A carnival of technology

Dear David Shea,

I'm sorry you weren't able to purchase the mailing tube and a pair of shoes at
your Sandy Springs Target store.

We work hard to make sure we have the things you want and need on our shelves.
Sometimes sales of a particular item may exceed our expectations, even when our
buyers do their best to anticipate how popular it will be. Although this
product isn't available right now, we hope to have it back in your store soon.
Be sure to call or stop by in a few days to see if this item is available. You
may contact the store at (404) 256-4600.

However, if you would like us to locate the item, please provide us with some
required information. Here’s what I need to help with your search:

-Our product number, also known as a DPCI (Department, Class and Item) number.
You can find this nine-digit number on a price tag or shelf label at the store.
If you’ve bought the item before, you can also find the DPCI on your receipt;
or
-A Universal Product Code, also known as a UPC or barcode. You can find this
12-digit number on the item packaging.

If you’re able to locate this information, you can reply to this e-mail and
we’ll try to track down the items for you. Remember, we're always changing our
selection to offer you unique, up-to-date merchandise at a great value. That
means the item you're looking for may not be around for long, so get back to us
today!

Great products. Great value. And a great shopping experience -- every time you
visit our store. That's what Target is all about. Your comments are a big help
to us, and I'll make sure to share them with our buyers.

Thanks for shopping with us. We'll see you again soon at Target.

Sincerely,

Jason
Target Guest Relations
www.target.com
[THREAD ID:1-1J0J9K]

When I read this, I see a form letter bemoaning the fickle currents of demand and offering, as apeasement, a means of obtaining products which I neither know nor care to be extant in their catalog, and which I stopped wanting when I bought them from other stores two days ago.

I like Target, but I’ve had trouble shopping there. I’ll find products in places I don’t expect, or not at all. Today I had my worst experience to date, finding only one of the items I desired and having that taken from me at the checkout. What follows is an email that I shoved into Target’s general-purpose contact web form. This is not a desire for reparations but rather a statement of disappointment. I will still shop at Target, but I think that I’ll keep alternatives in mind more than I did in the past.

Their web form removed all of my paragraph breaks. I do hope that the readers take out their frustration on the crappy web designers instead of me. I have added them back below and tried to arrange the text into a space wider than 40 columns.

Subject: My store experience

First Name: David

Last Name: Shea

City: Sandy Springs

State: GA

E-Mail Address: david@gophernet.org

Comments: Dear Target,

          I generally enjoy shopping at your stores. The convenience, prices
          and environment are all attractive enough to keep me coming back.
          However, I've noticed of late that I'm finding myself unable to find
          all the items I seek. It doesn't really matter whether or not you
          carry them; if I can't find them, I'm not going to purchase them.

          Today I visited your store on Johnson Ferry Rd in Sandy Springs, GA.
          I entered with the goal of buying a mailing tube, a pair of shoes and
          something to hang pictures on the wall. The picture hangers were the
          easiest found, and I put a set of 3M Command adhesive picture hangers
          into my cart and continued on my quest. The mailing tube was nowhere
          to be found, so I assume that you don't carry them.  I wasn't so much
          upset about this as slightly annoyed, since it is a bit of a
          specialty item, but I had some small hopes. As for the shoes, I found
          exactly one pair of sneakers in my size (13), and I decided not to
          buy them. There weren't gaps in the shelf for more size 13 sneakers
          that all happened to be gone; there was simply only one pair. To
          dictate so what people of a certain foot size must wear while
          offering a sea of choices to those with size 7 or 8 feet--or even
          12--seems like an odd practice for selling shoes.

          I ended up grabbing some water filters that I forgot I needed, which
          I suppose is a small win for you, but I only saw them because I was
          wandering the store looking for the shipping supplies. This strikes
          me as a hollow victory. When I checked out, I ended up leaving with
          only with the filters. The picture hangers, as I was told by the
          cashier, should have been in a set, and they could not be sold as I
          found them on the rack, with only the part that I actually cared
          about available. I left with only the filters, a product a didn't
          even realize I needed, which, though it did my part to keep the
          wheels of commerce turning for another day, left me feeling empty and
          upset. For a store whose slogan impels me to expect more, I was a bit
          disappointed.

