Facebook Albums now online with Fotobook plugin
May1
I installed the Fotobook and Lightbox 2 plugins this evening to enable some level of integration between my Facebook albums and my blog. Now people without Facebook accounts can check out some photos. The Fotobook plugin allows some level of privacy by allowing you to control which albums you want to show. Pretty neat. Check out the “Photos” link above.
Best Buy, you FAIL
Dec7
Dec 24th, 2008 9:48AM – received BestBuy password reset request in my e-mail inbox.
Dec 24th, 2008 10:03AM – received BestBuy purchase confirmation in my e-mail inbox for $156.74.
The problem? I was asleep and didn’t make this order! Sometime between 9:48AM and 10:03AM a Thomas Ng in Beaverton purchased a Sony Cybershot 8.1 MP camera over the phone and had it shipped to a Gabrielle Ng in Portland. I’m assuming that the Thomas in Beaverton waited a while for their password reset request to come to his e-mail inbox, and when it didn’t, he called up BestBuy for a phone order. So a BestBuy representative handled the phone order and changed MY account information and overwrote it with THEIR account information. The billing address, shipping address and even the credit card information was changed out this morning.
Okay, so if a customer calls and tries to place an order over the phone and also says that all of their billing information was different, wouldn’t the customer service guy get a little suspicious and deny the order?
Lucky for me, the order was billed to their Master Card, so I didn’t loose any money. I wonder how many other people this has happened to? Now that I have their CC information, what prevents me from racking up a bunch of purchases under their name? This is a huge security hole.
Best Buy, you FAIL.
Cost of text messaging vs E-mail.
Sep0
So I just got a text messaging plan after having a cell phone for the last 8 years. Being nerdy, I calculated the cost of texting vs just using internet e-mail. Let’s assume that there is no protocol overhead for e-mailing or texting and that what you only send is pure text.
My Comcast bill is approximately $55/month. Comcast recently announced that one can use a total aggregate bandwidth of 250GB per month before reaching their monthly limit. At this rate, the price per character is $2.05 x 10^-10 (that’s $2.05 billionth of a dollar per *character*… a very very small number.)
The math:
($55.00 month / 250GB) * (1GB / 2^30 bytes) = $0.000000000205 / byte.
(1 byte = one 8-bit ASCII character – e.g. A-Z, 0-9 and punctuation)
On the other hand, my text messaging service costs $5.00 / month. You get 400 *total* text messages, with 140 characters each. Lets assume that every text message that you send and receive is 140 characters long… even though the average text message is much shorter. At this rate, the price per character is $0.0000893.
The math:
($5.00 month / 400 messages) * (1 message / 140 bytes) = $0.0000893 / byte.
(1 byte = one 8-bit ASCII character – e.g. A-Z, 0-9 and punctuation)
So, if Comcast charges the same amount as your phone carrier for the same amount of service, it would cost you $23,971,286 per month.
The math:
($0.0000893 / byte) * (1 byte / [1/2^30] GB) * 250GB = $23,971,286.
Yes … almost $24 MILLION dollars a month.
asdf
Apr0
I’ve owned this domain name since August 2004, and a blog since 2001, and since then, I’ve gone through 7 site re-designs and countless hours of blogging. All of the entry archives were kept on this site just for historical fun, but after 8 years it’s time to move on, and start from a clean slate.
I’m just using the default template for the time being, but I intend to make my own template photo friendly… I just need to find the time.
If you read this often, the last entry that i wrote was way back in October of 2007 after the LiveSTRONG ride. Since then, this blog has remained dormant and abandoned. Work consumed most of my time, and well, I just don’t like to sit in front of the computer after the work day is over. If it’s nice outside, I’ll go cycling, if it’s storming on the mountain, it’s snowboarding time. If I just want to get away, I drive in to Portland and hang out with my friends.
We’ll see where 2008 takes me. Maybe this site will sit idle, but who knows.