eviljim.com: the mac days

I must have an unbeknownst fear of heights because watching this video makes me incredibly uncomfortable:

Maybe it’s because I’m switching buildings after a year and a half here at the Google (so, if you had been planning an elaborate way past security to murder me, HA! Too late. Unless you do it before 5:00 PM Pacific), or maybe it’s just been long enough, but today I crown a new “Worst Movie Ever.”

Those who know me or that have ever asked “what do you think the worst movie ever is?” know I have an immediate answer. I have never needed any time to think about it, because the movie stood out as the worst movie-going experience of my life:

8MM is was the worst garbage I had ever seen. It was long. It was stupid. The plot was boring and uninteresting. The “twist” at the end was not even remotely exciting nor was it “a commentary on the absurdity of human preconceptions.” It was just terrible. I remember seeing it in the theater and, despite going to a 9 PM showing, fully expecting to leave the theater and it be daylight out.

But. It’s reign of near 9 years as worst movie ever has ended. Today, officially, it is replaced by the new Worst Movie Ever. This one will be more controversial as, apparently, everyone can appreciate this movie except me.

Atonement is the worst piece of trash that has ever attempted to pass itself as a movie. And I’ve seen “Envy” — I would rather watch Envy twice than watch this even partly again (except, maybe, the chocolate bar scene).

First of all, the beginning was drawn out. You’re placed in this colonial-styled world wondering when something, anything will happen. People show up. There are twins. People are suspicious. A play is written by a little girl who is, as we are told, “quite fanciful.” A strange chocolate magnate acts as one would expect the Monopoly man to act after having a life-altering stroke. You see Keira Knightley’s butt, or rather, just the beginning of it. There is a Keira Knightley sex scene, which, originally was sold to me as reason to see this movie. It is not. The last sex scene sold to me through lies and mistruths was in “Brokeback Mountain” before I knew it was about gay cowboys (not that there is anything wrong with being gay or a cowboy. Also I wrote that as “coyboys” the first time and I don’t know what that means). I feel just as betrayed this time. An urn is broken. There is a bee. At some point you watch people watching things for a good couple minutes.

Also, the producer apparently contracted someone to create a little recurring diddy throughout the movie that involves a typewriter used as a musical instrument. The main character also uses a typewriter. It’s all very apt. Apparently the producer thought it so much so that it’s played every minute. Click-click-CLICK-click. Ding. Fortunately near the end I believe they either ran out of royalty money or forgot about it.

FINALLY something starts happening - a rape occurs and a false accusation is waged by our “protagonist.” You start wondering what really happened and

All the sudden, people are speaking subtitled French and are at war.

It is unclear why.

Then, Hedwig is there. From the Harry Potter movies. That was pretty sweet. Later in the movie you see a bunch of dead wizard children as well. I hate to ruin the best parts for you, but you need to know the truth.

Anyway, you sit through these war sequences, which are relatively pointless and irrelevant (go watch “Saving Private Ryan” instead), until we get to find out what really happened in the first part of the movie.

Or so you would think. Apparently the producer, the same guy who loved that typewriter song, wanted to win an Oscar. So he rented an Oscar award winning picture at random, and decided to emulate it. The movie he picked was “Titantic.”

My general summary of “Titantic” is that the old woman was a liar, and a bit of a tramp (this summary stolen from Seinfeld, because it is so succinct and correct).

So at the end of Atonement you find out that the woman (who we already know as a liar) makes up for her misdeeds by lying some more, except this time instead of to the police, she lies to the audience. Also, if not being liar is enough, she’s got dementia so who knows what really happened? Fortunately, I don’t care. I was just so excited that she was like 90 years old; it meant the movie couldn’t possibly last much longer (this is true; if you are forced to see this film, know that when she becomes old your misery is almost at end).

Do not go see Atonement. It is bad. It will make you unhappy.

The fact that my Homeowner’s Association pays for my $3,800 roof leak repair has made the $260 I pay monthly seem much more reasonable and tolerable.

I was quite startled by Walmart’s architectural choices, seeing this picture in a Walmart page on Wikipedia:

The best part is the first line of the caption got me hopeful that this actually was a picture of a Walmart.

Over two nights and probably 4 or 5 hours:

7 reboots.
4 failed updates.
One update which was progressing quite well at downloading even though the network card was not connected to a network.

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate has been upgraded to SP1.

So far I have yet to notice a single difference in speed, performance, or anything else.

