Clayton’s Weblog

Jeffery Veen quoted Nietzsche:

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence. - Friedrich Nietzsche

And he goes on to argue that this is another way of looking at the old “users are stupid” adage. He says “Users aren’t stupid, they’re efficient,” and I largely agree.

However, this only works because users are generally providing value back, either in the form of payment, feedback, community, etc.

This also applies to the “people are stupid” adage, but not in nearly so positive a light. An “efficent” co-worker, or friend doesn’t necessarily provide value back to you. It’s frequently just as likely that they’re efficent only from their own perspective, and they find it much easier to ask me to do whatever task for them, regardless of how long it may take me to do it.
This is a good thing to keep in mind, especially in a work environment. It’s frequently not efficent for you to do things for other people even though they would love for you to. It may be more up front effort to teach them how to do something new, but if they’re going to be at your desk every other day asking for it, you need to ask yourself if that’s time-effective for either of you.

Sometimes when you tell people you’ll show them how, or point them to documentation, will think this is “putting them off”, and refuse to put in the effort to try for themselves, but I try to emphasize that I’ll be happy to help them with any problems they have, if they give it a try.

The flip side is that everyone can’t know how to do everything. There is a large gray area between the specialist and generalist, and both ends are gunuinely useful. Sometimes it does make sense for you to be the goto person for certain tasks, as long as there is some plan for when you’re not around.

Parkour set to Super Mario Brothers sound effects

Kill Bill meets SMB music - There aren’t really enough sound effects to do the fight scenes justice, but a few parts were pretty great.

I picked up this on Ebay last week. Overall I’m fairly happy with it. It clips on to the existing hook for the leash that comes with the DS, and the small slot at the top of the standard stylus. The hook that attaches to the DS end of the leash isn’t the highest quality in the world, but I don’t think there is any danger that it’s going to break or fall off either. The only real downside is because of where the leash attaches to the stylus, it doesn’t clip firmly into the DS anymore, but this is pretty much not an issue since you can’t lose it either. I left my normal stylus in the slot on the DS and I’m letting the one on the leash just flap around.

One thing to be aware of is that the stylus can’t be removed from the leash, but it does come with a stylus, so it’s actually a slightly better deal than I expected.

Also, the woman selling these is in West Virginia, so it showed up like 2 days after I ordered it, via USPS.

The VP of Corporate Communications (Who I’ve mailed about this twice before) got back to me shortly after my Digg post hit the front page. I’m sure those two things have nothing to do with each other though…

To answer the people on the Digg thread, yes, I have opted out of all of Gamespot’s partner spam and I have my email address marked private in my profile.

Also, one of the guys from GameFAQ’s (which has been part of GameSpot for a while now) actually called my house and I’m going to go back through my inbox and find the old spams and forward them on to them, so they can look into it.

So, I use the Spamgourmet service to generate temporary email addresses that look like examplewebsite.20.coneill@xoxy.net. This means that I can give www.examplewebsite.com this email address, and they can send me 20 emails and then the email address automatically expires if I don’t say otherwise. As a result, I can generally tell exactly what web site sold my email address to spammers, and it limits the damage they can do.

However, I didn’t expect to need this with Gamespot. I gave them the obvious Spamgourmet email address when I signed up, and received the normal confirmation email, etc. About a week or two later, I got spam to the same email address which seemed really odd.

Here is a copy:

---

`Greetings!My name is Joseph Ngoho
I am sorry for the unusual approach but I have acquired
your email address (gamespot.20.blahblah@xoxy.net)
as a person who is actively involved or is `looking for an
online `Business `Opportunity.

If this is the case I would be grateful if you would allow
me to send you details of an `opportunity that I am currently
involved in at the moment.

I did not want to send you any details until I had mailed
you to seek your `permission first,as experience has taught
me that not all leads that we acquire are genuine`Business
`Opportunity Seekers, If this is the case for you then please
ignore this email as you have already been excluded from
future mailing from me.

If however It would be ok to send you details of my
`Opportunity then please send an email to
“josephngoho@fastermail.com” with “REGISTER_ME” in the
subject line and your Name in the text body, without this I cannot
send you any further information I am afraid.

So why not give it a try?… it’s`FREE anyway!…
Just give me a chance to show you how our program
works.

