Are captchas capsizing?

I mean, come on. Really?

Put some effort into your product, guys, or just stop offering it.

L.A. Times: No gun bias here, move along

Joe Zamudio gained unexpected, instant fame as the first armed (non-police) responder during the shooting at the Gabrielle Gifford rally in Tucson. You’ve probably already heard of Joe as “that crazy Arizona gun nut who almost shot the wrong man.”

As Mark Twain once noted, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Here, in Zamudio’s own words, courtesy of American Handgunner Magazine, is what really happened:

Zamudio continued, “I reached into my pocket, put my hand on my pistol, took the safety off, and ran down the sidewalk (towards the shooting). That’s when I saw a group of people wrestling with (Jared Loughner). The first thing I focused on was the man closest to me. His back was to me. He raised up with a Glock in his hand, open, magazine sticking out. In that second I decided that because the gun was open, I didn’t have to shoot him. I immediately grabbed him by the wrist, turned the gun in toward him, told him to drop the weapon. He did.”

Note well: the gun never even left Joe’s pocket. Joe maintains this, and no one on the scene has ever stated otherwise –that they saw a gun in his hand, or even that they saw his gun at all.

You will also notice that although he had his hand on his gun (a prudent move), he did not have “his finger on the trigger,” as reported by the AP. This is a violation of the second most important rule of gun safety. You would have to be really stupid to take a gun’s safety off and then put your finger on the trigger while the gun is still in your pocket!

So to be crystal clear, he did not draw or display his gun, he did not point it at anyone, and he did not put his finger on the trigger.

Joe continues:

“A lot of [the press] wanted to know about [my] gun, but only wanted to ask specific questions, and if they didn’t get the responses they wanted, they’d move on and that would be it. They wanted to hear me say I almost shot the wrong guy. On one show they took a short blip from a long sentence to make it sound that way…

“One newspaper lady was very nice, got me when I was by myself, talked for 20 to 30 minutes about wanting to interview me, but didn’t mention the discussion was the interview. She wrote an article for the L.A. Times and sold it to every AP newspaper in the country, it seemed. She was quoting me as saying I almost shot the wrong guy.”

Zamudio and the columnist, Massad Ayoob, summarize this reportage with a very apt analogy:

The anti-gunners tried to say he added to the danger by “almost shooting a rescuer.” Of course, nothing of the kind happened… Zamudio himself has the best answer: “By that thinking, when you get into a car you ‘almost get into an accident.’ Same logic. You control your vehicle, I controlled my firearm. I never pointed it at anyone, so how could I have ‘almost hurt’ anyone?”

So I would ask anyone in the Los Angeles area: if you ever see reporters Molly Hennessy-Fiske or Neela Banerjee climbing into a car, remember to scream, “Look out! She’s gonna crash!”

How to Succeed in Monkey Business

While Googling for a hard drive upgrade for an older laptop, I encountered an site called ePartsGiant who was selling 80GB 7200RPM Travelstars for half the price of the competition. They were advertised as new, in-box, with a 30-day warranty. Intrigued, I investigated to see if there were similar bargains in larger drive sizes. I found the original drive listed under two different prices, both marked new, in-box. I also found a 100GB 7200RPM Travelstar listed under the same two prices, both marked new, in-box. Strange.

Since I’ve found shipping to be cheaper and quicker from nearby vendors, I clicked on the “about us” link to see where these fellows were located. The page was blank, except for the title and a vaguely disturbing indication of English illiteracy (“A Giant Store for Hard Drives, Memory, Power Supply, Processor & System Board” and “Term of Service.”) The “contact us” page indicated an unconvincing address in New York.

Warily, I tried their checkout screens. The left margin contained logos for “PayPal Verified” and PayPal payment services… but there was apparently no way to pay with PayPal. You entered your credit card information, or you didn’t play. Now I was growing dubious.

Since I spend my winters away from my credit card billing address, I took note of the following advisory: “If your Shpping[sic] and billing address is[sic] different, then please download the authorized[sic] form by clicking the above link and then fill the form and mail to us. This form will help us to manipulate your order properly.” I downloaded the form, opened it, and almost blew soda out my nose. Here it is:

I probably should have seen where this was going when I read the copyright line: “All right[sic] reserved by Credible World Inc.” I guess it was critical for these folks to hire someone who could insert some credibility into their website.

Needless to say, I quickly booked out to a more respectable website. I wonder how many people without sensitive hink meters have completed the ordering process here? I’d as soon stick my credit card information into a site like this as I’d chance a one-nighter with Paris Hilton.

