aubreyturner.org

I’ve been seeing some back-and-forth between posters on one of the email lists to which I am subscribed concerning a change in PayPal’s acceptable use policy.  So I decided to go check it out for myself.  I was less than pleased with what I read.  Here’s the offending section:

You may not use PayPal to sell any firearm manufactured after 1898. Certain related items and high-capacity ammunition magazines are also prohibited, as described in more detail below. In addition, it is the responsibility of users to abide by all applicable laws when dealing with the sale of permitted antique firearms, ammunition, replicas, militaria and other associated items.

What this does is prohibit the use of PayPal to make payments for sales of legal firearms that are not antiques.  Since PayPal is a private entity, they have the right to dictate these terms, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with them.

When you sign into PayPal you are required to agree with the new terms and conditions.  I declined the new terms this morning, which just means that I am only delaying their effectiveness until June 4, 2003 (when they become effective whether I’ve agreed or not).  I sent the following to PayPal customer service this morning:

It was with consternation that I read your new acceptable use policy concerning firearm sales.  While I am not a seller, I am a law-abiding collector of firearms.  As a private entity, I agree that you have the right to restrict the use of your service.  However, I will not continue to use the service under these terms.  As PayPal bills itself as a payment service, as long as no laws were broken in the transaction, PayPal should only concern itself with brokering payment.

I will continue to monitor this situation in the hope that PayPal will discontinue this misguided policy.  However, I will close my account in June if the policy continues, rather than become subject to the new terms.

The people on the email list were suggesting a boycott of PayPal.  I’m not quite ready to go to that extreme, as I’d like to give them a chance to respond.  However, I will not do business with anti-gun organizations.

One of my problem traits is that I have a tendency to be a packrat.  I’ve been keeping my spare change in a large plastic Haloween pumpkin (the kind that kids use to gather their loot) for years and it finally reached the point of absurdity.  So over the past three days I’ve been taking parts of the change to Coinstar machines in the area.  With today’s final load, I’ve converted a little over $183.00.  To give you an idea how bad it was, today’s load had 5411 pennies (yes, that’s $54.11 just in pennies).  I would estimate the weight of the bag that I carried into the Tom Thumb today at between 30 and 40 pounds.  In a way, it was a little embarassing.  They put the machines at the front of the store in front of the checkout lines and they’re very loud.

At least I’m not as bad as the guy described here (who did $8105 in coins in one session).

I’ve updated my guns page to include my latest acquisitions:

• Bushmaster Bullpup
• Ruger Single-Six
• Mosin-Nagant M1944 Carbine

The Nagant was definitely an impulse buy.  I went to the show on Saturday (apparently I left about the time Rachel Lucas arrived) looking for a scope for my Bullpup.  I found a scope but ended up browsing the rest of the show.  I stopped at this carbine and looked it over.  It caught my eye because it was Soviet-made, stamped 1945, and in good condition (the stock had been repaired, but it was pretty well done).

I printed out a copy of a manual* created in the 1950’s by the Army’s ordinance corps so that I will be able to take it down and clean it.  As soon as the ammo arrives I’m going to schedule some range time to try it out.

* If anyone is interested in manuals for a lot of old military guns, Cheaper Than Dirt sells a CD containing them (in PDF form).  I can’t get to their website right now, or I’d post a link to it.  The item number is ‘MGR-861’.

I missed the president’s speech as I didn’t get around to turning the TV on until 7:15.  I was surprised it went that quickly, but then I guess when you’re being direct and to the point it doesn’t take much.

Now comes the horrible last-minute waiting until we see how this whole thing unfolds.  I’m going to be worrying about the worst that can happen and hoping for the best.

One of my criteria for evaluating notebooks was the size and quality of the keyboard.  I’m a touch typist and the keyboard makes a big difference to me.  The keyboard needs to be big enough to accomodate my hands (and should ideally be close to full size).  Further, it needs to have a layout that makes sense (it should mimic a full size keyboard wherever possible). 

The reason I mention this is that the Toshiba laptops that I saw looked good in all respects except one:  I couldn’t find the delete key.  Maybe they had one, but I couldn’t find it.  Given my habits with the keyboard, not having a delete key in a sane position would drive me nuts.

I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about Best Buy.  Today, though, they’ve probably lost me for good.  I had decided that I wanted to get a laptop for use around the house, since I’m getting tired of being tied to my desktop (which is in my home office).  After doing some online research and visiting a couple of stores, I was ready to buy today.  I went in to the Best Buy in Lewisville, and after examining their available systems, I found one that I liked.  The problem was that there was no one available to assist me when I was ready to buy (despite there being plenty of people around when I started looking).  I think what finally did it for me was the overall noise level in the store.  Combined with being ignored, it made for a very annoying experience.

I’m currently writing this entry from a laptop that I purchased at Compusa.  The experience there wasn’t that great, either, although they did have someone available to take my money.  The salesman pushed a bit too hard to get me to buy the extended service plan (to the point of asking me afterward why I didn’t buy it and almost trying to argue with me about it, even though I had politely declined), and they tried to gather my personal info at the checkout (which I also politely declined).  Finally, the advertised price included two mail-in rebates, but now that I’ve had a chance to examine the terms (they were both online, so I couldn’t see them at the time), I find that both of them want the original UPC code.  I’ve sent in a complaint to Compusa about this, since it seems deceptive to me to advertise both rebates if you can’t redeem both of them (and their ad for the laptop definitely shows both rebates, which can be seen here).

Of course, the fact that this laptop doesn’t want to work with the Linksys WPC54G card doesn’t make me any happier (I’ve currently got a cable strung across the living room to my wireless bridge).  But that’s an issue I’ll take up with Linksys and the laptop manufacturer.  This is a new model of laptop, so there may be some BIOS issues to work out.