Click for Full Size Image

Attempting to Bootcamp XP on my Mac was a mistake. Two hours later I have a semi-working version of XP SP1 that refuses to upgrade to SP2 (hey, it’s only 3 years old. Of course there are still going to be major, blocking issues).

I’ve gone back and forth on just buckling and installing Vista instead, but I don’t want to. I think I might expunge Vista from my life. There’s just absolutely no reason to run it.

From what I understand I can “slipstream” SP2 onto my SP1 disc and then burn it, though I have to do something special to make the disc bootable.

Installing (rather, attempting to install) XP has made me realize what I’m leaving behind and how happy I am with my Mac. Perhaps this is the main reason Apple developed Bootcamp — to keep switchers in line by occasionally reminding them of their alternative.

PS: If you attempt to run Windows Update before activating your copy of XP, it will redirect you to a page. This page will have a small line at the top saying to activate Windows, and the remainder of the 99% of the page tells you your XP is not authentic and you should buy an authentic copy for $149. The one line of text explaining you need to activate has a little zippy you can click on, which expands to add text on how to activate. So, they hid the most relevant text on the page, simply to give more space to something the user probably doesn’t even need. The whole page is horribly confusing and quite possibly has stolen money from innocent people.

I am extraordinarily proud with myself.

Yahoo is sending 3 requests a second to my webserver for no apparent reason, requesting files that do not exist, and using a HTTP/1.0 browser (WTF is up with that? Can Yahoo not access virtual hosted websites? Are you serious? Is it possible they are further behind than Microsoft?)

I realized this when trying to search my logs for an IP that a spammer used to sign up for a webhosting account with — at first I thought *he* was flooding my site with requests to prevent that information from being available to, say, figure out who he is.

The requests already violate common sense, check this out:

[Fri Sep 7 15:13:13 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.215] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:13:13 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.215] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:14:21 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.219] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:14:21 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.219] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm

First off, don’t request the same URL twice in the same second. The reason this does not make sense is obvious. Second, if you receive a 404, that file does not exist. It is quite unlikely that some random jib of content was created between your first and second request (which are only separated by one minute).

Also, it’s complete rubbish to NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF CORRECTLY AS A ROBOT:

209.191.87.219 - - [28/Nov/2007:20:19:45 -0600] “GET /nmfjopqw80gty HTTP/1.0″ 404 284 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

This gives me no information as to who is constantly barraging my server with requests.

Going through the last 50,000 requests (which only reaches to about 15 hours ago) over 49,000 are requests from Yahoo for non-existent pages.

I noticed the following story in my Google mail:

And this made me reminisce.

You probably won’t know it unless you ever did paste-up on the staff of a newspaper (my experience being from my high school newspaper), but typically headlines are not written by the same person who wrote the article. This is typically because it’s unknown what size the headline will need to be — it’s often not until the day of layout that the width, height, and specific layout of a story is determined.

So the two things you need to know:

- Those people laying out the stories for the paper also write the headlines.
- Paste-up is typically a several hour tedious process. I never even had to do the worst parts, because I wasn’t an editor, but I helped out a lot. I thought it was fun; most people didn’t share my opinion.

Paste-up is putting together a puzzle, except every piece is looks the same, it’s just a different size. Also, you can kind of cut pieces of the puzzle off. Or split them in half. But doing so sometimes means that other piece you already cut needs to get glued back together and put somewhere else…

Anyway, enough rambling. By the time you start writing headlines you know how much width you have and are given a point size. This means, since printed fonts are not fixed-width, a varying amount of characters that again you have to fiddle with to fit yet not be too short.

(We used a WordPerfect 5.1 macro for this, if you were curious. I’d include a WordPerfect 5.1 screenshot, but it’s completely unnecessary. Close your eyes and imagine a completely blue DOS screen. Now imagine gray fixed-width characters which represent variable-width characters. Or just Google it you lazy jerk).

It’s pretty much the only creative part of the entire paste-up process I got to participate in. As such, I tried hard to write some great headlines.

Let me tell you: there are not many literary devices one can employ in 5-8 words. Allegory? Characterization? Certainly you can’t build an entire climax in there.

The headline writer’s crutch is alliteration. It’s the only thing you can do to make a headline pop.

Thus, you get so many “W”s in a headline.

Personally, though, I think this shows this guy’s a newb… “W” is the widest point-size character; I would have tried to alliterate on “I” or something, to get more words in.