I have no patience with whiners who bellyache about how merchants and corporations have all the power and consumers are always the victims. Here’s your power: walk away from bad deals! Do your homework, know what a fair price is, know what fair terms are, and know who you’re dealing with. You have equal power. The merchant wants your money just as much as you want his goods. Shop for a deal on your terms from a merchant with a reputation you can verify.

Digital Illogic

“Fuzzy logic” was going to be the next big thing in the ’80s. I think it was killed shortly afterward by Microsoft’s invention of “Rampant illogic.”

As the “technologically literate” one in the group, I spent all last night trying to load Vista Service Pack 2 on a friend’s machine. The installer kept saying I had to load Service Pack 1 first. But the system information pane assured me (correctly) that Service Pack 1 was already present, and when I tried installing Service Pack 1 over again, the installer told me the same thing.

Good engineering practice would demand that if there is an indication somewhere in the system of which packages are present and which are not, then every program that needs to check would look at the same indicator so they would all agree on a given package’s presence or absence. A ten-year-old could probably deduce this; it isn’t brain surgery. Obviously, Microsoft is short of ten-year-olds.

What to do? I discovered Microsoft offered free telephone support for people unable to load service packs, so I called them. They activated a tool that let them take over my PC screen (actually, they activated a third-party tool on top of their own tool, because theirs apparently doesn’t let them click on the security “continue” buttons Vista throws up!) and then they went to town.

A few hours later, I was popping popcorn and sitting back to watch them thrash. They couldn’t fix it. They couldn’t even figure it out. Ironically, I had already tried almost every fix they tried, courtesy of a Google search on the symptom (the web is so wonderful!) Even funnier, every fix they attempted to apply was resisted by the same type of Windows brain-damage we’ve all come to know and love:

• “No, you don’t have access to change that. I don’t care if you are the administrator.”
• “Windows has encountered an unknown error. Check our knowledge base for detailed information about this error.”
• “Click here to have Windows recommend solutions to your problem. [After clicking:] Windows cannot detect a problem.”
• “Installation has succeeded. More installations are available. Oh, look — one of them is the installation I just told you succeeded.”

One thing they did manage to do was wedge the machine so that the “Fn” key worked backwards: if you wanted to type normally on the keyboard, you had to hold the Fn key down, because if you didn’t, you got numbers on the right side of the keyboard instead of characters. “That’s a side-effect of our ‘Easy Access’ [screen-sharing] software,” said the tech. “We’re working on fixing it.” (Later, I discovered that the effect is permanent — I thought it would go away when I rebooted, but something has wedged this keyboard permanently. When will that “fix” be out, please??)

In the end, the nice Indian fellow gave up and scheduled a callback for me at 10 AM. (You can never call Microsoft, you know — they have to call you.)

At 11 AM, another nice Indian called me, and did most of the same things. Then he changed a value in the registry that hadn’t been touched before, and asked me to reboot. Suddenly, I had no network. Attempts to bring up any network configuration control panels hung for minutes, then said services were missing. Changing the value back didn’t reverse the problem. Now I had no network and a fouled-up keyboard. The tech said he would have to call back.

About an hour later, I got two callbacks, about three minutes apart, while I was on the phone with an important client. I couldn’t break off to take them. Then Microsoft stopped calling me altogether, on the theory that they were thereby off the hook for the problem.

When I called back the number that had called me (513-698-1051), I was greeted with the following recorded message:

“Hi, this is the Microsoft Technical Callback Team. We were unable to reach you at the time agreed upon by you and our callback team. We may attempt up to two more calls in an attempt to reach you. If you have any further questions, please call back. Thank you for calling Microsoft, and have a great day.” [Hangup.]

“Please call back???”

Call me a sucker, but I called back, just in case Microsoft had some unexpected stateful technology that would let them know I had called before and would forward me to an actual human being the second time. Stupid me. Of course, all I got was the same message.

What do you believe is the minimum IQ a person has to have before he realizes how stupid it is to tell people to “call back” to a recorded message that never changes, and which nobody will ever answer? Probably even less that the IQ required to realize that every program that needs to know a certain machine state should check exactly the same indicator. But what do I know? I’m an engineer.

Dressed for Regressed

I love Andy Ihnatko’s columns. He’s like the Dave Barry of Macintosh tech columnists… or maybe more the Penn Jillette.

But his column in the November 2010 Macworld near to made my brain explode from cognitive dissonance:

This photo has been running on Andy’s column for over a year now, mutton-chop sideburns and all. And he looks pretty pleased about it, doesn’t he?

“I don’t like quaint?” “I hate re-enactions?” “I can’t want to get into the future?”

