Sephy’s Platzish

With gasoline prices reaching new highs seemingly daily, and quite a few stations breaking through the $1/liter barrier on regular gas in this area. The average price of gas for today is at $3.683 per gallon (97.4c/L) - an increase of 80.3 cents over one year ago. Last night, I paid $3.599 per gallon to fill up the car, and that is one of the lowest prices you find in the area now. Nationally, it’s gotten up to 3.50, and there is no end in sight to these increases.

It can lead to people complaining that the oil companies are making way too much money.

However, I’m not complaining about that. They’re only the incidental beneficiaries of my target. My gripe is with all of those people who must have nothing better to do than to play games with the wallets of everyone around the world. Yes, the speculators who spend their time hunched down on the trading floors of commodities markets like the Chicago Board of Trade, the New York Mercantile Exchange and other similar trading houses around the world. It is this group of people, along with all the others who are requesting trades be made, who are forcing the prices of everything to go up.

Of course, you never see the heads of these trading houses being brought in to explain why they’ve forced the prices of crude oil, raw gasoline, and other commodities (which literally range from Bananas to Wheat - and everything in between, meats, vegetables, fruits, name it, there’s likely a commodity traded for it) to increase substantially over the last year or so.

However, it’s not sexy to see some financial analyst in front of Congress. Nope, it’s cool to have the oil executives in front of a Congressional committee facing ignorant questions from ignorant politicians about why they have such high profits. That isn’t to say that the oil companies don’t have some fault in this situation - for example, the last refinery in the US was built in 1976! The reason that they aren’t building them anymore is twofold - first off, apparently they’re not profitable for the oil companies, and of course, it seems that if you build just about anything nowadays, there’s the barrage of environmental complaints which come from it. And, believe you me, sometimes the extreme environmentalists can get quite annoying…I can name one in particular who still is around…

Another problem is the government, whose continuing insistence that corn-based ethanol will be a boon for making us more energy independent (of course all of those evil sheiks in the Middle East - the truth is that our biggest source of foreign oil is Canada, and possibly, if things come to fruition with the recent find there, Brazil) has caused the prices of food to skyrocket (remember when you could get a gallon of milk for $2.49 and it wasn’t a sale? I remember when a Wal-Mart opened locally, the price of milk was $1.68 per gallon - now, $3+.

So, what can we do about this? There isn’t much we can do about getting the price of oil lower, because at this point, it’s nearly cost prohibitive for anyone to buy a barrel of oil - and you can’t just go in and say "I want to buy one barrel of oil, for $25.00" - you’d get laughed at by some bigwig in his new Armani suit, paid for off of the backs of other speculators who, as far as I can tell, don’t give two shakes about the damage they’re doing to the economy.

The only practical thing that you can do is drive more efficiently - combine trips, use the shortest route, go the speed limit (or a few mph/kph over), keep your tyres inflated, and keep your car in good working order. With the economy the way it is right now for a lot of folks, buying a new hybrid car is probably out of the question, but if you can do that, and are comfortable with it, you should consider it.

One thing I should add, though, is that there is a good side effect to what has been happening to the price of gas - we’re using less of it now - with the amount used projected to decline by a small amount - not a lot, but it is less than in the past. Of course, China and India’s increase in oil usage will outstrip any decreases we have here in the US.

All I know is that I hope that the speculators are happy that they’ve made 3 airlines go into bankruptcy, along with a lot of other people needing to cut way back on their spending in order just to afford the basic supplies. And yes, in this modern society, fuel is a basic supply.

Admittedly, I haven’t been the most active with Entrecard dropping and getting my blog advertised on other blogs (in fact, I’ve got over 10,000 credits now just kinda sitting there at the moment). As I was browsing the site today, however, I noticed some new things - most of them good, but one of them quite confusing.

First, (somewhat like I did with WordPress), let’s go to the good stuff.

Drop Statistics

One of the new things you’ll see when you view the profile page of a blog on the site, you’ll see this new addition to the blog information -

That’s a pretty cool feature, because it lets you see if a potential advertiser has taken an interest in your site before they decided to commit their credits to advertising with you. For me, if I have a whole bunch of ads queued up in my queue, I can go through and see who’s had the most drops and kinda order them as to that, instead of trying to make a personal preference sort of thing…

Navigation in the Inbox

By far, this is the coolest new feature that they’ve added. You can now see everyone who has ever dropped their card on your widget in the inbox, instead of the “old” way of the last 70 or so. Also, to fix one of the more tricky problems of the old inbox, they’ve added a dropdown so that you can choose if you want to show the cards you have or the ones you haven’t dropped on yet today.

