Over on YouTube I found my favorite old Sesame Street skit. I enjoyed seeing it again after all these years. My kids also enjoyed it.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
God damned
This is kind of a funny saying if you think about it. I mean why would God bother to damn something.
A traffic light glitch causes it to go flashing and delay motorists. Like God personally damned that traffic light this morning to go flashing.
Some dog barks at night. It starts raining while you walked from the bus stop to work. More likely stuff just happens, breaks, wears out, bad luck or whatever just happens on its own or by chance. Much less likely is that God for some reason decided to damn it.
But who knows. Maybe God for whatever reason does choose to damn things. Perhaps each morning He sits on His throne for a few minutes with a coffee and a huge printed list of thousands of things that He will choose to personally damn this day. Elevator out of order in Dallas. Newspaper ink smudge in Montreal. Traffic jam in Chicago. Bank machine out of service in Calgary.
A traffic light glitch causes it to go flashing and delay motorists. Like God personally damned that traffic light this morning to go flashing.
Some dog barks at night. It starts raining while you walked from the bus stop to work. More likely stuff just happens, breaks, wears out, bad luck or whatever just happens on its own or by chance. Much less likely is that God for some reason decided to damn it.
But who knows. Maybe God for whatever reason does choose to damn things. Perhaps each morning He sits on His throne for a few minutes with a coffee and a huge printed list of thousands of things that He will choose to personally damn this day. Elevator out of order in Dallas. Newspaper ink smudge in Montreal. Traffic jam in Chicago. Bank machine out of service in Calgary.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Classmates.gone
With many clicks and a Yahoo answers search I've managed to delete my Classmates.com account. It was not an intuitive process. I'd been on classmates since like the late 90s.
Why did I leave? Well it's because I've switched to Facebook which is much better. Facebook like classmates lets me connect with people I know from back when. However with classmates both me and the other person have to pay classmates money to interact in any kind of meaningful way. Facebook is free and frictionless. And classmates is hardly cheap. Why should I pay classmates to broker a connection. Facebook recognizes the huge pent up demand with classmates and solved the dilemma - make it free to connect with people and for people to connect with you. Like any free service such as tv or gmail or whatever I'm well conditioned to accept some targeted passive advertising on the screen in exchange for using the cool free service. Facebook gets this in a way classmates never did.
Classmates.com is like that girl from High School. You know the one. Popular, good looking, She acted at times like she was kinda sorta maybe in a way interested in you. You were friends and she seemed to flirt with you at times. Phoned you more than once. But then she seemed to almost always have a boyfriend in some complicated situation. You never really knew where you stood with her or if she was really interested. So eventually you get to graduation day and nothing ever came of it. You never went out or kissed. And that's fine, no regrets. Maybe if you'd made a move things would have turned out different, or maybe you would have just made a fool of yourself. In any case it's all good and everyone moved on to better things.
Why did I leave? Well it's because I've switched to Facebook which is much better. Facebook like classmates lets me connect with people I know from back when. However with classmates both me and the other person have to pay classmates money to interact in any kind of meaningful way. Facebook is free and frictionless. And classmates is hardly cheap. Why should I pay classmates to broker a connection. Facebook recognizes the huge pent up demand with classmates and solved the dilemma - make it free to connect with people and for people to connect with you. Like any free service such as tv or gmail or whatever I'm well conditioned to accept some targeted passive advertising on the screen in exchange for using the cool free service. Facebook gets this in a way classmates never did.
Classmates.com is like that girl from High School. You know the one. Popular, good looking, She acted at times like she was kinda sorta maybe in a way interested in you. You were friends and she seemed to flirt with you at times. Phoned you more than once. But then she seemed to almost always have a boyfriend in some complicated situation. You never really knew where you stood with her or if she was really interested. So eventually you get to graduation day and nothing ever came of it. You never went out or kissed. And that's fine, no regrets. Maybe if you'd made a move things would have turned out different, or maybe you would have just made a fool of yourself. In any case it's all good and everyone moved on to better things.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Atlantic Lotto Ripoff
Check out the Atlantic Lotto ripoff story. It turns out retailers and other insiders are cashing in large prizes at a statistically impossible rate.
