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Apple Owns Your Harddrive

June 12th, 2010

My first generation MacBook Air has been performing progressively worse over the past year. I had assumed it was just a consequence of software cruft, so I thought nothing of it. Then, last week, git commits started taking several minutes for small Django apps. It was time to fix the problem. Not wanting to be bothered, I did a simple OSX reinstall. (Although, since the Air has no optical drive, it was a bit bothersome; for some reason, the Air refused to communicate with my Desktop.)

Upon resinstall, I was quickly disappointed. The problem was not corrected. That annoying little beachball kept on spinning for practically every task. This suggested harddrive, so I took a look in the logs. S.M.A.R.T. was indicating imminent hard disk failure. (I really have no clue why no glaring alert was generated; I assume S.M.A.R.T. indicated the same thing a year ago — when I was under warranty — but I never checked the logs. Unfortunately, by reinstalling OSX, I lost access to historical logs.) After perusing a few articles online suggesting that replacing a first gen Air drive is very unpleasant, I just decided to bite the bullet and go to the Apple Store.

I went without an appointment, only because I was ignorant of their reservation policy. (Kudos to Apple on reservations; it’s a smart idea.) I was forced to wait around at the mall for an hour until a slot opened up. After learning the mall had no bookstore — a fact that made the snob in me feel angry — I turned to skimming HackerNews. (HackerNews is to geeks what Facebook is to non-geeks — somewhere to go when your bored and want stimulation.) Coincidentally, a blog post about hard drive replacements at Apple happened to be one of the front page stories for the day. This was fortunate, because it warned me that Apple would not allow me to keep my hard disk before having to deal with the genius bar “genius”; it spread my anger out over several quiet minutes instead of one loud minute. Thank you for making me appear like a decent person, HackerNews.

So basically, after deleting all my files and writing a quick python script to fill the hard drive with random numbers, I finally got to talk with my genius. (When you have a failing drive, filling it with random garbage is a painful operation to watch.) I must admit, Apple hires or trains employees very well. He was calm, funny, and generally charismatic. After I told him I want to keep my drive, he clearly explained Apple’s policy: they refurbish the drives and use “government standard encryption” to prevent data theft. By “government standard,” I assume they mean they overwrite the drive about a bajillion times past the point (one overwrite) where data could reasonably be expected to be recovered. I assume his answer is considered satisfactory for most users, but I was unhappy. I’m not paranoid enough to think my single-pass overwrite was going to make me vulnerable, but it’s still my drive. Furthermore, for drives that have not been overwritten, the eventual buyer is not the point of vulnerability — the many hands the drive passes through before being fixed are the dangerous ones. If the user requests their drive, not giving it to them is a bad policy.

Later on I realized that there is something more troubling about this policy. Apple, a consumer product company, is profiting on the failure of their own products. That’s pretty uncool. The replacement cost on my invoice was listed at $139.06 with an additional $85.00 in labor (HARDWARE REPAIR-LEVEL 1). By comparison, a new Toshiba MK8009GAH 80GB internal 1.8″ ATA-100 4200 rpm drive costs $114.85. Considering the cost of the very similar Toshiba drive, I don’t believe they were replacing my bad drive with a refurbished drive. (If they were, that would be especially ugly.) I assume they sell the refurbished drives as part of a refurbished MacBook Air, not as an individual component. Regardless, if the cost of a new drive plus shipping and less the profit from selling my drive refurbished is less than $139.06, Apple is earning money off product failure (i.e. shipping < refurbished profit). I’m angry.

Update:

A commenter on HackerNews asked why I didn’t just go to a non-apple service center. The truthful answer is because I am lazy. Nonetheless, it appears like the policy is set by apple and is universal amongst non-apple service centers. From MacService:

The old drive (working or not) is returned to Apple. If you wish to keep your original drive, Apple charges a significant core charge.

P.S. I’d be curious to see some hardware failure rate comparisons on Apple products. It’s my opinion that they produce bad hardware, but no one cares because most Apple consumers buy the latest version of whatever product Job’s slings out.

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Getting Konqueror to Work with Facebook

April 29th, 2010

Facebook redirects Konqueror to Facebook mobile; I assume it sees WebKit and thinks IPhone. Until facebook corrects the identification error, you can use Konqueror’s settings to fix the mistake.

Navigate to http://www.facebook.com/facebook?ref=pf.1

Go to Tools > Change Browser Identification > Safari > and click the highest non-IPhone version you see. (On my computer, this was 3.2.)

