jcole’s weblog

Adrienne and I went on a picture-taking day today. We drove up Skyline Drive (Highway 35) and then on up to San Francisco for lunch in the city (at Lori’s Diner) and the Golden Gate Bridge. We then drove around Marin Headlands a little bit, and drove home.

Adrienne didn’t bring her camera, but I’ve posted my pictures for the day: Skyline Drive, Golden Gate, and Battery Mendel. Enjoy!

Christy and Greg have been performing a very interesting social experiment in deviant behaviour: What would someone do if you just took something from their shopping cart?

This fascinates me, as I’m always up for a good-natured social experiment. When I was in high school, I tried one of my own: I did not shave for about three weeks. During the latter half of the three weeks, I looked completely homeless and ragged. I made mental notes about the differences in the way teachers and students acted towards me, using my “old self” as a baseline. The reality was, regardless of what people say, and how much they think they don’t pre-judge people, they do.

Everyone acted completely different around me, not being nice to me, being very short with me, not wanting to be seen with me, etc. Fascinating. Oh well, back to the story at hand: Read all about Christy and Greg’s findings.

So it turns out our new kitten is remarkably similar to Scratch Fury, Destroyer of Worlds from the PVP Comic. Such a cute kitty.

I’ll be talking about the magic behind FlightStats during an on-line course through Zend, starting at 06:00am PST, 09:00 EST on Thursday, February 17.

Sign up now!

All web sites hosted on my server have now been transferred to the new server at ServerBeach!

FlightStats and my gallery, in particular, should be much faster now.

Jeremy Zawodny recently wrote a pretty good summary about employee blogging. A few people have asked me why I haven’t blogged more about working at Yahoo!, and what it is that I do there. Basically, I always follow these basic criteria when I blog about work:

• Is it about anything sensitive in any way?
• Is it disrespectful to either your employer or any coworkers?
• Would you flinch in the slightest if your boss, his boss, all the way up to the CEO and the board of directors read it?

Does that leave you with anything? Is what you have left interesting? No, I mean interesting to other people. Yes, that’s what I thought. You’re not left with much.

Hey, it sucks that Mark Jen got fired from Google, but it looks like he pretty consistently violated my three rules above, and apparently posted something that in itself pushed it over the top, since he was forced to remove it. There’s a huge difference between writing an occasional blog about your employer (as Jeremy Zawodny often does, and is fine!) and blogging about your employer as though the whole exercise of working there was a documentary writing project.

Let’s move on, guys!

You might have noticed a bit more downtime than usual on my site. That’s because we got a real server– Nikko! I’ve been working busily to transfer all the sites over to the server, and in order to do that in any reasonable time while Google is refreshing their image index, I’ve been shutting down Apache at night.

The only sites left to transfer are jcole.us and flightstats.us. Those will take a while.

Google has been hitting the hell out of my server for the past 24 hours. It looks like they are updating their image index. Between my site and Adrienne’s, they downloaded around 1.3GB in one day, for a total of 16kbyte/s average, or 1/3rd of my upstream bandwidth. Amazing. Hopefully they’ll get done soon.

OK, let’s take a look at typical usage and requirements first:

Typical Usage and Requirements:

• Your customers will visit maybe once a month.
• They’ll make a single payment, maybe more, and leave.
• Once a year or so they’ll want to get forms for filing taxes.
• Payments can only be made, new loans can’t be requested.
• Your customers may have loans in someone else’s SSN which they’d like to make payments on. (With permission.)

It seems like Sallie Mae tries to make their website as hard to use as possible. The most frustrating part is: They require a “secure” password for an account. Part of their definition of “secure” is “never used before”, which is the real crux of the problem.

Every time I go to their website, I can’t remember my password, because the previous time I was there, I had to reset it because I couldn’t remember it, because their system requires you to use a password that you’ve never used before, and it has to have all of the other typical “secure” requirements. And of course, every time I go there, a month has passed since I last set the password.

I find this kind of odd considering that if someone was to get access to your login on Sallie Mae, most likely the worst thing they could do is make payments on your student loans, which would certainly be appreciated.

Maybe I should start writing my password down on a Post-It and sticking it on the bottom of my keyboard.

On another note, they provide no easy way to make payments on both of my loans, because one is in my father’s name. It seems like it would make sense to allow linking of one loan to another SSN in order to let the person with that SSN make payments online. I can make payments over the phone, so why not?