I’m sad to report that this morning, we had Tippiedog put to sleep. She was about 15 or 16 years old, and, as this photo shows, had been a member of our family since 1995 or 1996. We already miss her greatly.

The theme of this week’s This American Life radio program is ‘Scenes from a recession.” In the first act:

Ira goes to the Rogers Park area of Chicago to talk to some condo owners who are in a precarious situation—since the housing market crash, the developer who renovated and sold them their units has all but disappeared. He’s in foreclosure on half of their building’s units, and in the meantime, they have no one to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of the building they all bought into.

It’s a nightmare situation for the owners. At the end, Ira talks with two of the owners about why they haven’t just defaulted on their mortgages in order to get out of this horrible situation. First, each owner concedes that the consequences of default would not be that onerous for them, but then each owner explains why she stays. The first owner says it’s a matter of honoring her word: she signed a contract, she has the ability to pay on it. The second owner says that she stays out of a sense of obligation to the community of unit owners. Her departure would just make the situation that much worse for the remaining owners.
I’m shocked at the stark contrast between the attitudes of these people and of the people and institutions who got them into this situation–not just the slimy developer who fled the country, but also the bank that is stalling on foreclosure as long as possible, when foreclosure is what the unit owners need to move forward.
I know that this story was produced so as to highlight this contrast, but I’d say it’s a pretty clear depiction of how we’ve gotten into our current economic mess.

Inventor Ted Ciamillo has created a ‘dolphin-inspired’ fin that allows humans to swim “up to 33 miles (53 kilometers) per hour and turn up to 80 percent of their energy into thrust.” How cool is that?
(Via Follow Me Here)

I heard this on the news this morning: SXSW iPhone users overwhelm AT&T’s 3G coverage

In response to my recent musings about making needlepoint hip, I received an email from Jenny Henry who has her own needlepoint design company: Jenny Henry Designs. She does some pretty cool stuff. The best place to see Jenny’s work is her Flickr gallery. My favorite of her designs is her true love coin purse.

After relating one of my car buying horror stories yesterday, I should offer some advice to help others from getting screwed. Here’s a detailed Consumerist entry on how the four-square sales method works and how to get around it.
Whether or not the salesman uses the four-square method, his goal is to mix together the several different transactions you’re undertaking (buying a car, selling a car, getting a loan): by lumping those together, the salesman makes it harder for the consumer to spot that he’s getting screwed in any individual transaction (though in the story that I linked to in my last post, the dealers tried to screw this inexperienced car buyer on just the one transaction).
The best thing to do is to eliminate as many of those combined transactions as possible ahead of time: get pre-approved financing from your bank or credit union before you walk into the dealership, sell your old car yourself. But if you have to do two or more of those transactions at the dealership, undertake each one separately and make sure you understand the terms of each one: this is the amount I’m being given for my trade-in; this is the amount I’m paying for the car I’m buying, and these are the terms of the loan: interest rate, period, amount financed, etc.

Here’s another fine example of why people dread the car-buying experience so much. In short: guy walks into multiple dealers with cash in hand, knowing what he wants, dealers try to screw him every which way.
I’ve had several bad car-buying experiences, but this one was the worst: back when we lived in New Jersey, a tree limb fell on our beloved Camry and totaled it. A few days later, I walked into the local Toyota dealer, explained to the salesman what had happened, and told him exactly what I was looking for: another 2-3 year-old Camry with a particular set of features, color doesn’t matter.
Instead of consulting his inventory, the salesman’s response was, “Well, let’s go see what we have on the lot.” Already off to a bad start. As we walked around the lot, the salesman would point to a car and ask, “Do you like that one?” or suggest “Why don’t you drive that one home and let your wife take a look at it.” He would point at another car and ask if I’d like to test drive it or if I liked the color.
Each time, I responded with “Does it meet the requirements I gave you?”, “As I mentioned, I don’t care about the color”, “My wife only cares that it meets the requirements I told you” or “Once we find a car that meets my requirements, sure, I’ll test drive it to make sure it runs.”
Each time we went through this process, my blood pressure inched up. After we’d walked around the lot for about 10 minutes, I had had it. I don’t remember exactly how I expressed my frustration, but when we went back into the showroom, the salesman excused himself to go talk with the sales manager. A few minutes later, the sales manager asked me into his office; I recounted the story above, to which the sales manager just replied, “Well, it looks like we’re not going to sell you a car today.” I walked out of that dealership never to return.
In hindsight, that stupid salesman managed to turn away a customer who was already in love with his product. I was an easy sell.
And it amazes me how many car salesmen seem incapable of adapting their sales pitch to the individual customer.
(geez, my heart rate is up just writing this blog post)

My friend Susan and I maintain the Religious Resources directory. Users can submit sites for inclusion in our directory, but Susan and I personally review all submitted sites before they appear in the directory.
Years ago, we started getting bots that would fill out and submit the site submission form, so I implemented a captcha system. A while back, the spammers figured out how to defeat the captcha, so the bogus submissions started flowing again. The other day, I changed the verification mechanism for the site submission form, so I’m one step ahead of the spam bots again. I’ve foiled the bots for the time being.
After changing the verification, I saw a few bogus submissions still coming through. I noticed that the information was appropriate for the submissions: the ‘site name’ field contained a site name, the ‘URL’ field contained a URL, and, most tellingly, the submitter had selected an appropriate category for the site.
The spam bots tend to enter data in fields pretty randomly, so this consistency struck me. I emailed Susan and told her that some of these bogus submissions must be hand-entered. However, I was doubtful about that, since this seems like such a time-consuming activity, but I really couldn’t think of any other plausible explanation.
Yesterday, I checked the recently submitted sites and found this one (that’s a screen capture from our admin page; click on it for a larger version):

Theory confirmed. However, I don’t know how to defeat cheap labor.

I’ve started following the feeds for several crags magazines and blogs. This showed up today: Cross stitch your favorite physicist. Cool. You could just as easily use the same pattern for needlepoint.