Konqueror Facebook Screenshot

Konqueror Facebook Screenshot

Enjoy lightweight browsing.

  1. The setting we are changing will be applied to a domain. Since you cant get to facebook.com otherwise, you visit this page so that the modification is applied correctly.

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Why I Blog

April 29th, 2010

Sometime last year, I had started maintaining email correspondence with a number of people from a diverse set of professions. Whenever I had an idea or a question that I was unable to fully flesh out or answer myself, I would find someone who was an “expert” on the topic and email them. Initially, I received replies, but they were terse. Courtesy dictated that they answer — especially those at academic institutions – but they felt no obligation to continue the conversation.1

As time progressed, my messages became more finely crafted. My questions were more specific and the background material was assembled with more clarity. I learned to write better.2 The act of writing diligently was in and of itself helpful, and writing with a critical reader in mind imposed diligence. I now offered value to the recipient, whereas before I was at best a nuisance. My ideas and alleged insights were at least well-formed, albeit not always novel. The recipients began to answer out of interest instead of obligation. The correspondence ceased to be one-sided — now, I had conversations and debates. At the point when I started BCC’ing people, I realized it would simply be easier to continue in blog format. Instead of updating a few people with a follow up email, they could just revisit the post and look for edits or comments; instead of emailing the same group of people every time I had a new idea, they could just add me to their Google Reader.

Like many nerds, I have attempted to create many blogs. (A small set, limited only by those I can recall instantly, includes: JustLikeJesse, ChasingSparks, jbn, and JohnBNelson.) Previously, I started blogging motivated by either AdSense or vanity — I wanted either money or attention or both. My interest in blogging waned shortly after the ubiquitous “Hello, World!” post and immediately before I found anything interesting to say. This blog, PathDependent, is the only blog of mine that has not floundered after one week — and it’s the only one where money and fame were never motivators.

Assuming I write reasonably well, my blog posts get attention. Attention by itself is useless at best while attention with comments is very valuable. There are limits to what I see in my own writing and thought processes. An idea may have such appeal to me that I completely ignore very relevant, seemingly tangential details — or major mistakes. Commenters — especially those that I do not know and thus have no requirement of politeness given anonymous commenting — have become unit testers for my ideas. Without commenters — private or public — I would not maintain this blog.

I blog because it helps me learn.

Notes:

  1. Looking back, many of the emails resembled a parent handling a child who persisted in recursive “but why?” conversations. I’m almost embarrased by some of the messages.
  2. HackerNews is probably more responsible for improving my writing than anything else. Conversation threads with karma acts like a unit test framework for ideas expressed in English.
  3. I am defining success in terms of how it helps me explore ideas. The metric I use to judge success is the number of email messages elicited by each post.  I usually get a handful per-post now. While my traffic stats are beyond my expectations, traffic is valuable only insofar as it improves the odds of good feedback.

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Who is missing from this disease?

April 26th, 2010

Edit: Josh Sommer directed my attention to How a Healthcare Company Can Accelerate Translation of Scientific Knowledge to Practice, which was mostly what I had in mind.

The mainstay of drug discovery is automated molecular screening, dose-escalating response curves, and clinical trials. It works, but it’s painfully slow and expensive. Meanwhile, patients with both chronic and acute diseases are continually given drugs with known efficacy. This has been going on for a very long time. Certain cost conscious elements of the health care system — health insurance companies — keep detailed records of this information on a per-person basis. I called up my prescription benefits provider last week and they provided me a copy of my historical prescriptions without a problem. I assume this is true of most, if not all, providers. I think these data could be very valuable.

For instance, I have (although there is no evidence yet of recurrence) a rare disease called Chordoma. If a sample of the Chordoma population’s drug histories were collected, certain inferences could potentially be drawn. Given known incidence rates for diseases, you have certain expectations. If you know 1:100 people taken should have had rheumatoid arthritis1 but they are under-represented or missing, two things are possible2: people with Chordoma do not get rheumatoid arthritis, or people with rheumatoid arthritis take drugs that might incidentally treat Chordoma.

Does the sample of patients’ drug histories conform with expectations? If not, why? Considering the cost of clinical trials, this seems like it might be a low-hanging fruit, especially for patient-led non-profit research/advocacy organizations. I recognize that a straight-forward pre-existing drugs regiments are unlikely to be curative, but they may hint at promising avenues of exploration. (For example, does the group taking a drug for RA seem to have slower disease progression.) Such hints might not be possible to derive from in vitro and animal models.

