dpk’s weblog

I’m getting pretty tired of being asked to fill out or answer phone surveys every time I deal with a company. Isn’t it enough I spent my money with them? I have to get random phone calls and/or pop-ups and/or letters too?

More controls urged on payday lenders

The one-time fees translate into exorbitantly high interest rates on a standard annual-percentage-rate basis, sometimes as much as 800 percent. … The average payday borrower pays back $793 for a $325 loan, the report said.

Bad marketing tactics: UltraDNS has been hung up on so many times that they’re now just saying they’re “a company that does DNS” when they cold call you. They still won’t let you off the line, you have to hang up on ‘em mid-sentence, because they just won’t shut up even after you tell them you’re not at all interested in their services.

It saddens me that some people must actually respond positively to these tactics.

Sonics sold :

Seattle “deserves an NBA franchise,” Bennett said.

Argh. What does he think we did to deserve one of those? With any luck we can fix that situation, and they’ll leave before we are forced to pay for another new stadium.

One thing that I’ve noticed, and I’m sure many of you have noticed, is how hard it is to search for documents containing programming terms such as “operator!=” or “read()”. The results on Google are completely worthless. Lycos results are similarly worthless.

I was surprised to find that AltaVista seems to return relevant results for “operator!=”, although not for “read()”.

I am curious if there are any search engines out there designed for programmers. My (admittedly limited) searching hasn’t turned up any.

Over the weekend I picked up a Kodak EasyShare Z612. It was $379.99 at Best Buy, but I’d check other places first ($56 restocking fee) It’s a 6.1 megapixel camera with a lithium-ion battery, 12x optical zoom, optical image stabilization, and it can be operated in a “fully” manual mode. That is, you can set the f-stop, ISO, shutter speed, etc — about as manual as a non-SLR digital camera will get. You can direct it to take multiple shots (2 per second) of a scene, and it will store the first or last 8 shots (depending on the mode). This may be a feature all cameras have nowadays, but it also stores all of the shot meta-information in the EXIF fields of the jpeg. (I’m using this information to re-learn, in a practical fashion, how to use f-stops and etc.) It’s a pretty feature rich camera, IMO.

Continue reading ‘Kodak EasyShare Z612, Best Buy’ »

I picked up a SanDisk SD card for my camera, and it was packed in that hard plastic packaging you see on electronics and other products — many items at Costco use it. It’s hard to cut, it’s hard to tear. It’s basically completely anti-consumer(anti-user). It turns out, it’s so hard to cut that the handle on my scissors actually broke under the pressure that was required to cut through it. SanDisk: You owe me a pair of Fiskars, dammit.

Added 2006.06.02 I forgot about this: Hard plastic packaging is made by the devil!

UltraDNS employs some of the most relentless telemarketers ever. You tell them you’re not interested, they pull the “I don’t know why you wouldn’t be interested!” routine. You hang up, they call back in a few weeks. Yeah: I think I won’t be recommending anyone use them (not that my recommendation carries much weight).