For both of these, I think the answer to “why” is fairly obvious - it’s something that there has been demand for in the past. However, something that I don’t understand the reasoning behind is something that kind of blindsided everyone - the new Ad pricing structure.

New Ad Pricing

As I was looking in my dashboard, I noticed that my price to advertised had almost halved itself from the around 200 that I’d been maintaining for quite some time now (thanks to averaging about 100 drops on my site per day, multiplied by 2), to 128 (or 2⁷).

The strange thing is that, if you look at the post announcing this change, there are some of the same generalities strewn about, somewhat like WordPress did. In my (and probably about 90% of Entrecard users), apparently this was discussed in the Forums, but like WordPress, the changes seem to have no bearing on what users have been used to - a system that (for the most part) worked.

Just as an explanation of how the old system worked - the price to advertise was based on the average number of cards dropped on your blog over the last 5 days, multiplied by 2. Now, it’s based on varying exponents of 2, with the number of ads determining the exponent used for 2. For example, if you have 1 ad in your queue, then it costs 2 credits, 2 means 4, 3 means 8, et cetera.

Now, all those cards dropped on your site? Well, that just means you and the dropper get a credit for it, along with positioning on the popularity rankings (which are now available in the Browser feature).

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In the end of it all, this (as they call it) Long-Awaited change to the pricing structure sounds to me a bit like WordPress 2.5 - a half-baked “fix” to something that really didn’t need fixing with little to no explanation as to why it was done. The old system was simple to figure out - you drop a card, that site’s price goes up by around 2/5th credit. Now, we have a system where if you want to advertise on even a moderately popular blog, you need to have a ton of credits bankrolled.

The only question, which for all intents and purposes is rhetorical, I have is “Why?”. Why, when you’ve made such good changes as the new features in the inbox and on the individual pages, did you drop the blog information from the Browse by Category page? Why did you drop the Nearby tab, which was useful for bloggers to connect to folks in their country? Lastly, why did you change your advertisement pricing from a stable one based completely upon merit to one that becomes based upon daily fluctuations in ads appearing or not appearing, with anyone with more than 7 or 8 ads in their queue (128 and 256 ec per ad respectively) having drastic jumps in the price of an ad?

Perhaps, a suggestion would be that beyond 8 ads in the queue, the next “level” of ads would be at a set separation - say, 128 or even 256, thus making a progression of 256, 512, 768, 1024, 1280, etc. (with the 128 progression being 256, 384, 512, 640, 768, etc.). That would eliminate the exponential growth problem that is natural with the exponential system in place, along with making the most popular blogs more accessible to everyone out there for advertising once again.

Just a note - if you’re looking for the week in walks, they’ll be up tomorrow, pictures and all. However, WordPress 2.5’s release is more recent news, and an issue that I believe is worth pushing my normal schedule back a day for.

I bit the bullet and installed WordPress 2.5 on my testing blog, and I’ve been playing with it for a few hours now, and my impression is that the number of things I don’t like far outweigh the number of things I do like. Before I get to my critique, however, I have a couple of important questions.

First, why was this released on a Saturday? Every other major release of software - free or not - has happened on a weekday. To have something as seemingly major as WordPress 2.5 released on Saturday suggests to me that the folks at Automattic almost wanted this release to be as low-key as possible, as most of the “major” web writers usually go at a more relaxed pace on the weekend.

The next question I have is pointed at everyone who is raving over the new interface - what specifically about it makes this particular version superior to the old interface? All I’ve seen are generalities. Something tells me that a lot of this is related to a disease known as “fanboyism” (which I know doesn’t exist, but is noted by the almost-fanatical praise heaped by certain people whenever something comes from one place, no matter how poor it is), and that is never a good thing as it allows hype to take over real substance.

The last question I have, and this is something that I’ll keep coming back to throughout my discussion of dislikes, is about this supposed research that they did. Who exactly did they ask for input? It seems like they’ve asked some quite inept people to get their suggestions when it comes to getting an opinion on the current dashboard’s so-called downfalls.

I’ll be reasonable, however, and let you in on the couple of things that I do like -

Things I like

First, is that in the Theme editor (under Presentation Design -> Theme Editor), they’ve split up the template and style files into their own groups. Actually, I’m surprised they didn’t try to prettify that and manage to totally screw it up in the process. Sure that’s a dumbed-down option that they did, but it’s quite useful when you consider that currently, all the files are listed in one big list.

Another thing that I like is the addition of a link to edit a newly-published post. Also, the fact that they did make the size of the fonts smaller wasn’t a bad idea either.

