Has anyone else tried to contact someone by e-mail about their blog or site or something and noticed there’s just nothing there?

I’ve seen it many times (and might be guilty of it here, and if so, that’ll be corrected poste haste, but in general you can put our first names, used under the post, before at (this domain) and it’ll work just fine.

Recently I tried to get in touch with Jonathan Blow, developer of Braid.  I succeeded only after getting the whois information for his newer domain, which had his gMail address in it.  Come on man, you sell products, let your customers contact you.

Today I saw Chris Messina mention Netflix is getting an API, and because my dumb ass bought Netflix Freak (the first result in google is some messed up infinite refresh/redirect page), I wanted to let the developer know so he could continue the project. Welp, they’ve redone their site and gotten one domain per application (can’t blame them), but in doing so, removed the contact information page from their site and the awesome “omg, you found a 404 page, here’s a code for 10% off” treat. So I checked Connoisseur’s contact page, and it’s friggin blank. Based on the text from iPodRip’s help page, it looks like The Little App Factory is no more and the apps have been sold off? That kinda sucks.

I went to the “Developer Blog” link for Connoisseur, went to his about page, and saw that he hadn’t gotten around to putting his e-mail there. I just now noticed at the bottom of the Connoisseur site that it’s owned by Concept Development, where as iPodRip is from Happy Hour Code, LLC.

Welp, goodnight, The Little App Factory. I wonder what happened to you.

One thing I really hate is when people get their facts wrong. In this case, it’s facts about what started it’s life as House Resolution 3221. In Subtitle B of the bill, we have section 3091 that caused a lot of hubbub on sites like Digg and Campaign for Liberty. The problem with their facts is that why claimed the bill ordered all credit and debit card transactions will be reported to the IRS, and that’s exactly what’s happening, and that’s not in context either.

The section’s text is as follows:

(a) In General- Subpart B of part III of subchapter A of chapter 61, as amended by subsection (b), is amended by inserting after section 6045A the following new section: SEC. 6045B is amended by adding at the end the following new section:

So, the section everyone is getting their shorts in a wad is part of a larger picture. Who bothered to find out what the larger picture was? No one. So what’s the larger picture

• TITLE 26 – Internal Revenue Code
  • Subtitle F – Procedure and Administration
    • CHAPTER 61 – Information and Returns
      • Subchapter A – Returns and Records
        • PART III – Information Returns
          • Subpart B – Information Concerning Transactions With Other Persons
            • § 6050W – Returns relating to payments made in settlement of payment card and third party network transactions.

So the law isn’t just, “Tell the IRS everything everyone buys.” It’s an amendment to the IRS code dealing with transactions between individuals. This is NOT dealing with transactions between individuals and legal entities such as companies, corporations, government agencies, etc, but only between regular people.

Further detail is revealed by reading the text of the amendment in context:

(a) In General- Each payment settlement entity shall make a return for each calendar year setting forth–
(1) the name, address, and TIN of each participating payee to whom one or more payments in settlement of reportable payment transactions are made, and
(2) the gross amount of the reportable payment transactions with respect to each such participating payee.

The most important words there in my opinion are “to whom one or more payments in settlement of reportable payment transactions are made.” This is not your purchases being reported, this is payments to you being reported. They don’t care who did the buying, they want to know who did the selling, and for how much.

This is the IRS catching up with people who sell things on eBay and get paid via Paypal, Moneybookers, and other electronic payment methods, and who never report those payments to the IRS. There is no efficient and effective manner to get people to report what they make at a garage sale, and most people never port that. They put their junk out on the lawn and get paid in cash. But online, the records already exist in machine readable form, and it’s not that hard for the IRS to match that with tax returns, which more and more people are filing electronically, in machine readable formats.

This essentially does away with the $600 limit formerly in effect. Unless you got more than $600 from Paypal or other “third party networks”, they didn’t have to bother telling the IRS unless more than $600 went through in a calendar year. If you sell a golf club on eBay and get paid via Paypal, that’ll be reported. If you’re getting donations for your website, that’ll be reported. If you’re some dude in Iowa who pretends to be a 14 year old girl to get losers to send you money online, that’ll be reported.

Again, this isn’t the IRS going though your Visa card bills. This is the IRS making sure you reported the income from the sale of your aunt’s collectors edition Barbie on eBay. You can take off your tin foil hats now. It doesn’t even take effect until January 1, 2011. Plenty of time to call your congress-critter and complain.

I actually saw this post while following fuelfrog. Since they might change it, I wanted to preserve the text as is. And yes, they put a hard enter before every link. Since they didn’t link to subpages, I just won’t bother to a href them.

What Can I Do With Twitter?
Our experts geek out on your toughest questions

To the unconverted, Twitter is just a way to deliver mundane details of your life to many friends at once. The free service(
Twitter.com) is a social-networking site in which you post updates, or “tweets,” to a page where friends who “follow” you can view them. But since it lets users post and receive tweets via text messages, it’s actually a powerful platform for getting things done on the go.