You can cancel your membership anytime you want.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thank you very much for your time and your cooperation,

God Bless You and your Family

Yours sincerely,

Joseph Ngoho
mailto: josephngoho@fastermail.com

To no longer receive any important information from us, just reply
‘NOT INTERESTED’to joseph_platinum@earthlink.net.

---

I thought this was really weird, but figured it was a fluke. I received another email of the same general content later the same day, but from a different person, so I took the precaution of changing my email address with gamespot , to see if it happened again. One or two weeks later, the same thing happened.

I’m now up to 5 different spamgourmet addresses that have been spammed. I’ve emailed pr@gamespot.com, info@gamespot.com, advertisingfeedback@cnet.com and received no response. After the 3rd one, I also emailed the PR person listed on CNET’s web site for Gamespot, and the VP of corporate communications. I realize these people are busy, but I’ve received absolutely no response from any of them. I’m not sure what the point of listing their email addresses on the web site is if they don’t read mail sent there. On the other hand, I imagine they’d have responded to me now if I were a potential advertiser.

To be clear, I don’t think Gamespot is selling my email address to spammers. It has occured to me that maybe it’s a problem with Spamgourmet, but I don’t see how that would be possible, since I’ve created other new addresses for other sites since this problem began, and I’ve received no spam from them. My best guess is that some server at Gamespot has been compromised, or an employee is doing this on their own.

Ironically, I signed up for Gamespot Basic because you can tag games that you’re interested in, and they’ll send you updates when new information is available for those games. Somehow I’ve only gotten one updated for about 20 games I’ve tagged, which seems a bit….broken.

So, does anyone know a good contact person for Gamespot, where they might actually read email?

Update: Gamespot/CNET has contacted me and they’re apparently as baffled as me, but they’re going to look into it. More information is in this post.

Compusa has the Maxtor 250gb PATA drives with 16mb of cache on sale until Friday. They’re only $99 and if you buy two you get free ground shipping. I ordered two and I think it was ~$210 with tax.

So I managed to get into the Feedlounge alpha. I saw a reference to them a while back and signed up for the beta and yesterday they sent out email asking for the first 100 responders to be alpha testers. Apparently they got over 175 responses in 10 minutes. I think it took me about 11 min before I noticed the email and responded, so I guess I got lucky.

So far notable features include:

• Feeds are tagged, not put into categories
• It’s trivial to keep track of read/unread on individual feed entries
• Clicking on the tag names shows all unread items in feeds with that tag sorted by posted date. It shows which feed the item is from, so it’s pretty easy to read this way.

Negatives:

• No way to open links in feed text in a new window/tab - planned to be fixed
• No package tracking, also planned to be fixed.
• All my imported feeds disappeared before I really got a chance to play with it much (One of the developers fixed this pretty quickly).
• Bit slow sometimes, but so is Bloglines.
• I’m not entirely sold on the 3 pane view. I like the extra screen real estate I get with Bloglines 2 pane view. However it does make reading individual items much easier.

Overall this looks really promising, if nothing else the ability to easily mark individual items read/unread will make it much easier to keep up.

I found a post that describes how to get the Kensington USB Bluetooth adapter working with Windows XP SP2’s built in BT stack. You can find the instructions here. To sum it up, all that needs to happen for this to work is to add the USB id’s to XP’s config file that defines what devices the built in drivers can work with. Why neither Microsoft or Kensington did this is a mystery to me.

So, I won this ebay auction for a Kensington Bluetooth USB Adapter. Now, I realize I only paid $6 for the thing. I didn’t look real hard, there were a number of them selling for around the same price, so I assumed that BT USB adapters has reached the point of commodity. Most other commodities sell for nothing + outrageous shipping on Ebay, so I assumed this was just more of the same.

If I had done my research, I would have found out that not only did this item come with no drivers, but Kensington hasn’t bothered to put them up on their web site either. Of course, if you read the reviews, you see that I probably don’t even want the software. It uses an old version of the Widcomm stack, and has no drivers for the Windows XP SP2 bluetooth stack.

Overall, I’m only out $13 or so, but it’d be nice if it was useful for something. I’m not sure if I want to leave Buy Essex negative or neutral feedback. I feel like they misrepresented the BT widgets to some extent. They did mention that they didn’t include any software, but they neglected to mention that no software is freely available, like you’d typically assume for this sort of thing. I have to think they’re being intentionally silent on the point so that they can unload their inventory of the things.