Standard Mischief

Hi SM,

According to our Advance Auto Parts garage records, your Toyota Camry may be due for its 45,000 mile scheduled service.  Learn More…[snip]

I got news for you guys, the 45k scheduled maintenance was due over a decade ago. Oh, and I distinctly remember unchecking the check-box that says I agree to you sending me spam (doesn’t matter of course, thanks to our congresscritters and the CAN-SPAM act, ordering parts online for quick local pickup just so you can save $10 with a coupon means we’ve established a “business relationship”, and the sleazy corporation can spam me until I beg them to stop.)

Thanks to sneakemail though, I can create a custom disposable email address just for this one transaction and then decide to cut off the email spam spigot after receiving the initial order conformation emails – all  on my terms, not theirs. I can also turn on the email address again if I ever want to initiate another transaction. Took longer to blog about it than do it too.

I don’t know if the average person will grok the user interface without a bit of effort on their part, but I’ve had no issues. There’s a free one month trial though, so you risk nothing. There are also features out the wahzoo that I’m sure you’ve never considered needing in a disposable email service, all for only $2 per month.

This has been another ad-free, payola free review from a happy 7 + year customer.

It’s harder to tell since ebay stopped displaying the handles of the bidders that bid against you. But this one looks pretty suspicious:

(clickable to enlarge)

Above is the recent bid history of the partly-anonymized second highest bidder on an auction I recently bid on. This poor guy has made 463 bids in the last 30-days, yet he only has a feedback level of (7). It’s almost like he’s not trying to win any auctions at all!

The last 15+ bids he’s made were on the merchandise for sale from the same seller. All the bids were placed between 8 and 9 hours before the auction ended. (Can you say bot?)

I’ve reported the suspected shill, but I don’t expect anything to happen. The person offering the auction in this case is a high volume seller that makes a lot of money for Ebay.

So I’m out a small amount due to fraud. If his bid was retracted, I’d get about one dollar back from the seller. This is my first detected shill and I wasn’t burned too bad this time.

I make it a practice to submit one bid, my final bid, at my top price within about 15 seconds of the auction ending. (Thank you jbidwatcher. ) While Ebay “sniping” is 100% allowed by the rules, my top bid going in that late makes it very hard for confederates of the seller to react and nudge the auction price upwards. Not foolproof, but a damn sight better than the “15 minute rule” over at gunbroker.com

Update before publication: Ebay sent me a nice form letter. The meat of the matter: “To protect the privacy of the member that you’re reporting, we can’t tell you exactly what actions were taken. ”

I guess there’s no chance at all for getting my buck back.

I’ve been using the SSL version of Duck Duck Go as my initial search engine for the past week or so, only switching to my fall back list of engines when the syntax of the search goes into “power user” territory. I’ve been happy with the results.

The privacy policy is much better than google and there are a number of “!bang” codes that you can use on the command line, like !ebay or !scribd or even !i (google images) for custom searches.

I’ve emailed the creator and actually gotten a response back. The engine seems to be in active development, with a forum and whatnot. It sure looks like something good is brewing. Good enough for a payola free plug, at least.

Last time I went in for an eye exam, my regular doctor wasn’t there. I like my regular doctor because he’s ex-military and understands peep sights, 6 o’clock holds and minutes-of-angle. He’s also the first optical professional that didn’t laugh when I told him my dominant eye sometimes switches. For these reasons I like going to him even if he’s at the awful discount chain around here called For Eyes. I just take my prescription from the Doctor and leave.

The other reason I like him is because he’ll take walk-ins, which is handy if you get flunked on you eye test the day before by the Maryland MVA. The last time I went I had a competent substitute doctor. Since there were no customers, I was able to talk directly to the Optometrist, and I asked when she could fit me in. She said right away, so I asked her if she would provide me with my pupillary distance if I paid her in cash (saving her maybe 2-3% in credit card processing fees, though I’m sure as a professional, she paid her share of taxes in any case). She agreed and then started the exam.