Update: CompUSA informed me today that they will accept copies of the UPC when there are multiple rebates.

The Dixie Chicks are definitely going to take a hit for what Natalie Maines said in London.  Both of the big local country stations in Dallas (96.3 KSCS and 99.5 The Wolf) are getting lots of negative feedback.  Many calls are coming in to tell the stations not to play any Dixie Chicks songs.  Think about that for a minute.  It’s a negative request line scenario.  I imagine that not many publicists or managers have ever contemplated such a thing.

From my perspective, Natalie Maines’ half-ass apology doesn’t cut it.  It’s possible to oppose the war for a variety of reasons, but she chose the low road of personal vilification that I have seen so often from the anti-war types.  In her case it was less offensive than the Bush-Hitler comparisons, but it was still nasty and personal.  That’s why I think her statement is something that can not be forgiven.

Here we go again:

Dixie Chicks Remark Irks Country Fans

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP)—The Dixie Chicks are drawing harsh words from country music fans for remarks singer Natalie Maines made about President George W. Bush during a recent performance in London.

Maines told the audience earlier this week, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.’’

Angry phone calls flooded Nashville radio station WKDF-FM on Thursday, some calling for a boycott of the Texas trio’s music.

The group released a statement Thursday saying they have been overseas for several weeks and “the anti-American sentiment that has unfolded here is astounding. While we support our troops, there is nothing more frightening than the notion of going to war with Iraq and the prospect of all the innocent lives that will be lost.’’

In a separate statement Thursday, Maines said, “I feel the president is ignoring the opinion of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world. My comments were made in frustration, and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your own point of view.’’

The Dixie Chicks will kick off a U.S. tour in support of their multi-platinum album “Home’’ on May 1 in Greenville, South Carolina. The group’s hits include “Wide Open Spaces,’’ “Ready to Run’’ and “Landslide.’‘

I was planning to take a day off on August 1 and go see their concert in Little Rock.  It would have been an opportunity not only to see the concert but to do some sightseeing in Arkansas.  But none of that will happen now.

While they have the right to say whatever they feel, I also have the right to spend my money with whomever I choose.  Perhaps my $65.00 won’t affect them much, but it’s my choice where to put that money.

You’d think, though, that the Dixie Chicks would know better than to make these kinds of statements in an overseas venue.  Country music fans are generally a patriotic bunch and they don’t take kindly to this kind of stuff.  Even if they don’t like the president, they won’t bring it up in front of non-US citizens.

This will quickly fall off into computer geek land, so those who don’t care for such things may wish to scroll down.

I’m working on a web project that has to access some backend (legacy) systems.  Of course our corporate security people don’t allow direct access to these systems (and rightly so) from systems that are accessed from the internet.  They have created a couple of layers of firewalls, so that when you access one of our online applications, your request is proxied and redirected across a firewall into the hosting zone (not the actual names used by our security people).  Even though this zone is protected, it is still not trusted.  If a system needs access to something in the internal network, it has to go through an intermediary system which has been certified and approved for crossing the firewall.

Our application has been designed to use a Web Services interface to access the data that it requires.  We have put in place a set of these services on the internal network that will access the backend systems.  We’re using SOAP over HTTP for this.  Since the security folks won’t allow HTTP traffic across the firewall, we have to use another protocol (in this case it’s a bit of messaging middleware).  To prevent our application from having to know about all this, we created a “bridge” that takes an HTTP request and puts it into a message.  There is another application running on the internal network that dequeues the message, contacts the web service, and puts the result back into a message, which gets sent to the front-end of the bridge.  If this sounds like a very round-about way of doing things, it is, but we’re required to do things like this for security purposes (that and our bridge code is very careful to accept requests only from validated systems/users and to send the requests to validated target URLs; it won’t act as a standard HTTP proxy).

Anyway, the bridge code works fine in every instance except one.  If the web service throws an exception, the bridge was not passing it on to the caller.  After going back and forth through the Java code, it appears that this all comes down to a peculiarity of how Java handles URLs.  The URL requires a trailing slash (’/’), which had been left off in the configuration file that specifies the target URL.  Normally, this doesn’t seem to matter.  The SOAP client code doesn’t care, and a web browser wouldn’t either.  If that trailing slash isn’t there, a call to HttpURLConnection.getInputStream() will throw a FileNotFoundException (but only when there is a SOAP fault, which causes an HTTP 500 return code).

It’s one of those things that drive you crazy.  You search and search for a bug in the code only to find that it’s in the JDK and it can be fixed by a small change to the URL.  One of my team members has been looking at this all week and I finally got involved and spent most of today on it.

With computers, you really do have to sweat the small stuff.  Now I need to get away from this computer for a while to let my eyes uncross after reading code, scanning books and manuals, and searching online discussions all day.

I have to admit that there have been times recently when I’ve been sorely tempted to do this:

George Doughty hung his latest hunting trophy on the wall of his Sportsman’s Bar and Restaurant. Then he went to jail.

The problem was the trophy was Doughty’s laptop computer.

He shot it four times, as customers watched, after it crashed once too often.

After one too many times listening to my laptop swap memory simply to open a new window (or even the damn Start menu) I might respond in a similar fashion.  It’s like swimming in molasses.

As a public service reminder, though, I should caution against shooting your computer in a public place.  Take the computer to a suitable location where it is safe (and legal) to discharge a firearm.  Otherwise, like Mr. Doughty, you may be facing some annoying charges.

Link via The Volokh Conspiracy.