Note: I am neither a medical researcher nor a medical doctor. I am just a guy whose reach exceeds his grasp. I took a cursory glance at PubMed and asked around to a few researcher friends of mine to see if they knew of anyone who tried what I suggested. So far, I found no evidence that this has been attempted. If someone wants to correct me, please leave a comment. If you know someone who might be able to correct me, please forward them this blog post. Thanks.

1. Adjusted for Age, Ethnicity, Sex, etc.
2. Well, several things, but two relevant to my argument.

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Intelligence is NOT Normally Distributed

April 20th, 2010

At first glance, it seems as though a person’s IQ would be a reasonable proxy for intelligence. The faculties tested – pattern matching, logic, spatial recognition, etc – are strong tools for grasping truths, relationships, facts, and meanings. However, viewing them as tools illuminates an important caveat: tools must be used, properly wielded, and maintained.

Now, assume that the genes and biologically relevant environmental factors that are responsible for innate intellectual capacity are effectively independent. I am neither an expert in biology nor genetics, but this seems like a reasonable assumption (see note below). Elementary statistic will show that the distribution of the product (or sum) of n normally distributed variables is normally distributed. Hello, bell curve.

However, it is one thing to assume the biological factors responsible for innate intellectual capacity are independent. It is an entirely different matter to assume that the non-biological factors of intelligence are dependent on neither the biological factors nor time, effort and accumulated knowledge!

Employing reductio ad absurdum and the Einstein as the poster-child cliché: what would Einstein have been if he was isolated at birth with no social interactions or mental exercise offered? Again, I am not an expert psychologist, but I think it is reasonable to think that he would not have amounted to much – and would probably have been insane.

Without stimulation, your mind will atrophy. With a predominance of erroneous information feeding your mind, it becomes diseased (in the abstract sense.) Having strong biological machinery may be a necessary precondition for being “very smart,” but it is certainly not a sufficient condition. I do not think I am conflating knowledge with intelligence. The ability to learn — to grasp truths, relationships, facts, and meanings — is conditioned upon an individuals existing knowledge. If things that are taken as given are erroneous, errors ensue. Errors have a tendency not only to accumulate unculled, but given intellectual path dependency, results in a higher probability of accepting more falsehoods as truths.

As intelligence is conditional upon many factors chained together, it is more gamma than Gaussian. There are far more dumb people than polite company cares to admit; there are also very few very intelligent people. Contrary to what I often prefer to think there are intellectual giants. They exist at the intersection of favorable enviroment, genetics, motivations, and opportunities. Feynman was not only smarter than I am now; he was smarter than I could potentially ever be.

Note: Some prominent geneticists have suggested that intelligence may be geographically and racially dependent. These people are usually lambasted — promptly.  Even if this was found to be true, I don’t think the deviation between means would be large enough to matter.

P.S. This post was not me saying IQ tests are useless. My IQ is big. Ladies, you’ll love it.

P.P.S. I started writing this a while ago in response to a friends politically charged assertion, “Democrats are Smarter than Republicans.” Initially, this was a private email response to him. However, I became more interested in the non-political part of my response (i.e. IQ is not normally distributed.) I made my politically-oriented part — Democrats are Smarter Than Republicans — into a seperate post in an attempt to maintain the integrity of my central thesis while lessing the probabilty of Goodwin’s law asserting itself.

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Hacking Women and the Delusion of the Ethical Pickup Artist

April 7th, 2010

The self-declared ‘Mystery‘ treats courtship as an interaction between a man and a finite automata, the woman. His eponymous method — the Mystery Method in promotional materials and MM to its adherents — essentially instructs adopters on how to crack a woman’s instinctual suitable-mate, pattern matching machinery to elicit (false-) positives.  The ad copy proclaims it to be a brilliant self-help book and it is often billed as a way for shy, nice guys to get girlfriends. Ostensibly it is — in practice it’s not. This book is not about getting girlfriends. It’s about substituting sexual frustrations caused by lack of sex with sexual gluttony.

If you are, or at least believe yourself to be, a good man, acquiring the tools to overcome your own social phobias and a woman’s strong, evolutionarily-endowed defences is both self-improvement and mutually advantageous. Unfortunately, I doubt that this group dominates his readers. Instead, I assume the majority of his customers are men lured into reading his books because doing so offers the promise of getting laid by any attractive woman that falls under their gaze. (Even in Neil Strause’s best-seller, The Game, some of the PUAs seemed border-line sociopathic.) The subtitle of the book is devoid the ethical girlfriend pretence: “How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed.” The language used between the covers is more telling: women are (Hot Babe) HB7’s, HB8’s, HB9’s, and HB10’s. People buy it because they want to turn the fantasy world of pornography into their reality.

