aubreyturner.org

Is anyone besides me tired of getting letters marked “Important Information About Your Account?”  I know marketers like to get their stuff in front of you using any means ppossible, but it’s gotten to the point where I’m almost ready to start shredding them unopened.  I got two of them the other day that annoyed me, since they appeared to actually be legit at first.  One was from my mortgage company, and I always pay attention to that stuff, since it’s pretty important.  So opening it and discovering it’s actually a solicitation for one of those “early payoff” plans that was just using my company’s logo was very annoying.  The other was from GM and it said that it contained “Important Information about your Chevrolet Avalanche.”  Since there’s a recall on the Avalanche for a problem with rear seatbelts, I thought it might be something about that.  Instead it was actually a solicitation from Chase for a GM business credit card.

I really wish they’d quit doing this.  It’s sneaky and deceptive and it relies on the fact that you are afraid to miss some bit of information that actually is important.  I noticed that companies have had to start putting “statement enclosed” on bills, likely because of this stupid marketing tactic.

I guess on the upside I can use it as a good signal that whatever is inside needs to be shredded instead of just tossed into the trash… 

An inventor in Wales has created a sonic annoyance weapon that targets teenagers (mostly).

The device, called the Mosquito (“It’s small and annoying,” Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in South Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside.

“On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers,” said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. “On the high end, they’d be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff.”

Gough (pronounced GUFF) planned to install a sound system that would blast classical music into the parking lot, another method known to horrify hang-out youths into dispersing, but never got around to it. But last month, Stapleton gave him a Mosquito for a free trial. The results were almost instantaneous. It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one.

I wonder if I’d still be able to hear something like this?  While I have some notches in lower frequency ranges (due to gunfire and drums), my high frequency ranges used to be quite sensitive.  I don’t doubt that I’ve lost some as I’ve gotten older, but I often still hear things that others don’t (then again, maybe it’s just me   ).

I recall that we used to have trouble with a dog that would chase cars.  In an attempt to deter her we bought one of those sonic devices that only dogs are supposed to hear.  It had two tones, each one with a button.  One tone would be a warning and the other for stopping the bad behavior.  It never really did work on the dog, but I know that if I was close enough to it I could hear the tones, which were nerve-jarring enough to make you slightly nauseous.  I learned this because my sister snuck up behind me one day and hit the button to see what would happen (I think she may have been surprised when I reacted to the sound…).

Link via Slashdot.

I see that the FCC has decided to advocate “a la carte” pricing for cable TV (although they aren’t pushing for it to be required).  In the past I’ve often wished for something like this as well as “on demand” or “pay per view” for premium channel shows (i.e. being able to watch individual episodes of “The Sopranos” without having to buy a full subscription, since I don’t watch anything else on HBO). 

But it occurs to me that the cable operators, if they were to participate, would see it as a money-making opportunity.  I would bet that when all is said and done that you’d pay more just to get your favorite channels than if you bought the package.

My new Fios TV package has the Crime & Investigation Network. 

I already watch far too much of this stuff on Court TV and A&E.  Having it available 24/7 on its own network means I’m doomed.

I was awakened by the dogs around 3:00am Saturday morning.  They were barking at the police cars and wrecker that were sitting out in front of the house.  The wrecker was there for the smashed-to-hell SUV that was on the lawn across the street and the police officers were talking to its driver, who was sitting on the curb.  When my foggy brain comprehended what was going on I decided it would be a good idea to go outside and check my mother’s car to be certain that it didn’t get hit.  Fortunately, it was OK, but my neighbor across the street was not so lucky.

The young man in the SUV had been heading north on our street at a high rate of speed (the police estimated it at 50mph) when he came up on the curb and clipped a brick mailbox (it was knocked over, but intact with a few scratches).  His SUV then came across my neighbor’s lawn and smashed into the right-rear corner of the pickup, which was parked in the driveway.  The impact spun the truck’s front left corner into the garage door before the SUV pushed it into the middle of the lawn. 

In a way, it was lucky that the pickup truck was parked in the driveway.  Had it not been there, the path of the SUV would likely have taken it into the front bedroom of the house, which is where my neighbor was sleeping at the time. 

Oh, and the SUV driver?  He was taken away by KPD on a drunk-driving charge.  According to my neighbor the guy reeked of alcohol when he got out of the SUV.  Further, he appears to have been racing another vehicle, which my neighbor heard speeding away after the crash (the other vehicle was likely what forced the SUV onto the curb, since there was a car parked on the other side of the street there).

The SUV driver had almost made it home.  He was only one block from his house, which sits at the end of our street on the cross street.  You can see his house from here. 

In my daily referer check I came across someone hotlinking (or trying to hotlink) an image of mine from something called the YaHooka Forums.  It requires a membership to view the particular thread, but I decided not to bother, since I’m not particularly interested in a pothead forum.  But I found it interesting that the same forums can be found via l1.itechgroup.com.  I guess someone over there hasn’t killed off all their braincells and figured that this would look less damning in the corporate firewall logs of some members.

As I’ve previously written, the Keller city council has decided to go forward with a plan to issue $8.8 million in bonds to fund a new library.  The latest issue of The Keller Citizen had some interesting quotes from various council members with regards to the reasoning behind their decision to not allow a vote on the issue.  Of all the reasons, though, the following one struck me as the most arrogant.

Councilman Russell Lake said the council has so much information on the library that it would be hard to convey it accurately to the citizens to prepare them to vote.  Also, he said council members work hard to spend city money wisely and keep the tax rate low.