To receive breaking news updates from cnn.com, for example, just follow Twitter user “cnnbrk.” Or send a message (“move car 30”) to user “timer,” and it will text back a reminder in the time you specify. Other functions are available through third-party sites: Enter your favorite RSS feeds on
TwitterFeed.com, and you’ll get a text whenever the feed is updated. Send the mileage, price and gallons to
fuelfrog.com each time you fill up your tank, and it will chart your fuel-efficiency trends. With i-Link home-automation software, it’s even possible to use tweets to turn on lights or open the curtains remotely (get details at
hacknmod.com).

Dive in at
twitter.com to find more useful tricks. Of course, you can still let everyone know that you’re thinking tacos for lunch.

My response (posted via the wonders of bugmenot)

I found out about this post because I follow @fuelfrog. I found out about fuelfrog before I found out about @mymm (my mile marker). Not only does My Mile Marker know how to do subtraction (with fuel frog, you need to know the number of miles you drove since you last filled up, with My Mile Marker, you input your odometer readout), but it also makes multiple graphs, predicts how much you’ll spend in a year, keeps track of oil changes and the affect it has on your mileage, and just plain works better than fuel frog.

So, add mymilemarker.com to your list, it’s a great alternative to fuelfrog. And it can do math.

Also, Twitterfeed is totally different than you describe. You say it’s a way to get texts for RSS feeds (there are actual services that do just that, surprisingly), when in fact it’s a way to take posts from an RSS feed like @cnnbrk (for CNN Breaking News), @firefox_queries (for the latest support requests for Firefox) or @TheDailyWTF (for computer humor) and create a twitter account other people can follow that’s fed by that feed. Most people just use it to have their twitter account updated whenever they create a new blog post.

You even got @timer wrong, you need to first follow timer (it sends direct messages, and you can only receive those from people you follow), and you need to put the number of minutes before the message, not after.

John, I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s like you purposefully got everything as wrong as possible when writing this article. Do a little more research next time.

Sigh.

Who would you like to see interviewed? What questions would you like to ask him or her? Is he or she relatively easy to get to be interviewed (like perhaps a congressman/woman)? Why don’t we just use “he” as the generic like everybody used to?

From: Bill Gates
To: Tom from MBILF
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:48:20 +0000
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: In a world without walls, who needs
Windows?

this is an exciting time… wait, you know what? it’s always an exciting time. i am as excited and passionate about Microsoft as i was when we were Micro-soft. the goal never changes for us, so everyday seems like the first day, and the first day was really just about one thing: connecting people.

maybe this didn’t answer your question at all. but I wanted to say it anyway. i mean, this is an auto-response email. and i will try to answer a few of them, but they will all say the same exact thing…

this is an amazing company. and, yes, the future really is delicious.

Mmmmmm…

Bill

Google Search

I got that exact quote today in a comment. I looked into it before marking it as spam. However, at least 477 others didn’t. This brings up an interesting idea: distributed “you got spammed” e-mail announcements. We could use the google API or something similar to create something similar to a “phonebank”, but of blogs that have been spammed. Then, users could go in, choose to “contact” someone, and do so. Either mark the person as “contacted”, or if they don’t have a way to contact them on the blog, perhaps leave a comment saying a certain previous comment was spam (on the same spammed post) and mark it as “commented”. This could be a pretty interesting guerilla warfare technique against spam. And of course, you don’t have to get every piece of spam on the internet, that’s not the goal, the goal is to let people know that they are susceptible to spam and how to resolve their spam issue. Getting more people to accept the cure (especially when they’re on a “directory of wordpress blogs”, and therefore all could be using akismet or defensio) would mean less people to contact in the database in the future, and less spam on the Google. End result: it becomes harder to spam, and more costly.

For the most part. They have a lot of HD channels(Wikipedia attempts to have a list) but some of them are (after googlin’), pointless. For example, there’s LMD (I think that’s the name), the lifetime movie channel. It’s not really high def, it’s just a stretched version of the regular lifetime movie channel, and apparently that’s ALWAYS the case. We’d have done better if they just carried the SD version (if it exists) and put in some better HD channels. Or, you know, actually put up all the HBO HD channels instead of just HBO and HBO west? That’d be nice.

I’m thinking of starting a “Let’s USE that fiber” campaign to get Verizon to carry more HD channels.

Anyway, I re-did my entertainment system the other day, removing all the electronics, cleaning it up, putting them back. And of course, afterward some HD channels didn’t come in (about half of them, oddly). I called Verizon and since they couldn’t resolve it on the phone, they sent a tech out (who arrived less than 24 hours later, within the scheduled window). She replaced the tv cable with a longer cable and connected it directly to the cable box and reprimanded me for doing it wrong, while it worked for almost a full year when it was connected through the UPS. However, it worked again, so I don’t mind. I then explained to her what a UPS was and did, and she was impressed. One might wonder why I have a UPS on my home entertainment system, and the answer is simple: one of the electronics must have the fans cool it down, and if it loses power with a hot part, it will break and be expensive to repair. The UPS is cheaper.