This is the photo of a man who marched through Georgia with Sherman. This is the photo of a man whose “future” includes Reconstruction.

This is a man whose smiling image sells oatmeal cartons.

Beam me up, Ebenezer.

We’re Always Here, Unless We’re Not

They don’t publish a phone number on this site, and in three days of looking, I’ve never seen the “Live Chat” feature active.

I guess that email correspondence is technically “24 hour customer service”… but only a weasel would hide behind that.

But Please Buy Our Stuff Anyway

The droning, pesante piano theme commences, as the face of the sad, sad woman looms imposingly on the screen.  ”I don’t like being depressed…”

Nor do I, which is why I quickly mute this ad whenever it intrudes; and, when the dreary faces continue to grimace in mime time, I proceed to explore what is playing on other channels.

I’m not in the target demographic for this ad, but I can’t help wondering how attractive it can be to the people who are. What depressive person would be fascinated by a commercial featuring somber, depressing music, and tortured, depressing faces?  (Maybe I’m all wet here, and the agencies know what they’re doing.  After all, there are actually people who spend good money for “Forgotten Tomb” and “The Smiths” albums.) But all in all, this approach seems to me to be diametrically counterproductive.

Luckily for this company, their competitors are equally flummoxed. Has no one told them that the image of a somber wind-up doll shuffling grimly through life is not what one might describe as enticing? And, as horror would have it, that is not the before image they present, but the after image they promise you—the successful result of a course of treatment with their anti-depression drug. Collect a few dozen of these aimless, tottering icons of success in a room, and the resulting video would be indistinguishable from certain group photos in the archives of Dachau or Treblinka.

There’s a popular cautionary bromide that reminds the listener that 50% of all doctors graduated in the bottom of their class. Of course, the same is true of any professional, including ad executives. That’s why we really shouldn’t be surprised to see the occasional ad campaign that doesn’t merely trigger the viewer’s apathy, but his active antipathy.

One particularly annoying example from a few years back was a commercial for a two-part candy bar, whose tagline was, “Two for me—none for you.” Seriously, does American society need more positive reinforcement for greed? I suppose it’s a short step from denying a cartoon rabbit your breakfast cereal to denying your human friends a piece of your candy bar. I found this particular commercial so morally offensive me that I now make it a point to avoid buying this treat.

My favorite contemporary example of outrageous offensiveness in an American ad is Audi’s infamous “Green Police” from Super Bowl XLIV:

Some folks thought it was “obvious” that Audi was taking a humorous, tongue-in-cheek swipe at the fanaticism of greens for the sake of an entertaining commercial; but how could you square this interpretation with the object of the ad, which was to sell a “superior” green car? A subsequent posting on the Audi website indicated that the company still had no clue as to the source of the fiercely negative public reaction their ad generated:

Audi has created a fictional Green Police unit that are caricatures of today’s “green movement.” The Green Police are a humorous group of individuals that have joined forces in an effort to collectively help guide consumers to make the right decision when it comes to the environment. They’re not here to judge, merely to guide these decisions.

Apparently, the “helpful guidance” of this “humorous groups of individuals” takes the form of slamming people’s faces into checkout counters, storming their houses, chasing them around their own yards, and placing them under arrest.

Perhaps this is a cultural disconnect. Audi is, after all, a German company, and it’s quite possible that violence, arrest, and imprisonment falls squarely into the German tradition of lighthearted, neighborly persuasiveness.

But then, how to explain the British advertisement that goes only a short step further?

Audi’s “Green Police” compares to this little ecofascist wet dream as Sheriff Joe Arpaio compares to Idi Amin. What sort of person glorifies the imposition of absolute ideological conformity upon a society, on pain of instant, atrocious, explosive death? Even our favorite historical villain with the toothbrush mustachio didn’t punish children for not volunteering to join his famous Youth Corps.

The marvel here is that these images were ever consigned to recorded media in the first place. Is it actually possible that absolutely no one in the production chain ever took the opportunity to draw aside the client and tell him, “Look, don’t you think images of children being violently exploded by authority figures affiliated with your group might… offend people? Aren’t you worried that the storyline presented here is a bit, well, Freudian—revealing—and that it may not reflect entirely positively on you? Do you really want to expose this fantasy to the world?”

Of course, this particular client wasn’t deterred from disgusting his audience by any economic necessity of having to persuade them to buy actual merchandise from him. All he needs to sell is an ideology, and if people won’t voluntarily buy it, he can almost certainly persuade England’s authoritarian government to simply impose it. And for those who still believe there is a freedom to think for oneself, a freedom to disagree… see, there will be this big red button…