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During our run we’ve had what I would describe as “mild success.” Across the entire series, we got over 700,000 downloads / streams. Our first episode accounted for about 10,000 of those listens, but most episodes tended to get around just 1,500. We run a listener Discord that has about 30 members, and a Patreon that topped out at just over 30 paying members.

We saw slow but steady growth in listenership for about the first three years of the show, but around 2022 things sort of plateaued, and we couldn’t seem to reach a larger audience. That stagnation, combined with the fact that we had an unexpected addition to our family in 2023 led me to finally make the decision to bring the show to an end.

Now that it’s over, I thought it would be cathartic for me and possibly enlightening for others to share some thoughts about what we did well and where we fell short.

What we did well

First and foremost, we connected with our listeners, as evidenced by this excerpt from a recent email I received from one of them:

The world you created was funny, quirky, different, mysterious, and totally immersive… it’s something I feel really connected to. … The show you’ve made is amazing, the extent to which you’ve created and produced it is amazing, and you really have done some great work for many people with no profit to yourself. and that in itself is amazing.

That’s just a small part of a very kind note that one of our listeners recently sent us, and it makes me feel so great about what we’ve created. Thank you so much C.L. for sharing with us.

As for the nuts and bolts of it, I really feel like our show had great quality audio, good editing, and most importantly it was fun to listen to (and to make). I didn’t spend a ton of money on my setup, but I did at least buy some decent mics and try to treat the recording space to minimize echos, and in my opinion, that effort paid off. I also personally put hours of work into editing every 20 to 30-minute episode, choosing just the right sound effects, background ambience, and deliberately pacing our lines to maximize comedic timing.

We were also very consistent in our release schedule. For the first five years, we were a weekly show, and a new episode went up every single Tuesday morning, without fail. Around the five-year mark my wife and I had a baby so the show made a pre-announced move to monthly for a year, then to every-other-week for the final year. Whatever our schedule was, we never published an episode late, or skipped a week, or uploaded a re-run or some other filler like an episode of some cross-promoted show.

Speaking of promotions, I am proud of the fact that we never ran any advertising. I get that people have to pay the bills, but I find most podcast ads to be pretty off-putting, and especially in an audio drama I feel like they really destroy the sense of space that a show is trying to create. So I’m glad we never did that—not counting the fake parody ad reads that we sometimes did for things like “ButterHelp Online Cow-nseling” or “ATEsleep,” which I always thought were pretty funny.

I also think that I did a pretty good job picking my partners for the show. Both of my co-hosts were willing to fully commit to the bit, and did a great job at it. The original co-host Scott is very clever and had such a great ability to deliver a broad range from deadpan to over-the-top silly. He decided to leave the show after about two and a half years, and I feel like we handled the transition well. We “wrote out” Scott’s character over a lengthy storyline and came up with an amusing in-universe explanation for bringing in J.R., the new co-host.

Since J.R. had already appeared as a guest in a good number of previous episodes he knew the feel of the show well. Plus, J.R. and I have known each other for nearly 30 years, so we had a great dynamic together on the show. Scott also brought his character back now and then in a series of guest appearances, especially for major milestone episodes, which was fun for both us and the listeners.

Where we fell short

Our biggest challenge throughout the run of the show was probably the same as most shows: awareness. It’s just really hard to get your show in front of people who might enjoy it, and get them to actually give it a chance. The struggles of the attention economy are real.

The only big success we had in marketing the show was when I managed to get an ad at the front of Episode 7 of “Unseen,” a new show made by the crew that created the popular podcast Wolf 359. I took a gamble and backed their Kickstarter at a tier that allowed me to be a sponsor of an episode, which ended up driving a pretty good number of new listeners to our show when that episode dropped in December of 2020. But other than that, we never really managed to grab much attention.

We tried experimenting with ads on various social media channels. We tried posting regularly on social media. We tried engaging with relevant communities on Reddit. We consistently brought on guests and asked them to share the show. Nothing ever really moved the needle.

It’s also worth noting that during the lifetime of our show, more and more people began to get their podcasts from YouTube for some reason. We did try putting the show on YouTube, but for an audio drama there really isn’t a good way to create a compelling video component without a huge budget for something like custom animation. Even Hello from the Magic Tavern—one of the most popular, longest-running audio dramas out there and a big inspiration for our show—only gets a few hundred views per episode on their YouTube videos, which usually just run a generic looping animation of the three hosts as the video component.

Another angle I tried was getting press. There isn’t a ton of podcast-specific media out there, but there are a handful of people who write about podcasts on sites like The Verge, Vice, Vulture, The A.V. Club, and BoingBoing. I wrote personalized pitches to quite a few of the specific authors who had written about other shows similar to ours, but literally never heard back. Just total radio silence. Similarly, we never manage to get any traction with any of the various awards that are out there recognizing podcasts, which can often be a gateway to getting press, and vice-versa.

What held us back

Looking back, I can identify a few things that I think might have limited our success. First off: the show’s name.

I spent a pretty good amount of time brainstorming names for the show, rejecting ideas like “Dimension Cast” and “Multiverse Pop” before eventually settling on “Dispatches from the Multiverse,” but in hindsight I think I should have kept looking, for two main reasons. First, I think the name is a bit too long. It’s kind of a mouthful, and not as memorable as something shorter could have been. Second, I think putting “multiverse” in the title may have been a mistake due to that word’s strong association with comic books in many people’s minds. If people thought our show had something to do with comics, but they weren’t interested in that, they might have just immediately passed us by. Or if they were interested in that but listened and found out we had nothing to do with comics, they might have been disappointed.

Another thing that limited our reach was the fact that I’m just not well-connected with influential people. If you know the right people it’s easy to get press to review your show, or people with large audiences to post about you on social media. Even painfully mediocre podcasts hosted by celebrities can pull in a large number of listeners purely on the strength of their connections and pre-existing fan base. Unfortunately we just don’t know enough of those “big name” people.

My co-host J.R. also had some thoughts about why we hit a plateau:

It is a little mysterious that the show didn’t take off, to me. Probably this is because I think we are funnier than we really are? It seems strange that a podcast of reasonable quality without constant ad interruptions should do better than other podcasts of similar quality that have ads.

I suspect the market for podcast discovery is not really driven by pure quality. I remember hearing about research into which songs will take off in a group of people. I remember they ran experiments multiple times, and the songs that soared in popularity and “went viral” in the group were more or less random. In other words, any media that meets a minimum quality bar can “go viral”, and most of it is just luck. At least, that’s what I remember. I don’t have links or anything, nor do I plan to go hunt it down. However, if this is true, the lesson for me is not “make something great,” but “take lots of shots on goal” with things that are “good enough,” whatever that means.

While we did have a good fan base, they apparently weren’t the type to enthusiastically share our show online. Whenever I’d see a thread on /r/podcasts of someone looking for recommendations, none of our fans showed up to promote us. Back when Twitter was fun and not a dumpster fire of hate and ignorance I would regularly search on there to see if people were talking about us, only to come up empty. I don’t know if we just never reached a critical mass of fans to see that kind of organic promotion or if our listeners just didn’t think we were that good, so they chose not to share.

It’s also entirely possible that our biggest problem was that the show was just too weird and/or too niche. Personally, I thought it was pretty funny, but I recognize that I don’t have a typical mass-market sense of humor. Maybe there just aren’t that many people out there who would enjoy listening to a dry, weird show about visiting parallel dimensions.

Closing Thoughts

To be clear, I am very pleased with the podcast as a whole. I am happy that we created it and proud of the finished product. While I have some minor regrets about our execution, there is very little I would change about the content. I still laugh at our episodes when I re-listen to them, and frankly I am in awe at the sheer volume of the ridiculous, complex lore we created. We have received some very nice emails from fans through the years who love what we’ve made and I hope more people will continue to discover it even though the show is complete.

From J.R., a.k.a. Jack Strobe:

Another measure for success of a project is: did I make the world a better place than it would be without this project? For Dispatches, I believe we pretty clearly did. For people that share our sense of humor, and happen to find us, they get many hours (hundreds?) of free entertainment. Our existence also makes it just a hair more difficult for someone to fill that niche with a more commercial product with annoying ads. I think the world is a better place because of this podcast.

From Scott, a.k.a. Wilson:

I like J.R.’s comment about the world being a better place with the podcast in it. I honestly think it’s one of the coolest things about being a part of it. Knowing that I was able to make someone laugh who I’ll probably never meet, who potentially lives an ocean away from me is just incredible to me. I love the idea that we made someone’s day just a little bit better. What more can we ask for?

I am immensely grateful to the listeners and it was an absolute pleasure to work with Tim, J.R., and the other random bunch of misfits we assembled to do the show.

A highlight of my life. Thank you Tim for including me.

The post What I learned making 300 episodes of my podcast “Dispatches from the Multiverse” appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

It was killed by the one-two punch of layoffs and the worst job market I’ve experienced in my entire professional life. At my former employer and across the tech industry, uncaring executives are desperately trying to limit the damage they inflicted on their companies through reckless spending and over-expansion during the ZIRP era, and professionals like me are suffering the ongoing consequences.

I loved my job. I loved the company, the mission, the leadership, the work, and the coworkers. For most of the past 18 months since it was unceremoniously taken from me I have been searching for a decent replacement. I wasn’t naïvely thinking that I would find another dream job–just a place to work where I can make enough money to pay the bills and feel marginally good about what I’m doing. Unfortunately, after many hundreds of applications, a very small handful of interviews, and an endless stream of rejections and ghostings, I’ve come up utterly empty-handed.

This job market has left me defeated, dejected, and demoralized, and I’ve decided that I’ve had enough. I’m done spending hours a day searching for jobs that align with my skills, writing enthusiastic cover letters, fine-tuning my resume, filling out applications, and sending cold emails to hiring managers, all for literally zero return on my substantial investment of time and emotional energy. It’s time to move on.

Of course, I fully realize that a post like this is likely to turn off some potential employers, but apparently I’m already unemployable, as evidenced by the past 18 months, so I don’t really have anything to lose now, do I?

To be clear, I’m still open to gainful employment. It would be great to have a paycheck, paid time off, health insurance, and all that. If you are someone that I’ve worked with in the past and you have a job that you think I’d be great at, by all means, drop me a line, let’s chat! But I am done with the endless, hopeless, fruitless cycle of searches, applications, and rejections.

Barring some deus ex machina resolution where the perfect job just falls out of the sky into my lap, what does the next phase of my career even look like? Well, that’s still TBD. Obviously I’ll continue to work with my wife to make our little retail tea and spice shop Chai Cupboard successful. In fact, we’ve just launched a number of new initiatives on that front. If you enjoy tea, check out the website at ChaiCupboard.com to learn more. But that’s still a long way off from paying the bills for our family of four, so I’ll be launching another new venture in the very near future.

This was originally posted on LinkedIn.

The post 🪦 R.I.P. My Tech Career: 2010-2022 appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

In short: It has been and continues to be difficult!

Starting up

Let’s start with what it took just to open our doors. We spent about $32,000 of our own money (no investments, no loans) to start up. This included things like buying the initial inventory, all our jars and other supplies, furniture, and putting in new flooring.

Finding a good location in downtown Everett was a challenge. It seemed like every space we looked at was either way too large (2,000+ square feet), way too expensive ($2,000+ a month), or both. The space we eventually landed in is around 1,100 square feet and costs us just under $1,800 a month. Plus electricity and gas. Plus parking. Plus basic building maintenance, repairs, and real estate taxes. You would think that those last few things should be the responsibility of the landlord that owns the building, but this particular landlord owns such a large portion of downtown Everett that they are able to dictate the terms of the lease to dramatically favor them and there’s basically nothing you can do about it. Fun!

Keeping the lights on

Okay, so let’s talk about ongoing costs. All together, running the shop five days a week, we need to make about $100 a day in profit to pay our basic bills. That means we need around $200 a day in sales to break even after paying for our inventory and other supplies. So far in 2023 we’re making an average of $117 per day in sales. That’s up from $100 per day during the same period in 2022, but still far short of where we need to be in order just to break even—and these figures are with no employees, just us (mostly my wife) running the shop entirely by ourselves. If we wanted to hire just a single employee at $20 an hour for 20 hours a week, the wages, taxes, and other costs would add up to another $2,000 a month or more than $100 a day.

All of this means that we’re putting about another $1,500 into the shop every month out of our pocket to keep the doors open. To date we have made around $55,000 in revenue, but spent a total of about $128,000, meaning that over $70,000 has come directly out of our pocket to try to make this work.

Expanding our horizons

Since it has been difficult selling enough loose-leaf tea and spices to make ends meet, we have been working on a few different ideas to try to bring in more money. The biggest of these plans was to open a full tea bar, serving things like tea lattes and iced tea. Unfortunately, our space is not equipped with the proper kitchen to obtain the necessary permits from the health department.

Our landlord was open to letting us pay to upgrade their space (how generous of them!) and we were able to get a grant from the city for about $16,000 that we thought would cover the plumbing improvements and appliances we would need. Unfortunately again, once we opened up the walls we discovered that the existing drainage was nowhere near sufficient for the amount of sinks the health department requires. Fixing this would require considerably more work than we originally expected, including cutting a trench into the concrete floor. Between the extra drainage work and the extreme inflation that ratcheted up the cost of everything else while we tried to figure it all out, the total cost of the project ballooned to over $50,000. We applied for a second grant in hopes of still moving forward, but were denied. So the full tea bar idea is dead unless we find a whole new location with a proper restaurant kitchen, which would of course have much higher rent, somewhat negating the benefit of opening the tea bar at all.

Thankfully as long as we only serve hot tea in a to-go cup, we are not classified by the health code as a “food establishment,” so we can still do that without all of the extra sinks. We have been able to set up three tea brewers on a custom stand that I built out of hardwood, and at least provide a basic cup of tea to-go.

