I was sent this undercover report on Jiffy Lube today. It exposes their practice of upselling all kinds of services and not performing them. The experiment was constructed by placing small pinhole hidden cameras all over the vehicle and also numbering parts so they could be identified upon later inspection. They visited 9 stores and 5 blatantly ripped them off hundreds of dollars. When confronting the district manager of Jiffy Lube, the man denies his identity and insists he’s a customer who’s red Camero was in the drive bay, but in reality the car belongs to some kids. Jiffy Lube Corporate later confirms the mans identity.
Archive for August 31, 2006
Thunderbird Adaptive Spam Filtering
The spam threshold is very conservative by default. To make more sensitive to spam, you can change the preference using Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General -> Config Editor. Enter junk in the Filter field to show only the preferences that contain junk in thier name, and then double-click on mail.adaptivefilters.junk_threshold , enter a number (I choose 80) in the edit field and press the OK button.
Something else that’s interesting is to download http://bayesjunktool.mozdev.org/ and explore your training.dat file which maintains all the tokens for spam classification.
New Porsche Turbo
In the Highway section of the LA Times today, there was a nice expose of the new Porsche Turbo. The author had some nice smack talk to laydown on regarding Lambos.
“Look, I’m not saying the Gallardo doesn’t have its uses. If I were a teenage millionaire and I needed a smooth surface from which to blow rails, the Gallardo’s hood is first choice”
Disabling Bell in Xorg
Don’t you hate that irritating “pling, pling” sound every time you hit the backspace for too long?
Disable it.
echo ‘set bell-style non’ >> ~/.inputrc
Hollywood Sign
Decided on Saturday to go on a little adventure exploring the Hollywood Hills. Our first stop was the scenic outlook spot on Mulholland Drive, just off the 101 FWY. Reading signs posted, we learned that the sign originally read “Hollywood Land” and was installed simply as massive billboard for land spectulation in the area. At some point, a land slide took out the last four letters, which is how the sign reads today.
After digging up the start of the Hollyridge Trail, I decided we’d explore the mountain route from Mulholland to the top of Beachwood Dr. Doing so brought us to Hollywood Lake. This was another first for me. There are a lot of resouvoirs up here, but unlike the one by my house, this one is totally fenced off. Absolutely no access to the shore. Just past the lake is another scenic lookout spot for the sign. We’d kept on thinking we found the best spot to view the sign, only to keep driving and get closer and closer.
Ultimately, we’d decided we had enough and headed over to the Hollyridge trail. From there we hiked about 2 miles up to the very top of Mt. Lee where the big antenna stands behind the sign. There is another trail apparently that takes you right up below the sign, but we couldn’t find it from below. Camera’s surround the sign with warnings everywhere. Nonetheless, there’s a rope conveniently placed, which will take you down directly to the sign itself. We opted to go each Sushi instead of getting arrested.
PHP5 Class Visibility
Beware: Visibility works on a per class basis and does not prevent instances of the same class from accessing each others protected/private properties/members! I consider this a real cop out from an OO perspective and doesn’t offer me any level comfort.