Archive for August, 2008

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I Got 99 Problems

Posted in Uncategorized on August 5, 2008 by themaroon

Blogging has been rough on me lately. Between infrequent updates (and therefore linkage from the readers) and failure to use the rel=”nofollow” tag on ads for some really cheesy sites that I sold there, the poker blog has seen its PageRank slip from a high of 7 all the way down to 2. I’ve cleaned it up a bit and have a couple good posts halfway ready to go, so we’ll see if we can’t that back to something reasonable.

Really, though, I don’t care as much about that blog as I do this one. I keep it around mainly because I feel like my poker thoughts (in the rare instances I have them anymore) don’t belong here, and because I’ve still got some money coming in from ads.

But unfortunately this blog has been hit with an even worse problem (because really, who cares about the PageRank of a blog with a trivial amount of revenue?). This blog, which I care about mainly because the URL is my name, was listed for about a week as a promoter of malware by Google. Anyone who came there on Firefox (which is a pretty high percentage of my traffic) got a big scary warning and probably left immediately.

On the one hand, I sort of deserved that too, because there were iframes in a number of posts that did something malwareish. On the other hand, I didn’t put them there. It was due to some WordPress vulnerability that I was unaware of until it was too late.

So I did what I could. I upgraded to the latest WordPress and then removed every iframe (since God knows there’s no reason I’d ever use one of those intentionally) from every post that had one. I then used Google Webmaster Tools to request a site review.

A few days later, my site was still displaying the malware warning. Needless to say that was as disappointing as ever R.E.M album after Automatic for the People, since I knew the site to be clean. Whoever had reviewed the site (I assume it was a person since it took a few days) listed a few URLs they believed were still tainted, but I poured through the html and saw nothing. So I just went back to Webmaster Tools and requested another review, and luckily after a few more days the warning was gone.

Then I had some problems with my template. I use a modified version of a theme I found somewhere on wordpress.org, but a lot of things were not working. Some links seemed to be doing nothing but regurgitating my home page, and my RSS feed was no longer being recognized as valid by FeedBurner. All I can figure is that the update somehow busted my theme, so I reverted to WordPress’s default.

So now I think I’ll see if I can’t find a good blog designer to whip me up a custom theme. I kinda like what Fred Wilson did with AVC. I think I’ll shoot for something like that, but minus the widgets. (Well, with different widgets anyway.)

Anyone know anyone who does a good job of that sort of thing?

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The Difference Between Sports and Dumb Things Rich People Do

Posted in Uncategorized on August 4, 2008 by themaroon

I seem to be getting an odd number of comments (mostly with insults accompanying, so they’ve been deleted) about something I said in my anti-Winklevoss post.

Those aren’t jocks (and rowing isn’t a sport).

I seem to have touched a nerve among the 8 people who still don’t have the common sense to just buy a motor. But I’m sorry, rowing is still not a sport. It’s a punishment for being born with a trust fund.

At some point God/Karma/The Universe (take your pick) realized that life was just too good for blue bloods. So He/She/It decided that anyone with born with too much money should spend a portion of their life on a form of manual labor that all but the poorest Vietnamese peasants quit doing 50 years ago.

For something to be a sport, it must meet the following 5 conditions:

  1. It must be on ESPN or ESPN2.
  2. It must not be played sitting down.
  3. Vomiting must not be cause for disqualification or have a euphemism like “a reversal”.
  4. None of the players use a broom.
  5. It must not be something that people once did to survive, but has since been replaced by technology (there goes half of the Olympics).

That’s it.

Why Hotel's Don’t Use Roomba: Because That Would Be Retarded

Posted in Conclusive Proof That People Are Stupid on August 2, 2008 by themaroon

I’m always amazed when I see something in a major publication like the New York Times (even if only on their website) and immediately think to myself “man, that is retarded.”

Take this entry “Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?” on the Freakonomics blog. You can get the gist of the article from the title. The author goes on to propose 7 theories as to why they don’t, ranging from social status to powerful hotel maid labor unions.

I have a theory, and Occam’s razor would seem to prefer it:

8. Because to do so would be retarded.

For one thing, Roombas suck. They’re kind of a pain in the ass even for the moderate use required in a home. For a hotel they’d be a logistical nightmare.

They’re expensive, with a good model priced at around $350, which is probably about what it costs to pay a maid to vacuum one room for over a year. How long does sweeping a hotel room take, 3 minutes each time? So every 20 days of maid service costs one maid’s hourly wage in vacuuming. That’s about 18 hours a year. If your maid is getting paid under $20 an hour (and I since I spent almost ¼ of my time in hotels for 5 years and have yet to meet one that speaks English, I’ll assume that’s true) it would take at least one year to recoup just the initial cost of the Roomba if you left one in each room. My guess is it would be closer to two.

And that’s just the initial cost. Also there would be theft, breakages, etc. You won’t get anywhere with customers by trying to charge them for stepping on a vacuum that roams around in its own. And you can try to charge them for theft, but they’ll just tell their credit card company “there was no Roomba when I got there” and the charges will be reversed.

So the maids would instead have to carry them around and set them to work. Roombas aren’t built for long periods of vacuuming. They could do very few rooms without a recharge (an Amazon review I found estimates 3 rooms in one house, and those are presumably smaller than hotel rooms) meaning a hotel with 300 rooms might need 100+ of them, and have to deal with recharging them all daily.

A maid tasked with cleaning 30 rooms is supposed to do what? Take 10 fully charged Roombas with her a and put them in each room after she is done cleaning it? It’d be a pain in the ass for her to change sheets, etc. while that free-wheeling tripping hazard was roaming around, so she’d probably put it in each room after she left, then come back and get it.

They have a tiny storage tank, so it would have to be emptied after each room. Then when she’s done with a room, she has to go back to the previous room, collect the Roomba, and check to see if its battery was depleted. At the end of the day she then has to go put 10 Roombas on charging stations (presumably in a room somewhere that has 100 of them). The life of any rechargeable battery deteriorates over time, and with full use every day that will happen quickly, so there’s lots of maintenance there.

And they have trouble with wires or other small things lying on the floor, so they’ll inevitably get stuck on things and ruin customers’ property. All of that to replace carrying one cheap vacuum that is probably used for a few minutes per room?

Hotels don’t use Roombas because it’s a stupid idea.

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