Building the physical and digital space

Speaking of building furniture, the shop has given me a good excuse to spend some quality time with my woodworking tools. I built our custom shelves that hold all the jars, as well as the custom main counter, and I’m quite pleased with how they all turned out.

Surprisingly, building physical objects like the furniture has been easier than building things in the digital space. While we have had a basic website set up since before we opened, building a proper online shop has been a bit of a pain. Aside from the challenge of synchronizing all of our inventory with an online storefront, to get it properly set up we need to take individual photos of all 200+ of the teas and spices we sell, which is a daunting task.

Once we do get the online side of the store set up with all the photos, another idea we’ve had to increase sales is to set up a tea sampler subscription box, but the economics of subscription boxes is pretty rough. There are competitors in the space that sell a tea box for $20 that includes shipping. It would be difficult for us to make and ship a box of teas for less than $20 in actual cost to us.

So, what’s next?

We have really enjoyed running the shop, learning more about teas and spices, and meeting all the lovely people who have come in over the past two years. To date we have had nearly 2,000 customers, about 25% of which are repeat customers. We have had zero problems with crime, and only one unpleasant run-in with an individual having a drug-induced psychotic episode. Downtown Everett is a great location, and we love the increasing number of events that are happening downtown like Sorticulture, Salty Sea Days, and the Wintertide Festival & Market.

We’re convinced that our shop is a valuable addition to Everett, but it’s tough to keep pouring thousands of dollars into it every single month, and to be so far away from even being able to hire a single person to help out. It is beginning to feel like running a small independent retail shop in downtown Everett may not be viable with the current cost of rent, lack of significant downtown foot traffic, and most people’s default mode of shopping online first. We’ve still got over a year on our current lease, so we’re going to continue trying to make this work, but looking around at the other businesses downtown, it’s easy to see why they’re mostly restaurants, breweries/bars, coffee shops, or retailers who have been around forever and own their own building.

And of course, I haven’t even mentioned the other big complicating factor: In just a few weeks we’re having a baby! This means we’re going to have to dramatically cut back how many hours the shop is even open, due to the aforementioned inability to afford to hire any additional help.

Anyway, if you fancy some tea, stop on by! We’re at 2809 Colby in downtown Everett. And if you have some brilliant idea for how to make this type of business actually turn a profit, please drop me a line and share it!

The post The Tough Reality of Running an Independent Retail Shop in Downtown Everett appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

1. Groundhog Day
2. Russian Doll
3. Cause and Effect (ST:TNG episode)
4. Edge of Tomorrow
5. Palm Springs
6. Source Code
7. Happy Death Day

Now, before you comment “why isn’t Tenet / Primer / [whatever other movie] on your list?!?” allow me a moment explain the difference between what I consider a “time loop” story and a “time travel” story. Although time loop stories do involve time travel, in my opinion they are a distinctly different genre.

• Time travel: One or more people travel forward or backward through time, usually intentionally. Multiple instances of the person or people traveling through time may exist simultaneously.
• Time loop: One or more people repeat a relatively fixed period of time over and over, usually against their will. Through any given loop there is only one instance of the person or people repeating the time period.

Even if a story covers the same period of time over and over like in Primer or Tenet, if there are multiple instances of the characters existing simultaneously, that’s a time travel story. And yes, I’ve seen the articles about Christopher Nolan’s claim that Tenet is “not a time-travel film.” He’s wrong. It obviously is. The characters are travelling back and forth through time. What would you call that if not time travel? ?

I also want to mention a couple of great video games that use the time loop mechanic: Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and Outer Wilds . I’ve played these each just a bit, but sadly I haven’t had the time to finish either one. There’s also a 1986 novel called Replay by author Ken Grimwood that I’ve read and enjoyed.

Are there other great time loop movies, shows, or video games that I’ve missed? Let me know! I’m always on the lookout for great content in the genre.

The post The Best Time Loops & Why Time Loops Aren’t Time Travel appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Previously…

• November 2016: City Of Everett Continues To Declare Dangerous Intersections “Appropriate”
• April 2016: Dangerous Everett Neighborhood Intersections Result in Predictable But Avoidable Collisions

And of course these are just the ones that happened while we were home and checked the camera after hearing the commotion.

Update: One of my neighbors contacted the city yet again to request some sort of improvement at this intersection and the similar one a block north. Here is the city’s reply, in part:

It appears that no crashes have been reported to the Everett Police at the intersection of 36th Street and Wetmore Ave in recent years. The intersection of 35th Street and Wetmore Ave does have an average of 1.5 reported crashes per year, but only about 1 crash every 2 years results in any injuries. While ideally there would be no vehicle crashes in Everett, the low incidence of injuries in this area is considered acceptable to the City.

The post Even more collisions and near misses at the intersection the City of Everett refuses to fix appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

So of course, instead of going to bed I decided to hop in my car and go try to find the source of the noise and get it on video:

It turns out the noise was coming from a tugboat with a stuck horn, as first reported that night by My Everett News:

Annoying horn blasting @PortofEverett is from broken horn on a tug boat. Workers trying to fix.

— MyEverettNews.com (@MyEverettNews) June 26, 2017

The tugboat horn did not stop until around 3:30 AM, keeping many people awake for most of the night. In the follow-up story the next day on My Everett News, they included a photo of the offending boat, which you can actually see in my video starting at around 1:25:

Tugboat with stuck horn at Port of Everett (click to enlarge)

A lot of people must have been disappointed that they missed out on the sound of the horn, because my video turned out to be fairly popular. It was featured on a handful of local news sites, radio reports, and even the national Fox News site:

• Everett Herald: Tugboat horn blares for 4 hours; dogs howl, and so do humans
• KOMO News: Port of Everett: Oops, sorry for the blaring tug boat horn all night
• Fox News: Boat’s horn blares for hours overnight at Washington port
• Warm 106.9: Everett Tugboat Mishap – What’s Trending
  • Follow-up: Tugboat Tim
• Seattle’s Wolf 100.7: Port of Everett Apologizes for All Night Tug Boat Horn

So I guess I’m officially a video journalist now.

The post Listen to the tugboat’s stuck fog horn at Port of Everett that kept my neighborhood up all night appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Tim’s 2016 Tea Stats

• Total hot tea consumed: 7,086 fl. oz.
• Number of individual mugs: 790
• Average duration per 8oz.: 1 hour 50 minutes
• Median duration per 8oz.: 1 hour 37 minutes
• Favorite brand/blend: MarketSpice Cinnamon-Orange (3,514 fl. oz.)
• Top hour for tea: 9AM-10AM

I don’t drink coffee, so I tend to drink a lot of strong black tea in the mornings. Meanwhile, the early afternoon is a good time for green tea, as evidenced by the tea type by hour chart:

The majority of the tea that I drank in 2016 was from MarketSpice, a local tea company here in Seattle. In a distant second was Tazo, the brand of tea stocked in the office at work.

Most of the tea that I drink is black tea. I should probably try to shift the balance more toward green tea, given its numerous health benefits.

Most of the time when I’m drinking tea I’m sitting (or standing) at my desk, working. At both my workplace office and my home office I’ve got an electric mug warmer that keeps the tea at a pleasing temperature for the entire duration of each cup.

When I’m drinking tea away from home, it’s almost always in my Zojirushi insulated mug, which keeps the tea hot literally all day. Even though I took a lot longer to drink tea when I was away from home, it was always still hot when I finished it.

I was also curious whether there’s any sort of seasonal trend to my tea consumption. The answer to that question appears to be “not really, but there was a bit of a drop-off in November and December.”

Finally, I thought it would be interesting to compare my 2016 tea consumption to data on tea consumption around the world. The best data I could find on this was from a 2014 Quartz story. The catch is that the annual per capita consumption by country data was measured in weight of tea leaves rather than volume of tea drink.

In order to properly compare my 2016 tea consumption to the rest of the world, I counted up the number of cups I drank using tea bags and multiplied it by the average weight of tea contained in a typical tea bag, 0.075 ounces. I also weighed the leaves I typically use to brew an eight ounce cup of loose leaf tea, which was about 0.4 ounces for MarketSpice Cinnamon-Orange. I told you that I like my tea strong.

The total estimated weight of the tea leaves used to prepare all the tea I drank in 2016 came out to 13.5 pounds, nearly double the per capita consumption in Turkey, the heaviest tea-drinking country in the world, and over 27 times as much tea as the per capita consumption here in the United States.

In conclusion: I like hot tea.

The post I logged every cup of tea I drank in 2016 appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Here are the latest examples:

[Update November 28 – Here’s another.]

Note that these are just the ones that we happened to see first-hand. This kind of dangerous driving happens daily, I just don’t happen to be looking and save the video.

Here’s my latest email to the city of Everett traffic engineering department:

​From: Timothy Ellis
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2016 11:36 AM
To: Michael Brick; Ryan Sass; Engineering / Public Services
Subject: Re: FW: dangerous intersections on Wetmore Ave

I would like to reiterate my request for four-way stops on Wetmore Ave. at 36th, 35th, and 34th streets. We continue to see people driving at unsafe speeds (35-40mph) north on Wetmore and other drivers running the stop signs on the cross streets. We’ve already seen one fatality and without adjustments I am certain we will see more.

Just a few days ago the same Everett High School bus almost t-boned a van that rolled through the stop sign at 35th: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxvPcgtUktM

Please consider adding four-way stops at 36th, 35th, and 34th where the steep hills lead down to Wetmore. By adding the four-way stops it would 1) discourage through traffic from using Wetmore Ave, moving them instead to the much better suited Colby Ave and 2) slow all traffic through those three intersections, dramatically reducing the risk of a fatality collision.

Thanks,
-Tim

And here’s their non-response reply:

​From: Michael Brick <mbrick@everettwa.gov>
Date: Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 9:11 AM
Subject: RE: FW: dangerous intersections on Wetmore Ave
To: Timothy Ellis
Cc: Ryan Sass <rsass@everettwa.gov>, Tim Miller <tmiller@everettwa.gov>, Kevin Allen <kallen@everettwa.gov>

Mr. Ellis,

After further review of this location Traffic Engineering still finds that the existing east-west stops at these intersections are appropriate. I have contacted Sgt Allen with the Everett Police Department and made him aware of your concerns. He agrees that this is an issue of compliance with the existing stop signs and that police enforcement is the appropriate next step. He will be contacting you shortly to discuss what option the Police have to address your concerns.

Sincerely,

Michael Brick, P.E.
Associate Traffic Engineer
City of Everett Public Works
(425)257-7790

It’s only a matter of time before there’s another serious injury or fatality collision at one of these intersections. It’s a shame that the city refuses to take the appropriate measures to prevent it.

The post City Of Everett Continues To Declare Dangerous Intersections “Appropriate” appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

The main problem is that people (often on bicycles but also in cars) frequently ignore the stop signs on 35th and 36th and blow right across Wetmore Avenue, especially when heading east, since both of these streets have a steep hill leading down to the stop sign at Wetmore. This has led to many close calls already. Here are just two recent near-misses that I happened to catch on camera at 36th & Wetmore:

Here’s an excerpt from my April 5th email:

I have seen people coming down the steep hill eastbound on 35th blow through the stop across Wetmore, and when you’re coming southbound down Wetmore, you have zero visibility of oncoming vehicles from the west thanks to that row of hedges. I typically avoid driving that portion of the road at all since I am afraid I will run over someone on a bicycle or skateboard without any chance to even see them coming.

This is what it looks like as you approach 35th heading southbound down Wetmore. Note that this street view was taken in 2012. The hedges on the right are even bigger than that now. [2021 Update: The streetview below shows how large the hedges were when this post was written. Thankfully in August 2020, the hedges were finally dramatically trimmed, mostly eliminating the zero-visibility hazard.]

Last Friday, April 22, the city traffic engineer responded to email. Unfortunately, the only action the city plans to take for these two intersections is to improve stop sign visibility and measure traffic to possibly recommend “emphasis patrols” by the Everett Police for speeding on Wetmore. Neither of these solutions really does anything to address the structural problems that make these two intersections so dangerous.

Sadly on Monday afternoon 35th and Wetmore was host to the exact kind of collision I warned the city about:

Bicyclist critical after collision with Everett school bus

EVERETT — A bicyclist suffered critical injuries Monday after colliding with a school bus in north Everett. The man, 52, was knocked unconscious but was breathing, according to police.

The man was taken to Providence Regional Medical Center Everett. No students were injured.

The crash happened about 2:15 p.m. at the intersection of Wetmore Avenue and 35th Street. The southbound bus was carrying the Everett High School track team to Memorial Stadium, according to the school district.

Police believe the eastbound bicyclist ran the stop sign and collided with the school bus, which did not have a stop sign.

[Update: According to a May 2 update from the Everett Herald, the bicyclist has died.]

I initially requested that the city install “traffic calming circles” at these two intersections. These exist at quite a few other intersections in our neighborhood, and would serve to slow traffic in both directions. The traffic engineer rejected that suggestion, saying that “they restrict the ability of emergency responders (particularly fire department vehicles) while they have proven to provide little to no reduction in crashes or excessive speeding at locations where they have been installed.”

Therefore, my latest suggestion is that the intersections on Wetmore at 35th and 36th streets should be made into four-way stops. There is already a four-lane north-south road with a flatter grade and a higher speed limit that is designed for through traffic just one block to the west on Colby. If vehicles on Wetmore were made to stop at 35th and 36th streets, collisions like the one that happened yesterday would be far less likely.

Here is my email exchange with the city on this matter:

From: Timothy Ellis
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2016 1:33 PM
To: Ryan Sass; Engineering / Public Services
Subject: dangerous intersections on Wetmore Ave

Hello,

I have lived on the corner of 36th Street and Wetmore Avenue since 2011, and I am very concerned about the safety of this intersection. In the time we have lived here, we have seen many people driving much too fast down Wetmore (usually northbound down the hill), and also many people–usually on bicycles or skateboards, but sometimes in cars as well–blowing through the stop signs on 36th Street.

