A friend outside of NewEgg’s shipping area wanted to buy some kit, so they contacted me to help out. I was more than willing. Sadly, Paypal decided to fuck it up. Here’s my email to PayPal about the situation:

A friend in XX asked me to buy him some kit from NewEgg because they don’t ship out of the US. Well, he used a debit card, so you folks wanted to charge me 6% to accept $500 (except he sent me $2,700), or upgrade my account to a business account. I denied the transfer, hoping we could avoid fees by him doing a bank to PayPal transfer, then transfer that to me. Didn’t work.
So you FORCED me into accepting a business account even though I’m not a business. Then when I went to use this to buy his Newegg items (and an item for another friend too), Paypal said I needed to add a card to confirm my address (even though I already had one). I add one, it says add another, and another, etc.
I tried a PP to Bank transfer so I can buy the items with my debit card, but you’ve frozen my account. I can’t prove I’m a business, because I’m not. I can’t provide shipping info until I buy his kit. My location was confirmed with my debit card. I could confirm my new phone #, by my SSN is private info.

I will NEVER give them my social security number, it’s totally unneeded. And why should I prove I’m a business when THEY are the ones who forced me into the Business account category? I hate Paypal.

This is the e-mail I sent to Samsung’s public relations department just now:

If you’re going to use advertising that blocks the whole page while the ad loads, then the close button doesn’t work, you have joined the ranks of the scummiest companies on the planet and I will try my best to make sure you lose money on the deal.  Attached is a screenshot of an ad that will not close, and comes up every time I load the page.  Don’t worry, I’m sending it around and letting others know how sleazy your ad department is.

Attached is the larger version of this screenshot:

(Click to embiggen)

This is friggin’ annoying and makes it impossible to post a comment on the page. It follows the scroll. I created a video demonstrating how the ad works and won’t close.

Photo of Page 44 of Learning PHP and MySQL showing the error in testing

Earlier I was sitting in Panera Bread reading Learning PHP and MySQL (which I now feel bad about purchasing as the second edition was out when I did so) and I came across this glaring error.  I just thought it was funny and took a picture with my iPhone so I wouldn’t forget.  On the next page (page 46, actually) they had a code sample demonstrating that you should put backslashes before quote symbols, and were using specialH2 inside of a class to demonstrate when you might forget to put backslashes.  At the end of their code sample, after ?>, was specialH2.  It didn’t actually need to be there, and I’m sure it’ll confuse a new programmer, but it’s there anyway.  Later on (Chapter 4) they start wrapping their text after echo commands in parentheses, but don’t tell the reader why (however on this one, I may have missed something, and if I have please let me know).

I almost always find errors in books, and I want a good way to report these bugs.

There’s only one project that has even a mention of RSVP in it, and it’s for “future” based on hCard debates.

It’s pretty interesting that in this web 2.0 world of trying to get people to socialize, it’s still impossible to use your own site to manage socialization events.  There’s a much longer post here, but for some reason my mind isn’t working tonight.  I’d crack open this bag of Dunkin Donuts coffee and brew some, but I have this incredible fear now that the coffee will “go bad” before I can brew it all (it’s a huge bag) because I don’t have the BeanVac Coffee Bean Canister which may or may not be ridiculous but I’m this close to giving thinkgeek approximately $45 of my hard earned money to save some of the $13 or so I spent on that huge bag of Dunkin Donuts coffee. (Dear Lazyweb: Is this insane? Is there a better option?)

Am I losing it?

P.S. Hey, ThinkGeek! You forgot to capitalize the I in if at the beginning the last sentence of the first paragraph.

This election brought to you by the Proctor and Gamble family of products.

This is a very special piece for MBILF, it documents how I voted this morning. First, I’m happy to say I voted on a paper ballot which was sent through an optical scanner. Reports from Williamsburg indicate it’s the same there. There was one real computer you could vote on as well, but nobody was using it.

I arrived at 5:30 am, 30 minutes before polls opened. It was drizzling, and hard to find parking. The lot was almost full. I saw about 120 or so people ahead of me in shitty-counting, and by the time I got in, another 250 or so people behind me. I showed my voter ID card (the thing they send you in the mail after registering), gave my name and address (I guess you need to have memorized it to vote), and was given a ballot. I marked Barack Obama for president, on paper, with marker pen. I was going to vote Libertarian for the other two options, but I decided, fuck it, and voted D both times. Bill Day and Mark Warner.

I was given sample ballots by the democratic and republican representative. The democratic one had the democrats in bold, the republican had the republicans in bold. On the back of the democratic one, instructions on how to make sure you vote, and if there’s problems who to contact. On the other republican sheet, info on how you need to vote for mccain because obama is evil. I kept these and have scanned the republican one in.

Click for bigger, or view the PDF file

He also asked me, right after I took this shot, to “please vote McCain-Palin”:


See the blue doors? That’s the entrance.

Oh well. I voted. I also reported it to 1-866-our-vote.

I have an album from the Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It’s a double album, disc 1 is titled Dawn to Dusk, and disc 2 is titled Twilight to Starlight. However, iTunes does not treat subtitles separately from the actual title, and sees these as two separate albums. I checked the ID3 spec, and 2.3.0 does not have an option for subtitles. 2.4.0 does, it’s called TSST and the description is:

The ‘Set subtitle’ frame is intended for the subtitle of the part of
a set this track belongs to.

The “set” they refer to is actually their term for which disc (it can mean other things, but disc number from a multi-disc set is what I’m talking about). It seems there’s a “Grouping” field in iTunes that might be used for this, but after reading What is iTunes grouping column for?, it appears this is incorrect:

grouping (Unicode text) : the grouping (piece) of the track. Generally used to denote movements within a classical work.

Which is not what lifehacker thinks it is, it’s actually TIT3 as described by the earlier versions of the spec:

The ‘Subtitle/Description refinement’ frame is used for information
directly related to the contents title (e.g. “Op. 16″ or “Performed
live at Wembley”).

However, after checking in ID3 Editor from Pa-software, the text put into grouping is actually TIT1, as it’s in the Content field, described by the help documentation as

Content:
The ‘Content group description’ frame is used if the sound belongs to a larger category of sounds/music. For example, classical music is often sorted in different musical sections (e.g. “Piano Concerto”, “Weather – Hurricane”).

Which is the exact description, verbatim, for TIT1. The description in ID3 Editor for subtitle is the same as TIT3.

VLC itself is confused as hell by all this, as it just shows hexadecimal bytecode in the Description field, and I don’t know what it’s trying to show there. In fact, VLC shows very little data.

Interesting tidbit: neither ID3 Editor nor VLC show artwork for the mp3s, but iTunes and the Finder do. My guess is iTunes is storing it oddly.

Also, ID3 v2.4 is 8 years old, with the most recent edit made five years ago in 2003. It’s apparently not widely adopted because there are disagreements with some of the revisions, I don’t know why these disagreements exist nor what they are. I think TSST is a worthy addition, perhaps backported to ID3 v2.3.1 (a not-yet-existing standard).

I’m working on a ID3 page for VideoLAN, if you’re interested in helping.