Colin Charles Agenda

“Those who study logic too long may lose sight of reason.” – Daniel Nichter (source)

I’ve always worked from home. I have no objection to an office, and in recent years even have an office, but I always believe in remote work from home/cafes/etc. I still check into an office from time-to-time, meet with my colleagues several times a year, and totally grok remote work.

This is how opensource has worked and flourished. The best minds can be anywhere. I’m playing around with a Hackpad, and wondering if people will contribute to it. Feel free to edit it.

I came home after a long day of activities to find myself locked out of my Google account. I was told that there was suspicious activity and it had decided to lock me out. 

The verification code to set everything going is via a text message to your phone. After that you enter a completely new password. 

Now comes the fun. You have to regenerate codes for all your 2-step authentication authenticated applications. This is a huge pain for me – iPhone, Galaxy S3, Nexus 7, BlackBerry, Mail, Adium, etc. The list is really long. 

Overall this seems counterintuitive. I checked my account history. I did get connected via one odd IP today, but beyond that, nothing. It was me, my mail client connected from that IP.

Saw a bounce. Seems that I forwarded a message from google groups, it got rejected, and automatically it triggered that I might be a spammer. Seems like a bug more than anything.

Overall, I spent about 45 minutes just sorting out this problem. There has got to be a better way considering how important the Google account is to us these days. I didn’t notice a phone number either so if I needed to call someone, I’d probably be quite out of luck.

On OS X Mountain Lion, df now has lots of extra inode information. This is the new default according to the man page (turning on -i). The workaround to get the old df output is simple – just use -P. So df is now aliased as: df -Ph

byte@lovegood~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  237Gi  228Gi    51% 62130995 59797234   51%   /

byte@lovegood~$ df -Ph
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  237Gi  228Gi    51%    /

Much friendlier.

In times of “war”, Wikipedia can be used to sway Google results. Read: In Lahad Datu conflict, Google bombs & Wiki-wars. That’s pretty much what I tweeted yesterday. Just check out the revision history for Sabah.

Wikipedia tells an interesting tale. Even since 2005, you can see from the Talk page, that there have been Sulu sultanate claims. All in, just look at the traffic stats to the page and you see a marked increase in people wanting to know about Sabah.

The page is now semi-protected till March 14, but I doubt the standoff will be over by then, so expect Wikipedia editors to be paying close attention to this page. As for Google, there are benefits to getting the latest information from Wikipedia, but you’re also vulnerable when non-neutral points of view get displayed (thus making many people claim that Google was hacked!).

I checked DuckDuckGo and it seems that they use a much older cache of Wikipedia so was not affected by these Wikipedia changes.

I love to buy stuff from Amazon, so why not try buying stuff from Lazada right? This was the case today for the purchase of a juicer (no, not for me). In the end, ESH, a physical store won. Why did I choose physical over e-commerce?

Seeing a list of juicers is great. But how do I know how they work? How do I know which one is easier to clean? How do I know if anecdotally, one comes back more for warranty claims? How do I know if a juice extractor can only juice 2 oranges at one go, then requiring a one minute break (maybe I can find this in the manual, but really, when was the last time a consumer looked at a manual?).

So, first problem – not being sure which juicer to buy. Lazada is new and lacks customer reviews. In fact, I’m not sure there will be quality customer reviews that will make me trust it anyway. Physical wins out totally here as you can touch the juicers and get guided.

Oh, but it’s surely cheaper online, right? Wrong. Every juicer in store had a retail price, but it also came with a “best price”. If you’re Malaysian, you also probably love to haggle – try doing that at an online store! Believe it or not, the best price matched the Lazada prices hands down.

Delivery times? 4-6 business days seems to be standard on Lazada. At ESH, I could walk out with the item immediately.

Payment? ESH like any good physical retailer accepts credit cards (Visa/Master only though). They also give you Bonuslink points. Lazada is no different, with B.Card points.

Warranty is a big deal. If something goes wrong, I can just walk into ESH and they’ll handle it for me. My family & I have been buying from them for decades. If something goes wrong with my purchase from Lazada, I’ll probably have to call up the individual manufacturer and work it out myself. After-sales service is very important – what has online done for improving this space?

Now, the juicer we finally settled on for the gift was a Philips HR1871. It was RM11 cheaper on Lazada at RM688 (we paid RM699, best price rate with no haggling today). However at ESH it came with another attachment: a juice extractor. It’s a whole other attachment, and if you buy it retail from other brands it would set you back RM130 or so (even on lazada). 

What did all this cost? A short drive (at most 2L of petrol burnt) as well as a RM0.60 sen parking fee. The time spent would have been the same, if not more online, as one would have to watch videos elsewhere, read reviews, etc.

Leaves a lot to be desired for online shopping when it comes to white goods. Notice that if I were purchasing a tablet or cellphone it would be completely different (I can take the cheapest price since I have some domain knowledge). 

I wonder what other experiences are…