Frankly I am amazed that nobody has been killed yet, and I fear that it is inevitable if changes are not made.

Here are just a couple recent examples:

August 26: two bicyclists heading westbound blow through the stop sign and are nearly hit by a pickup truck heading south on Wetmore – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKUIbppnn88
April 1: a bicyclist heading eastbound blows through the stop sign and is nearly hit by a car heading north on Wetmore – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oe708gx_KI

We also witness people driving far faster than 25mph up Wetmore on a daily basis (usually northbound as that is the downhill direction), occasionally even fast enough to catch a little air off the slight bump in the road just north of the intersection. It is ridiculous.

I would like to request that the intersection be modified in some way. I’m obviously not a transportation engineer, but it seems like the traffic calming circles solution in place at the intersections of 35th and Lombard and 35th and Oakes would sufficiently slow traffic in both directions to avoid any tragic events.

Also, I’m not personally there to witness it as often, but 35th and Wetmore has the same problems. I have seen people coming down the steep hill eastbound on 35th blow through the stop across Wetmore, and when you’re coming southbound down Wetmore, you have zero visibility of oncoming vehicles from the west thanks to that row of hedges. I typically avoid driving that portion of the road at all since I am afraid I will run over someone on a bicycle or skateboard without any chance to even see them coming.

Thanks,
-Tim​ Ellis

From: Michael Brick
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2016 11:53 AM
To: Timothy Ellis
Subject: RE: dangerous intersections on Wetmore Ave

Mr. Ellis,

Thank you for taking the time to make the City of Everett aware of your safety concerns. We have evaluated the line of sight for the intersections of Wetmore Ave with 35th Street and 36th Street, checked that the stop signs at these intersections are clearly visible, and checked crash records along Wetmore Ave.

Traffic Engineering has evaluated the line of sight at the intersections of Wetmore Ave with 35th Street and 36th Street and found them acceptable. For local street intersections such as these this line of sight check consists of measuring how far away vehicles approaching along Wetmore can be seen from the side-streets when stopped 10 feet back from the edge of the travel lanes. When stopped 10 feet from the travel lanes approaching vehicles should be visible from at least 155 feet away. The City of Everett does not check that drivers along the main road can clearly see drivers stopped on the side-streets, only that drivers stopping on the side-streets can clearly see approaching drivers on the main road. We assume that side-street drivers will respond appropriately and yield to any vehicles approaching along the main road. The large hedge on the northwest corner of 35th Street and Wetmore Ave does extend partially across the sidewalk and a letter is being sent to the property owner directing that the hedge be trimmed but this is to comply with a legal requirement that the sidewalk be kept clear and unobstructed, not to maintain sight lines at this intersection.

Stop signs on local streets should also be visible to approaching traffic from at least 155 feet away. The stop signs on the approaches to Wetmore Ave along 35th Street and 36th Street are clearly visible to approaching vehicles from at least 155 feet away. Because the eastbound approaches to Wetmore Ave along 35th Street and 36th Street are particularly steep the City has already installed “STOP AHEAD” signs mid-way between Colby Ave and Wetmore Ave to reinforce to drivers that there is a stop at the bottom of the hill. The City of Everett is in the process of replacing all of our “STOP” signs with new, highly reflective signs to improve their visibility so the signs at these intersections will soon be replaced with even more visible signs.

It appears that no crashes have been reported to the Everett Police at the intersection of 36th Street and Wetmore Ave in recent years. The intersection of 35th Street and Wetmore Ave does have an average of 1.5 reported crashes per year, but only about 1 crash every 2 years results in any injuries. While ideally there would be no vehicle crashes in Everett, the low incidence of injuries in this area is considered acceptable to the City. We will not be installing traffic calming circles at these locations because they restrict the ability of emergency responders (particularly fire department vehicles) while they have proven to provide little to no reduction in crashes or excessive speeding at locations where they have been installed.

It has been several years since the City of Everett collected speed data along Wetmore Ave near your home. We recently placed a traffic counter along Wetmore Ave in this area to collect vehicle speed and volume data. If this data shows excessive vehicle speeds at specific times of day we will forward that information to the Everett Police Department and request emphasis patrols to address the speeding at those times. As soon as we have reviewed the data currently being collected I will let you know our findings.

If you have any further traffic related questions or concerns please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Michael Brick, P.E.
Associate Traffic Engineer
City of Everett Public Works

From: Timothy Ellis
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2016 4:33 PM
To: Michael Brick
Subject: RE: dangerous intersections on Wetmore Ave

Thanks for the thoughtful response. However, I do feel somewhat like my point was not quite understood. My main concern is not that the stop signs are not visible or that people are otherwise not aware of them. My concern is that especially on the steep hill eastbound on 36th, people just don’t care to stop. Adding a “stop ahead” sign and making the stop signs more reflective will likely do nothing to change that.

Also, the location that you’ve put the speed/volume strips up at 34th street are not likely (in my opinion based on my observations) to measure nearly as much speeding as we see down the stretch of Wetmore between 37th and 36th. Since that portion has the steepest hill, it seems that most of the speeders are going their fastest at the bottom as they pass through the intersection of 36th & Wetmore, and may have slowed somewhat by the time they get to 34th.

I understand the downsides of the traffic calming circles, but I also think that something more than just improving existing stop sign visibility and possible “emphasis patrols” would be prudent to prevent a serious incident from eventually occurring here. I also find it odd that the city would be willing to go on record saying that a dangerous intersection like this “is considered acceptable to the City.” That seems like the kind of statement that might be problemati should there ever be a serious injury (or worse) that results in a lawsuit.

Obviously I still think some sort of modification would be advisable, even if it were just to make the intersections at 35th and 36th into four-way stops. With a wider, flatter north-south route one block west on Colby, I don’t see the harm in intentionally slowing traffic on Wetmore.

Thanks,
-Tim

The post Dangerous Everett Neighborhood Intersections Result in Predictable But Avoidable Collisions appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

You can still view a copy with all its original comments on the Internet Archive, but I decided to also republish my story here for posterity.

One way our family keeps the entertainment budget slim is by not buying new release DVDs, but waiting to buy movies until they drop below $10.

About a month ago, my wife purchased the DVD movie “Never Been Kissed” for $5.50 from the discount shelf at our local Target. A few weeks after buying it, we tried to watch it, but after trying multiple DVD players it became clear that the disc was defective. On our next trip to Target we brought the DVD and the receipt back to exchange the disc for a working copy.

There were no copies of that movie in stock, so we waited another week and tried again. Unfortunately, this time not only was the movie not in stock, but an employee looked it up and informed us that Target no longer carries that movie at all. (Well, they carry it, but now it’s in one of those double-feature disc sets.)

I figured that this was no big deal, that since they don’t stock it anymore, they would accept a return for cash or store credit for the defective product they sold me.

Wrong.

The employee informed me that Target does not under any circumstances accept returns on DVDs, CDs, or video games. I asked to see the manager, who affirmed the policy and told me that he cannot override it, because of “copyright law.”

I know my rights as they pertain to copyright law, and I know that there is no provision in Federal law or Washington State law that prohibits a retailer from giving a customer their money back for a defective DVD. In fact, I verified with Costco that they are glad to issue refunds for DVDs. (Their return policy contains no exception for disc-based media of any kind. [2015 addendum: I have since successfully returned DVDs to Costco on two occasions. Once a disc was defective, another time two of the three discs were completely missing. Costco staff was friendly and helpful both times, fully refunding my money without question.])

Unfortunately it seems that this “copyright law” excuse is being fed to Target employees from the top. An internet search revealed multiple accounts of similar tales across the country. It’s a store policy — nothing more. I can understand the rationale behind such a policy, but it’s pretty lousy that they give people with an actual defective product the shaft like that.

So, thanks to Target’s lousy DVD return policy, instead of a “cheap” $5.50 movie, we’re now stuck with a rather expensive $5.50 coaster.

The moral of this story is something that seems to be a good deal at the time can be turned into a complete waste of money by a lousy policy and stubborn or poorly trained employees. I’ve learned my lesson that it is important to be familiar with store policies and know your risk when assessing apparent “deals.”

Here are some other pieces I wrote for Get Rich Slowly. Some have been deleted, and others are still live. I don’t know why no one at QuinStreet bothered to mention to me that they were deleting my stories.

• Renting vs. Buying: The Realities of Home-Ownership (deleted)
• Bank of America Demonstrates How to Alienate Potential Customers (deleted)
• Moving? Rent First, Ask Questions Later
• Setting Your Homebuying Priorities – Price, Quality, Location: Pick Any Two
• Gaming Without Breaking the Bank (deleted)
• How Did My Phone Bill Get So High?!? Why You Should Pay Attention to Your Bills

The post Instead of refunding my money for a defective DVD, Target lied to me about “copyright law” appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Best protein shake ever.

The post Best Protein Shake Ever appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

a majestic giant cedar tree just up the street from my house (photo via Google Street View)

Recently, the owners of the property had a tree service come and cut the tree down. I was sad.

Strangely though, they did not cut the tree all the way down. A bare stump about twelve feet tall was left behind, a lonely testament to the cedar’s former glory.

Then a few weeks later, something magical happened…

Over the course of a few days, the sad stump was transformed into a the most creative Little Free Library I’ve seen to date.

Little Free Library carved into a giant cedar stump

Bears, Owls, and Books!

Some old cabinet doors serve to keep the books out of the weather.

The current reading selection.

I’m still sad that the tree is gone, but I have to admit, this is a pretty awesome alternative, and it definitely adds some cool character to our neighborhood. Well played, neighbor. Well played.

You can visit the library in person at 35th Street & Wetmore Avenue here in Everett.

[Update]
A couple weeks after I posted this, the Everett Herald wrote up a more in-depth story about the library: Everett woman turns beloved cedars into whimsical library

It all started when Sara Sanders’ beloved cedar took a turn for the worse.

It dropped a big honking limb onto Wetmore Avenue.

“It came down just before that big windstorm (in late August),” Sanders said. “It was time for it to go. The city sent me a letter that said ‘You must.’ ”

Still, it was hard letting go.

“The tree meant a lot to me. One of the reasons I bought the house 17 years ago was because of the tree,” Sanders said. “I wanted to be able to commemorate it in some way because it was a wonderful tree.”

What was once a 120-foot cedar is now a bear bearing books.

A couple days after that, KOMO News ran a video story:

[Update: Unfortunately KOMO deleted the story and the video from their website.]

[Update 2: The KOMO story reappeared on their website!]

Great stuff!

The post Giant Cedar Tree Repurposed as a Little Free Library appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

A Yellow Light Line?

tl;dr – Paint a yellow line on the road. If you’re traveling the speed limit as you approach an intersection and you’ve passed the yellow line when the light turns yellow, just keep going and you’ll clear the intersection before the light turns red. If you’re behind the yellow line, hit the brakes because the light will turn red before you clear the intersection.

How it Works

Actually there isn’t much more to it than that. Here’s what a city would need to do to implement yellow light lines:

1. use the speed limit and the length time the traffic light stays yellow to calculate distance
2. paint the yellow light line on the street at the distance calculated in step 1
3. there is no step 3

Simple, effective, and cheap.

Why It’s Needed

Intersections controlled by traffic signals have a basic design flaw that red light cameras only serve to exacerbate. Drivers are unsure of how long they have to clear the intersection once the light turns yellow. Should you slow down or speed up? Every intersection has different timing, and when an intersection is equipped with a red light camera that doles out $124 tickets, drivers are much more likely to slam on the brakes even if they could make it through safely. This leads to more rear-end collisions.

With yellow light lines, that ambiguity is completely eliminated with a simple, clear visual. If you’ve passed the line when the light turns yellow, continue on at the speed limit and you will safely clear the intersection before the light turns red. If the line is in front of you, you’ll need to stop. No more uncertainty, no more slamming on the brakes.

Yellow Light Line Calculator

In order to help visualize this concept I’ve created this handy calculator. Simply edit the speed limit and/or the yellow light length to see how far from the intersection the yellow light line would be painted.

Addressing Objections

This section has been added to address some of the objections brought up by Redditors at /r/Seattle.

It’s not illegal to be in the intersection when the light turns red, it’s illegal to enter the intersection after the light turns red. – davethegr8

Indeed, the relevant law here in Washington State (RCW 46.61.055) indicates that it is only illegal to enter the intersection on a red light. However, since the purpose of the yellow light line is not to adhere to strict legal definitions but rather to improve safety, I think it would be best to measure the distance from the end of the intersection rather than the entrance.

How about telling people what you did so they know what the lines are? – Sir_Dude

This is a good point. Above I jokingly said “there is no step 3,” but in reality step 3 would be driver education.

Oh, and how are these lines going to work with heavier vehicles? An SUV is going to need more room to stop than a Prius. One line isn’t going to work for all cars. – Sir_Dude

The yellow light line is not placed based on how long it will take you to stop. The line is placed based on where you can clear the intersection while traveling at the speed limit.

Example: A driver in a Prius is driving the limit on a 35mph road and the light stays yellow for three seconds. They will travel 154 feet during the three seconds that the light is yellow. A driver in a big rig, will still travel the same 154 feet if they are driving 35mph for three seconds. So we paint the yellow light line 154 feet from the end of the intersection.

If three seconds is not enough time for a big rig to stop, then the length of time the light is yellow should be adjusted by the city. This obviously would move the location of the yellow light line, but the correct location of the line is not variable for different vehicles, it depends only on the speed limit and the length of time the light is yellow.

Currently, judgement is all drivers depend on. If you suddenly give drivers a “tip” for determining if they should go or stop, what will change? People tend to be aware of their current speed, their braking capability based on vehicle characteristics, and how far they have before the stop line. – steve_mcgee

It is true that drivers are (or should be) aware of those things. However, what drivers are often unaware of is how long the light will stay yellow, and whether or not that is enough time to make it through the intersection from their location when it turns yellow. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that different intersections have different yellow light timing. The yellow light line is a simple way of providing exactly that piece of information to drivers.

