ericfaller.com Pithy Quote Goes Here

Towed

This morning I discovered that somebody had parked in front of my garage, blocking me in:

I had no idea who it was, but it appeared to be a female from the contents of the car.

I gave the person a couple of hours to move the car before eventually calling the towing company:

The tow truck driver said that this is a common sort of thing. Usually it's somebody who is drunk out of their minds and is unaware of where they are parking during the night. The next morning must be doubly bad for them - they have a hangover and their car is missing .

The funny thing was that the tow truck guy just walked up to the car, hopped in, put it in neutral and pushed it up to the tow truck. I didn't even think to check if it was unlocked - I could have just pushed it into an empty parking spot myself.

Bird Poo Smell

A little more than a week ago I noticed a bad smell in my apartment, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It was a vaguely familiar smell, but wasn't any of the typical things you'd easily recognize (like rotting food or mold).

Then one day I noticed a duct vent outside my apartment and realized what it was:

Some birds had been building a nest inside the duct and were pooping up a storm inside, so much that it spilled out, down my window. The duct connected to my clothes dryer as well as the oven fan vent.

Unfortunately this vent outlet is between the second and third floors, so it's impossible to reach without an extra-tall ladder. I called the maintenance crew and they were able to pull the bird nest out (there were no baby birds or eggs, luckily), and put a grate over it.

I think the birds must have pooped a whole lot inside of the duct (which didn't get cleaned up), because there's still a small lingering smell wafting through the apartment a week later. I'm hoping that the smell will eventually go away by itself, but in the meantime I have one of those plug-in air fresheners, which masks it so that you don't notice.

Dryer Vent

The dryer vent on the roof of the apartment across the way from mine has been spewing out this weird looking red stuff all morning:

I wonder what they put through the wash?

0 Day Delivery

The most amazing thing happened today: I ordered some stuff on Amazon this morning, and it was delivered before I got home. I was completely stunned and surprised, because I submitted my order with the standard 2 day shipping and didn't see anything about same-day delivery. I was also surprised that the package was just outside my door and they didn't deliver it to the apartment office in order to get a signature.

The package was shipped by some company I've never heard of, called Dynamex. I can't find anything about this on Amazon's website. I'm curious about whether this is a new standard, or if it is some sort of beta program being tested in select areas? What's going on here?

This is a big step that could really impact how I use Amazon. Typically, it feels like I get the desire to have a new book or toy on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, at which point I have to decide how much I really need whatever it is. If it's urgent, then I usually have to go to Borders, because if I order it on Amazon, it won't be shipped until Monday, and if I'm lucky it will be delivered on Wednesday, but it'll get delivered to the apartment office which will be closed when I get home, so I'll only be able to pick it up on Thursday morning on the way to work. With this same-day delivery, that huge wait time is almost eliminated (of course they probably wouldn't deliver on weekends, but still).

Here's a picture of my October 13th order, actually in my hands on October 13th. The weird thing is that I had already looked through all the toy stores in suburban Seattle trying to find a Rubik's cube (apparently there's a "Rubik's Liquidity Crisis" going on, because they were all out). I had resigned myself to ordering it on Amazon and waiting a week, yet here it is and I have it on the same day. Wow.

Grossly under-billed

For a while now I've been wondering why I only have to pay $1-2 per month for water. I thought it might have had something to do with all the rain that Seattle gets (lots of extra water, or something).

A letter came today which cleared it up:

I'm wondering how something like this even happens. How can you not notice that your revenue is ten times less than normal for an entire year? Granted, the error probably only happened in one apartment complex out of many, but still..

Stocking Up

Less than one week left!

Now I'm starting to wonder: will three extra copies be enough?

1.21 Gigawatts

Cool thing of the day: somebody in my building has a De Lorean and actually drives it to work every day:

Whole Foods vs. Safeway

Co-worker claim: Whole Foods is more expensive than Safeway.
Justification: They rip you off just because they can, and people are dumb enough to pay the higher prices.

My claim: That's BS! Their prices should be exactly the same.
Justification: This is what logical theory says. It's called Econ 101.

How to resolve this conflict? By doing an experiment, of course!

Here are my results from walking around in Whole Foods and Safeway with my camera-phone. I randomly chose different classes of foods, found products that were in both stores, and took pictures:

So what's the conclusion from all this? Averaging all of these products, Safeway is 4.3% more expensive than Whole Foods.

Result: We were both wrong. FAIL.

Netflix Bandwidth

A random thought experiment that just popped into my head: what's the bandwidth of my Netflix "connection"?

Let's assume that Netflix mails me 3 DVDs per week, each of which is just a plain old single-sided single-layer disc with a movie on it. The bandwidth should be:

The result surprised me: the bandwidth is 187 kbps! It's also sustained, full-duplex, and at 100% utilization (assuming I watch all the way through all the movies). The "download" speed is comparable to a low-end ISDN connection in the US. Switching to HD-DVD Blu-Ray would increase the bandwidth to 992 kbps, in which case the "upload" speed would actually be higher than my upload speed on my Comcast connection.

Of course, with an average latency of 2.3 days (201600000 ms), it would be pretty much impossible to run a protocol like TCP on it (unless the timeouts were really, really high). Just to begin downloading a simple HTML page would probably take several weeks, due to the SYN/ACK handshaking of the DNS and HTTP transactions..

Update 3/18: Fixed math error. Thanks Simon!

No Candy

The best part about Valentine's Day is always going and stocking up on super-cheap 70%-off candy afterwards. Apparently the 17th is too late to do that, because today when I went to Target all the candy was already gone .