taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about good shopping experiences I’ve had. Here’s a couple:

SoleTrader.co.uk: I’m a terrible shopper. I hate shops, I always wind up having to visit them at their busiest times on the weekend, and the last time I tried to go shopping for a new pair of shoes, I got caught in torrential rain, fell over and broke my thumb instead. seriously. So feck that.

Instead, I resolved to buy them online, and that I did — from SoleTrader. They had a great range of trainers, I found what I was after, the price was grand, and delivery on time. Shoes are always the same size — their sizes are standardised, after all — so naturally they fit fine. All in all, it worked out great.

Be Organic: these guys operate in North Dublin, delivering bags of organic fruit and vegetables to your door, weekly. We get the Essential Fruit Bag and the Mini Box, with a bi-weekly bag of spuds on top, for EUR 32 per week. The quality of the food is absolutely fantastic, there’s never any spoilage or wilting, and it’s always fresh and delicious. Compared to supermarket fare, it’s leagues ahead. They’ve also been grand and flexible when we need to tweak the order slightly — for example we have a veto on celery, and that’s not an issue at all. The only problem would be that they’ve recently increased their prices… but unfortunately that seems to be a general problem in Ireland these days!

Tags: dublin, food, good, organic, plugs, shopping

Meta: You might have noticed things being a bit quite around here recently. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for good reasons.

A close family member in Ireland died suddenly on Good Friday. Once we found out, being in Death Valley (of all places) that weekend, we made a mad dash back home for the removal, funeral, and so on. The past two weeks have been not so much fun, all in all.

I’m torn between eulogising here, and keeping it offline. All in all, I think it’d be better to not use this weblog for that; I don’t think it’d be appropriate. But he’ll be greatly missed.

Tags: bit, dash, family, friday, fun, good, home, member, meta, removal, weekend

Spam: Good Salon article on the new forms of spamming, such as Wiki and referrer-log spamming etc. Here’s a good quote:

‘The adult industry will likely be married to spam and its attendant distribution methods long past the evolution of man into beings of pure energy,’ jokes Domenic Merenda, vice president of business development for Edge Productions, a company that operates adult-media properties.

There’s a good deal of crossover — I’ve seen both email and referrer-log spam advertising the same porn sites.

Tags: adult, article, attendant, distribution, good, industry, quote, salon, spam, wiki

Innovation: Maciej posts a fantastic look back on the Wright Brothers from an interesting angle — their patent-related antics.

The Wright brothers won every patent case they fought, and it did them absolutely no good. The prospect of a fortune wasn’t what motivated them to build an airplane, but ironically enough they could have made a fortune had they just passed on the litigation. In 1905, the Wrights were five years ahead of any potential competitor, and posessed a priceless body of practical knowledge. Their trade secrets and accumulated experience alone would have made them the leaders in the field, especially if they had teamed up with Curtiss. Instead, they got to watch heavily government-subsidized programs in Europe take the technical lead in airplane design as American aviation stagnated.

Fantastic article. If you’re curious about the history of patenting, and its many fundamental failures, I can’t recommend it enough.

Weblogs: Guardian’s ‘best of British blogging’: good set of winners this year.

Tags: airplane, angle, case, fortune, good, innovation, litigation, look, patent, prospect, wrights

Good Wired article on the subject:

A security flaw at a website operated by the purveyors of penis-enlargement pills has provided the world with a depressing answer to the question: Who in their right mind would buy something from a spammer? An order log left exposed at one of Amazing Internet Products’ websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to e-mail ads and placed orders for the company’s Pinacle herbal supplement. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills at a price of $50 per bottle.

And check this out for bizarre:

An investigation … last month revealed that Bournival’s mentor and business partner is Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a chess expert and former neo-Nazi leader who turned to the spam business in 1999 after it became public that his father was Jewish.

Tags: answer, article, business, flaw, good, question, security, website, wired, world

blog is a Good Word — official. From Bayesian analysis of my mail spool, blog shows up 1525 times in non-spam mail, and never in spam.

Tags: analysis, bayesian, blog, good, mail, official, spam, spool, word