Light timing changes (gets shorter) on many intersections late at night. The timing would be off on clearing the intersection or you’d need two lines. – eran76

The overall cycle of a given traffic signal may get shorter at night, but the length of time the light is yellow is constant regardless of how long the light stays red or green, and does not change throughout the day.

What’s Next?

Like this idea? Contact your local city council and point them to this post. Share it on your favorite social media site and spread the word. Or if you’re really ambitious, file a statewide citizen’s initiative. If you feel like living dangerously, you can run the calculator for the intersections in your neighborhood, grab some yellow paint, and engage in some “Guerrilla Public Service” like L.A. artist Richard Ankrom, who installed his own freeway sign in 2001.

I’ve also provided a handy embed code above so you can easily share the yellow light line calculator.

Or maybe you think I’m a clueless idiot and this is an incredibly stupid idea? Point out the flaws in my logic in the comments below.

As always, thanks for reading.

Featured photo by Dan Bates, Everett Herald

The post Forget Red Light Cameras, We Need Yellow Light Lines appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Seattle’s worsening traffic has been the subject of a number of recent articles in both the Seattle Times¹ and the Everett Herald² based on a recent Corridor Capacity Report published by the Washington State DOT. However, this report only covers data through 2013, and my impression has been that things have gotten considerably worse just in the last few weeks.

As it turns out, I just so happen to have been collecting detailed data about my commute for over three years. Since late 2011 I’ve been logging the time at fourteen points along my way to work in the morning and on the way home in the evening. Using this data set, I can visualize my commutes to see if the last few weeks have seen anything truly out of the ordinary.

The plot below has a blue dot indicating the time between boarding the bus in Everett (at 34th & Broadway or 38th & Broadway) every morning and disembarking on one of the first stops (Stewart Street) in downtown Seattle. Orange dots represent the time spent on the bus in the evenings going the reverse direction. The lines are a 30-day rolling average.

After peaking at 56 minutes in late 2012, then peaking at 54 minutes in late 2013, the 30-day average morning commute has risen to an hour and five minutes as of November 3rd.

In fact, six of the ten worst morning commutes I’ve experienced in the last three years have been in just the past three weeks.

Probably due to the combination of the onset of rainy weather, less daylight, and other factors, the fourth quarter of each of the last three years has seen considerably worse morning traffic than the rest of the year, but this so far year it has been absolutely dreadful.

Interestingly, evening traffic in the opposite direction over this same period has not seen any significant increase compared to last year.

Hopefully the last few weeks have just been a series of terrible flukes, rather than the beginning of a trend of consistently nightmarish morning commutes.

At least I always get a seat on the bus, where I can sleep, read Reddit, or write blog posts like this.

The post Everett to Seattle Traffic Is Blowing Up appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Here’s a history lesson for you. The list below contains the names of every consumer version of Windows so far. See if you can spot the pattern…

1. 1985 – Windows 1.0
2. 1987 – Windows 2.0
3. 1990 – Windows 3.0
4. 1992 – Windows 3.1
5. 1993 – Windows 3.11 for Workgroups
6. 1995 – Windows 95
7. 1998 – Windows 98
8. 1999 – Windows 98 Second Edition
9. 2000 – Windows Millenium Edition
10. 2001 – Windows XP
11. 2007 – Windows Vista
12. 2009 – Windows 7
13. 2012 – Windows 8
14. 2013 – Windows 8.1
15. 2015 – Windows 10

Hah! It was a trick question! There is no pattern.

Here are the version names from another Microsoft product line you might be familiar with:

1. 2001 – Xbox
2. 2005 – Xbox 360
3. 2013 – Xbox One

So sure, why shouldn’t the next version of Windows be called Windows 10? Microsoft hasn’t bothered with logic in their naming schemes in the past, so why start now?

[July 2015 Update]
Just saw this tweet in an article on The Verge. Seemed appropriate to add here:

Saw this Windows t-shirt at the Microsoft booth today. Check out Windows 9 pic.twitter.com/H4jmi8hPfa

— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) March 2, 2015

The post Windows 10 No More Nonsensical a Name Than Previous Versions appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

I’m a total sucker for robots and bleeding-edge technology, but the Jibo campaign is throwing up all sorts of red flags for me.

Update: The crew at GeekWire liked my post, so I moved it over there. Read the rest at GeekWire.

The post Why I’m Skeptical of Jibo, the Overly Cute Robo-Servant appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

The visual of a can of paint larger than the moon being poured over Earth has always been something of a curiosity to me. Setting aside the obvious environmental concerns (to put it lightly) of literally covering the planet in paint, I can’t help but wonder when I see that image: How much paint would it really take to “Cover the Earth”?

A similar question was tackled by the venerable Randall Munroe in a February entry of his “What If?” series, but the question he was addressing was slightly different (“Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth?”). I want to know how much paint it would take to literally pour out a can and have it completely cover the planet—land, water, and all.

Let’s figure out just how big that giant planet-destroying Sherwin Williams paint can would really need to be in order to “Cover the Earth” with one coat of paint.

We’ll start with the surface area of Earth, which comes in at 196.9 million square miles.

Although the logo shows the planet-painting in progress rather than complete, we’re going to assume given the amount of coverage shown, the large splash at the top, and the fact that the can is tipped almost completely over that there was enough paint in the can to cover the entire planet once over with a standard coat of exterior paint.

For this project we’ve selected Sherwin Williams Resilience™ Exterior Acrylic Latex Paint. Here’s the product description:

Don’t let weather worries ruin your painting schedule. Resilience® Exterior Acrylic Latex paint gives painted exteriors exceptional moisture resistance so you don’t have to postpone painting when the forecast calls for rain, or quit working early in the day because you’re concerned about dew. You can apply Resilience in temperatures as low as 35°F.

Sounds perfect. Plus, the base color is Red, just like the logo. According to the technical data sheet, Resilience paint covers 350 to 400 square feet per gallon. We’ll go with the midpoint of that range and assume that a gallon of paint covers 375 square feet of Earth on average.

Now it’s time for a bit of math. One mile is 5,280 square feet, so a square mile is 5,280 feet * 5,280 feet = 27,878,400 square feet. Multiply the 196.9 million square mile surface area of Earth by 27.9 million and we get 5.5 quadrillion square feet. Divide that by our 375 square feet per gallon coverage and we come to 14.6 trillion gallons of paint to cover the planet in one coat of Sherwin Williams Resilience™ Exterior Acrylic Latex Paint.

So how big would that giant SWP paint can need to be in order to hold 14.6 trillion gallons? A standard 1-gallon paint can measures 6⅝” diameter by 7½” height, occupying total volume of 1.12 gallons. If we assume that our mega-can would be the same shape, just scaled up, we’ll end up with a can of paint that has a diameter of 2.6 miles and is 5.8 miles tall.

Here’s a visualization of our Earth-covering can of paint in comparison to some recognizable landmarks:

That’s a pretty big paint can, but it’s actually a lot smaller than the moon, which has a diameter of 2,159 miles. Note the surface of the moon in the visualization, to give you a sense of scale.

So, what if we actually had a can of paint with as much volume as the moon, as shown in the logo?

The volume of the moon is 2.1958×10¹⁰ km³, or roughly 5.8×10²¹ gallons, which is 397,260,274 times as much volume as our Earth-covering paint can. Let’s round that up slightly to a nice even 400 million coats of paint.

At 375 square feet per gallon, each coat of paint would be 0.00428 inches thick. It’s probably a little thinner when it dries, but with as much as we’re going do dump out on the planet, I don’t think that will happen for quite a while.

If you poured this moon-sized can of paint over Earth, the entire planet would be covered in about 27 miles of Sherwin Williams Resilience™ Exterior Acrylic Latex Paint. (Actually it wouldn’t go quite that deep, since the deeper it gets the bigger the surface area we’re covering with each layer.)

I’m no painting expert, but I think that would be going a little overboard.

Note: The coverage of a moon-sized paint can calculated at the end has been corrected. Thanks to the /r/theydidthemath user who pointed out my error.

The post How Much Paint Would it Take to "Cover the Earth"? appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

For example, thirty thousand people in the United States die every year in automobile accidents, but since we don’t see front page headlines about every single fatal collision, perhaps we just perceive the risk to be lower than climbing a mountain. Maybe mountain climbing is just as dangerous as your daily commute, but your perception is skewed.

In order to answer my question, I collected fatality rate data on a variety of activities to compare with climbing Rainier. Here are the risky activity contestants, and the average annual number of fatalities that occurred during each over the last ten years or so.

• walking: ~4,000 fatalities
• bicycling: ~600 fatalities
• driving a car: ~30,000 fatalities
• driving a motorcycle: ~4,000 fatalities
• commercial flight: ~14 fatalities
• skydiving: ~22 fatalities
• Dungeness crab fishing: ~3 fatalities
• climbing Mount Rainier: ~1 fatality

I wanted to include a good variety of activities, from things we all do every day like walking, riding a bicycle, or driving, to things that most of us probably don’t do, but are widely considered to be dangerous, like skydiving and professional Dungeness crab fishing, an activity that is widely regarded as the “deadliest” occupation in the country.

To compare everything on a relatively level playing field, I divided the total number of deaths over the last ten-ish years in each activity by the total number of trips taken in that activity in the same period, then multiplied by 100 million to bring all the numbers up to a scale that’s easier to visually compare.

Here’s the result:

Okay then! As it turns out, mountain climbing is ridiculously more dangerous than every other activity I was able to find data on. It’s not even remotely in the same league. Climbing Mount Rainier is 14 times more deadly than the “deadliest job” of fishing for crab in Alaska.

Now, it’s worth noting that normalizing for deaths per 100 million trips isn’t totally fair, since most people who attempt to summit Rainier will probably only do it once or twice in their lives, while the average person probably takes 50 to 100 thousand trips in a car through the course of their lifetime. Your odds of dying in a car wreck on any given trip are fairly low, but the odds that you might die in a car wreck sometime in your lifetime are much higher.

To quantify that, the odds that you’ll die in an attempt to summit Rainier are roughly 0.02 percent. The odds that you’ll die on any given trip in your car is 0.0000038 percent. But the odds that you’ll die in a car wreck sometime in your life is roughly between 0.19 percent and 0.38 percent—considerably higher than your odds of dying in a single attempt to summit Rainier. In other words, your chances of dying from driving at some point in your life are about 19 times greater than your chances of dying while climbing Rainier.

Still, I was surprised that climbing Rainier is that dangerous per trip. A 0.02 percent fatality rate sounds low, but it’s way, way higher than every other activity on the list. Of course, it’s not even remotely the most dangerous thing you can do. If I had included a bar for climbing Mount Everest, it would have made everything else on the chart look minuscule. Everest has around a one percent fatality rate—1,000,000 deaths per 100 million trips compared to “just” 15,942 for Rainier. And according to Mental Floss, there are at least five mountains even more dangerous than Everest—including Annapurna in Central Nepal, with a 22 percent death rate (22,000,000 deaths per 100 million trips).

So basically I won’t be climbing any mountains. Ever.

Data Sources:
• Journalist’s Resource: U.S. transportation safety over time
• NTSB: Review of Accident Data
• NHTSA: Fatality Analysis Reporting System
• NHTSA: Traffic Safety Facts
• US DOT: National Household Travel Survey
• US Census: Population Estimates
• US DOT: Transportation Fatalities by Mode
• NHTSA: Pedestrians
• Bicycle Almanac: Bicycle Safety Almanac
• Snell Foundation: Injuries to Bicyclists
• NHTSA: Bicycles
• American Journal of Public Health: Walking and Cycling in the United States, 2001–2009
• Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center: Pedestrian and Bicyclist Crash Statistics
• USPA: Skydiving Safety
• CDC: Commercial Fishing Safety
• National Park Service: Mount Rainier Annual Climbing Statistics
• National Park Service: Mountaineering Reports & Statistics
• Mt. Rainier National Park Climbing and Mountaineering: Fatalities at Mt. Rainier National Park

Feature photo by Flickr user Keith

The post Which is More Dangerous: Climbing Rainier or the “Deadliest Job”? appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

P.S. – This is 100% real. If META is funded on Kickstarter, I will really be building META.

The post Introducing META: The Idea Generator appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

I especially enjoyed the big, red, bold text at the end of the email threatening to use Google’s Disavow tool as some sort of weapon against me should I not comply with his demand. Despite the vague claim in the email (no specific link to the post or posts in question) and the unnecessary threat, I decided to look into it, because to my knowledge no spam comments have ever gotten through on my site thanks to Akismet.

As best I can tell, there exists a grand total of one link to BankruptcyAction.com on Seattle Bubble. It was placed by a long-time reader in a 2008 comment. Since I’m not in the habit of editing reader comments unless the person who posted the comment requests it or it violates my comment policy, I politely declined to modify or delete the link in my reply:

This did not please Gordon, who indicated that he intended to follow through with his big scary threat:

Since Gordon seemed to be operating under some sort of false assumption that I care whether or not BankruptcyAction.com disavows my site to Google, I thought I would clear things up for him.

In reply: more veiled threats from Gordon.

I thought it only fair that I give Gordon a few tips, like if you want someone to do something for you maybe don’t lead off with giant bold threats.

Gordon’s final word on the matter confirmed my original suspicion: he’s trying to undo the damage done by comment spam.

That the comment in question on Seattle Bubble is obviously not spam is of no concern to Gordon Sands or BankruptcyAction.com. And because apparently he felt like his threats did not go far enough, he decided to close our conversation by calling me “a sensitive woman,” which I assume was meant to be an insult. But I am the one who “can’t handle your business.” Right.

Good luck to you as well, Gordon Sands and BankruptcyAction.com! You’re going to need it.