Location of store Johnson Ferry Rd, Sandy Springs, GA
  where you shop:

I don’t really like the gate in front of the apartment complex. Besides the fact that it’s always broken—I had planned at one point to keep a record of whether and when it’s functional, but I was overly ambitious and tried taking pictures to back up the status, a task that proved difficult while driving to work in a morning haze—it provides no more than a false sense of security. I don’t happen to have any statistics to compare crime rates in gated vs. ungated communities, but if you really want to get inside, it’s not very hard.

I got to witness a bit of an incident at the gate today. The gate is a Doorking system with an in gate, an out gate and a call box that can be driven around so residents can still get in if someone is spending half an hour trying to use the box. When someone is using the box for its intended purpose, this tends to create a situation where the gate is opened from the box and resident pulls around anyways to open it with the remote. Today while coming home I saw someone open the gate with the box, only to be cut off by a Jeep with a North Carolina plate. To compound the situation, the Jeep made a point of stopping in the middle of the gate until the arm started to go down before continuing. The other car managed to get in unscathed, and, as luck would have it, they both live in the same set of buildings that I do. When everyone had parked, the yelling started.

I can certainly understand the man’s anger, since the Jeep was being a major-league asshole, but the argument still struck me as amusing. First (exaggerations mine), he held forth his gift from on high, the secret resident access code (maybe they ran out of remotes) giving him Holy Writ to enter the complex. He then followed with threats to report the Jeep’s tag to the apartment office, which had a tone combining the futility of both “I’m telling mom” and “this is going on your permanent record.” The Jeep driver countered with his own threats to do the same, there was a shouted exchange of names, and everyone went inside. I do pity the people working in the apartment office who have to face pointless issues like this one, but I really wish that they’d get rid of the gate.

The PAL converting DVD player that I bought and which may or may not be in violation of 17 USC 1201 arrived last weekend. I used it watch Fistful of Dynamite in the way that the director intended: restored to include scenes with quotes from Mao and some guy pissing on some ants, titled as Duck You Sucker, and dubbed into English. Some of the scenes with faster or more continuous movement had a spot where the film seemed to jerk, which I guess is because of the conversion. Assuming that the conversion chip uses the same framerate conversion method I had planned to use in http://wiki.burdell.org/wiki/PAL_to_NTSC, the thing’s going to have to clone a frame eventually. It’s not bad enough to be irksome, so I win, Europe. Maybe now I should try finding out what other exclusive works they offer so I can justify having bought a new DVD player for the sake of one movie.

As for the movie itself, it was a lot different than what I expected. Sergio Leone, through the symbolism of Once Upon a Time in the West, had declared this movie frontier dead by the time he made Fistful of Dynamite, and, though it was still another movie set in the West (well, western Mexico), it had a much different tone. Conflicts were set on a societal level instead of a personal one, and it had a sometimes more comic feel to it than the Clint Eastwood movies, when the humor wasn’t overshadowed by class warfare and revolution. Wikipedia says that it was also a criticism of the “Zapata Western” of the early seventies, which I can see, and of Jean-Luc Goddard, which I think someone just made up. Regardless, the fact that someone can relate such a baseless statement to this movie is good enough for me (blah blah, je suis disaffected).

In other news, some dudes in England tried to mail a hamster. The thing I find interesting about this article is not so much the story itself, but its digression into competing mail services for England. How many competing services can England support? Looking at a map, I’d estimate that the island is about 600 miles or so from tip to toe. The CIA World Factbook describes it as “slightly smaller than Oregon”, which is a state. I don’t know what sorts of shortcomings people face with the Royal (hehe! monarchy) Mail, but I’m pretty sure that if your package is that important, you could just take a weekend and drive it over.