I am not saying this book is without value. On the contrary, I find no fault in the efficacy of his methods in the context of cracking women nor do I think his ideas on “social dynamics” are erroneous. From an evolutionary perspective, his narrative is plausible, even probable. After years of what appears to be meticulous study, he impressively reverse-engineered women. Unfortunately, the few good, albeit shy, men admitted into his realm, if they are astute readers, are probably perverted by their education. The original goal of finding a girlfriend turns to an addiction of cracking women — to “The Game.”

Mystery might counter that this is justified because it is natural. It is merely the product of evolution. If it wasn’t his readers, it would be the guy who is naturally manipulative or happened to accidentally posses or learn social procedures that get him laid. However, something viewed as natural or an artifact of evolution (or history) is neither moral nor beyond morality. Society enforces certain protocols to correct some of our biological quirks and inadequacies. As Mystery says, “the human being is an out-dated model.” Thankfully, our ability to share knowledge and socialize has supplemented our operating systems. Cracking our biological systems violates our socially constructed protocols. It is blatant manipulation. He admits his theories are based on a woman’s evolutionary drive to find a man that ensures her survival, while in the next breath he explains how this can help you get between her legs. ”Hacking” (i.e. in the colloquial sense that pisses off proper hackers) was cool at age 13; hacking is not cool at age 25 — it’s criminal.

I find no fault in youthful promiscuity. Oscar Wilde could have written a novel about my college years. It was part of my development as a person and I have (almost) no regrets. However, I always had some recognition as to the vapid nature of what I was doing. Mystery and his pickup hucksters want to nullify that socialized feeling, feeling themselves justified by our selfish genes and tribal heritage. Do there techniques work? Sure, but at a heavy cost. Years later, you might finding yourself watching The Blue Lagoon on Starz at 3:00am, realizing that you haven’t felt the feelings that the movie depicted — intimacy with consequence — since before “correcting” yourself.

…And you’ll realize you made a mistake.

P.S. I suppose it seems hypocritical of me to lambast Mystery and his cohorts. I have obviously read their material. However, I consider myself to be a hacker: I enjoy learning for the sake of learning. Whether it be an exposition on syntax-directed translation or pre-Raphaelite painters, I am curious. It could be correctly observed that understanding leads to, or is tangled with, exploration and exploration can lead to exploitation and corruption. I offer no counter-argument. In my case, I only hope that the temptation is attenuated due to previous experiences (i.e. college promiscuity) and increasing maturity.

P.P.S. I should also point out that I think Mystery — the media superstar of the pick-up artists — actually seems like a good guy. Sadly, I think he may be condemning himself to the second circle of hell, figuratively speaking. I think he genuinely believes that he is helping shy but good men in his workshops. I just think his readers — and best students — are probably predominately horny assholes turned oversexed assholes. Adverse selection is a bitch.

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On Fiction

April 4th, 2010

Yesterday, in a leisurely scotch drinking session at my neighbors house, the conversation shifted to recent reads. Both husband and wife are avid readers, the former exclusively non-fiction, the latter mostly fiction. I asked him why he only read non-fiction, and he suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for “mere” entertainment. I used to think this way; I no longer do. If anything, my time spent reading fiction now exceeds time spent reading non-fiction. (Although, admittedly, I read less non-fiction now because in certain areas, I have achieved a semblance of expertise. Consequently, experimentation dominates my learning method.)

Obviously, fiction can inspire. Reading a good book with a plot that is relatable is not only entertaining, but often is motivating. Granting motivation, fiction can be a useful productivity tool. However, more importantly, fiction guides your personality. In the process of identifying with characters, fiction moves from a passive medium to an active one. You actively speculate as to what you would do in an identical situation and compare it against the character’s actions. The comparison is a process of judgement; it’s supervised learning, with a dead tree as the teacher.

Fiction allows you to be part of situations that are unlikely to happen otherwise. You can experience thousands of years worth of events by reading fiction. Yes, it is true that what happens to you in real-life — with it’s finality and incompariably richer stimulation – out-weighs that of a book. However, the course altering moments in life are infrequent. Fiction provides a means of accelerating your “personal growth.”