My personal best was an entire headline — 7 or 8 words — with words starting in S. I had to fight my editor (Ericca Pollack, if I recall correctly) and eventually our teacher said it was OK. I need to dig up that Tiger Tales (more alliteration! I told you!) if I still have it. I’m still very proud of it.

I’m leaving on an airplane in a few hours to go to Vegas to celebrate a traditional Thanksgiving with my family.

Seeing as I recently picked up an iPod Touch, I figured I should throw some video on it in case I don’t sleep through the flight (which is at 6 AM — in other words, the need for videos is actually academic).

I’d been hankering to re-watch Firefly for the hundredth time, so I figured I’d pop the series on my iTouch and enjoy.

Last time I attempted to convert a DVD to anything else it took about a day for one DVD. With this outdated knowledge, I decided to acquire some AVIs of the show, even though I already own it, as I figured that’d run a lot quicker.

While that acquisition was taking place, I figured a dry run would be in order. I had the entire Arrested Development series on my HD, and figured there’s nothing wrong with taking one of the funniest shows in history along as well.

Things did not go well.

I found a piece of free software — ffmpegX — that would convert the AVIs to MP4 (iPod format) but it didn’t have a built in option for iPod Touch/iPhone size. Also, it wouldn’t let me add more than one AVI at a time, and it would reset the settings each time I tried to load a new file. This led to incorrect settings and skewed pictures and all sorts of unhappiness.

So everyone was talking about this other thing, VisualHub, so I give it a go. Converts the first video quite fine, so I drop $22 to get a licensed copy.

Of course, once I do that, it decides to no longer work and all the converted files have audio off by many seconds. Tweaking options didn’t help. They were useless.

“Bah,” I say to myself.

Then I remember some co-workers telling me about Handbrake, a nice little tool to convert DVDs straight into whatever you want - DiVX, iPod Touch, ASCII, etc. I figure I can rip the first disc overnight and the second today — I’ve got a few cores now so I assumed it would take at most 12 hours each.

I was wrong - apparently the state of DVD conversion has come leaps and bounds since my last attempt. To convert the whole DVD (which includes ripping the content and decrypting it from the disc) only took about 1.5 hours for a bit over 3 hours of content.

Not only that the quality was leaps and bounds better than re-encoding the AVIs I had downloaded. Despite the same bit rate, they looked fantastic. I understand re-encoding causes quality to suffer, but the AVIs were pretty good quality, so I was surprised to see it cause such a large difference.

Huzzah! I will have Firefly on the plane. How exciting for me. I might rip Arrested Development, too.

(By the way, one HUGE thing — despite ripping stuff, consuming both cores 100%, the Mac responded instantly throughout the entire process. Even playing a video file while ripping didn’t skip. I was shocked that I could both encode AND still use my machine. On my Vista box, which was a 3 ghz machine, I couldn’t do *anything else*. I could hardly open a run window).

Amazon announced their eBook reader today, The Kindle. As an Amazon Junkie, I of course must give my opinions:

- “We wanted Kindle to be completely mobile and simple to use for everyone, so we made it wireless. No PC and no syncing needed. Using the same 3G network as advanced cell phones, we deliver your content using our own wireless delivery system, Amazon Whispernet. Unlike WiFi, you’ll never need to locate a hotspot. There are no confusing service plans, yearly contracts, or monthly wireless bills—we take care of the hassles so you can just read.”

Amazon is the first company to realize integrating wireless at no cost to the user is HUGE. Sprint is brilliant working with the company to provide this (it’s something, I think, a large number of devices will start to do). It’d be ridiculous for someone to expect me to pay a service fee for my eBook reader. While I don’t expect the Kindle become widespread, I expect this concept to catch on.

- The price is way too high, and I suspect Amazon knows that to be the case. I’d expect, especially with the service tie-ins, the price will drop to their cost or lower in a year or two. Especially considering they’ve got you as far as purchases go — you have to buy your books from Amazon — they’re going to make a good amount of money off of you just on the book purchases.

- It’s ugly as Betty

- Once again, as I felt with Amazon Unbox, they’re in a position to do combination purchases. For example, with Unbox, if you buy Season 2 of “Lost” you should get a free digital copy (you don’t, but you should). With Amazon, if you buy a hardcover, you should get a free or extremely discounted eBook copy (no more than, say, 99 cents). After all - you already own the book. If Amazon did this, I’d most likely buy this hideous device and also buy all my books from Amazon.