She also showed me how she takes it, and she merely had to read the scale right off the phoropter, which is the big, bulky, “try different lenses until you can see the eyechart” tool. My measurement is 59.9 mm, (though 60 mm is close enough when you get around to ordering.) While optical professionals are required by law to give you a copy of your prescription, the pupillary distance number is left off, even though it you’re going to need it at some point. The excuse is that this is the responsibility of the Optician that actually fits your glasses. If so, the last three Optician I had order my glasses did it wrong (although one used a proper measuring tool after I refused to accept the wrong frame size she chose using a scientific wild-ass guess instead of the tools of her trade).

With my prescription and pupillary distance, I then hit up a few web pages to understand how glasses are fitted, and then I placed my order at an online retailer called Zenni Optical. Getting ready to order, I went over my old, broken glasses with a metal ruler with a millimeter scale. That let me get the proper size of the frames themselves, including bridge the width and the bridge sizes.

There’s about six sites online to order glasses from, so feel free to pick your favorite. At Zenni Optical, at least you can tell that they’re not spending any profits on the site itself, because it’s awful. I spent about two hours browsing the frames before I groked what was going on. The very cheapest frames were like $8, but what they don’t tell you is that not all frames fit all heads. Even worse is the fact that you can’t enter in say, the width of your head or your pupillary distance and be shown only the frames in stock that would fit. Eventually I got it right, but I looked at the return policy to be sure the risk/reward ratio was acceptable to me. It was. Including shipping I could have re-ordered glasses online nine times in a row before breaking even with my last pair of “fitted” glasses.

I’ve shown my pair to several people, telling them I bought them online and asking how much they guess it cost me. Everyone was amazed at the price. My first pair cost me about $12 plus maybe a bit for shipping, (I don’t have the receipt handy). Mind you that’s bare-bones with a UV coating only. There are also “memory” flexible frames, eyeglass tinting and line-less bifocals to chose from. Zenni lets you order a frame only for half the cost of the frame + lens price, so I would highly recommend ordering yourself some spare parts at the same time if you are as rough on equipment as I am.

Even if you’re happy having someone locally to yell at if things go wrong for your primary pair of glasses, I would highly recommend you get yourself a few backup pairs. As a minimum, I’d say that you need a spare pair of eyeglasses in every glove box, every range bag and every Katrina Kit. Nowadays that does not cost a fortune.

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This post was inspired by Linoge’s, though mine is solely based on my real life experiences and is completely payola free. I’m not your healthcare provider and I’m not dispensing medical advice, (and this sentence is a magic incantation meant to ward off a lawsuit).

I used to bring in my old belt-buckle to the Tandy leather store in Rockville, Maryland, where the clerk would gladly pick a dyed blank off the rack and customize it for me. He’d spend about two minutes and cut the blank to length, rivet on my old buckle, and punch any needed holes. For under twenty I’d walk out with a rugged plain black or brown belt that lasted about two or three times as long as any name brand belt from the department store.

“Rugged enough” means being able to rack the slide on my pistol one-handed by snagging the rear sight on the edge of the belt. [1]

Sadly, the Rockville store (which seemed always slow) closed. I’ve found a few okay belts local, but never as good as what I used to get there.

I’ve just looked, and Tandy is on-line. Even better is that their 80% finished (no FFL needed) leather belt blanks, (with a slot already cut and snaps installed and ready), are on sale now at 50% off. Even better than that is coupon code 9bret-cr-10 , which will give you $10 off (or almost free standard shipping). I’ve got a few on order as of today. Hopefully the quality will be up to their past high standards.

I hope everyone has something to cut the belt to length. If you don’t have the proper punch for the belt holes, in the past I’ve used a pin punch, using a 2×4 to back the belt up and punching from the finished side first, and then again from the back. Leather dye is also available at Tandy, but I’m going to try the shoe “touch-up” dye I have left over from another project. I got that at Wal*mart.

Normally I’[d wait for the belts to arrive to tell you for sure that they as good as I expect, but the 50% sale says it ends this Tuesday (30june2009).

[1] Only practice this drill with the pistol unloaded. Remember the four rules.