I'm up at 5:30; what on earth is wrong with me.
..
Not much to do at this silly hour. A quick scan of the news is rather disheartening:
"It doesn't sound real good from what I've heard in the last few hours," said Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez, who would lose the most of any player, $114,754 a day. "You just have to prepare yourself for the very worst."
I would be appalled at his greed, yet it's really our own fault for idolizing these people .. What a silly world, where the sections of a newspaper are "news", "living", "business" and "sports", all given equal weight.
I think it would be fun if people paid me 6 figures a day and then came and sat in my living room and threw garbage at me each time I break the build.


Maybe not.

For those of you following the Volkswagen saga, I posted a not very nice message on usenet about my VW; after doing a little social engineering, I tracked down the email addresses of a few Executive Vice Presidents in charge of Customer Service at VW .. I sent a copy of the message in their direction.
To my absolute shock and amazement, one of them actually called me back today! After discussing the problem for thirty minutes, and turning down several of his offers for various denominations of gift certificates to the Volkswagen Store (hi, I hate your car, but I really want to wear your logo on my back, thanks), he finally agreed to extend my measly two year bumper to bumper warranty to three years! At the rate my car is falling apart, that must be worth at least $3000 ..
Let's hear it for executives :)

I've been so half hazard with my entries for the past few weeks; the site is really starting to come together, and we are looking to launch in late September - roughly the same time I leave for Georgia - so I'm actually having a fair bit of stuff to do for it.
At the same time, I've been building my curriculum for some of my classes; it's incredibly mentally stimulating, which makes me really realize how long its been since I've been challenged by .. anything ..
It feels good to create, and be motivated again.

Rather generous weekend - j & i cleaned a buncha crap out of the extra room and, after a pathetic attempt to sell some of it, ended up carting most of it to goodwill .. then went to waterloo records today and unloaded a bunch of garbage CDs, and picked up a few new ones too ..
spent last night watching cops and drinking beer, and today is cooking and eating day - sushi for lunch, and osso bucco and vegetable soup for dinner, and cupcakes for dessert :) I can't wait - it smells fantastic in here.

In our little venture over to Savannah, we are going to need to move all the crap in our house; after narrowing the choices down to Allied, Atlas & Stevens, I selected Allied. Ceaser won't be moving our stuff this time, but that's ok .. Allied is reputable.
But the moving industry is one giant ball of sketchiness. Horror story after horror story of movers losing peoples belongings, charging outrageous additional fees, and then holding their furniture ransom .. Even the legislation provided by the department of transit has been corrupted by the time it reaches the consumer! According to the Moving Advocate Team, the American Moving and Storage Association (AMSA) took it upon themselves to rewrite the "Rights & Responsibilities" booklet people receive when they move. The booklet is supposed to state federal moving laws; it now states very biased half truths.
Our moving quote was consistently around $4000 from three major companies; I got a quote from one of the blacklisted companies in question after using monstermoving.com. Their quote was $1800.


Riiiight.


Never trust anyone.

a buddy of mine, wl, works as a sysadmin .. his company does a lot of technical stuff - websites, hosting, etc - and they also harvest spam, by the zillion:
wl: you wanna know how the spam business works?

wl: I get a list of 15 million mails

wl: I send to 15 million people

wl: after a year, 5 million of those people have unsubscribed, 2 million bounce, the rest are good

wl: so you're left with 8 million legit and 5 mil unsubs

wl: well I take my new "scrubbed" list and sell it for 10 cents per legit email

wl: then I sell the unsubs at 1 cent per unsub

wl: so even if you unsub, you still get sold to someone else

wl: when a company we host sends a mailing, half of their profits go to the marketing company that sold them the list

wl: if one of our customers sends to 15 million people a day, they make about 20 grand a day

wl: a customer comes to us and wants to send an e-mail for netflix.com

wl: netflix.com has a deal where people sign up for $20.

wl: The marketing compnay, my customer, works a deal with netflix to get $10 for every signup

wl: so my customer (the spammer) sends 15 million e-mails. We charge them 10 cents per mail

wl: 10,000 people cilck on the netflix ad out of 15,000,000

wl: out of that 10,000 , 1000 people sign up at $20

wl: so netflix made $20,000 in one day and they pay the marketing company $10,000

wl: good campaigns will get about 12-20,000 clickthroughs

wl: now put that in perspective

wl: our customers send 1-2 campaigns a day, every day

wl: our customers supply email addresses to us and we load them into a database

wl: they pay the marketing company that provides them the list of e-mails

wl: for us to send the mail

wl: so, we invested $80,000 in a mail spamming infratructure, build a webpage around a database server to generate the e-mails, and essentially we can make around 300k/mo doing nothing

There's an article in gear magazine about the Chicken Ranch - a legal (?!) brothel located a little ways out from Vegas, in Nevada .. Sexuality.org has a FAQ written by a regular of the establishment. The FAQ is a good read (and so is this), but the whole thing is truly bizzare - I wonder what other little "gems" are hiding in our country?


Anyyyyways. It's a nice day today; the temperature hasn't hit 95 yet, so it might be safe to go outside without melting. Happy August.