[Update]
Oops, I guess Gordon Sands decided he wasn’t done “wasting time” after all!

@the_tim I did contact Tim for a simple, polite link removal request and only got a rude reply in turn. Tim does not know how to run a biz

— Gordon Sands (@bkaction) March 4, 2014

@the_tim Tim needs to grow up and conduct himself properly. When someone refuses to remove comment spam you disavow the website Timmy.

— Gordon Sands (@bkaction) March 4, 2014

Keep digging, Gordon.

The post Gordon Sands Threatens Seattle Bubble with Google Disavow in Misguided Attempt to Clean Up BankruptcyAction.com Comment Spam appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Don Adams’ “Get Smart” character Maxwell Smart was Agent 86.

Don Adams’ voiced the goofy 1980s cartoon character Inspector Gadget in a total of 86 episodes.

I just thought that was an amusing and random coincidence.

Also, I love Don Adams. He was great.

“Would you believe…”

The post Don Adams, 86 in Get Smart & Inspector Gadget appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

I have hand-crafted just the thing for you!

Behold: Kickstarter Design Project Idea Generator

You’re welcome.

The post Kickstarter Idea Generator appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Here are just a few of the amazing ’80s tech gems in the Markline catalog…

Credit Card Calculator

If you like calculators, Markline has you covered. Is it a credit card, or is it a calculator?!? Who can say?!?

Wristwatch Calculator

Or maybe you don’t carry a wallet? No problem, strap a calculator to your wrist!

Checkbook Calculator

Or perhaps you’d prefer not to flaunt your calculating prowess to the world… how about a calculator in your checkbook?

Printing Calculator

Maybe you need a calculator that can print tiny color charts? NO PROBLEM!

Mr. Disc

Sometimes after a hard day of calculating, you need to take a break. Behold: Mr. Disc!

Holodeck Workout

Gotta keep in shape, ’80s style, in the holodeck!

So Much More

The fun goes on and on and on… for over 40 pages. Just a few more examples:

• Take A Look Into The Future With Casio’s Large Screen Pocket-Sized LCD TV!
• The Miracle of Remote Control—In A Watch.
• Any Watch Can Tell Time… Only The Casio TS1000 Can Give You The Temperature Too!
• Revolutionary Storage Idea For All Your Tapes.
• Koala Makes Your Graphic Dreams Come True With The Friendliest Innovation In Personal Computing.
• The Phone Of The Future Is Here Today.
• How Do You Buy A ColecoVision Virtually For Free?
• At Last A Rechargeable, Voice Activated Microcassette Recorder.

At last!

Where’s My Fall 2013 Markline Catalog?

When this was brought into the office, another of my coworkers tried calling the toll-free ordering phone numbers mentioned throughout the Markline catalog. Unfortunately, one number was disconnected and the other went to some other company who had never heard of Markline.

So what happened to Markline? I dug around online a bit and was able to find this article, published about 10 years after this particular catalog hit the presses.

Catalog Age | October 1993: Markline ‘disappears.’ (Markline International goes out of business)

WEYMOUNT, MA—By all indications, gifts cataloger Markline International is out of business. Markline’s phone lines are either out of order or they go unanswered. Sources close to the company say it has ceased doing business, and “disappeared off the face of the earth,” according to founder and former owner Herb Klein. Klein still runs a business called Markline Business Products in Weymouth, MA, where Markline International had been based.

Gene Bellotti, whose direct marketing agency Harper Bellotti produced catalogs for Markline, says owner Robert D. Montague has “stopped mailing [the catalog], and he’s trying to sell it.”

Sad times.

But fear not! You can still enjoy the entire Fall 1983 Markline Catalog in convenient pdf format by downloading below or simply browsing the embedded version below.

Markline Fall 1983 Catalog

1 file(s) 39.41 MB

Download

January 2015 Update
I had the good fortune this month to receive the following email, reproduced with permission of the sender.

My daughter found your posting of the Markline catalog online. I was the vice-president of catalog planning (77-85) which included merchandising the catalog. I left the company before they were sold.

It probably was the most fun job I had during my career. Finding new and unusual items. In fact, we introduced the Sony Walkman in the U.S. We imported it from Hong Kong because Sony U.S. didn’t think it would be a hit. They changed their mind after they saw how many we sold. I’ve kept several different catalogs including the one you posted.

Thanks for the memories,

Ray

The post The Amazing ’80s Technology Gems of the Markline Catalog appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

The post Mmm… Flies! appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

I have won a PAX medal at each of the last three PAX Prime events that I have had the pleasure of attending. In 2011 I got one for placing second in a Pac-Man Championship Edition DX tournament. In 2012 I won one for having the second-best pitch at the Pitch Your Game Idea panel. This year I won a high score contest for the Super Nintendo game Tin Star, using the SuperScope.

As I was enjoying my PAX medals, I noticed something odd. Each year, the PAX medals are getting slightly smaller.

Time to break out some measuring tools.

PAX Medals: Ribbon Length

First up, length of the ribbons:

That’s 4cm of ribbon loss in just two years. At this rate, PAX medals will be a 15cm choker by 2020.

PAX Medals: Medal Height

Let’s check the height.

The shrinkage of the medals is even more dramatic than the ribbon shrinkage. If it keeps up at the same rate they’ll disappear completely by 2020.

PAX Medals: Mass

Finally, let’s weigh these suckers on my kitchen scale.

The loss of mass is the most extreme, with an average loss of 3.5g per year putting the medals on a path to vanish entirely by 2018. Also, apparently PAX medals are not very nutritious.

PAX Medals: Shrinkage Summary

Here’s a summary of my findings:

There is one category in which PAX medals are getting measurably better: back-side engraving. The 2011 medal just had a generic number. The 2012 medal still had the number, but they added a bit about what the medal was for. In 2013 the number was dropped entirely and the font got a sweet upgrade.

Anyway, this is all apparently interesting enough for me to write a 333-word blog post, but despite the shrinkage, I still enjoy my PAX medals.

The post The Incredible Shrinking PAX Medals appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Enjoy… OR ELSE.

[slideshare id=26285361&doc=11-classic-video-games-130917164657-phpapp01]

P.S. – I also posted it to BuzzFeed, if you’re more into reading these kinds of things in a flat format.

The post Video Games + Home Improvement = Porch Launch appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Dan Anderson is a high school math teacher. As part of a class exercise, he had his kids measure the “stuf” content of regular Oreo cookies, “Double Stuf” Oreo cookies, and “Mega Stuf” Oreo cookies.

According to his kids’ calculations, the “Double Stuf” Oreos contained 1.86x as much filling as regular Oreos. Oops.

After his original blog post blew up on the internet, Dan did a more extensive experiment of his own and came up with similar results: “Double Stuf” Oreos contained just 1.89x as much filling as regular Oreos.

The experiments got quite a bit of attention online, and even drew an official response from Nabisco, as covered by ABC News:

A spokeswoman for Nabisco told ABCNews.com the company’s Double Stuf Oreos are made to have double the creme filling as the original Oreos.

“While I’m not familiar with what was done in the classroom setting, I can confirm for you that our recipe for the Oreo Double Stuf Cookie has double the Stuf, or creme filling, when compared with our base, or original Oreo cookie,” the spokeswoman said.

And yet… That’s not what the data actually shows.

Score
Data-driven observations: 1
Nabisco: 0

via BoingBoing

The post “Double Stuf” Oreos Actually Only “1.89x Stuf” appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

For reference, here is the “Sharknado” trailer:

RT: NPR: ‘Sharknado’ Dares To Ask: Is It Going To Rain Giant Man-Eating Sharks?

YO: I feel like I should revive our shark air-swimmer.

NG: Sharknado was all the rage lat night on Twitter. 9/10 tweets were about it

FN: OMG. Seriously, EVERYONE I follow on Twitter was going nuts about Sharknado.

OS: Fin’s name should have been Foo. Then Foo could have owned a bar, and been friends with Baz.

FN: The company that makes these movies is called The Asylum. They were also responsible for the “Megashark vs.” series and other recent super low budget classics. There was one with a mega piranha. Here’s a 2010 article about The Asylum.

OS: The low-budget big action knock-off is such a funny niche. I’ve been watching a lot of Rifftrax recently of mid-80s straight-to-video knockoffs. There’s always the one or two big-name actors who are slumming or fallen on hard times, the incomprehensible plot, and the strangely professional cinematography and sometimes stunts.

FN: Last sharknado bit from me for today (I have so much work I’m avoiding!): io9 did an excellent interview with the writer.

GR: Ha ha, awesome: “Honestly, I don’t understand why people are so perplexed by this concept. The logic is undeniable.”

TO: That interview is hilarious.

TO: “Has the shark disaster movie run its course, or are we just ramping up? It’s called Sharknado. I think the shark genre has reached its natural and logical conclusion.”

NO: In other words, have shark movies… jumped the shark?

YO: What about sharks in space?

YO: “Freddy vs. Shark”?

OS: “Sharks on a Plane”?

XW: Zombie laser sharks in space. On fire.

OS: Tsusharkmi

GR: What if the Yellowstone Caldera were full of… SHARKS?!? “Megasharkano,” in theaters 2014.

OS: (clap)

RF: “Shark Impact” – Asteroid containing space-sharks on course to destroy Earth. …or would that be “Shark-ageddon”?

OS: Megalogeddadon

RF: Ooh, nice.

RF: I guess for the logic to be undeniable, it would have to be a comet containing frozen space sharks

RF: +1 if the sharks are sentient/intelligent. Then you could pull in the “Independence Day” trope.

ET: RE: intelligent sharks — Deep Blue Sea

RF: @ET good point; the movie should also feature the star power of LL Cool J.

TO: Microscopic sharks (ala Fantastic Voyage; 1966) attacking the body from within!

GR: Megashark vs. Microsharks!

TO: Megashark thinks it killed microshark by eating it, microshark kills megashark from within, microshark dies due to a lifeless host. A shakespearean shark tragedy!

GR: You know what guys let’s just forget this real estate thing and pivot Redfin into a shark disaster movie company.

YO: We can keep the company name.

RF: Can we work zombie sharks into this?

QS: @GR How do you know that this ISN’T a shark disaster movie?

QS: Oh, hang on, guys. I’ll be right back…

RF: Somebody’s at the door!

RF: (Landshark!)

RF: Man, the internets are sadly devoid of any SNL Landshark skits. Wow; first aired in 1975. Now I feel *really* old.

NO: You know what Twilight needed? Hunky teenage sharks.

QS: [Vampire Sharks]

NO: Would vampire sharks work together with vampire ents?

QS: I found this trailer when googling Vampire Sharks. It has, ah, homegrown charm.

RF: How about weresharks?

RF: That would be an unfortunate affliction to have you if you were landlocked during a full moon.

FYI: I anonymized the chat participants and cleaned things up a bit for readability.

The post Sharknado: Has the “Shark Genre” Reached its Logical Conclusion? NOPE. appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

For those who want more details, and for the other half of my coworkers who would have asked me about my breakfast in the coming months, I decided to provide the following step-by-step breakdown.

Tim’s Paleo Breakfast Cost & Calories

First up, here’s a summary of the costs and calories in table format, because who doesn’t like tables.

Shopping List

Next, let’s take a look at what you’ll need to buy from the grocery store if you want to eat like me for some reason. I get all my ingredients for this Paleo breakfast from Costco, which is what I’m basing the prices on in the lists below. Okay, technically that last sentence was a lie since Redfin (my employer) provides the eggs as part of their regularly-stocked kitchen items, but I’m including the price of the eggs so other readers can get a complete picture of the total cost.

Here’s what I pick up at Costco:

• 24 Eggs (organic free-range): $6.99
• Kirkland Signature Wild Alaskan Smoked Salmon, 16 oz: $15.59 $14.89
• Bella Sun Luci Sun-Dried Tomatoes, 2 lb: $7.99 $11.47 $8.59

[October 2014 Update – A few months ago Costco stopped stocking Bella Sun Luci Sun-Dried Tomatoes, replacing them with Kirkland Signature Oven-Dried Roma Tomatoes. The new tomatoes come in the same size jar and cost around the same, but do not taste the same. In my opinion the taste and texture of Costco’s store brand dried tomatoes is inferior. I am now purchasing the Bella Sun Luci tomatoes directly from the manufacturer, who sells them for $50.67 + $18.13 shipping for a case of six, which comes out to $11.47 each. I have updated the prices above to reflect this change.]

[August 2015 Update – Good news, everyone! Costco dropped their terrible Kirkland Signature Oven-Dried Roma Tomatoes and brought back the Bella Sun Luci sun-dried tomatoes. They’re a little more expensive now than they were when I first put this post together, but the price of the salmon has gone down, so the overall cost is back down to just under two dollars. Nice. I never got a reply to the email I sent Costco corporate complaining about the inferior quality of their tomatoes, but I am going to take credit for this victory anyway.]

Ingredients

Next up, the daily portion size:

• 2 eggs
• 1 oz smoked salmon
• 1⅓ oz sun-dried tomatoes

Technically that’s half a serving of salmon and two servings of sun-dried tomatoes. Obviously you should adjust the portions to your liking, but that’s what I happen to use. It’s also worth noting that I typically use a fork to get the tomatoes out of the jar, allowing as much oil as possible to drain off. This means that rather than the labeled 48 servings per 2-pound jar, I get about 36 servings per jar. In other words, about 25% of the contents of the jar of sun-dried tomatoes is olive oil.

