aubreyturner.org

Humans tend to be good at quick pattern recognition.  I suppose this could be advantageous in determining whether something is a threat (or perhaps food) quickly.  We can scan an area, recognize a pattern, and immediately associate that pattern with some set of memories, whether they are good or bad.  Corporate marketers take advantage of this by trying to associate the pattern of their corporate logo with good things in our heads.

But our quick recognition capability sometimes causes us to miss subtle differences.  At least it does at first.  We often feel that something isn’t quite right and decide to take a closer look.  I say all this in way of getting to the point of something that happened yesterday in Southlake.  As I was driving into a parking lot I noticed a young woman with a T-shirt that had what I at first took to be a familiar logo.  As I was getting out of my truck, she was getting into a Mustang across from me and I finally noticed what her shirt said.  She probably thought I was staring at her breasts, but those were just incidental, serving as the background for the message on her shirt.  I think if you’re going to wear an obscene bastardization of a logo that most of us associate with high-carb surgary goodness then you shouldn’t be surprised if you get a few looks.  Further, it’s probably a bad idea to wear a shirt like that in the general public where small children might encounter it.

Here’s the shirt for those that are curious:

I’ve been feeling like some kind of virus is working on me.  I’m tired, having trouble concentrating, and feeling slightly feverish from time to time.  So I haven’t been exactly on top of things, which is my excuse for the dearth of new content this week.

But at least I’ve got some good music to listen to while I laze around, thanks to Instapundit and the new fast/free shipping at Barnes & Noble. 

For those that know me, the seriousness of my malaise can be judged from the fact that I’m not going to the range this afternoon…

It’s interesting that Glenn Reynolds would have an article about customer service robots up today, since I had to deal with one this morning.  While his experience was positive, I’ve never liked dealing with them and my experience today didn’t exactly give me any more warm feelings for them.

The power failed here just before 9:00am.  As soon as I confirmed that there wasn’t a problem with my breaker I called TXU’s “customer service” number.  When you select the option to report an outage you’re dumped into a second phone system with an obnoxious overly chipper female voice.  They obviously didn’t think it out carefully, since the first thing it says to you is, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t able to get your account number.”  It then asks you to speak or key in the account number.  After navigating through this and speaking the right phrases at the right times I was assured by the chipper robotic voice that my problem had been recorded.

After a couple of hours had passed I started to wonder if they were doing anything about the problem.  The power was still off and I hadn’t gotten a call on my cellphone (which I had given to the chipper robot when it asked for a contact number).  I called back, determined to find some way to break the robot’s programming and speak to an actual human.  I found that when it asks you if your account number is right that it has no provision for keypad input (i.e. some systems allow you to enter ‘1’ for yes, but this one required you to speak “Yes” or “No”).  If you enter a number it says that it didn’t understand you and to either say “Yes” or “No.”  I hit ‘1’ again and it said that it was having difficulty understanding me and was transferring me to an agent.  Ah-ha!  Success at last.  After a short wait I got a person on the line and reported the problem.  The power was back on within 20 minutes of reporting it via the person.  So, from now on, I’m going to be purposefully obtuse in order to get a human on the line.  I don’t trust the damn robot to actually record my problem and dispatch someone to fix it.

Now I’ll be up front and confess that I despise talking to machines.  First, I don’t trust voice recognition to get things right.  Second, it feels silly to talk to a machine.  Third, most of these damn robots are too chipper and familar.  They come across to me as being unserious, which leaves me with the impression that my problem isn’t being taken seriously.  The whole concept of using a robot to keep from having to deal directly with me reeks of contempt for the customer.  It says that these companies will do anything in their power to keep us, their paying customers, at arms length.

However, despite my hatred for the damn things, it would appear that customer “service” robots are here to stay.  While talking to a friend this afternoon, he mentioned that he’d discussed these robotic systems with one of their vendors and was informed that their surveys showed that 85% of people would rather talk to the machine than key in information.  If we assume that the vendor’s survey is correct (and I would look carefully at it, given that it’s in his interest to show that people like the systems he’s selling), that still leaves the other 15% of us who despise the damn things.  I guess it depends on your market whether you can afford to offend and annoy 15% of your customer base.  While TXU has to face competition, there is still a lot of old-style monopoly mindset in the way they treat customers.  Perhaps they don’t care if they piss people off.

Anyhow, if companies are interested in keeping their customers happy, rather than just minimizing their callcenter costs, they might want to consider a few design points when implementing these voice response systems.

1. Every menu must have an “escape” to a human operator.
2. Voice recognition systems must have the ability to accept keypad input for those who do not wish to speak to the machine.
3. If a call has to be transferred from one phone system to another it must not be done in such a way that the call enters the second system in an “error state.”

Careful!  Guard goose on duty!

Four jails in Brazil are using geese to help prevent prisoners from escaping.

The prisons, in Sao Paulo’s Paraiba Valey, say no inmates have escaped since they brought in the geese.

The geese are kept in areas just inside the prison wall and make a lot of noise whenever anyone goes near them.

Idalecio Pereira Campos, director of Tremembe Prison, told Terra Noticias Populares: “When I was a child there were wild geese that would run after me on a nearby farm.

“That is where I got the idea from, I thought that the geese would do great in the prison, and they do!”

Anyone who has been chased by a goose can attest to the fact that they aren’t so cute and cuddly when they get riled up.