Some of you probably remember the fun (“fun”) that I had a while back with the differences between PAL and NTSC. To summarize, I bought a copy of the movie Fistful of Dynamite, which, due to some merging and selling of MGM assets before a promised release date, is not available in the US. The Internet suggests that there might be a Japanese DVD, but amazon.co.jp (a site that frightens me to my core) does not have it, so I bought a copy from the Great Britain. The end result of this trans-Atlantic commerce was me being in possession of a Region 2 PAL DVD which, even if I were to get around the small obstacle of region encoding conflicts, I am unable to play on my NTSC television. I may have mentioned to some of you that the bizarre Shinsonic DVD player I have seemed to be converting the signal, but this was me being stupid: I picked Once Upon a Time in the West off of the shelf, instead, and and I didn’t pay enough attention to the 12 seconds I viewed to realize that it was the wrong Western. I’ve now taken the path of least resistance and purchased a region-free PAL to NTSC converting DVD player from some shady shop in Illinois that also sells 50Hz AC ovens. I honestly have no idea why anyone in the US would need a large European appliance, nor do I know what sort of person would try to ship one. I do wonder if they offer an option of filling it with Quikrete before handing it to the freightline. Regardless, I’ll let you know how the player works once it gets here.

In other news, I’ve now entered the dark world of the Firefox extension developer; a stain will forever be borne by my soul. If you’re like me, the switch from Mozilla/Seamonkey/whatever to Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox/Deer Park/whatever was met with a lot of cursing, since most of those options from before that kept the browser from doing stupid, annoying things like making the URL bar pop up at you whenever you type something no longer had any effect. I used a hack in userChrome.css for a while, but eventually my dissatisfaction with a few other features led to me to move my chrome hacks into an extension which you can find at http://gophernet.org/projects/rmannoy/. My current goals are to make things stop freaking pop up all over the place, make the bookmarks toolbar folder go away, and make the password manager work on all sites whether my stupid bank wants it to or not. I’ve so far accomplished all of these goals except for the bookmark-related ones, so I slapped together a release before I lose interest and let the project die. The password feature isn’t in the release, either, since I just finished that and figured that two releases in two days (An incomplete attempt to take care of the bookmarks toolbar folder was interfering with other parts of the browser) is probably enough for a while. If you want this functionality, send me an email and I can send you a sooper seekrit pre-release XPI.

Extending firefox hasn’t really been the most fun ever. My process for any particular feature has been to use the DOM inspector in an attempt to find the offending pieces of the GUI, muck through the firefox source in an attempt to understand it better, and then search through xulplanet.com looking for the controls of the objects I don’t like and any other objects that may help me on my quest. The most fun parts, of course, are the ones that aren’t documented. For example, the password thing mentioned above is controlled by the use of an ‘autocomplete=”off”‘ attribute on HTML text input controls, a feature from IE that banks demanded from the Mozilla developers lest they withhold their official seal of support. Apparently this is important to people who care about market share and the other fickle winds of business. I found all of this out because jwz happened to feel as I do, that I don’t need web designers babysitting my saved passwords, and he posted about this in his blog along with a method for patching the browser binary. I found the event I needed to catch for content pane changes in the code for the greasemonkey extension. As far as I can tell, none of this is written down anywhere by the Mozilla team. According to that jwz blog entry, the means I use of getting my browser to do what I want interferes with Google Suggest, a site I had never heard of that uses autocomplete=off to keep the browser out of the way of their ridiculous hack. I do not care one single bit.

My main gripe with the whole extension development process is that I’m damn sick of writing everything in XML. The GUI definition files sort of make sense in XML, since I guess you could think of a window as a tree, but the paradigm starts to wear thin even with the GUI overlays. The idea with these things is to define a list of element in the document being overlayed along with new content to insert as children. So, at its best, it becomes, rather than a tree of GUI elements, a list of GUI trees, each rooted at an extant element from another document. This is the entire basis of the extension mechanism. Maybe I just lack sufficient XML team spirit, but this seems to me to be pushing it. At their worst, the overlays become what I used them for: an overlay document with a single element to pull in a javascript file and a single processing instruction to pull in a stylesheet. Everything interesting that can be done in an extension must be done through javascript, but the only entry point to any particular chrome file is the XUL overlay.