I then asked about why we didn’t have that many HD channels, but was told we JUST GOT SOME MORE. I wanted Planet Green HD, and she didn’t know why we didn’t have it, but said it will be at least 6 months. And you know what? I just looked at the list I linked to on wikipedia, and noticed that NEW YORK HAS IT ALREADY. Stop pwning me, New York. Maybe I can complain that New York has it and I would like to have it too.

Why does the linux command cd select non folders when doing tab completion? Say I have environment.rb and a folder titled environments. If I did cd and did env tab, I would get ‘environment’, because it doesn’t know how to go from there. It needs to go, “hey, that’s not a directory! I won’t complete to that!” because I know app completion doesn’t do that bs, if you do ./appname (but incomplete) and hit tab, and it’s not +x, it will not open it. I know directories work in a similar way, there is a directory flag, so why is this not done with cd?

Couple weeks ago, I was trying to free up some space on my notebook’s hard disk. I fired up WinDirStat to look for large offenders. WinDirStat does it’s thing, and shows me a lovely graph of my used disk space. There was this big blue blob in the middle. So I pulled up a command console window to verify this insanity. I have screenshotted and highlighted the crazy huge Dr Watson log. I even did a chkdsk to make sure this wasn’t a file system issue. Nope, that’s legit. That’s 24GB I didn’t have before.

See bottom of post for workaround provided by Jonathan Blow

I sent my xbox in to be repaired just over two weeks ago. They received it, and soon shipped another Xbox to me. I was to get it last friday (which would have made it just 2 days shy a fortnight round trip), however issues with UPS and doorbells delayed my gratification. This was not the final delay.

I was unable to play games I had previously purchased in the Xbox Live Arcade, like Braid. In fact, this entire post is centered on Braid not working properly. Braid was of the belief that it was a demo game, and has been every single time I start it. Clicking “Unlock full version” reveals I already have the game, and closing the purchase screen (by clicking back) now, but I do not believe originally, removes the “Unlock full game” from the menu for the duration of the gaming session. Braid forgets it was purchased every single time you start, and as such, forgets to load save files. This means I cannot finish Braid unless I play all the way through in one sitting, or use the old school pause-and-switch-tv-inputs trick (you didn’t do that as a kid?). I looked this issue up online, and Hawty McBloggy re-posted a microsoft guide to resolving the issue. I used the trick posted and played some braid, and it was indeed the full version because I could get to the end of World 2 and be told that the princess was in another castle (but not that I wouldn’t get an achievement because I haven’t bought the game). However, access to World 3 was not granted the next time I started Braid (I turned the system off and took a break). I was worried that I might have to go through the motions Travis Illig did.

Recently, I went to the Memory management screen and deleted the full game, only to re-download it. I loaded Braid, and the “Unlock full game” item is still in the screen. More playtesting will have to be done to find out if it will work, but I wanted to get a post out so that I could update it later. Thus, this will be updated.

Update Thu Sept 11 3:55 am EDT4USA

I got all the way to worlds 4 and 5 last night before turning off the Xbox. I loaded Braid again today (after last night not only deleting the game, but deleting the save files just in case). Unlock full game is back in the menu, and since it uses a single save system, afterward it does NOT check to see if you have any saves (and why should it? the developer probably didn’t expect users like myself to have to constantly remind the game to check for a license and then allow me to go further). Thus, while I can easily click “Unlock full game”, be told I already bought it, hit back, and the game will notice the license is there, I cannot play saved games and thus must beat the game all at once to ONLY receive achievements (not access to all worlds). This is a serious DRM issue that has not been addressed, and even worse, there is no document telling you that this will become an issue. Microsoft barely has a page on this issue, whose steps render your purchased games half-functional (as long as you’re not interested in actually playing a saved game).

I will be calling Microsoft soon and will probably end up updating this post instead of writing another blog post, as it really isn’t so long as to warrant multiple posts, and I try to not be too loquacious.

Edit: 20 minutes later. I e-mailed jonathan blow. His e-mail address is hard to find.

Edit: Fri Sep 12 2008 8:44 am EDT4USA

cleared my cache at the suggestion of a friend, loaded braid, clicked unlock, clicked back (game then was unlocked), and exited braid. Opened braid again, menu shows braid is locked again. God damnit.

Update Fri, Sept 12 2008 8:55 pm EDT4USA

Jonathan Blow, author of Braid, replied to my e-mail. Awesome. Here’s the workaround:

Yes, this is a known bug and I am going to put out an update to fix it. In the meantime, you ought to be able to workaround the problem. After you start Braid, go to Exit the Game, so that you are at the Press A to Sign In screen. Then just press the xbox button to open the guide, then press it again to close the guide, and the game should realize it is really the full version. (This can also work if your profile is signed in and you do it during the loading screen, before the game starts up).

Sorry about the inconvenience but this is something that VMC seems to not have been testing for (Castle Crashers has the same problem).