Let’s Make Breakfast

If you’re making this at home the instructions are easy:

1. stir everything together
2. cook it on a greased skillet

Unfortunately something the Redfin kitchen doesn’t have is a burner, which means the skillet method isn’t available to me at work. Consequently, I’ve had to learn how to make the perfect scrambled eggs in the microwave. Here’s what the complete process—store to serve—looks like for me:

1. buy salmon
2. buy sun-dried tomatoes
3. buy eggs
4. prep salmon (night before)
5. prep tomatoes (night before)
6. break 2 eggs into a bowl
7. beat the eggs
8. add the salmon & tomatoes
9. stir ingredients together
10. microwave 1 minute at 50% power
11. remove from microwave
12. stir ingredients together
13. microwave 1 minute at 50% power
14. remove from microwave
15. stir ingredients together
16. microwave 10-30 seconds at 50% power, depending on how wet you like your eggs
17. remove from microwave
18. enjoy

And here it is in pictures, if you’re more of a visual person (click for slideshow):

That’s it! Add some salt & pepper or your favorite hot sauce (I prefer Frank’s Red Hot) and you’ve got yourself a healthy, delicious, energy-packed breakfast.

P.S. – If you’re wondering what “Paleo” is, in short it’s a way of eating that consists primarily of meat and vegetables. Basically you eat no sugars, no processed foods, and no grains. I’ve been eating this way (though not 100% strict) for most of 2013. I don’t care about nor buy into Paleo’s evolutionary mumbo-jumbo backstory. All I know is that eating this way helps me feel great and have more energy throughout the day. Plus I shaved about 15 pounds in the first month, so that was a nice bonus.

The post Salmon, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, & Eggs – Tim’s Daily Paleo Breakfast appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

From the Los Angeles Times: 6,297 Chinese restaurants and hungry for more

[Los Angeles attorney David] Chan, 64, has eaten at 6,297 Chinese restaurants (at press time) and he has documented the experiences on an Excel spreadsheet, a data-centric diary of a gastronomic journey that spans the United States and beyond.
…
Chan was eating at new restaurants faster than they could open up. Soon there wasn’t a single one in the area he hadn’t tried, but still, he was unsatisfied.

In 1985, he hit 86 restaurants in the Los Angeles area and around the country. The next year, 119. Before long he was trying more than 300 restaurants every year.

In Toronto, he hit six dim sum restaurants in six hours. When he traveled for business in Florida, he zigzagged the state to sample 20 Chinese restaurants.

Chan had always wanted to travel to all 50 states, and Chinese food gave him an excuse. In places he would have never imagined, he found Chinese people with their own version of Chinese food.

They’ve also created a neat interactive timeline visual of the LA-area visits documented in Chan’s spreadsheet, a static portion of which I’ve excerpted above.

The article doesn’t really get into the details of how he’s kept his list, or what types of information he keeps about each visit aside from the date, location, decor, and his order. Since he started his list in 1955, he must have kept it in a paper journal for decades before taking the time at some point to transcribe it all into Excel.

That is a seriously impressive dedication to data.

via BoingBoing

The post LA Man Collects Data on 6,000+ Chinese Restaurant Visits appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

I won’t ruin the ending for you. If you want to see how the 100 Peeps challenge turned out for Francis, you can check out the full episode on Netflix (Season 2, Episode 1).

Guess who has obtained over 200 Peeps and thrown down a 100 Peeps challenge to his friends?

The post The 100 Peeps Challenge: “How can something so simple be so delicious?” appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

It’s slim, looks cool, and doesn’t have any metal like my current money clip, so it won’t tear up my jeans. Plus the fact that the project creator is local is an added bonus too. But this post isn’t about the cool new wallet I’ll be receiving in a month or two. It’s about the dozens of other wallet projects that have suddenly appeared on Kickstarter as of late.

Maybe it’s just my perception, but in the last few weeks there seems to have been an explosion of wallets on Kickstarter. Here’s just a sampling of currently active wallet projects:

Behold The Kickstarter Wallets

In case you haven’t got an hour free to sit around and watch all those videos, here’s a summary. We’ve got…

• stylish leather – $30
• modern leather – $30
• titanium & elastic – $76
• titanium & rubber – $78
• aircraft grade aluminum – $29
• super-thin aluminum – $45
• recycled billboard vinyl – $20
• carbon fibre – $50
• minmalist wrap – $20
• stick-on iPhone – $40
• hardwood – $25

Holy cow that is a lot of wallets.

I wonder why Kickstarter seems to have suddenly become Walletstarter? Is there some sort of international internet billfold-maker club whose members suddenly all decided to go put their new wallet projects up on Kickstarter in 2013? Is Kickstarter having a special promotion for wallet projects? Is there a wallet drought on the internet that inspired dozens of projects to attempt to fill the void?

If you’re looking for a new and unique way to store your money and cards, apparently now is the time to join Kickstarter.

About the only kind of wallet I haven’t seen yet on there is one made of glass. Say, that gives me an idea…

The post Wallet Overload on Kickstarter appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

After 3,723 hours of service, the lamp in my projector literally exploded one Friday night (01/25) a few weeks ago in the middle of 30 Rock (okay, technically I think it actually imploded). With just over a week left before my annual Groundhog Day party (02/02), I needed to order a new lamp right away, so I got online immediately and began the hunt.

The 1000Bulbs Experience

Fortunately (or so I thought) I found a great deal on a replacement lamp at a site called 1000Bulbs—just $115 shipped. I placed the order before going to bed, assuming it would be sent to me from their warehouse first thing Monday morning and delivered well before the following Saturday via standard ground shipping.

Monday came… and went. By early Tuesday afternoon (01/29) I still had not received a shipping notification from 1000Bulbs. With just four days until my party I was getting nervous, so I emailed them to ask when my lamp would be shipping. Here’s their response, in part:

Unfortunately the product you ordered is currently out of stock. Occasionally our vendors experience product demand that conflicts with our goal of providing our customers with speedy delivery and we apologize for this inconvenience. It is estimated to ship from the factory on or before February 3, 2013.

Well that obviously wouldn’t work, since I needed it for Groundhog Day. This revelation was especially annoying to me, since the product page for the lamp I ordered did not indicate anywhere on it that the item was out of stock.

The Amazon Experience

So I headed to Amazon to see if they had the right lamp. Luckily I was able to find the right lamp for my projector, and although it was from a third-party seller, it was “fulfilled by Amazon,” so I was confident that it was actually in stock. I paid the extra $10 for 2-day shipping and called it good.

By the end of the day Tuesday my Amazon orders page still said “shipping soon.” Wednesday afternoon it still said “shipping soon.” Okay now I was starting to get worried. But then Wednesday evening (01/30) it said “shipped.” Not only that, but when I checked the FedEx tracking number, I discovered that they had shipped it “FedEx Standard Overnight” even though I only paid for 2-day shipping.

Sure enough, the new lamp arrived Thursday (01/31). When I got home from work and put it in the projector, it worked like a champ. It cost me a little more to get a new lamp than I originally thought it would, but it was worth it since Amazon came through with even better service than they promised.

The Continuing 1000Bulbs Experience

Back to 1000Bulbs… Since their lamp was so cheap, I decided to leave the order open, figuring that I would use the second lamp as a backup for next time. But, the same day FedEx delivered the lamp I had ordered on Amazon (01/31), I got another email from 1000Bulbs:

Unfortunately the product you ordered is currently out of stock… It is estimated to ship from the factory on or before February 12, 2013.

What?!? Okay fine, whatever. I don’t need it right away anyway.

Guess what email 1000Bulbs sent me on the following Wednesday (02/06).

Unfortunately the product you ordered is currently out of stock… It is estimated to ship from the factory on or before February 18, 2013.

Okay seriously. Forget it. I responded to the email, asking them to cancel the order. It is also worth noting that the product page for the lamp I ordered still did not indicate anywhere on it that the item was out of stock, despite the fact that it had apparently been so for at least 13 days.

By Friday (02/08) I had not heard a peep back from 1000Bulbs confirming that my order was canceled, so I called their customer service number. When I asked to cancel the order, they informed me that it had already been canceled. Great. Thanks so much for letting me know.

The Scoreboard

Let’s check the scoreboard:

• 1000Bulbs: Deceptive product page with no indication of zero stock, slow communication, repeated delays in promised delivery, no confirmation of order cancellation.
• Amazon: In-stock product shipped via a faster method than promised, less than 48 hours from order placed to product in-hand.

Gee, I wonder why Amazon is taking over the world of online retail.

The post 1000Bulbs vs. Amazon: A Tale of Two Orders appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Allow me to explain. Here are a few examples of your typical microwave:

This LG microwave has 31 buttons. Thirty-one (non-tactile) buttons, when all I want to do with a microwave is heat up food for a specified amount of time..

Talk about overkill.

This Jenn-Air microwave sports 34 buttons. Thirty-four buttons! The microwave in my kitchen at home is a similar Jenn-Air model, also with thirty-four flat, zero-feedback buttons. The vast majority of the time, I use exactly two of these buttons: “Add 30 Sec.” (which also starts the heat) and “Stop / Cancel.” For those of you keeping score at home, that makes 94% of the buttons on my microwave a total waste of space.

Combine an excess of useless buttons with a completely flat surface that has zero tactile feedback, and you’ve basically designed the worst interface possible. Which comes standard on most microwaves. For some reason.

Let’s say I’m watching a movie in the next room over and would prefer not to divert my eyes from the screen and turn on the kitchen lights just to reheat my tea. Too bad. Thanks to the totally flat, non-tactile button style that has somehow become standard on microwaves, coupled with how tiny each button needs to be in order to fit that many buttons on the face of the microwave, hitting the correct buttons to heat your food or drink requires a well-lit room and your full attention.

Thankfully, microwave user interface design is not a completely lost cause… You won’t usually find them on the shelves of your local Sears or Target, but there are some microwaves that manage to avoid “death by mega-button-pad.”

This is the microwave in the kitchen at my office, the awfully-named Panasonic “NN-SD681S Genius ‘Prestige'” ($180 on Amazon) It’s definitely a step in the right direction, with 14 raised tactile buttons plus a simple knob, but most of the buttons are still completely superfluous. What the heck is “Inverter Turbo Defrost” or “Inverter Melt & Soften”? No doubt some microwave engineer worked long hours coming up with these clever features, but seriously… why?

I don’t need my microwave to “sensor cook” my food. I don’t need it to tell me the time. I don’t need an entire button dedicated to “Pizza Slice” (I kid you not, that is a button on my microwave). I just need it to heat up food for a specified amount of time.

The really strange thing is that things have not always been this dire when it comes to microwave UI. Here’s a typical microwave from the 1970s:

Source: Ranch Wife

That’s more like it. Two knobs and three nice, big, tactile buttons. It doesn’t get much more simple than that. Okay, well maybe it does…

I have been able to find one currently-available microwave that satisfies my simple use requirement of “heat up food for a specified amount of time” in the most elegant way possible. A microwave that sports a user interface that’s actually an improvement over microwaves of forty years ago, instead of a dozen giant steps backward.

Behold the Sharp 1000W/R-21LC:

One knob. That’s the entire user interface. Zero buttons. Zero fancy-sounding features that never get used. Just turn the knob to the desired time, and the microwave heats the food. Lights blink around the knob to indicate how much time remains. So simple, so elegant. (Although I could do without all the superfluous text.)

I purchased this UI masterpiece at a surplus store, but I have also seen them at a “business” Costco in my area, or you can get it at Amazon for $280.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t come in an over-the-range style, so I won’t be able to replace the 34-button monstrosity in my kitchen just yet. For now I’ll have to be satisfied with only having a microwave that’s actually user friendly in the basement, but since that’s where I’m relocating my movie room to anyway, that will do nicely.

[2015 Update]
After this was posted on HackerNews and BoingBoing, some of the commenters on those sites brought up some info worth sharing.

First, a few people complained that I didn’t answer the “why” question in the headline. As it turns out, Reddit user colorimeter addressed that in a recent /r/AskEngineers thread (hat tip to BoingBoing commenter t3knomanser):

Guess what: US appliance controls are all contracted out, and there is very little institutional knowledge that is retained across the designs. … They are mostly pathetic designs, because nobody in the corporate side of this business seems to know what they are doing anymore. The poor sods who do this kind of work are probably some of the most disgruntled engineers out there, since they literally aren’t allowed to do a good job of it.

Also, HackerNews commenter ZeroGravitas pointed out another modern microwave with a clean, simple interface, the Samsung MS23F301EAK/EU:

[2020 Update]
The YouTube channel Technology Connections made a great video about a 1997 Sharp microwave that is pretty nifty. The button layout isn’t the best, but at least they are actual physical, buttons. And I will admit, the features of this microwave sound pretty darn useful. Give it a watch.

The post Why do most microwaves have such a terrible user interface? appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

The 2020 election is well behind us, but Trump’s big lie about election fraud is unfortunately still very popular among the Republicans. Now Republicans in a bunch of states are making a big push to pass a wide variety of bills blatantly aimed at voter suppression. I want to be extremely clear here: I do not support this in any way.

I still prefer in-person voting to all-mail voting, but I am totally in favor of dramatically expanding early voting, adding many more polling places, and generally removing obstacles to voting. I still think universal mail-in voting suffers from the problems listed below, but I strongly denounce any and all attempts to artificially limit access to voting.

August 2020 Update

With mail-in voting becoming a much larger issue nationwide in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to briefly re-visit this topic.

Given the health risks of assembling in large groups and the need to take extreme measures to combat the pandemic, I am fully supportive of using widespread mail-in ballots to mitigate public health risks.

I also want to make it very clear that I am in no way agreeing with Donald Trump’s characterization of mail-in voting as somehow rife with fraud and leading to an “illegitimate” outcome. That is garbage and obviously nonsense with absolutely no basis in reality.

That said, I do still have a number of issues with all-mail elections (outlined below), and my preferred solution to make voting equally accessible to all in normal circumstances would be to dramatically increase the number of polling places and make election day a national holiday. No one should have to wait in line for hours in order to vote. Obviously though, we are not living in normal times, so we cannot rely on normal solutions.

[end of updates, original post follows]

As another Election Day trudges along, I would like to take a few moments to rant about an incredibly stupid aspect of election administration here in Washington State: The all-mail election.

