I have strong opinions about “that ‘W’ store”. As with all of the big box discount retailers the real reason they have gas stations in the first place is to get you to stop there. They are not so much profit centers as marketing venues and as such they are happy to just break even, if that.

This may be a triple play on Wal-Mart’s part; to be seen as a ‘leader’ in the effort to combat global warming, free promotion of the brand, and to expand the target demographic to those tree-hugging, blue state, liberal nut jobs intellectuals (of which I am one) that currently would not enter the “‘W’ store” unless they were being chased by a rabid mountain lion.

Now, if they were talking about cellulose based ethanol rather than corn/cane based I would be much more impressed, but that’s an entirely different rant. 😉

Plugged in: Your car, corn and Wal-Mart – Aug. 9, 2006

Well, it seems that those knuckle heads over at AOL have belched up a “Oops, my bad” for the release of the search data from 500,000 of it’s subscribers.

“This was a screw-up, and we’re angry and upset about it.” spewed the spokes-mouth. “We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened…” should be read as “We’re going to eviscerate the poor schlub who got an OK from his boss without realizing his boss didn’t have the authority to authorize such things.”

I’ve worked with plenty of ex-AOL people, engineers and ‘managers’ alike. The engineering folks are a bright bunch with first class skills. I have a distinctly different opinion of the ‘management class’; they are rife with two-faced, responsibility dodging, finger pointing, attention seeking dullards who fire those that ask ‘Why?” a few too many times.

But seriously, I think AOL should call each and every one of the subscribers who search data were released and apologize. And I don’t mean a call from a $3/day flunky in some offshore call center, I mean from the kibble-brain that approved the release of this data, personally.

AOL apologizes for release of user search data | CNET News.com

Wow.

Wrapped in the warm cuddly blanket of ‘research’ AOL has taken it upon themselves to release the search logs of 500k users.  Gathered over a 3 month period the data amounts to 20 million search queries.  They did obfuscate the username by replacing it with a unique number but they did nothing to scrub the search strings of phone numbers, names, addresses, etc.

This has to rate in the top 10 most profoundly stupid online acts ever performed.  I do see the value in providing this data to academic researchers.  AOL could have achieved the desired goal of becoming a citable reference without releasing this data to the public.  As a result of the outcry, AOL have taken the data down.  This is a loss for legitimate researchers as they are very unlikely to release it again for fear of additional public caning.  But the data is out of the bag and this tasty data set will be circulated amongst those that would use it for less than lofty goals ad infinitum.

Nice job AOL, you could not have kicked the pooch any worse if you had planned it.

AOL Releases Search Logs for 500,000 users

Americans love their cars. We love them for the freedom they provide as well as a sense of independence. I’m sure this begins with the first time we utter the phrase ‘Can I borrow the car?’ to our parents. We are finally ‘in control’ of our destiny! We can go where we want, when we want and once we leave the eye/ear shot of our parents we could do whatever we wanted and they wouldn’t know. I remember this time when I was in high school and we were out in the woods with ‘my’ Toyota Land Cruiser… but I digress. Continue reading But will it get me into the high-occupancy lane? →

So we’ve had MANY days of 90+ weather here in Boston and I’m damn sick of it. Being of northern-Europeaon decent makes my biology pooprly suited to high temp/humidity environments. The result is one very unhappy Tim.

Yesterday we had a rather dramatic cool down (below).

Bear in mind that this chart is based on 5 minute averages so the drop was even more dramatic than it appears. The unusual part is that this dramatic drop in temp. was not accomplanied by strong thunderstorms. I dig strong t’storms! 😉

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