- Prices are reasonable for lots of things: 99 cents a month for full, wireless delivery of blogs isn’t bad (again, seeing as you grab them over a cellular network adds that value), $9.99 for a hardcover release isn’t bad, $.10 to send any document wirelessly to your reader isn’t bad (free cable-based support is allegedly there; if not, it should be). Some blogs appear to cost $2; that’s getting a bit expensive.

- This is a great delivery method for newspapers, and I can see their relevance returning if devices like this catch on.

- Free access to Wikipedia on the device and an integrated dictionary are awesome. I certainly could have used the latter when reading “Name of the Rose.”

If you travel a lot, I could see the expense making sense (though if it was half the price, it’d make it a no-brainer). Clearly they need to get Apple to design them some hardware.

The huge negative, of course, is the simple fact that I own a lot of books — I even own a lot of books I want, but have yet to have the time, to read. I don’t want to re-buy those books in order to read them on the new device.

I found what I believe is a hidden feature in the Wii controllers.

A while back I noticed that some of my controllers, when I turned them on, would only blink 3 of the 4 LEDs while trying to connect. “Weird,” I thought, “Maybe one of the LEDs is burned out.”

I ignored it until I spoke with support (about my green pixel problem), and the rep said it’s normal, but didn’t expand as to why.

Today I turned my Wiimote on and only two lights blinked. On a hunch, I hit the Home button and noticed the battery meter had only two bars - out of four.

So, apparently, when you boot up your controller, it will flash the battery life remaining. Neat. Wish I had been able to figure it out earlier.

As part of the NaNo experience, Alfonso and I have had a few meet-ups at local coffee shops. Alfonso is bad at picking shops as he typically picks ones that have 5 minutes remaining before they close, and they won’t even sell you any coffee or old bread.

Anyway, I’d been wanting to check out a local coffee shop opened by a fellow Googler (though I can’t say I know him, I think he works in another building). You can check out the astoundingly and surprisingly bad website here. Don’t expect hours of operation or even an exact address.

So, the gist of this cafe is that payment is on a voluntary basis. You go in, order whatever drinks or snacks (small sandwiches, FroYo, bagels, CostCo muffins, etc) and you receive them. There is no cash register. There is — off to the side — a small slot where you can put money, if you so choose. You can also give the barrista your card and just tell her whatever you want charged. Or pay online at the previously mentioned website via PayPal. (Wait: why doesn’t this dude accept Google Checkout?)

My supposition is that, because payment is voluntary, the median visitor ends up paying more than they would at a Starbucks, or what have you. This is, however, quite necessary to make up for the people that pay nothing. And by “people” I kind of mean “teenagers.”

They also have an Xbox 360 hooked up that you can go to town on, complete with several games. How do the games not get stolen? Nuclear technology.

You know that part of the Simpsons opening where Homer handles a nuclear rod inside a lucite case with some gloves? Well, Terra Bite has a 360 and a bunch of discs inside a similar case. You stick your hands through some holes in the case - too small to fit a CD through - and you can change out the games. I don’t know what keeps people from stealing the controllers, though. Hmmm.

Anyway, the cafe itself is pretty nice. It’s also convenient when you know you’ll be sitting there for two hours - you don’t have to go up and pay $2 each time you need a coffee refill, or feel like an incredibly delicious bagel. You can just settle up for whatever you feel like you owe at the end of the day. Or end of the week. Or just not pay.

Some strange events and such:

- At one point on our second day visiting Terra Bite, the owner came in. His demeanor kind of made me feel unwelcome there — Alfonso asked a good question (how do they handle sales tax) and through the entire 30 second conversation, the owner seemed to be bothered that he was forced to have it. And the entire time he was there — sitting out of sight on the other side of the cafe — I felt vaguely like I shouldn’t be there. Like I have broken into this dude’s house and was using his coffee maker, but he was too polite to ask me to leave, but not too polite to offer me biscuits. I’m not certain the entirety of this feeling is his fault though; I think it’s from the concept of the place. I hadn’t paid for anything I had taken (yet), so I felt like a freeloader, even though I fully intended to pay when I was done consuming his goods.

- Tatiana didn’t have any cash, so she felt like she could not get anything. This confused me. So I offered to pay, which she accepted. Me paying for her consisted of going with her to the counter, standing next to her while she ordered and got her drink, and then sitting back down. A couple hours later I put money into the little hopper. With new payment guidelines comes new and odd social situations that I don’t have the ability to understand.

- We went to eat afterwards, and felt slightly put out that restaurants were now telling us exactly what we had to pay. It seemed very presumptuous of them to do.

