t.”  But never have I seen this expressed by another.  Until I read a version of it on MJD’s Blog.  He wrote, “Advice to people wishing to become smarter: Get in the habit of assuming that everything is more complex than you imagine.”  Kudos to him.

Forgetting what our local portal server at work was called, I typed in portal in Firefox’s address bar.  That was not the name of the server, so Firefox did its magic, running an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search at Google and giving me the first match: http://www.firstgov.gov/. It’s a massive, wonderful U.S. Government web portal. Auctions, taxes, science for kids, census data, blue pages, product recalls, forms — massive amounts of stuff. Well recommended.

I have discovered the interesting fact that all the regular male cast members on Firefly are older than all the female cast members on the program, that this span is 1,357 days, and that my birthdate lies in this gap. So, a game. Points to players who:

1. Find other shows where all the men are older than all the women (or vice versa) and the gap is smaller than 1,357 days.  IMDB and the date calculator will help.
2. Extra-super-crazy points if you find one of these gaps in which your birthdate lies.
3. Runner-up credit for finding a show where all the old cast members are older than all the young cast members.

If Blogger stopped publishing to your server four months ago, change (or ask your sysadmin to change) “PasswordAuthentication” to “yes” in your sshd config file (check /etc/ssh/sshd_config).

In related news, mcgees.org is back.

For Magic players, CardShark seller greggo4randy is donating all proceeds on card sales to “relief efforts for the people affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina”.  He has 9249 cards in stock.

I opened a corked bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape this evening. This time it was an inexpensive wine, but last time it was a $135 vintage Jaboulet Hermitage.

From wineanorak.com: “A slightly dangerous response is that in old world wine countries there is less emphasis on product quality and greater tolerance of what could be considered wine faults by consumers and even the wine trade. The fact that the wine industry trades heavily on tradition may imbue it with a degree of inertia, and thus a significant change such as changing closure type is perceived as more problematic than a 5% taint rate.” This from a very interesting article on screwcap closures.

If Blogger broke the formatting of your blog, as it did mine for the last month, go to Settings -> Formatting and change “Enable float alignment” to “No”.

Neighborhoodies.com. Custom-lettered clothing, no minimum order, lots of choices in clothing styles, real designers designing every piece. T-shirts are about $20. Looks wonderful. Anybody have experience with the company?

(Coupon code “BLOGGER” for 10% off, according the the ad on MeFi.)

Some years back, someone was offering a neat service. If you had a high-traffic file on your website, you could create a link through this service — say, http://www.foo.com/mirror?url=http://www.mcgees.org/some.file. The first five (or whatever) times that someone tried to download it, foo.com passed the request on to mcgees.org. But on the sixth or subsequent times, foo.com would make a copy of the file and they would serve it for you. Anyone remember who offered this service, and anyone know whether it’s still offered? Maybe it had something to do with archive.org?

Anybody know a way to report a bug to Yahoo! Mail?

<campvoice> It’s all just soooo reassuring! </campvoice>

Google begins to digitize paper books.  Amazing potential.

Cartograms give more realistic election data than geographic maps, and most states are purple anyway (this is really good — if you follow only one link on this page, make this it.)  More on cartograms, and one of the world that will lead you to the conclusion that, as a first-order approximation, the whole world is Asia.

Daily cash withdrawal limits from your PayPal debit card are either $300 or $400, depending on your service level. You can see your limit by going to your “Account Overview” page and selecting “View Limits”. Remember this, because when I forgot and tried to withdraw $500, I ended up locked out of my account (presumably for the rest of the day, although I won’t know that for sure until tomorrow.)

Why was I trying to withdraw $500? To deposit into my checking account. I know it costs $1, rather than being free (as a bank transfer is), but I hate having my funds in limbo for four days, absent from my PayPal account but not yet in my bank account.