free variable

This morning, I discovered that my credit card had been compromised and had been used to pay for several hundred dollars of “World of Warcraft” subscriptions without my knowledge. The helpful and thickly-accented woman at the call center asked me if I played “World of Warcraft” (I do not); she then asked multiple times with increasing intensity whether the “other user on this account” might be responsible for the charges before finally saying “Your wife, sir, I suppose she is playing a lot of ‘World of Warcraft’ and you do not know?”

This line of questioning may only be hilarious to those of you who know us, but let’s just say that I regard the prospect of Andrea playing “World of Warcraft” and racking up massive credit card charges in the process as only slightly less likely than the prospect of her using the card to buy plutonium from the Libyans. (Although that’s too bad, since I understand that you can get triple reward points for all purchases of fissile material from state sponsors of terrorism.)

I think I can say with confidence that this Ryobi countersink bit and driver combination is the worst tool I’ve ever bought. It seems like a clever idea — you can flip the countersink bit around to reveal a Phillips-head screwdriver bit without removing it from the drill — but the product is marred by poor design, loose manufacturing, and cheap materials. Over the course of its lifetime, I used it to drill twelve pilot holes in pine and plywood, and it broke in two different ways: the mechanism to hold the bit in place broke off and the bit itself snapped in half.

I’m hoping to have better luck with a W. L. Fuller tapered drill and countersink, which I ordered from Amazon this morning. The Fuller bit costs about 1.5 times as much as the Ryobi one, but as long as it makes more than eighteen holes before catastrophic failure I’ll be happy with it.

Blanket redirects to “mobile” sites are maybe the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Say you’re using a mobile browser and request a page with a URL that looks like this:

http://foo.com/2009/09/article-slug

You’d have clicked there because you wanted some particular article, right? Well, there are an awful lot of values of foo for which the site administrator believes that he or she knows what’s best for you; these sites will redirect your request to a different URL:

http://m.foo.com/

And then your browser will render an enfeebled version of the foo.com home page, optimized for viewing on a tiny, tiny screen. It will not contain the content you’re looking for. In fact, it will offer no clue as to how to get to the content you’re looking for or — if you followed a shortened link (as is common on Twitter) — what that content actually was.

As just one example, if one were to click on the link in this tweet, one might expect to see a candidate for the worst sports article ever (indeed, the linked article must be in the top 25). One would not expect to see the “mobile” home page for the Orange County Register, which — beyond the ad for Tustin Toyota — is almost completely devoid of useful content.

I had been intending to order tickets to the Vikings’ home opener for about a week, and had been looking forward to taking my dad and my son to the game. (The team had been running a great package deal with free parking, etc., for the home opener, which made it an easy choice.) On the evening of August 17, I almost placed an order, but then I thought it would be better to wait until the morning: to make sure Dad was free and see whether or not Andrea thought it would be a good idea to take the lad.

Those of you who have had any exposure to the sporting media in the last day or so know what happened the next morning: as I tried to order tickets via the web browser on my phone¹, I learned that my favorite football team had just crossed the Rubicon by signing the efficient cause of my second 2005 New Year’s resolution², and that fans were mobbing the Vikings’ practice facility and purchasing tickets and memorabilia at staggering, tulip-bubble rates. As you might imagine, I was unable to secure tickets.

So this year will, I suppose, be fairly similar to previous years. I will still be cheering when Brett Favre completes passes to Vikings players. However, I’m not sure which moral of this story is more troubling: the idea that everyone’s favorite Everyman can lie his way out of training camp, or the idea that I should be punished for delaying an impulse purchase.

¹ Why is this so painful, Ticketmaster? It’s not like mobile Safari is a niche platform.
² Namely: “Cease allowing televised sporting events to affect blood pressure, pulse, or frequency of profane/malicious utterances.”

When Circuit City existed as an actual, physical retailer I thought they offered a surprisingly good online shopping experience. You could go to their site, check to see if something was in stock in your local store, and, if it was, pay for it online and pick it up from the front desk in about the time it would take you to drive there. (This was and probably still is vastly superior to the Best Buy experience, where purchasing something for in-store pickup means “within 24 hours or so” rather than “within 20 minutes.”) The workflow combined the best parts of shopping in person (immediate gratification) and shopping online (searching via a text box from one’s desk, rather than hunting around physical stores).

However, after Circuit City was liquidated, some company bought their trademarks and applied them to a fairly generic e-commerce site. Apparently, the fairly generic e-commerce site was also able to purchase customer lists, because I’ve been getting spam from them fairly regularly. Since the new circuitcity.com doesn’t allow me to purchase something, drive six miles away, and pick it up in the same hour, it is not significantly more compelling than Amazon Prime; in any case, I’m not particularly interested in “hot deals” on mediocre computer hardware, which seem to be the bulk of circuitcity.com’s current offerings.

My experience in trying to unsubscribe from these mailing lists — and I had been added to several, apparently — bodes poorly for the usability of the “new” circuitcity.com, especially in light of how nice the old one was. The first problem was the “unsubscribe” notification at the bottom of one of the messages, which I have included below:

Not only does this (or “th is,” perhaps?) appear in a larger block of text that recalls every nearly-plausible phishing email I’ve ever received, the address is misspelled: “circuitcity-oline.com” isn’t a real domain. So my first attempt at unsubscribing bounced. Fortunately, this was fairly easy to correct: I sent a blank email to the appropriate address at “circuitcity-online.com,” and was on my way. Or was I?

(Do note that I had sent a blank message — one without the word “subscribe” in it anywhere. Also note that “circuit-city-master-unsub” is an awfully strange name for a list.)

On the third try, I was able to unsubscribe, as far as I can tell. (I’m actually not sure whether or not “leaving” the “master-unsub” list will cause me to get additional mail.) A more cynical observer might conclude that circuitcity.com has very little incentive to make it easy for me to opt out of further advertising, but this seems more like garden-variety incompetence to me. (Although I’m not particularly interested in entrusting my payment details to businesses who can’t manage their most basic computing infrastructure.)

It is, however, a little sad that the retailer who used to have my commodity consumer electronics ready within twenty minutes has given its name to a pedestrian “hot deals” list that requires twenty minutes of effort to leave.

Below is the lower part of a poster-sized advertisement in a local parking garage. Similar advertisements are on billboards, etc., throughout Madison.

I suspect it is impossible for others, as it is for me, to read the URL without immediately locking on to “infertility.com,” which is probably not what these folks want unless there are some Secret Branding Techniques that cover such subtle reverse psychology. (It could be worse.)