In all, I kind of like the concept. In some respects it heralds to the mom-and-pop kind of store; I could imagine in such a place, if you visited daily, they wouldn’t make you fork over $1.72 for coffee. You could probably just throw them a twenty every week and call it even. It’s a certain kind of convenience you rarely get.

PS I feel it is BS that this near-800 word essay does not count towards my horribly-low word count.

Any time I get a new electronic goody, I feel certain “firsts” for the device are very important to set the tone of my experience with said device.

With my new iPod Touch, the following seemed appropriate.

First website: jailbreakme.com
First song: CSS - Music is My Hot Hot Sex
First (possibly only?) over-the-air iTunes purchase: Spice Girls - Headlines [Added bonus - it’s iTunes Plus so it’s already an MP3. Score)
First video watched: Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier
First game of blackjack played: I busted to a dealer blackjack

jimr became an active employee on Monday November 6, 2006 (365 days ago).

One year!

Exactly one year ago I was in Mountain View, sitting in the courtyard eating Wagyu steak from Charlies’ Cafe, watching to my left a scale-model T-Rex get assembled, and to my right, a bunch of engineers running through one of those inflatable obstacle course things.

It’s crazy. Seems like I’ve been here much longer, but also, like I’ve only been here a few months.

Oh and, of course, my non-solicit with Microsoft has expired and as such, I now can concentrate on recruiting everyone I enjoyed working with at Microsoft. Bwa-ha-ha-ha.

For a while now, my Wii has been displaying little green pixels every now and again while playing games (especially when playing Resident Evil 4). It was only a little annoying, but I finally got sick of it, so I called Nintendo for support.

Their first bonus point is that they were open on Saturday. The rep took my serial number, and asked what was wrong. I explained the problem and she asked if I was using Nintendo-official cables, I said yes, so she set up a repair. I said I was in Washington, and she asked, “Do you live within driving distance of Redmond,” and it just so happens I live in Redmond. She said instead of waiting for a repair, I can pop into the Nintendo repair center and get it fixed while I wait. Not only that, they’re open Saturdays, 9-6.

I jumped into the car, walked in (turns out it was about 2 blocks from my old Microsoft building), and the guy said they’d just swap me over to a new console. He went back to go do that, and I looked at some old-school Nintendo systems in a display case. They had most everything in there, though surprisingly none of the rare top-loading NES machines. They did have a ROB, though.

I also noticed a Wii set up, and it had Super Mario Galaxies in it, so I played that for about 5 minutes until my new Wii was ready. He handed me the new system, said I have a 1 year warranty on the new system already set up in my name, and sent me on my way. Took about 20 minutes including driving there and back.

Sure beats the 360 experience I had: they refused to fix my machine (it was before they extended the warranty to 3 years for the red-ring-of-death), so I had to swap it out at Costco. Plus I had to deal with their “helpful” automated debugger “Max” and useless India-based technical support who had me do everything “Max” did again. All this before telling me it’d be $179 to fix.

(According to the Invoice I got repair of a Wii is $75, though obviously my warranty covered that amount. That’s a fairly reasonable price - especially since you also get a new warranty to go along with your replacement system).

Kudos, Nintendo. I wish I knew how to buy your stock.

For the past few months, I’ve been wanting a Mac. I made myself wait, however, because the new shiny “Leopard” operating system was about to come out. I figured, might as well buy it when that comes out. Secretly I was hoping this would delay the purchase indefinitely.

That is not what happened.

I stopped by the Mac store on my birthday (the 27th, for those of you that are bad friends or random strangers) and took a little poking around with Leopard. After about 10 minutes, I felt compelled to purchase a new iMac. So I did.

Of course I couldn’t get out with a few accessories - specifically, a free after rebate printer, and a small-yet-expensive box of AppleCare which, despite just being an extended warranty, had a CD inside of it. I am not sure why.

The Mac is undeniably beautiful. There is exactly one cable involved, the power cable. That’s it. You plug that in and hit power and you’re using a Mac.

The startup process is beautiful. The first thing that happened was a screen popped up instructing me how to put batteries into my mouse and turn it on. Once I did so, it walked me through pairing it (I had to click a button). Then I did the same thing with the keyboard. Simple. I was struck with the fact that my mom could completely set up this computer - from plugging it in to even getting the wireless mouse and keyboard up and running. The only thing she’d have needed help with was lifting it up onto her desk.