I interpret that as a round-about way of saying that we voters are too stupid to understand the reasons and that we can’t be trusted to be properly “prepare[d]” to give them the desired outcome.

Interestingly, from the ways that bonds are differentiated, it appears that the city council has the authority to issue these without voter approval.  Which seems to me to be a root issue that needs to be addressed.  I don’t think any city should be able to create any significant amount of new debt without voter approval.  Further, there needs to be some level of accountability with regards to the long-term liabilities for operations that will be incurred.  Until I hear definitively that the city can fund staffing and operations for the new fire station, I will remain implacably opposed to a new library.  Books are nice, but they’re not much fun if you’re reading them by [house]firelight…

I’ve been harvesting spam referers and trackback attack IPs on a daily basis, but while the number of new spam referers is down, the trackback IPs seem to be up.  I had one single IP in Cambodia hit the trackback script 424 times yesterday.  Before that I’d had another IP hit it over 700 times in a day.  There have been 434 trackback attempts today, none of them valid.  The problem is that even though they don’t succeed, they still require invoking PHP, making a database query to check the “token”, then issuing a response. 

I hate to do it, but I’m disabling trackbacks for a while.  I’ve also disabled anything with “referrers” in the request, since that is no longer an active page.  Anyone hitting that page now is presumed to be a spammer.

I had to do a bit of searching to come up with just the right .htaccess incantation to do this, since my installation of PHP requires the use of the CGI GET separator (”?”) instead of using “clean” URL’s like most installations of Expression Engine.  The following looks at the parameters passed to the script and returns a 403 to any caller who passes “trackback” or “referrers” anywhere in the query.


RewriteCond %    ^(.*)trackback(.*)  [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %    ^(.*)referrers(.*)  [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) - [F]


It does have the danger that if I ever use the word “trackback” or “referrers” in a post title it wouldn’t be accessible, but that’s a small risk I’m willing to take.

As I wrote yesterday, I’ve been suspecting that my wireless network is getting interference from a nearby AP. 

Yesterday afternoon the problems started again and I was able to get outside with my WiFi finder and snoop out the house where the signal seems to originate.  Interestingly, I’ve also noticed that I always see the 2Wire AP in conjunction with the other AP on channel 6.  That AP, no so coincidentally, has an SSID that is the name of the owner of that house.  So I think I’ve got a good handle on where the problem is coming from.

But I was a bit puzzled that I only see these AP’s intermittently.  As far as I could tell I wasn’t doing anything to change the RF access path like opening windows or doors.  After thinking about it a bit, my suspicion is that this guy has two AP’s, one of which is the 2Wire, and he’s trying to operate them at the same time and they’re interfering with one another.  I also suspect that the 2Wire may be increasing its power to try to “burn through” the interference it’s seeing from the other AP on the same channel.  The pattern of interference probably coincides with him fiddling with the equipment and then shutting it off for a while.  My WiFi detector also showed a 2.4GHz phone being operated there, so I suspect his network is all over the floor. 

I’m still curious as to why he has two AP’s, though.  If he was using the 2Wire previously and just got Fios, I suppose that could be one reason.  Another could be that he seems like one of those “more power” guys who’d search out something like the 2Wire (see next paragraph).

Anyhow, I now need to figure out how to approach him without making him defensive.  I’ve only dealt directly with him once, when his dogs broke through the fence and came into my yard.  But his demeanor during that incident, his subsequent treatment of the dogs, and the way he yells at his kids don’t give me much hope that he’s the type that one can work with.  An offer to help him “fix” his network might be interpreted as a threat to his pride/manhood. 

I received an email from Jim Maine last night.  He’s a local watchdog who runs the ourKeller website.  It seems that the city council voted last night to proceed with plans to issue $8.5 million in bonds for a new library (registration required, has Firefox-circumventing pop-ups).

With a 4-to-1 vote Tuesday night, City Council members said they intend to issue $8.5 million in bonds for the project without asking for voters’ approval. The council will vote again on Dec. 20 to actually issue the library bonds and another $270,000 in non-voter-approved bonds that would pay for new police cars, a dump truck and a street paving machine.

Councilman Mitch Homes voted against the plan saying the decision should be made by voters.

Residents who attended the meeting criticized the council after the vote, also saying the controversial issue should be put to voters. If the council decides in December to issue the bonds, Jim Maine said he will circulate a petition that would force the issue to a public election.

I have written about this topic previously.  I think this is something big enough that it should go to the voters, especially since they have previously rejected plans for a new library. 

Depending on the current budget state of the city, it may be possible to issue bonds and repay them without affecting the tax rate (I recall the city manager saying at one point that some early debt payoff had left room for further bond expansion¹), but I’m skeptical of it.  But aside from the bond issue, there’s the issue of ongoing staffing and support.  This new library will require staff to run it, and it will have ongoing maintenance and operational costs.  At this time we can’t afford to keep the existing library open for extended hours.  How do they think we’re going to pay for these ongoing costs without raising taxes?  Further, we have fire and police positions that are unstaffed (at least they were the last time I checked).  Until we have full fire and police coverage it seems irresponsible to me to be building and staffing a new library.

¹ I’m not sure where I got this from.  The city manager came to the Citizen’s Police Academy one night and gave a presentation on the city budget, but a quick scan of the 2005 city budget doesn’t show anything like this.  Perhaps I was on drugs at the time?