I see from her latest entry that Rachel Lucas is thinking of setting up another, anonymous website to vent.  Given that she’s using her real name, it makes it easy for stalkers to find her. 

The first and biggest obstacle to online privacy is that ICANN requires valid contact information in domain registration records.  If it is found that you put false information in the registration record, they can cancel your ownership of the domain.  In fact, I recall in one instance where a company attempted to hijack a domain from its rightful owner and ICANN sided with the hijacker because the owner used false registration information.  While having your contact information in the registration database is bad from a spam/junk mail perspective, it also makes your address public knowledge to anyone who knows how to do a WhoIs lookup.

Some people have taken the approach of using a P.O. Box (or one of those PMBs you can get at the UPS Store).  The solution that I use is a service from a company called Domains By Proxy.  If anyone does a WhoIs lookup on my domains, all they will get is the address of Domains By Proxy.  If someone needs to contact me about the domain, Domains By Proxy maintains an anonymous email redirector (with spam blockers).  If someone wanted to find out my real address they’d have to get a subpoena before Domains By Proxy will release that information.  They are affiliated with Go Daddy, so you have to use them as your registrar.  The service is $9.00/year, which is less than a P.O. Box.  I haven’t had any problems with either Go Daddy or Domains By Proxy, although Go Daddy is a bit pushy during the registration/transfer process in trying to get you to buy other services from them.  If I recall correctly, you have to decline three separate pages of “special offers” before you can finish the checkout process. 

Name Secure is another, similar product ($9.00/year), but I don’t have any experience with them, so I can’t say how good their service is.

As long as you use a real name, people can find you using other methods.  However, a good pseudonym and a service like Domains By Proxy can make it harder for stalkers and enraged Michael Moore fans to find you.

I just saw a commercial for Florida orange juice.  Normally, this wouldn’t warrant comment, since it seems like they’re always running in one form or another.  However, this commercial was a bit different.  It flashed up the dates and names of some of the hurricanes that hit Florida this year along with a voiceover reminding us that we’re helping to rebuild Florida with every glass of orange juice.  Is it just me or does this seem a bit sleazy?  It reeks of opportunism and strikes me as being in poor taste.

It seems that printer companies have been embedding the model and serial numbers in the output of their color laser printers and color copiers.

Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printed there that could be used to trace the document back to you.

According to experts, several printer companies quietly encode the serial number and the manufacturing code of their color laser printers and color copiers on every document those machines produce. Governments, including the United States, already use the hidden markings to track counterfeiters.

What bothers me about this isn’t so much that it’s there, but that we weren’t told about it before it was done.  The technology is ripe for abuse.  Sure, it can be used to catch the really stupid counterfeiters, but it could also be used to catch people who have legitimate purposes.  Consider a whistleblower who prints incriminating documents and submits them anonymously.  The affected wrongdoers, if they obtained the documents, could potentially decode the serial numbers and work back to the person who printed them.  This doesn’t necessarily require access to the printer manufacturer’s records, either, given that companies could potentially know the serial numbers of printers assigned to employees (or at a minimum, narrow it down to a certain shared printer).

And what about government abuse of the system?  There appear to be no safeguards built into the law, since this is just something that the printer companies decided to do to be “helpful.”  There is no subpoena requirement, no probable cause, no warrant, no review by a judge.  The company just gives up the information to the government upon request. 

If there really is a legal reason for the government to need to know the information, it won’t hurt them to go through the normal due process procedures and get a warrant.  Even though I don’t trust the judiciary these days to do much more than rubberstamp warrant requests, it would would at least provide a bare minimum of oversight to avoid some abuses.

Update: GeekWithA.45 has some more thoughts on the subject.

If you’re tempted to complain about your job, consider that it could be worse.  Popular Science has released its latest list of worst jobs in science.  So what’s the worst job in science this year?  Anal wart researcher.

“I see about 15 butts a day, and a third of them have warts,” says nurse practitioner Naomi Jay of the University of California at San Francisco. Jay and infectious-disease doc Joel Palefsky were the first to run extensive clinical studies on the sexually transmitted diseases that afflict the anus. “He’s the tushie king, and I’m the tushie queen,” Jay boasts.
…
And the only way to detect this rare but deadly disease is to ask a highly trained nurse like Jay to scrutinize your derrière. “A giant anal wart can be a couple inches large and blocking the anal opening,” Jay says with her customary vigor. The bright side? “In 13 years I’ve only been pooped on twice, and that’s not bad.”

When I hear about this (or the tampon squeezers), it makes me glad to have a job that doesn’t involve nasty bodily emissions. 

I was leafing through the Academy ad that came in today’s paper and found what looks like a good deal on a Marlin Model 60.  Academy is offering one for $99.86 from now through November 24th.  MSRP is $195, and a cursory online search shows retail prices running around $150 (although there appear to be some Gunbroker auctions that are running around $100 for a new one). 

I don’t have any personal experience with this model (I’ve got a Ruger 10/22), but from what I’ve heard it’s a good rifle that’s suitable for plinking around or even taking small game.

This year I didn’t buy nearly as much as I usually do on National Ammo Day (or week this time around).  I’‘ve got pretty good stocks of most of my major calibers hanging around from that monster purchase I made earlier this year.  However, I can always use some .22, so I bought 200 rounds of .22LR target and another 100 rounds of .22WMR for my Ruger Single Six.