My wife's theory, which the Chronicle Herald story also implied, is that dishonest retailers are telling unsophisticated customers that their winning tickets are losers. The retailer tosses the "losing" ticket into the trash and the mark leaves the store empty handed. The retailer then gets the winning ticket out of the trash and cashes it as his own.
This is most likely true. I am pretty smart, and I find scratch and win tickets confusing, unintuitive, intimidating and difficult to read. It is not at all easy at a glance to tell if a ticket is a winner. 6/49 is only slightly better. If someone has less than high school education (which sadly is a large portion of lotto players), then that player may not be able to tell himself if his ticket is a winner, he has to rely on the retailer. That makes him an easy target for a dishonest retailer to cheat him out of his rare big prize.
Years ago when I was in university I was on a crew helping to clean up a residence on a temp job. One of the regulars from the cleaning company said when he was cleaning offices and it was not busy then he would sometimes recheck discarded lotto tickets. He said he often found winners, including a $50 win. That means people either can't or don't check carefully enough and may not be aware their ticket is a winner.
Make no mistake, retailers will attempt to cheat unsuspecting customers out of winning tickets. I don't play the lotto myself of course. Why would I put money into a game which has a negative expectation? That doesn't make any sense. Anyway sometimes I get tickets for my birthday or Christmas. One time a couple of years ago I had around 5 scratch and win tickets. 4 were losers and one was a $2 winner. I went to the kiosk across from the motor vehicles registry in West End Mall Halifax with all 5 tickets. I had checked the tickets carefully and knew there was 1 small winner and 4 losers.
The clerk laid the tickets out in front of him on the counter and quickly glanced at them. I was watching him. I could tell he noticed the winner among the tickets. He put the tickets together on the counter. Then one by one he put the tickets under the bar code machine. After each checked one he put it back into the original pile, mixing the checked and unchecked together. He checked the losing tickets but not the winning one.
After the losing tickets were checked he said to me sorry you didn't win. I told him he missed one. He tried to act stupid like he didn't know what I was talking about. I specifically pointed out the winning ticket he hadn't scanned. He reluctantly checked it and of course it was good. I got my $2 and left and didn't say anything more about it until now.
So whatever, he tried to cheat me out of $2 and failed. What if I didn't know I had a winner, and it was $200, or $25,000? Based on my direct first hand experience it surprises me not at all to read that retailers on average have an absurdly high win rate.
The thing about the retailers win rate, the true rate is actually even higher. Consider my own case above. Suppose that retailer cheats someone out of a $25,000 winning ticket. If I was that retailer, I would not try to cash that ticket myself. That could bring unwanted attention. I'd get an accomplice such as a spouse, relative or close friend to cash it and divide the proceeds. That way there's no obvious link between me and the big winning ticket. So the stated 10X win rate is just the times the retailers were stupid or sloppy and cashed out the tickets themselves. I expect they would also use accomplices to cash their scammed winning tickets to conceal their ill gotten gains and make it difficult to impossible for the lotto corporation to link back to them.
One angle that I was concerned about is the bar codes on scratch and win. In order to scan a ticket the bar code must be checked. Thus there must be a database somewhere linking the bar codes to the actual value of the ticket. It would seem that given the bar codes it would be possible to determine the value of a ticket without scratching it. I would expect that Atlantic Lotto corporation does not allow casual access to this database. Still for the data to go in or come out it has to be known so it may be possible for insiders to obtain this. This knowledge could be used to skim the tickets to pick out the rare big winners, leaving the general public with the crumbs.
It could work something like this. An insider at the lotto company somehow gets access to the database matching the scratch and win bar codes against the actual value of the tickets. An accomplice retailer gets his regular delivery of tickets. The retailer tells his bar code numbers to the lotto corp insider. The insider checks the database for big winners. Usually there's nothing interesting and the tickets are sold as usual. However say once every 2-3 years the retailer has a $10K+ ticket.
In that case the lotto company employee tips off the retailer about the ticket. The retailer himself or a third accomplice then makes a standard clean purchase of the marked ticket over the counter from the retailer, takes the lucky ticket home and of course hits the jackpot. The proceeds are split and the big ticket is never sold into the general public.
I love in the article how the ALC spokesman said there's no evidence of wrongdoing despite insiders winning at a statistically impossible rate. When they say that, the lotto company is either very stupid or lying through their teeth to the public. I'm not sure which is worse.
