Just ordered…

A bunch of books off Amazon. Some classics, some geeky stuff, some that are both. When they get here I’ll be happy as a baby in a topless bar.

Phone update.

Their sims aren’t interchangeable. Might be ’cause the old phone was a Cingular, before AT&T bought Cingular. Oh well. If I ever give enough of a shit, I’m sure I could find someone with suitable hardware to unlock it.

On the bright … or totally fucking evil… side, I was bitching last night over txts about the phone’s constantly popping up “The last transaction cost you 0.00″ messages with every send/receive, there being no way to get rid of them, and considering getting it unlocked and switching to Verizon or such in the future. Today it seems to have decided of its own accord to nolonger do that.

So either it quits bugging you if the phone’s actually registered with your own name, they’ve quit that annoyance on unlimited accounts, or one of my txts got flagged to be read somewhere.

Just sayin’. All in all, I’m happy enough with it.

Phone fun.

Got a Samsung A177 (prepaid AT&T) on the way home from work today. Mostly got it just for text/IM/etc…, I’ve already got a different AT&T that I use like hell on nights/weekends, which for various reasons I cannot simply add texting to. If I can, however, I intend to ditch the old phone and just swap the sims in the A177 as needed.

I’ve just put it back together (well, I went to add the battery, and the screws were right there… I had to peek…) and finished activating it so now I’m waiting for the $15 credit it comes with to get added to it, after which I’ll add the $15 card I got as unlim texting is $20.

Once I confirm texting works, I’ll attempt the sim swapping.

PayPal just fucked me.

Been busy the last couple months, working on houses, getting some cash together. Finally did, and got a few books regarding web design. Just made a simple site, it came out quite nicely. Got a PalPal account so they could pay, and they did. Went to add my bank acct and verify it… whoops, “You are currently not allowed to add a bank account because your account access has been limited.”. Everything in PayPal’s help area regarding such, with the steps for fixing it, don’t work. There’s nothing in the “Resolution Center” most of them reference. I just confirmed my cell phone, upgraded it to Premier, and still the same deal.

What. The. Fuck?

Yes, I’ve tried to call them. It’s a bunch of voice prompts, all the options being things already on their site.

Yes, I’ve tried to email them, it says 2-4 days for a reply which will probably be canned anyway.

Update: The resolution seems to have been to upgrade to a business acct. Can’t imagine why… bank acct in my name, I wasn’t planning on switching to a business PayPal acct until I got one as such from my bank. Go figure. Waiting for the deposits to verify the bank acct now. Any more problems and I’m going to just drop PayPal and get a merchant account.

Update: Woke up, checked to see if the two little deposits paypal makes to verify account had been made, and they hadn’t been. Nothing unusual, it can take 3-4 days and I started it on a weekend anyway. Checked paypal acct, and I see this:

We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information about your business to allow us to provide uninterrupted service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Why is my account access limited?

Your account access has been limited for the following reason(s):
Sep. 22, 2008: We have detected suspicious activity regarding the receipt or withdrawal of funds.

Apparently, there were two refunds. Except my one customer swears they didn’t request one, and the 2nd one is… a whole 10 dollars, which was from my self when I set up the acct to make sure I could accept $ with it. I fucking know I didn’t request a refund from my self. Again: What. The. Fuck?

Needless to say, I’m not fucking amused at all. I will attempt to get my fucking money out of this situation, but considering their well known history of this crazy shit, I’m not expecting much. Damned thing is I knew about this going in. It was just the only real way I could accept a payment at the moment. I was so happy, too. Was going to use the cash to get a business license, open a new bank acct for it, get a proper domain and hosting, and buy more books to study, particularly regarding PHP5, as most of my PHP knowledge is from when PHP4 was new. Now I have nothing.

I’ll just have to borrow the cash I need, and work my way from there. Which is precisely what I was trying to avoid having to do. Needless to say, no more of my earnings will be trusted to PayPal.

Just a little food for thought…

Ever had a “gut feeling”?

Maybe it was your Enteric Nervous System

More here, here, and here.

Just a little food for thought.

On a related note, wrt privacy.

‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy — Professor Daniel Solove, George Washington University Law School

Why, Even If You Have Nothing To Hide, Government Surveillance Threatens Your Freedom: The Case Against Expanding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Powers — John W. Dean, FindLaw columnist, former counsel to the president.

No more Facebook.

Logged In or Out, Facebook Is Watching You

Facebook A Black Hole For Personal Info

Facebook Sharing Too Much Personal Data With Application Developers

Facebook Widget Installs Zango Spyware

Facebook Caves To Privacy Protests Over Beacon

Facebook Beacon Privacy Issues Worse Than Previously Thought?

Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking

Facebook Users Complain of New Ad-Based Tracking

The New Facebook Ads – Another Privacy Debacle?

From Facebook’s Terms of Service:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

Gun control is using both hands.

Came across an interesting page w.r.t. firearms.

” [...] Since I was suspicious of the Handgun Control Inc. statistics that everyone quotes, I decided to do my own research. Here’s what I found. I welcome corrections and reliable sources of more recent statistics.

“Out of 30,708 Americans who died by gunfire in 1998, only 316 were shot in justifiable homicides by private citizens with firearms.” -Handgun Control, Inc.

Let’s break that number down. [...]“

Which subsequently falls entirely apart under even the most basic of analysis. From: http://seanbonner.vox.com/library/post/grigsby-why-im-no-longer-antigun.html

Which reminds me of another short post I had seen before regarding firearm permits and gun crime and shows quite literally, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”:
http://mcgonigle.us/bill/blog/articles/2008/03/21/gun-crime-statistics

Of course mention must also be made of the eternal classic, How to Lie with Statistics (which is still for sale).

Statistics are the new propaganda for everything ranging from politics to science. Think about it. Are there any beliefs you hold that may be based in large part upon misrepresented “statistics”? Ever bothered to research their data yourself?

Is the Web the new BASIC?

“Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”… hundreds of thousands of geeks first got into computing by learning BASIC (or something similar) on their computers. Commodores, Amigas, Altairs, etc…

You don’t really hear of that anymore. It seems to be the trend that with the rampant popularity of the Web, instead of learning BASIC or something similar and working their way up to more traditional (i.e., not designed specifically for noobs) languages, people are getting their first taste of design by learning HTML and CSS and moving on to things like AJAX or PHP. They’re not learning to write clever programs to make their *computer* do new things, they’re writing web apps to make the *Web* do new things.

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? One obvious point of failure is that HTML and CSS are not programming languages as they’re nowhere near Turing complete, and really teach nothing more than a form of typesetting (though I’m sure Knuth would appreciate the return of the popularity in general of the separation of content (HTML/XML) from presentation (CSS)). But then again, JavaScript, the “J” in “AJAX”, certainly *is* a proper programming language by anyone’s standards, it just happens to have a very specific problem domain like Erlang or raw assembly… or BASIC. Not to mention PHP, ASP, and all the other web scripting languages.

And with on/offline web apps becoming so popular (look at Google, or Facebook, and this whole “Web 2.0″ craze in general for obvious examples, not to mention WordPress), has anything really changed, other than instead of learning to program computers, the new breed learns to program the Web?

Just a thought.

It’s official part deux, and a little scheming along the way.

Got my state EMT-B license in the mail to go along with my national license today. Now I can actually start working. Ideally I’d like a part time or full time gig at the agency I did my ride time with, but if need be I can give the local fire dept. or maybe the hospitals or something a try. Re-read the hell out of that pediatrics chapter in the meantime, now I’m just eager to to get to work (and get paid).

And as long as there’s actually some kind of job in my future, I’m using a bit of cash I’ve managed to save to feed my lust for books which has been starved for far too long. Specifically, “The x Schemer” series, as I’ve been wanting to get these for quite some time now.
The Little Schemer for recursion and Scheme in general,
The Seasoned Schemer for functional programming and more details on Scheme,
and The Reasoned Schemer for its blend of functional and logic programming.

Eventually I intend to go through my entire TAoCP set again, this time rewriting all of the examples and problems in Scheme.

Man, I need to get laid.