What follows is a list of characters that have become integrated as part of my self. I am not a summation of them; I have pieced together certain traints from them. Most of which were selected because I already had such a quality; many of which were selected because I found them admirable. (The later being more important.) Yes, my family, friends, and experiences have contributed more to who I am, but the following contributions were not negligible.

I am Morpheus.
I am Drago.
I am Lord Finkle-McGraw.
I am Hardin.
I am Francisco; I am Galt; I am Rearden.
I am Roark. I am Wynand.
I am Will Parry; I am Lord Asreil.
I am Ender.
I am Gray.
I am Guy Montag.
I am Mustapha Mond.
I am Simon.
I am Winston Smith.
I am Bruce Wayne.
I am Adrian Veidt; I am the Comedian.

I am the product of my parents, my friends, my life, my experiences…and my teachers.

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A Math Lesson for Nancy Pelosi

December 7th, 2009

Nancy Pelosi is now an vocal exponent of H.R. 4191, the “Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act of 2009.” (This makes me pine for Orwellian naming templates. If they titled this bill, “The Freedom and Security for the American Financial System Act,” at least I could delude myself into thinking that its true purpose was obfuscated to the average nightly news watcher, rather than being an unmistakable deference to mob opinion.)

The following is a reasonably accurate summary of the bill:

The U.S. Government’s fiscal situation is FUBAR. For foreseeable and unforeseeable reasons, the deficit is now a leviathan. For the sake of expediency, it is best to go with the tried-and-true Democratic narrative that places all of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the evil Wall Street fat cats. (This narrative is mostly a pastiche of Scrooge McDuck. The government has an odd tendency to use cartoon ducks to sway popular opinion.) Since Main Street’s unemployment has persisted while Wall Street’s profits have returned, the best course of action is to use fervid populist opinion, to take money from the ostensibly stable and wealthy Wall Street firms and redistribute it to the unstable industries that would obviously be irreparably damaged if not for the infusion of money.

Since the political actors are perennial fans of war analogies, I’ll make one of my own: H.R. 4191 is similar to a situation in which there are 5 wounded soldiers and one unharmed soldier left on a battlefield. Upon reviewing the situation, the feckless medic who has just entered the fray realizes that these soldiers will need blood transfusions. The medic proceeds to shoot the unharmed shoulder in the thigh, allowing the blood to messily drain into a pan to be given to his comrades. This is hyperbole; it is also not far from the truth.

Irrespective of the fact that the Wall Street firms are far from healthy — they may be making large profits but they are still exposed to some terrific risks — a cursory glance at the numbers using basic arithmetic, would suggest that Wall Street is not likely to be the one bearing the costs of such a tax raise. (Basic arithmetic is probably above the botox battered brain of Nancy Pelosi.) I am not talking about the pedestrian argument that suggests the tax would be passed on to consumers. I am referring to a more damning flaw: no market maker could pay this tax.

Take, for example, the 25 basis point tax on plain old stock transactions. Looking at Yahoo Finance right now, I see the bid-ask on SPY is 111.20/111.21. Market makers looking to make a few pennies on every transaction might have difficulty staying in the black with a 25 basis point tax per transaction. (I was unable to ascertain whether the tax is levied once per side or once per round-trip; For a conservative estimate, I’ll assume it is only levied once per round-trip). This would mean the market maker could only profit on swings of at least 28 cents if he was hoping to avoid bankruptcy.

(Ironically, some of the proponents of this bill were touting it as a structural method of reducing volatility! They argue that with a tax, there are incentives to hold positions longer. That may be true for marginal day traders. However, market makers would have to significantly widen spreads in order to survive. Wide spreads translate into higher volatility.)

Since market makers are integral elements of markets, it seems likely that they would be exempt from this tax. While the tea-party crowd loves to shout that the “Progressives” are socialist wolves in sheep’s garb who are looking for any and every way to demolish capitalism, I’m not so conspiracy-minded. Progressive Congressmen and Congresswomen would be forced to exempt market makers in order to maintain market integrity. At which point the absurdity of the bill comes into sharp focus: the bill that would force Wall Street to “contribute” to the economic recovery would…EXEMPT WALL STREET?!

P.S. I appologize for the discordant feel to this post. I am a bit peeved by this bill and could not proceed stoically. I have spent the past 9 years of my life learning about markets so that I could be a competitive trader. This bill would render 9 years of sacrifice (lower grades in college; no traditional forms of employment to build my credentials; less time with friends and family) wasted for arbitrary reasons. I suppose this is true for most congressional edicts.