My wife's theory, which the Chronicle Herald story also implied, is that dishonest retailers are telling unsophisticated customers that their winning tickets are losers. The retailer tosses the "losing" ticket into the trash and the mark leaves the store empty handed. The retailer then gets the winning ticket out of the trash and cashes it as his own.
This is most likely true. I am pretty smart, and I find scratch and win tickets confusing, unintuitive, intimidating and difficult to read. It is not at all easy at a glance to tell if a ticket is a winner. 6/49 is only slightly better. If someone has less than high school education (which sadly is a large portion of lotto players), then that player may not be able to tell himself if his ticket is a winner, he has to rely on the retailer. That makes him an easy target for a dishonest retailer to cheat him out of his rare big prize.
Years ago when I was in university I was on a crew helping to clean up a residence on a temp job. One of the regulars from the cleaning company said when he was cleaning offices and it was not busy then he would sometimes recheck discarded lotto tickets. He said he often found winners, including a $50 win. That means people either can't or don't check carefully enough and may not be aware their ticket is a winner.
Make no mistake, retailers will attempt to cheat unsuspecting customers out of winning tickets. I don't play the lotto myself of course. Why would I put money into a game which has a negative expectation? That doesn't make any sense. Anyway sometimes I get tickets for my birthday or Christmas. One time a couple of years ago I had around 5 scratch and win tickets. 4 were losers and one was a $2 winner. I went to the kiosk across from the motor vehicles registry in West End Mall Halifax with all 5 tickets. I had checked the tickets carefully and knew there was 1 small winner and 4 losers.
The clerk laid the tickets out in front of him on the counter and quickly glanced at them. I was watching him. I could tell he noticed the winner among the tickets. He put the tickets together on the counter. Then one by one he put the tickets under the bar code machine. After each checked one he put it back into the original pile, mixing the checked and unchecked together. He checked the losing tickets but not the winning one.
After the losing tickets were checked he said to me sorry you didn't win. I told him he missed one. He tried to act stupid like he didn't know what I was talking about. I specifically pointed out the winning ticket he hadn't scanned. He reluctantly checked it and of course it was good. I got my $2 and left and didn't say anything more about it until now.
So whatever, he tried to cheat me out of $2 and failed. What if I didn't know I had a winner, and it was $200, or $25,000? Based on my direct first hand experience it surprises me not at all to read that retailers on average have an absurdly high win rate.
The thing about the retailers win rate, the true rate is actually even higher. Consider my own case above. Suppose that retailer cheats someone out of a $25,000 winning ticket. If I was that retailer, I would not try to cash that ticket myself. That could bring unwanted attention. I'd get an accomplice such as a spouse, relative or close friend to cash it and divide the proceeds. That way there's no obvious link between me and the big winning ticket. So the stated 10X win rate is just the times the retailers were stupid or sloppy and cashed out the tickets themselves. I expect they would also use accomplices to cash their scammed winning tickets to conceal their ill gotten gains and make it difficult to impossible for the lotto corporation to link back to them.
One angle that I was concerned about is the bar codes on scratch and win. In order to scan a ticket the bar code must be checked. Thus there must be a database somewhere linking the bar codes to the actual value of the ticket. It would seem that given the bar codes it would be possible to determine the value of a ticket without scratching it. I would expect that Atlantic Lotto corporation does not allow casual access to this database. Still for the data to go in or come out it has to be known so it may be possible for insiders to obtain this. This knowledge could be used to skim the tickets to pick out the rare big winners, leaving the general public with the crumbs.
It could work something like this. An insider at the lotto company somehow gets access to the database matching the scratch and win bar codes against the actual value of the tickets. An accomplice retailer gets his regular delivery of tickets. The retailer tells his bar code numbers to the lotto corp insider. The insider checks the database for big winners. Usually there's nothing interesting and the tickets are sold as usual. However say once every 2-3 years the retailer has a $10K+ ticket.
In that case the lotto company employee tips off the retailer about the ticket. The retailer himself or a third accomplice then makes a standard clean purchase of the marked ticket over the counter from the retailer, takes the lucky ticket home and of course hits the jackpot. The proceeds are split and the big ticket is never sold into the general public.