After startup a welcome video plays, saying “Welcome” in a whole bunch of languages. It plays full screen and looks sharp. I wish I knew how to play it again. This video is Apple’s version of the new car smell. It works. You can watch it right here, but it’s not the same. Even if you made it full screen, and had a 24″ display at home, you’re missing out on how perfectly crisp it is.

By comparison, this is Vista’s welcome screen, and looking at it depresses me.

(Note that the Vista useless welcome screen comes up every time you boot until you uncheck that stupid box at the bottom; make sure you do that upon your first boot. The Welcome Center is completely useless).

(Taking a break to watch the Leopard welcome video again)

After that, you… oh wait. That’s it. The Mac is up and running. I believe one step did involve selecting my wireless network.

On Vista, I would have had to boot the Vista DVD and reinstall (because the OEM would have put a ton of crap I don’t want on the PC). After re-installing the OS, I’d have to disable that Welcome screen again. Then, I’d have to break out a really long Ethernet cable so I can download a Wireless driver. After rebooting, I would be able to get on my wireless network, get rid of the long Ethernet cable, and then FINALLY I could download my display driver so I could increase the screen resolution from 800×600.

Using a Mac is pure pleasure. Everything works so well, and so quickly. The new features are spectacular, and even better are all the small things that they tweaked because, well, people wanted them better. And everything is great, right out of the box.

There’s a lot of stuff I hadn’t ever even used, because I’ve only used Macs at work. Front Row is awesome; it’s what Windows Media Center should be and it’s included (and they even throw in a nice remote). It makes me want to buy a Mac Mini to hook up to my TV. It’s so simple but works so well.

The new “Spaces” feature is something you can get utilities to already do, but it’s again, done so simply and so well. The awesome thing is I can dedicate an entire space to a full-screen Remote Desktop session to my PC, so it’s like my Mac is my PC, too.

I’m stopping by Best Buy tonight to pick up an external hard drive - I can’t wait to get Time Machine up and running. I’ve been extremely lax with backing up in the past, and now I won’t have to even think about it.

Well, I need to stop writing about this because I sound like a 9 year old girl who was just invited to an Alice in Wonderland party, so. Adieu.

Approximately 8 hours of my life was consumed by SOAP. Not the washy type SOAP, but rather, Simple Object Access Protocol. Yes, another nerdy post.

Python has a nice little library, called SOAPpy, which lets you generate SOAP requests. It seems to work, unless you’re accessing a .NET SOAP proxy. This, unfortunately, is what I was trying to do.

So it took about 6 hours to come up with the following 4 lines of code:

proxy = SOAPpy.SOAPProxy(’http://whatever/webservice.asmx’, ‘http://whatever/namespace/’, ‘ http://whatever/Action’)
proxy.config.dumpSOAPOut = 1
proxy.config.buildWithNamespacePrefix = 0
response = proxy.Action(variable=value, variable2=value, variable3=product_name)

Specifically:

Line 1: You have to pass in the SOAPAction here, fully qualified. Otherwise you’ll get things such as “Object Reference” errors.
Line 2: This is great for debugging
Line 3: This line is not documented. Nobody suggests using it. Nobody talks about it. It is the most critical line and the one that took the longest to figure out. The problem is the SOAP request is not exactly what .NET is expecting; Python specifies the namespace with ‘ns1′ which I believe identifies the namespace. .NET chokes on this and dies.
Line 4: You need to specify the name of the variable, then the equals sign, then the value.

Somehow I ended up subscribed to Microsoft’s Small Business newsletter. I think, but am not sure, it is because I signed up for something. Deciding to unsubscribe, I found a link at the bottom of the email (nice!) which led to this monstrosity of a page:

Click for full sizeosity

Holy shit, do they think anyone CARES? I want to unsubscribe! Not read a treatise some deluded PM wrote because he was feeling especially self-important one day.

Oh, and by the way, the instructions suggest that I find links that do not EXIST.

That was going to be the end of the post until I got THIS beautiful page:

Click for full sizeness

I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. It says to check the box to unsubscribe, but at the same time, the column header is “Subscribe” - not Unsubscribe. But I already am subscribed? If there is a checkbox why are there also two different buttons, and what happens if I hit Update instead of Unsubscribe but check the Un(subscribe) checkbox?

We live in a world of uncertainty.

Oh and the best part is - what is up with the newsletter description? “Is created to be sent out as regular monthly or bi-monthly NL”? That’s so screwed up even Yoda wouldn’t say it.

I think I have unsubscribed, but I don’t have the fucking computer expertise to determine this from their poor-ass website.