And that’s about where this ends.

Things I don’t like

Where do I start with this? There are a lot more things that I don’t like about the new admin panel, but let’s start with the most obvious one -

New-look menus

Instead of sticking with the normal set of menus, they decided to split the main toolbar into two parts - with the connections between them being loose at the best. Thankfully, it’s easy to hack the admin-header.php file to get the Plugins, Options Settings, and Users down with the rest of the menu items, it’s something that shouldn’t have to have been done in the first place (not to mention that cForms and Polls are now to the left of these other sections). Also, the dashboard is an integral part of the WordPress admin panel - why is the link to that relegated to a teeny-weeny link in the upper left that almost blends into the background?

Widget redesign

Pardon my French, but what the fuck were they thinking when they thought this one up? Actually, what the fuck were they smoking and/or drinking at the time? I’d like to have a sample.

Since I’ve been using WordPress, the Widget page has been a straight-forward drag-and-drop affair where you could take the available widgets (at the bottom of the page) and drag them up to either sidebar. You could also have multiple text widgets at your disposal, and if you wanted to take one away for a short while, all you had to do was drag it out of the sidebar and it’d be saved.

Now? Well, now you can only work on one sidebar at a time, and those saved text widgets you had off of the sidebar before you upgraded? Gone. Hope you saved the code to them.

Oh, by the way, if you remove a text widget from a sidebar - you can say goodbye to whatever text was in there before. It’s not saved. It was something important? Sorry, but it’s not OK to take text widgets away anymore; game over, you lose.

The other thing that is completely ass-backward is that they show you all available widgets, including those you already have activated. How useless is that?

Like whitespace?

If you’re a fan of completely wasted space on a webpage, then you’ll love a lot of the pages in WordPress 2.5! Why? Well, on most of them, there’s a maximum width of just less than 1000 pixels. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was centred on the page, but infinite wisdom was used to put it all aligned to the left. Fortunately, if you’re using Stylish, you can create a new style for your URL and put this in between the curly braces -

.wrap, .updated, .error {
max-width: 100% !important;
}
.narrow {
width: 100% !important;
}

That will fix one of the few things you can actually fix on your own.

Categories are dead. Long live tags.

Or that’s what they want you to believe when you look at the write screen. Instead of the current setup of having categories at the top of the right hand column, easily accessible, they put them at the bottom of the write screen (where you can’t move the elements anymore, like you used to), under tags. The message here is clear - categories are less important than tags.

Gaping security hole

One of the more ballyhooed new features in this new version is the ability to automatically upgrade plugins from your plugin page. On my site, I had tried out a different plugin that allowed me to do just that, but it didn’t work because of server permissions that there are.

However, WordPress have made a great decision to usurp any server’s security when it comes to running zip files by including its own unzipping program in the WordPress install - that’s got to be part of the reason why the zip file is 30% larger than it was previously. By doing this, anyone running a plugin has the potential of opening themselves up to a major problem with their server by upgrading to a new version of a plugin that has a malicious file in it.

The chances of this happening are slim, but it is not outside of the possible realm of things that can happen. Fortunately, there is a way to fix this and to break the plugin upgrade function - set the permissions of the wp-content/plugins folder to 555, thus making it read only, and forcing an error on the update page.

Lazy time

The last item I have on my list of dislikes is that they’ve changed the way you select your timezone - it used to be that you just typed in a number, say, -6 for Central Standard Time, like you would on a forum run by SMF. However, apparently in these supposed interviews, they discovered that people had a hard time typing in a simple combination of a plus or minus sign and a number between 0 and 14. It’s been replaced with a drop-down box with selections for timezones, with minor half-hour intervals.

Overall initial verdict

If I had to give a grade to their efforts in regards to what they did, I would give them a grade of about 60/100, or just barely a D-minus in school grading terms. The biggest thing that they lose points for is the rule of “don’t fix something that ain’t broke”. The Admin interface in previous iterations of WordPress worked perfectly, and were, after a bit of a learning curve, very intuitive.

However, doing patently stupid things like splitting the options panel into two distinct menus, making the dashboard into the least important thing in the dashboard (by the way, where can you see the stats for your blog? the stats sub-panel under the dashboard has gone missing.), and making everything fixed width only goes to hurt the cause further.

Unfortunately, it seems that the folks who are at the head of WordPress are only more concerned with glorifying their latest release, but don’t be surprised if there are urgent updates to 2.5 coming out as soon as a week from now, as it seems that they’ve gotten creative with the roadmap, making up nearly 30% of the overall progress in their planning within a week or two.