I love in the article how the ALC spokesman said there's no evidence of wrongdoing despite insiders winning at a statistically impossible rate. When they say that, the lotto company is either very stupid or lying through their teeth to the public. I'm not sure which is worse.
Friday, March 02, 2007
A Letter from the British Prime Minister
Date: 2007
From: Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Subject: Britney Spears
To the US media;
It has come to my attention that the US celebrity media commonly uses the nickname "Brit" for Britney Spears. This letter is to request that you not refer to Ms. Spears by this name.
Historically by convention the term 'Brit' describes to a person who is a British subject. Often a nickname given to a British person living abroad by the locals.
By calling Ms. Spears "Brit", you may lead some people to believe that she is British. This would be a very unfortunate misunderstanding. Ms. Spears is certainly not British, and we wouldn't want anyone to mistakenly get that impression.
To protect the reputation of Great Britain and British subjects worldwide, please do not refer to Britney Spears as Brit.
Regards,
Tony Blair
--
Q: What do you get when you combine trailer park trash with a nine figure bank account?
A: Britney Spears
From: Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Subject: Britney Spears
To the US media;
It has come to my attention that the US celebrity media commonly uses the nickname "Brit" for Britney Spears. This letter is to request that you not refer to Ms. Spears by this name.
Historically by convention the term 'Brit' describes to a person who is a British subject. Often a nickname given to a British person living abroad by the locals.
By calling Ms. Spears "Brit", you may lead some people to believe that she is British. This would be a very unfortunate misunderstanding. Ms. Spears is certainly not British, and we wouldn't want anyone to mistakenly get that impression.
To protect the reputation of Great Britain and British subjects worldwide, please do not refer to Britney Spears as Brit.
Regards,
Tony Blair
--
Q: What do you get when you combine trailer park trash with a nine figure bank account?
A: Britney Spears
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Playing sports
We've had some cold weather lately. The lakes are now frozen. There's all kinds of people on them skating, playing hockey, ATVs and ice fishing huts. Last Sunday I was on the ice with my two boys at my wife's parents house. They're right on the lake. We had a nice time. We had out some sticks and pucks. I haven't handled a puck on the ice in a good while so it was nice stickhandling and passing and skating.
On Monday I was at Cleve's Sporting Goods in Bayer's Lake getting my older son's skates sharpened. The shop guy had a couple of other pairs to do first so I had a few minutes to wait. Walking around through the sections in the big warehouse store made me think about sports I used to play in the past. I don't play any sports now and haven't in quite a while.
These are the sports I enjoyed in the past and when I last played them in some kind of regular way.
running - 1997
tennis - 1996
ice hockey - 1999
ball hockey - 2002
golf - 2005
softball - 1999
football - 1986
So why did I stop playing? Well lots of reasons: not enough time, not enough money, not enough energy for it, not motivated for it, perception right or wrong that it was just too much hassle. Some of these things are interrelated. For example if money is tight then that's a demotivator. If you can't or won't "make" time for it then you probably don't have the energy for it either. "hassle" is an aggregate term for all the reasons taken together, a substitute for articulating the reasons individually.
Still, walking through Cleve's, I felt I missed playing sports. I haven't felt that way in a long time. So with some motivation I should go out and get playing at least some of them again.
On Monday I was at Cleve's Sporting Goods in Bayer's Lake getting my older son's skates sharpened. The shop guy had a couple of other pairs to do first so I had a few minutes to wait. Walking around through the sections in the big warehouse store made me think about sports I used to play in the past. I don't play any sports now and haven't in quite a while.
These are the sports I enjoyed in the past and when I last played them in some kind of regular way.
running - 1997
tennis - 1996
ice hockey - 1999
ball hockey - 2002
golf - 2005
softball - 1999
football - 1986
So why did I stop playing? Well lots of reasons: not enough time, not enough money, not enough energy for it, not motivated for it, perception right or wrong that it was just too much hassle. Some of these things are interrelated. For example if money is tight then that's a demotivator. If you can't or won't "make" time for it then you probably don't have the energy for it either. "hassle" is an aggregate term for all the reasons taken together, a substitute for articulating the reasons individually.
Still, walking through Cleve's, I felt I missed playing sports. I haven't felt that way in a long time. So with some motivation I should go out and get playing at least some of them again.
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