Stan Taylor

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.

According to this NYT article, the group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood recently discovered what every parent of a public-school child has known for years: a lot of the stuff that Scholastic is selling in the flyers that they send home with kids is not books. Based on this shocking finding, CCFC has started a ‘Put the Book Back in Book Club’ campaign.
What gets me is this (from the NYT article):

Susan Linn, director of the campaign, said she had received complaints from parents who were concerned that their children were being sold toys, games, makeup and other items under the guise of a literary book club that is promoted in classrooms.

For parents like this, I have one piece of advice: if you don’t want your kids buying junk, don’t let them. Do you really need to complain to an anti-consumer watchdog group about it?
When Samuel brings the Scholastic flyers home, he inevitably asks to buy a toy, not a book. No duh, he’s a kid. I know this might come as a shock to some, but I actually tell him what he can buy: sometimes I let him get a toy; sometimes I tell him he can choose a book, but most of the time, I just tell him ‘no.’
Side note: I always just assumed that schools send these flyers home because the school benefits financially in some way from the sales it generates. If that’s true, it’s no obvious on the Scholastic web site (not surprising). Is my assumption correct? If so, can any teachers or school administrators explain the arrangement?

This tilt-shift video is very cool. With the trippy music, it just makes me smile:

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
(via Snarkmarket)

One recent episode of the radio program Speaking of Faith is an interview with paleoanthropologist, fiction author and person of faith Mary Doria Russell. She is a fascinating person. During the interview, she described her Catholic upbringing, how she became a humanist for two decades and has most recently converted to Judaism.
During the program, host Krista Tippett mentioned that Ms. Russell had described herself as an ‘agnostic Jew’ and asked her to elaborate on that. Ms. Russell answered, “The God that I almost believe in is the Jewish God” and went on to explain why she feels Judaism best reflects her own view of God. I love that quote!
After listening to the podcast of this interview, I immediately went and bought two of Ms. Russell’s novels: The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace. I’m reading The Sparrow now and liking it so far.

I’ve been a Flickr user for several years. Some time back, Flickr started offering detailed stats on your photo stream. My most viewed photo–which has almost double the views as my second-most viewed photo–is Neck tumor dog.
I thought that was curious, so I drilled down into the stats. Images.google.com is, by far, the top referrer for this photo. No surprise there. What did surprise me is the search terms that led people to my photo. Below is a screen shot of the search terms. Click on the image for a larger version.
I think it’s safe to conclude that not a single person who viewed my photo via Google image search found what he or she was looking for.

Since my post about needlepoint a couple of days ago, I’ve been looking online for hip needlepoint work.
The good news is that it exists. The Craftster forums are full of hip needlepoint designs (You apparently can’t link to a forum search. Go to http://www.craftster.org/forum/ and search for ‘needlepoint’).
The bad news is that the factors that I mentioned in my previous post do indeed seem to pose a challenge for beginning needlepointers. I’m still not sure if there’s any way around this. Still thinking…

I mentioned in my previous post that I had been doing needlepoint since I was a teenager. I just ran across something that gave me a major flashback: back in the day, professional football player Rosey Grier was known for doing needlepoint. In 1973, he even published a book, Needlepoint for Men. Someone has graciously scanned pages from the book and put the images on flickr.