There are actually a number of things that I think are idiotic about the way we run election in this country generally and this state specifically, but for now I’m going to stick to the topic of all-mail ballots. Here are the six reasons that all-mail voting is inferior to polling-place elections, with some totally random “Christian” art thrown in to keep things visually interesting.

1) Your all-mail voting means many voters no longer have a secret ballot.
When multiple voters live together (e.g. husband and wife, older children living at home, etc.), all ballots are mailed to the home and accessible by whoever happens to check the mail. There is literally nothing to stop a controlling husband/father from forcing his electoral preferences on all other members of his household. With physical polling places, this is not an issue since each person goes into the private voting booth alone.

2) All-mail voting encourages participation from people who don’t care.
Getting off your butt, driving or walking to the nearest polling place, waiting in line, and casting a ballot at a physical polling place requires at least some small degree of “giving a crap.” With all-mail voting, you never even have to leave your house to cast your vote. Frankly, I don’t really want people casting a vote if they can’t be bothered to expend the minimal effort required to go to a polling place twice a year.

3) All-mail voting provides more opportunities for lost, stolen, or damaged ballots.
Ballots are all mailed out on a predictable date, which means anyone whose mailbox is not secure could have their ballot stolen before they even have a chance to fill it out. After you fill your ballot out and drop it in the mail, there’s a chance that it gets lost in the mail and fails to make it to the county elections administrators, or caught in a piece of mail-sorting equipment, rained on, or otherwise damaged to a point where one or more of your votes are unreadable. Granted, this risk is small, but with physical polling places, the risk is zero since you get the ballot, fill it out, and drop it off with election officials all in the same building.

4) All-mail voting allows candidates undue influence “at the polls.”
On the day I received my ballot, my mailbox also contained political ads for two or three candidates running for various local offices. Why should the candidate with the money to send out a mailer and the luck of good timing be allowed to have an advantage like that over his or her opponent? With physical polling places, this is not an issue since candidates are not permitted to campaign or have any campaign materials at the location where people are actually casting their votes.

5) All-mail voting drags out Election Day.
Washington State’s current system merely requires that mail-in ballots be postmarked by election day. This means that election officials won’t have all the ballots in-hand to count until days or even weeks after Election Day. We could instead require ballots to arrive at the county election office by Election Day, but then we would risk disenfranchising people whose ballots were somehow delayed in the mail through no fault of their own. With physical polling places, all the ballots can be counted on Election Day, then the election is over.

6) All-mail voting wastes paper.
In addition to the ballot itself, inside the envelope containing my ballot for today’s election, there was a security envelope, a mailing envelope, a small flyer describing new congressional districts, and another listing off ballot drop box locations. Compare this to a physical polling places, where all that needs to be printed is the ballot. Let’s assume that the three envelopes and two small flyers weigh a total of one ounce. Multiply that by the 3,851,274 registered voters in Washington State, and you’re talking about 240,705 pounds (120 tons!) of wasted paper per election.

So, there you go. If I were Secretary of State, one of my top priorities would be to eliminate all-mail voting in Washington. It’s just a bad idea, and the problems it introduces far outweigh any perceived benefits.

P.S. (These arguments should not be construed to be making a case against legitimate absentee ballots. If you aren’t going to be physically present in your voting district on Election Day, or you are physically incapable of traveling to a polling place, you should of course still get to vote.)

The post All-Mail Elections Need to Go appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

The more lines you match the more wildly the game board swings around in all three dimensions. It gets even more insane than you can see above, I just didn’t have that good of a game when I was capturing the video.

Another random cool bit about the game: The soundtrack is contained in a file called “pufftris.mod,” which when opened in a music player like Winamp displays the title of the piece as “zaggazogga,” and includes the comment (apparently in Swedish) “NU E DET BROTTOM! Ursäkta för att jag gör detta!” This appears to translate roughly as “NOW, IT’S A CRIME! Excuse me for doing this!” In my book, any game with a soundtrack called “zaggazogga” would be awesome for that reason alone.

I don’t remember where I originally got this game. According to the game’s closing screen it was released in May 1996, and I have had it floating around on various hard drives since high school. When I thought I had lost it in transition between computers, I tried numerous times to locate it on the internet with zero luck, and other than the reference on the game’s closing screen to an entity called “PuffSoft” and the game designer “Jesse,” there aren’t any clues as to who exactly created this game.

[2018 Update]
Some time after I published this post and video, PuffTris appeared online on the website collectingsmiles.com. Here’s the site description:

Collecting Smiles is an independent developer based in Stockholm, Sweden. Collecting Smiles was founded by Jens Andersson in 2007, while on sabbatical from his dual role as Creative and Engineering Lead at Starbreeze Studios in Sweden. He used Collecting Smiles to experiment with new gameplay types and share his findings with the gaming community.

I reached out to Jens on Twitter and confirmed… he is the original creator of PuffTris!

PuffTris was made during the demopoarty Hackerence in 1995. They held a game-jam that weekend with the theme Tetris-clone. I didn't win. :)

— Jens Andersson (@Llerd) April 26, 2018

So finally after all these years, I can give credit where it is due to Jens for creating what is still my favorite version of Tetris. Be sure to check out his current game Yoku’s Island Express, coming to PC and consoles later this year.

[End of Update]

Therefore, I present to you here today the apparently world-exclusive, unauthorized re-release of the world’s most brutal Tetris clone:

PuffTris

1 file(s) 148.46 KB

Download

Be sure to read the README.txt file. Since this game was released sixteen years ago for MS-DOS, the only way I’ve been able to get it to run correctly on a modern PC operating system is by installing DOSBox and running PuffTris through that. The README.txt file has step-by-step instructions on how to get the game running with DOSBox.

PuffTris has always been my favorite Tetris clone. It’s not overtly evil like HATETRIS, just plain insane. Plus the soundtrack isn’t half bad, especially by mid-90s standards.

Anyway, I hope that some of you out there can enjoy PuffTris as much as I have.

The post PuffTris: Most Insane Tetris Clone Ever appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

[Councilmember Jane] Hague then wanted to know if the region could support so many teams. Counting the NBA and NHL, as well as the University of Washington football team playing in a new stadium, Councilmember Larry Phillips said the area could have seven major teams. He wondered if any other “midsized major market” supported that many.

“I think this area can support it,” [former Sonics coach Lenny] Wilkens said.

Phillips said he’d want to see a market analysis.

Traditionally the only kind of market analysis I do is for the Seattle real estate market, but once in a while I like to branch out, so I thought I’d give the Council a head start.

To get an idea of how reasonable it might be to have six professional sports teams here in the Seattle metro area, I took a list of the top 30 largest metro areas in the United States and counted up how many pro sports team each metro area currently has. For this analysis, I decided to exclude college sports and just focus on NFL, MLB, NBA, WNBA, NHL, and MLS. Las Vegas is the 30th-largest metro but has no pro sports teams so we’ll leave it off the chart. LA’s Inland Empire (Riverside & San Bernardino Counties, #12 on its own) doesn’t have any sports teams of its own, so I included its population with LA. I’ve also included the San Jose metro area population (#31) with the San Francisco population to better reflect the whole Bay Area.

Here’s the resulting chart, showing where Seattle sits today with four teams (NFL, MLB, WNBA, and MLS):

As you can see, Seattle’s current collection of professional sports teams puts us slightly above the trendline of these 28 metro areas. If we were to add NBA and NHL teams to our roster, it would put us on par with Washington DC, a metro area with 63% more people than Seattle.

[Update: A friend of mine asked for a weighted version of the above chart, where the major sports (NFL, MLB, and NBA) count double. You can view that version here.]

Another informative way to look at this question is in terms of population per team. Here’s a table of that data, showing Seattle’s location with and without two extra teams:

Click on any column header to sort by that column.

At 875,007 residents per local pro sports team, Seattle is already 25% below the 28-city average of 1,174,483. If we were to bring both NBA and NHL teams to our market we would shoot to a full 50% below the average.

It would appear that the answer to Councilmember Hague’s question of whether Seattle can “support so many teams” would appear to be “probably not.”

As for Councilmember Phillips’s question of whether ‘any other “midsized major market”‘ supports six teams, the answer is no. Only five other markets currently have six or more professional sports teams:

• Washington DC – 6 teams, 63% more people than Seattle
• San Francisco – 7 teams, 79% more people than Seattle
• Chicago – 7 teams, 172% more people than Seattle
• Los Angeles – 9 teams, 393% more people than Seattle
• New York – 11 teams, 443% more people than Seattle

Not even close.

Obviously a more detailed analysis would take into account incomes, recreational spending patterns, and other factors. That said, we’re obviously not hurting for pro sports teams here in Seattle, relative to the size of our market. So why exactly do we need to spend $200 million in public funds to build a new stadium and bring two new pro sports teams to Seattle?

[Update: Whoa, 164 226 comments and counting on the Seattle Times piece linking to this post. People certainly have strong opinions on this subject!]

[Update 2: …and it’s been posted on the Seattle P-I as well.]

[Update 3]
There have been a number of comments on the Seattle Times piece as well as here on this post about the various other factors that need to be considered when attempting to answer the question of whether Seattle can support six pro sports teams.

Although I did plainly call out that this was just a cursory analysis meant to answer the specific “metro size” questions posed by the Councilmembers, I decided to get the latest Personal Income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to run a few additional numbers.

Here’s what the first chart looks like if you use Personal Income as the x-axis instead of population:

I made a weighted version of this one, too if you prefer that.

For the non-stats-nerds out there, the R² value on the chart is the coefficient of determination, which is basically a way of measuring how closely correlated two sets of values are. In this case, total Personal Income and number of sports teams are 82% correlated, which is pretty high, and sightly better than the 79% correlation between population and number of sports teams.

And as long as I’m posting an update with incomes, here’s the table version, looking at personal income per local pro sports team instead of population per sports team:

Click on any column header to sort by that column.

At $44,021M in Personal Income per local pro sports team, Seattle is currently 15% below the 28-city average of $51,811M. If we were to bring both NBA and NHL teams to our market we would be at 43% below the average.

Here’s how the five markets with six or more professional sports teams stack up against Seattle in terms of total Personal Income:

• Washington DC – 6 teams, 84% more income than Seattle
• San Francisco – 7 teams, 113% more income than Seattle
• Chicago – 7 teams, 147% more income than Seattle
• Los Angeles – 9 teams, 292% more income than Seattle
• New York – 11 teams, 484% more income than Seattle

It would appear that the answer comes out roughly the same when you factor incomes into the equation. Seattle still just doesn’t stack up with the metro areas that have six or more teams.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that I personally don’t really care whether Seattle gets a new stadium and two new teams. I’m neither a sports fan nor a sports hater. I’ve got no horse in this race, and nobody’s paying me to do this basic analysis. I just saw the Councilmembers quotes in the Seattle Times and thought it was an interesting question worth exploring.

The post Can Seattle Support Six Major Pro Sports Teams? appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Earlier this month, when Prevail announced that they were switching to a new online banking experience, I decided to ask them if this change meant that they would resume support for Mint.

Here’s what I asked Prevail:

I am curious whether this new online banking system that is rolling out tonight will also come with renewed support for Mint.com. If not, are there plans to provide compatibility with Mint.com in the near future?

And here’s the response I got the next day from a Prevail “Member Service Consultant” Crystal B. (emphasis mine):

We would love to offer that service to our members, but unfortunately Mint.com is not compatible with our website because transferring online account information to Mint.com violates our privacy agreement that we have with our web service provider.

Our new online banking system will also not be compatible with Mint.com because Mint.com will not sign a security agreement with our web service provider. Until Mint.com will sign a security agreement or until we move to another platform, Mint.com will not be compatible with our website.

Although I was of course disappointed that Mint would not be supported, I appreciated the prompt and succinct answer from Prevail. Armed with this information, I sent the following message to Mint:

I contacted my Credit Union to ask why Mint was not supported, and they gave me the following response:

“Mint.com will not sign a security agreement with our web service provider. Until Mint.com will sign a security agreement or until we move to another platform, Mint.com will not be compatible with our website.”

If you could please work with my Credit Union to sign the security agreement with their provider, I would really appreciate it. I used to be able to use Mint with these accounts but it stopped working a year or two ago.

Here’s the response I got the next business day from Jeffrey M.:

Thank you for contacting Mint.com.

We’ve been informed by our data provider that Prevail Credit Union is currently blocking our data aggregation efforts. Until the block is lifted, the issue you are experiencing with this account cannot be resolved. We are in the process of working to address this issue.

We apologize for this inconvenience and hope to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

Have a good day!

Did Jeffrey even read my message? I know that Prevail is blocking Mint. I told him exactly why it is happening, and what the solution is. Totally unsatisfied, I sent the following response:

Hi, did you actually read my message in its entirety? Your efforts are being blocked because “Mint.com will not sign a security agreement with our web service provider.”

You didn’t really answer my question at all, which was “could [you] please work with my Credit Union to sign the security agreement with their provider.”

If you guys sign the agreement, my credit union will stop blocking you, and everyone can be happy.

Here’s what Jeffrey responded with about an hour ago:

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Our Engineering team are still working on this issue. Please be advised that it may take time to fix the issue. We will keep you posted on any updates. Sorry for the frustration this has caused.

Have a good day!

*bang*
*head*
*on*
*desk*

EARTH TO JEFFREY. Hello? Is anyone at Mint actually reading these emails?

This is not an engineering problem. All that needs to happen is for Mint’s lawyers to call up Prevail’s lawyers, and sign a security agreement. How hard is it to read the words I am writing to you and give me a straight answer to my question?

Too hard, apparently.

The post Mint.com staff have a reading comprehension problem. appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Tuesday: Quoted in a Bloomberg / BusinessWeek story:

Agents encountered multiple bids on about half of offers in Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Oregon this year through March 15, said Tim Ellis, real estate analyst for online brokerage Redfin. In the San Francisco area, Redfin agents reported that three of four offers involved competition, he said.