The stylesheet is even worse. XUL has a sister language, XBL, to add content, event handlers and dynamic properties to a XUL element, and these new XML files can only be added through a mozilla-specific style property. Worse, the XBL files are little more than a list of little javascript containers. Of the three types of grouping elements contained in a binding—content, implementation and handlers—two of them are done entirely through javascript. The XML around them does little more than name them. The content makes sense as XML, since it’s defining new XUL trees to add as the children of a XUL element, but wouldn’t it make more sense to add this ability to the overlay mechanism? Not everything needs to be XML. They would also do better to make the javascript parts more javascripty. There is a means provided for extending an XBL binding, but augmentation is accomplished through adding to the list or replacing the pieces of the original. Subclassing is an alien thing, and you will find none of that here.

Even the RDF files that tie everything together have no business being XML. I hadn’t really thought much of RDF before, but I learned through this research that the RDF XML file is nothing more than a representation for a list of three-element tuples. That’s it: subject, predicate, object. There is no structure beyond that imagined through shared subjects. Maybe I’ve become jaded about the whole thing, but when I think of the best way to represent a list, a tree isn’t the first thing that pops into my head.

He’s arrived in the St. Nick of time!

Rated PG for action violence and brief mild language.

Starring Hulk Hogan, some kid who went on to star in Children of the Corn V, some kid who became the voice of Ducky in fifth through eleventh Land Before Time movies, and some kid who went on to star in That 70’s Show.

Viewed 2005-12-22 by susi, dshea, kat, dane and mike

Santa with Muscles is the ridiculous sort of bad movie rather than the exhausting. Sentimental Christmas movies have a hard sell to begin with. They’re expected to be either a sentimental feel good movie falling short of It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th St., or they’re expected to be a children’s comedy that falls short of Home Alone. We already have our Christmas classics; homes are filled with this nostalgia during the holidays rather than untried new films. Santa with Muscles, perhaps seeing the failure inherit in its situation, doesn’t try very hard to become the next classic. The protagonist, Hulk Hogan, is a callous, rich body builder who gets hit on the head and, through the magic of amnesia, ends up thinking that he’s Santa. The villain is an evil, rich developer who wants to demolish an orphanage for secret reasons. We later find that the secret is a cache of rare, exploding gems beneath the orphanage. There are only three orphans. Christmas appears to be set in July. The evil developer’s army of evil scientists all carry around T-squares for some reason. They look like really nice T-squares.

The movie fails through this erosion of absurdities. It doesn’t matter how good of an actor Hulk Hogan is, or whether the kids are doing their part or just reciting lines, or whether the characters are ones that we can grow to love, since everything is overshadowed by the implausibility of the story and the ridiculous evil scientists. Maybe this movie’s lesson is that science is bad. If I remember the main characters correctly, one was a fairly mundane evil doctor to the obsessive-compulsive developer, one was an evil geologist who posed some unclear threat, one was an evil chemist who carried around a tank of fart smell, and I don’t even freaking know what the woman was supposed to be. She shot lightning bolts out of her fingers. It’s as if the story was nothing more than a laundry list of archetypes and clichés. I don’t know if the filmmakers thought their audience that stupid or if it’s supposed to be a joke. Some moments felt like I was reliving the worst parts of Superman.

The final thing that left me scratching my head after this movie was its anachronisms. There were several clues that seemed to indicate an 80’s setting. The hair, the clothing, the mall as central to teenage life, the fact that exploding-gem cavern (in the catacombs under the orphanage where the orphans played) looked kind of like something out The Goonies. But the film was made in 1996. I just don’t get it.