As far as my site is concerned, I’m going to stick with 2.3.x series WordPress releases for at least the near future. Maybe if someone comes out with an admin theme that looks like the old version, and maybe fix the widget issue (come on, they seriously fucked up there).

What do you all think about this release? More importantly, do you know anyone who was interviewed to help them out? I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who would love to know how they came to the conclusion that this was “needed”.

Every day, when I go to work, I have to change the speed I’m going about three times, and of those three times, only one of them makes sense.

The first change in speed that I have to do is going from 55mph (88km/h) to 40mph (65km/h) - that is for a crossroads where there is very little visibility for both the main road and the cross road that has stop signs there. However, after crossing that intersection, the speed doesn’t go back to 55, it goes only up to 50mph (80km/h). The main reason that this happened is supposedly because of community pressure, but that argument doesn’t add up, because right after you go past a fire station, the limit goes right back up to 55.

Now, here’s where everything goes strange - the 55mph speed limit stays in effect for a few miles, until the road becomes a 4-lane, double-carriageway road. Logic would dictate that the speed should stay at 55, or possibly go down to 50, but what happens is totally bizarre - it goes all the way down to 45mph (72km/h). To me, there’s no reason for this to happen, as the road is completely safe at 55mph (which seems to be the speed most of the traffic does most of the time anyways). Sure, there are cross roads and driveways, but the main intersections have lights at them, and this really is no different to the rest of the road (heck, in the 55mph zone, there are driveways all up and down the road).

Making things even more interesting is the fact that on most of the crossroads, you encounter higher speed limits than on the 4-lane road. For example, a county road that I pass by has a 50-mph speed limit, and it’s a 2-lane road that has plenty of driveways and cross roads.

I have my own theory on why this is - for example there was community pressure to keep the speed limit low (the most likely chances on that since the people have whinged at every opportunity possible to stop the duplication, but were unable to do it). There is also the conspiracy theory that they kept the limit low in order to allow the police to increase their income from fines (over the three weeks I’ve worked, I’ve seen cops there twice already, along with a smattering of cops with traffic stopped elsewhere).

I’ll have to write to the state to find out the mail on that one, because it is strange that one 4-lane road would have a 45-mph speed limit, while another would have a 55-mph limit. It just seems that there’s no consistency in setting these limits. Thinking about it, another example of this inconsistency would be on a different 2-lane road, where, until about 5 years ago, the limit on both sides of 35-mph “community” zone was 55, only to have the northern side shaved down to 40 mph….

This is one of those things that I think I’m just a tad hypersensitive to, but it can really irk me when someone uses the totally wrong punctuation for something. For example, take this sign, spotted in a grocery store last year -

Oh boy, where do I start? First, the whole thing about capitalizing every first letter - not necessary! You’re not writing a headline in a newspaper (heck, most of the time not every word is capitalized there). Ok, so what next? See that comma? It should not be there (unless you put another comma before “Mentioned” setting off that section of the sentence). Then we come to “This Weeks Ad”, shoulda been week’s. And the last thing, you don’t put a space between the end of a word an the punctuation!

You would think that writing a sign in a grocery store would be something a person with a first-grade English understanding would be able to do, but, well, I guess not…here’s how the sign should look (at least to me) -

Attention customers: The California Pizza Kitchen pizzas mentioned in this week’s ad will not be included in the sale because they are already sold for a lower retail price of $4.99. Thank you.

The next subject is one I’ve already alluded to in the past - this beauty -

The only way they could have approved on this sign’s error record is if they would have called them tail’s…seriously, that weekend in that particular store, they had all kinds of quotation marks on everything, but this definitely takes the cake with the dashes on the two lines as well.

This bizarre use of punctuation, and especially the old quote key to the right of the home row (at least on most English-language keyboards), brings me to some convenient reminders, because I’ve seen this particular word misused so many times that it has begun to grow on me.

It’s its, and its companion it’s.

I’m not sure why this is one of the most confused usages of a word, but for some reason it is. It’s is a contraction of the words it is, and should be used when appropriate to change the two words into the contraction. On the other hand, its signifies possession. For example, my computer has its own intricacies, it’s got this ability to be a pain in the arse at times.

The same goes for when you’re pluralizing acronyms and other complex words. It’s my general guide to not use an apostrophe when talking about DVDs and CDs, but if I’m talking about a CD’s properties, then, as witnessed, I use the apostrophe.

If there’s anything that can be taken away from this rant of mine, I think that it’s a sign that I’m definitely ready for a change in seasons!

Only 3 more weeks of winter to go (officially, but of course, today marks the start of meteorological spring, so there is some hope for us yet!)!