Tuesday: Appeared live on Q13 5:00 News:

Wednesday: Appeared on separate Bloomberg radio and separate KOMO radio news briefs (which unfortunately I was unable to record).

Wednesday: Appeared in a KING 5 story.

Thursday: Appeared in a KOMO 4 story.

Friday: Appeared on the nationally-syndicated NPR program Marketplace Money

Throughout the Seattle area, the number of homes for sale is down more than 30 percent from a year ago. In some parts of San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Diego, the shortage is even more pronounced.

Tim Ellis: Inventory is just dropping like a rock. I think that’s really the big story.

Tim Ellis is a real estate analyst with the property firm Redfin. He says housing inventory always picks up after the holidays. But in many markets in the U.S., inventory has dropped for the last two months. Why is this happening? Ellis calls it a hangover from the housing bubble.

Ellis: You know, the traditional, kind of, buy a home and then hold it for a while and then sell it, that cycle on average lasts about 7 years. Well, when you think about where were seven years ago, that was kind of right at the peak, is was right at the height of the boom, so the people who bought seven years ago might be today’s sellers in a normal market, they can’t afford to sell.

Seven media appearances in one week, spanning print, radio, and television. Doubt I’ll manage to beat that without committing a major crime or something.

The post Some Kinda Big News Guy or Something appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Shortly after it finished uploading to YouTube, I received the following email:

Dear TheTimSeattle,

Your video, Fountains of Bellagio: The Pink Panther Theme, may have content that is owned or licensed by EMI Music Publishing.

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,
– The YouTube Team

Yup, despite all the booms and ooohs and aaahs distorting the music, YouTube nearly instantly recognized The Pink Panther Theme song playing in my video, and felt the need to send me a nasty-gram warning me about the usage of “third party content” in my video. At least this one didn’t get totally blocked like the one-minute video I uploaded a year or two ago of the contents of a Woot Bag of Crap with massively distorted audio of “The Final Countdown” playing in the background.

Okay, fine. Whatever. I get that the big publishing companies want to “protect” their “intellectual property,” and it’s easy for YouTube to automatically detect things like this and take action.

What I don’t get is why when someone uploads an exact copy one of my videos that’s on YouTube, YouTube does absolutely nothing. I shot the video below of a crazy electrical installation about a year ago.

After I uploaded it to YouTube and posted it to Seattle Bubble, it took off, rapidly racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Shortly after it became popular on YouTube, some user downloaded it and uploaded it to Break.com as their own. Then, other users started uploading copies to YouTube.

Did I learn about this via an automated message from YouTube about my video’s copyright being violated? Nope. I only found out because friends pointed out that my video was embedded on various websites, and when I clicked through to YouTube from those sites I discovered that my video had been uploaded by another user.

To its credit, YouTube does react quickly when you use their Copyright Infringement Notification form to report this sort of abuse, usually taking down the offending video the same day. However, it’s still quite annoying that I’ve had to personally hunt down copies of my video that have been uploaded by other users (seven other users, so far) and manually fill out that form, despite the fact that YouTube obviously has technology capable of automatically detecting things like this.

It’s also worth mentioning that when you fill out YouTube’s Copyright Infringement Notification form, there’s a field where they ask for the address of original YouTube video that the offending video is violating the copyright of. And yet, when they do take down the offending video, they don’t bother providing a link to the original content anywhere on the page. Instead, you just get a generic page that looks like this:

They can put links in the video space. Why wouldn’t they put a link to the original content on the removed video when a user like myself explicitly tells them where the original content is?

If YouTube really wants users to upload original content, why wouldn’t they use their existing tools to provide better copyright protection for independent original content, instead of intentionally turning a blind eye to infringement that they are easily capable of automatically detecting?

I can only conclude that YouTube doesn’t care about original indie content.

The post YouTube Doesn’t Care About Original Indie Content appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Seriously, how can such incredible devices be available for just five dollars? Just a decade or two ago something like this would have been either impossible or unimaginably expensive.

Truly we live in an amazing time.

The post Appreciating Cheap Tech Toys appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

• 11/21, 1:04 PM – Winter weather advisory in effect for Puget Sound
• 11/21, 6:18 PM – Travelers warned of possible icy conditions
• 11/22, 12:57 PM – Snow across Washington, more to come
• 11/22, 3:57 PM – I-5 traffic causing big backups
• 11/22, 7:01 PM – Snow creates record traffic numbers on WSDOT site
• 11/22, 8:15 PM – Closed express lanes snarl evening rush
• 11/22, 9:52 PM – I-5: Seattle area’s newest parking lot
• 11/23, 5:09 AM – Snow, freezing temperatures hit Washington hard
• 11/23, 8:29 AM – Northwest freezes as rare blizzard roars through

This is my story of that day.

Since it was snowing lightly throughout the day, I kept a fairly close eye on the traffic situation online, doing my part to contribute to the above-mentioned record web visits to WSDOT’s traffic website. Things were getting a bit hairy-looking as the day wound down, with I-5 north showing as stop-and-go, but the express lanes (which my bus usually took on the route home) still looking okay. At 4:30 PM, I decided to leave work.

I headed down to the bus stop at 6th and Union. A couple buses came by, but they were both completely packed to the gills. I started walking up the line to try to get on a bus earlier so as to maybe get a seat.

At 5:11 PM, I finally got on a bus at 3rd and Madison.

At 6:00 PM, the bus had traveled a grand total of three quarters of a mile. Speed on the bus: 0.9mph. Average human walking speed: 3.1mph. I got off the bus at 7th and Olive to try my luck on foot, since a quick calculation showed that with a little over 12 miles to go, at the speed we had been traveling at so far it would take over 13 hours to get home on the bus, versus just 4 hours on foot. While on the bus, I learned that the reason the express lanes looked okay online was that they were open to southbound traffic instead of northbound traffic like they are during every other evening commute. See the story above about that colossal fiasco.

After a quick stop at REI to buy a hat, I headed off at about 6:15 PM. When I got to the I-5 off ramp that my bus would usually take, there were no cars coming off the freeway. None. I later learned that this was because the freeway was completely blocked just south of the off ramp. I don’t know when it was eventually cleared.

I covered 8 miles in two hours to a friend’s house in Lake City, where I stopped for a 45-minute break to get some tea and dry socks.

At 9:00 PM, I headed out to take the four and a half mile walk the rest of the way home.

The whole time I was walking along Bothell / Lake City Way (SR-522), I saw so few cars drive by that I could count them all on two hands. I finally arrived home at 10:25 PM, just over four hours after getting off the bus. Who knows how long it would have taken me had I stayed on that bus.

The next few days I was pretty sore.

The post Epic Commute: Tim’s November 22, 2010 Snow Trek appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Thanks to the idiotic complexity of music licensing, only Season 1 of Malcolm in the Middle ever made it to DVD. If Fox released the rest of the series I’d buy it today, but instead they seem to prefer that their fans pirate the show online. Whatever.

The post “He was playing music… while I… did stuff.” appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Drop monkeys onto table. Pick up one monkey by an arm. Hook other arm through a second monkey’s arm. Continue making a chain. Your turn is over when a monkey is dropped.

FOR ONE PLAYER: Time yourself for picking up all 12 and try to beat your best time.

FOR TWO OR MORE: Each monkey left on chain is 1 point. First player to get 12 points wins.

Those instructions “for two or more” aren’t the most exciting game for an adult, especially when you know the simple trick (always pick up the monkeys by their right arm, using their left arm to pick up the next monkey). However, recently one of my friends (I forget who—sorry!) had a cool idea to make Barrel of Monkeys into a better multi-player game for grown-ups:

1. Get multiple Barrels of Monkeys in different colors, one color for each player.
2. Pour all the monkeys out on a table, mixing together all the colors.
3. Everyone tries to pick up their own monkeys at the same time.
4. Whoever successfully picks up all their monkeys first is the winner.

The only catch is that you can only buy Barrel of Monkeys in three colors today: Red, Green, and Blue. This limits the game to only three players… or does it?

I decided to see if I could make a new color of Barrel of Monkeys using Rit fabric dye to darken the color of one of the three existing colors. Here’s the process I used.

Since I knew I was going to have to use a pretty big pot if I wanted to dye the barrel itself, I decided to use two packets of black Rit. I added hot tap water to my pot, then put it on the stove to keep it hot.

Once the water was almost to boiling, I added both packets of Rit, the monkeys, and their barrel.

Most tutorials on the internet that talk about dying plastics with Rit say to leave it in for 20-30 minutes, but the plastic that Barrel of Monkeys is made out of is especially resistant to being colored, so I left it in there for an hour, stirring frequently.

After an hour, I took them out, rinsed them off, and let them dry. You can see the result above. On the left is what the monkeys looked like before dying, and on the right is after.

I didn’t think it was working at all during the 1-hour dying process, since the dye solution was jet black and the pieces still looked pretty blue, but as you can see, the monkeys definitely turned into a much darker shade of blue—sort of a teal color.

I deem this experiment a success. I now have four distinct colors of monkeys, allowing me to play four-player rapid-monkey-grab. I may even give it a shot with green and red as well to see if I can get some pleasantly-darker shades of those colors, too. Then we could have six-player monkey mayhem!

The post How (and Why) to Dye a Barrel of Monkeys appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

It’s coolest feature is the massive zoom that they crammed into such a small package. Allow me to demonstrate.

Here’s a photo of our church’s lawn zoomed all the way out:

Now here’s that same scene zoomed all the way in to that dandelion in the center:

HOT.

The post I Got a Keen New Camera appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

I posted it on Seattle Bubble, it got a few thousand views, and we all had some laughs. I didn’t think much more about it.

…until a week or so later, when the video started to spread.

First it appeared on Fark, then on White Trash Repairs, then on Reddit. Total number of views on YouTube shot up to over 20,000! Wow!

At some point, some jerkface decided to steal it and upload their crappy stolen copy to the popular video site Break.com, where it proceeded to get over 300,000 views!

Then someone else stole it from Break and uploaded it to their own YouTube account, where a few more sites found it, including Jim the Realtor’s blog and Sports Illustrated. Fortunately both YouTube and Break were responsive and helpful. YouTube took down the other copies on their site, and Break transferred the copy on there to my account.

A few days later, someone at Gawker (a very popular blog) found it and posted it on their site, after which it was re-posted on their sister tech blog Gizmodo. Another Reddit user found it and posted it there again, this time making it to the front page.

Meanwhile, the video also made its way on a few other popular sites, including Geekologie and even a German site called Brainblog. Nice!

As of this writing, between YouTube and Break my video has been viewed over 850,000 times! Yesterday at this time it was at about 750,000, so if this pace keeps up, my video will be viewed by over a million viewers by this time next week!

The post I guess I’m a famous videographer now? appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

I contend that the Wii game de Blob has the best video game music ever.

The tracks embedded at right were composed by yours truly in-game. I say “composed” because the genius of the music in de Blob is that the music is a fully-integrated part of the experience you get when you play the game.

Each level starts off totally silent. The music begins to kick in as you bring the drab grey city to life with colorful paint. The more colorful the city gets, the more intense the music becomes. Plus, different musical flourishes (vocal ‘dows’, keyboard, guitar, etc.) are added to the music with each building you paint, with the instrument determined by what color you’re painting with at the time.

For more of my thoughts about this under-appreciated gaming masterpiece, check out my full review.

de Blob 2 comes out in a week, we’ll see if they can live up to the high musical standard set by the first game.

The post de Blob: Best Video Game Music Ever? appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

I say it’s an eagle made out of flames, the logo for whatever company made the cap.

Jeni says it’s a bottle cap over a fire, a symbol meant to instruct people not to put the cap in fire.

Who’s right?

[Update]
Thanks to Adam, who pointed out in a comment below that the mystery image is the logo for Phoenix Closures. Looks like I win!

The post Eagle or Bottle Cap? appeared first on Ellis.FYI.

Pastor to church leaders: Get off Facebook or step down

Rev. Cedric A. Miller has had it with what he says Facebook is doing to couples coming to him for help and is giving his married church leaders until Sunday to get off the social-network website or resign their posts.

Miller, senior pastor at Living Word Christian Fellowship Church, the popular interdenominational and evangelical church on Route 35, said a large percentage of his counseling over the past year and a half has been for marital problems, including infidelity, stemming from Facebook.

Miller said there was no problem when people just met with friends from high school in a platonic way.

But that has changed, he said, and now people are reigniting old passions and connecting with people who should stay in the past. He said a marriage can be going along fine when someone from the past breaks through and trouble begins.

I’m the last person you’ll find defending Facebook, as I personally think it’s an enormous waste of time (to put it lightly). That said, this pastor is deceiving himself if he really believes that “a marriage can be going along fine” and suddenly Facebook is to blame for leading a spouse to infidelity.

People don’t just decide one day to go out and break their marriage vows by having an affair. “Reigniting old passions” on Facebook is the symptom of underlying problems in a marriage, not the cause.

If Rev. Miller thinks that banning Facebook will somehow magically prevent marriages from falling apart in his church body, he is going to be in for an unfortunate awakening.

In my opinion, misguided dudes like Rev. Miller are part of the reason that Christianity is perceived so negatively by much of the culture. What if, instead of focusing on nonsense like Facebook, Rev. Miller launched a campaign in his church to teach husbands and wives how to meet each other’s needs, and strengthen their marriage against all forms of temptation? Wouldn’t that be time much better spent than sermonizing about the evils of Facebook?

[Update]
Like I said, Facebook is not the cause of marital infidelity. Guess what Rev. Miller managed to do ten years ago without any assistance from the big blue internet evil: Pastor who banned Facebook had three-way sex affair.

The post OMG, Facebook is Destroying Marriages! (Yeah Right) appeared first on Ellis.FYI.