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Fund-raising is done wrong

December 5th, 2009

Soliciting small donations is called fund-raising. It involves straight-forward requests, bake sales, pay-per-mile jogs, and beef-steak dinners. It is not glamorous. Soliciting large donations is called development1. It is glamorous. It involves managing relationships (see: SalesForce, Convio, Kintera.) People who work in development are ostensibly paid a premium because they either have or are capable of building a network of high net-worth contacts from which funding can be extracted. The more general the cause they advocate for, the more important they become.

Most not-for-profits favor development over the solicitation of small donations. This preference was probably justified in the past but now exists as a historical artifact — a philanthropic appendix.2 The cost of building and maintaining a motivated army of constituents was much higher twenty years ago than it is now. However, with the advent of internet-based communications, it can now be practically free in terms of time and money. This preference may now persist due to certain cognitive biases. It may appear as though finding one large donation is more likely than finding N small donations of equal aggregate value.

For small highly-focused organizations, I believe this nearly ubiquitous preference is sub-optimal. The constituent beneficiaries also have networks of contacts: their friends and family. The relationships between the constituents and their friends and family are likely to be far stronger than anything a development professional could build. I have been impressed by the generosity of my own family and friends in supporting my cause. I was also impressed by the initial strong push made by the Chordoma community in general after I offered them a fund-raising tool. Unfortunately, the initial success of community fund-raising was soon marred by swift appearance of fund-raising fatigue. Ignoring the poor quality of the first implementation, I completely missed a very important feature set: feedback. I believe that novelty combined the promise of proactivity resulted in a strong drive at first. However, after funds had been collected, there was a post-endeavor funk. Money had been raised, but there was no obvious coincident progress made on the non-monetary front. (Such an expectation is not rational nor was it encouraged, but I assume it was a quietly held assumption nonetheless.)

I believe feedback mechanisms could alleviate this problem in the same way that repetition in marketing leads to consumer interest. Early on it was decided that coaching mechanisms — nagging reminders, occasional notifications of non-monetary progress, and reports on historical donors that have not given recently — would be beneficial. Unfortunately, life intervened and I never implemented those features. This is unfortunate as I subsequently concluded that such mechanisms are crucial. (I think MoveOn.org’s email campaigns are a paragon of good feedback mechanisms in fund-raising. Ignoring the accompanying inane commentary, they are brutally effective.)

I should also note that in favoring beneficiary empowerment, the organization does not preclude the possibility of receiving large donations. Again, exploiting the social connections of your constituents gives you a far deeper social reach than that offered by development professionals. For causes that affect people randomly across socio-economic parameters, you’re going to find some potentially wealthy individuals. The constituents are engaging in the search for wealthy donors at no expense, in time or money, to the organization. If they tease out a potential large donor, why should they then be referred to a development professional? The potential donors interest is already piqued. Now they need to be convinced that their money will not be given in vain. They need to be sold on the efficacy of the organization. The development professional could (and basically does) play this role. However, since it has already been established that the donor is a strong lead, this role could also be played by someone intimately involved in the actual decision making of the organization.

Obviously, I have made a lot of assumptions in asserting the superiority to community-style fund-raising over top-down development work. Some of these assumptions are known to me, but I am probably ignorant of others. I encourage the reader to leave comments to help guide me while building Fundify, which will act as a test of my fund-raising hypothesis.3 Expect to see an alpha with active deployment sometime in late December / early January.

Notes:

  1. I strongly dislike the term development in this context, but it’s part of the industry nomenclature. In the non-profit world, development means a combination of marketing and one-on-one salesmanship.
  2. Medical g33ks: I understand this might not be strictly true. Please refrain from commenting that this not a perfect analogy.
  3. Actually, Fundify is being built to raise money for Chordoma research, a rare type of cancer. I have Chordoma. I would like to not have to worry about Chordoma. That being said, focusing on testing my hypothesis is a better motivational tactic. Intellectual curiosity is a robust motivator; Terror inspired by mortality is a persistent drain.

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Google Unobscures Munged Email Addresses

November 11th, 2009

I was trying to find an email address of someone so I did a Google search for [his name] + email. A page in in the SERPs showed his email address naked. I clicked it to confirm the context of the address. The actual content was a munged email address.

This is a test to see if/how Google unmunges email addresses.

spam[@]gmail[.]com
spam[at]gmail[dot]com
spam at gmail
spam at gmail dot com
spam [at] gmail [dot] com

Edit: Nope. Apparently, this translation does not happen. They just must have changed the page.

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