Month: June 2017

Zing owns a nice MacBook Pro that we aren’t using, so rather than just have it sit and gather dust, I figured I’d sell it. Craigslist is the easiest way to sell stuff like that, so I put together a nice brief ad on Saturday and waited for a buyer.

It turns out I didn’t have to wait long for the scammers to pounce. Within a few hours I had five or six of them, all texting me asking about the laptop. What’s funny is they all use the same formula:

1) Send text with a brief greeting and the name of the item from Craigslist.

2) Regardless of my response, they respond with a short story about how they’re out of town and want to buy this MacBook for a nephew or brother-in-law or whatever. Of course I’ll have to ship it to that person. They’ll pay an exorbitant rate for shipping ($100-200 above the asking price).

3) If I respond to that, they jump into something about using PayPal and conducting the deal as soon as possible.

I think after another response, the bot (or whatever computer software is handling this) notifies an actual human to take over. I’m guessing they figure at that point if the sucker is still engaged, they need to act like a real person. I figured that was the point where I needed to start getting weird.

Sadly, despite the absolutely adorable puppy photo, this scammer didn’t want to continue the conversation.

I used the approach again on someone else:

At least this guy acknowledged how cute the puppy was, but apparently decided to give up on the scam.

All of this would be funny if it wasn’t so sinister. Scams like this must be successful to some degree, or people wouldn’t use them (and in such volume! I had the same guy actually contact me twice even after I called him out as a scammer). I figure there’s a special circle in hell for low-lifes who do this kind of thing.

For the past week or so, the air conditioning hasn’t worked in our office. I have a little desk fan that manages to move the 80-degree air over my left arm, so at least a part of me feels a little cooler. It’s bad enough that some of the guys have actually left to work at home instead of enduring the heat. And it’s bad enough that the chocolate chips in my cookies have melted as they sit on my desk.

Brent’s dealing with it by sitting at his desk and eating ice cream directly out of the half-gallon box. He has the right idea…

I found a fascinating article online about the order of words based on the sounds. The lead-in question was “Why do we say ‘tick-tock’ and not ‘tock-tick’?”

It turns out the reason is that words like that must follow a certain order to “sound right”. If there are three of them, the vowel order must be I, A, then O. If there are two, the first is always an I, followed by an A or O. For example:

tick-tock
mish-mash
chit-chat
dilly-dally
tip-top
hip-hop
flip-flop
tic-tac
ding-dong
ping-pong

Of course saying “dong-ding” for a doorbell sounds weird, and that’s why. It’s one of those unwritten rules that everyone knows but no one really thinks about.

The article went on to explain the even more fascinating adjective order, which is:

opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose

If a noun has multiple adjectives describing it, and they’re out of order, it’s immediately obvious (and strangely disturbing). For example:

lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife

sounds right, and in fact much better than:

green lovely rectangular whittling little French silver old knife

Things get even more interesting when you combine the two. Does Little Red Robin Hood face the “Big Bad Wolf” or the “Bad Big Wolf”? Well, the adjective rule clearly places opinion (bad) before size (big), but the vowel sound rule says I comes before A, and therefore “big bad” sounds right and “bad big” sounds awkward.

Incidentally, this rule of vowel sounds is called ablaut reduplication.

Laralee and Kyra seem to know all of the spells from the Harry Potter series, but I have a whole different set of incantations– stuff like this:

Yay, shell scripting! I was faced with the task of parsing a gigabyte of log entries, counting the number of posts to an external API and organizing them by date. Done, in a single line of black magic.