I love buying and selling things on craigslist but I’m amazed at how many people email you about an item and never respond back. Are they just gathering email addresses for spammers? That seems like too much effort to build a spam list but I would say about 50% of the people I respond to never follow up. Maybe they found a better price but if so why not offer me less?
I feel like adding a note to my postings saying that if you inquire about an item and then don’t follow up I will post your email address on my blog. 
The flakeout list.
These flakeouts make everyone’s life miserable. I always give an item to the 1st person who inquires and tell other people that someone else responded 1st but I will let them know if they don’t follow through. Anyway here are my craiglist tips after selling about 8 things on craiglist.
- Post items around lunch time on a weekday. People browse craigslist from work. I get much better responses on weekday posts than weekend.
- If you get multiple responses let the 1st responder know that the item is theirs but they need to pick it up soon or you will give it to the next person. This will get them to commit or bail quicker so you won’t wait a week for them to make up their mind. Respond to other interested parties letting them know someone else is ahead of them but you will contact them if the other person does not follow through.
- Google the person who emailed you. On a few occasions I have found that someone lived near my work and I met them at lunch. Saving them a long drive to my house. You might also find some scary information on a person. Remember, you’re inviting these people to your house for a pickup, so do a little research.
- Always include a picture of the item.
- Don’t host the pictures on craiglist. If you upload pictures to craigslist they are deleted when the entry expires. There is a nice repost option but you need to upload the pictures again. If you put the pictures on a photo sharing site and type the html by hand the reposting process is much easier. for example
- <img src=“http://tonycode.com/craigslist/jacks.jpg” />
January 24th, 2008
Tony Primerano
Recently I implemented a Rails application sitemap but once the search engines started hitting my site, I realized that I wasn’t giving them all the information they desired.
- Yahoo was doing simple HTTP head requests on my sitemap and going away
- 206.190.57.45 - - [11/Dec/2007:08:35:49 -0800] “HEAD /sitemap.xml HTTP/1.0″ 200 334 “-” “Yahoo! Slurp/Site Explorer”
- Google read my sitemap infrequently but loved to do HEAD requests on my index page
- 66.249.70.196 - - [17/Dec/2007:07:11:24 -0800] “HEAD / HTTP/1.1″ 200 372 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”
For those of you unfamiliar with HEAD requests, they are requests for a page that don’t actually return the page. Just information like size and date. Its a nice way for search engines and caches to decide if there are any changes they need to pull. For some examples of HTTP requests check out the wiki page I wrote on making HTTP requests via telnet.
Now what do you think Google and Yahoo were looking for? My assumption is they are looking for the Last-Modified header in the response to see if they should bother requesting the sitemap. They could compare the size of the response since they last visited but I doubt they want track this information.
The Last-Modified date is the ideal field to check.
This is all fine and good but guess what. Rails doesn’t set that header for you.
telnet ficlets.com 80
Trying 64.12.150.213...
Connected to www.ficlets.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
Host: www.ficlets.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:22:31 GMT
Server: Mongrel 1.0.1
Status: 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 16355
Set-Cookie: _session_id=s322clipped; path=/
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
The good news is this is easy to add! If you look at my wiki example you’ll see that I set the header with the time of the latest entry in the sitemap.
headers[”Last-Modified”] = @entries[0].updated_at.httpdate
Now it isn’t rails job to add this header for you but it would be nice if the scaffolding added this header. The standard show/1 actions are pulling a record from a database and the action knows the updated_at value.
I have added this header to my show actions as I am just pulling a record from a database and I have the modified time!
headers[”Last-Modified”] = @business.updated_at.httpdate
That’s all. I’m looking forward to any comments and suggestions people may have.
January 10th, 2008
Tony Primerano
Up until a few months ago, all of my bedroom ceiling fans used Compact Florescent bulbs (CFLs). Back in October I bought a Hampton Bay Ceiling fan for Dani’s room and when I installed the light fixture I noticed it had a different socket type. It used Intermediate base bulbs (also known as E17). These bulbs are rare and there is no CFL option. So I went back to Home Depot and sure enough all the manufacturers were starting to use these things. The Home Depot guy suspected it was a conspiracy between the ceiling fan companies and the bulb manufacturer. There is only a single brand of intermediate base bulbs at Home Depot so this made a little sense. They also cost as much as a CFL!
I had no desire to use these bulbs so I started looking into converting my base to use the standard medium base socket. I saw a medium base for a ceiling fan display model at Home Depot but they wouldn’t sell it to me and it was no longer going to be carried. The plot thickened. So I looked on the Lowes website and I found a medium base socket that I figured I could retrofit onto my base. While I was looking for the item at Lowes, I asked a representative of one of the lighting companies (who was restocking) about the intermediate bases and he said it was all part of the 2007 Energy Bill. Huh? How can using a base that doesn’t support CFLs be part of an energy bill? I googled around and it appears this was a loophole to get around the Bill. The bill required ceiling fan manufacturers to ship with CFLs, UNLESS they used candelabra or intermediate base bulbs.
Bastards.
Here is the conversion that I did tonight in about 15 minutes.
DISCLAIMER: Please do no do this unless you are experienced with electrical wiring. Follow these steps at your own risk. There may be typos so use common sense if you do this.
1) Unscrew the existing sockets and cut the wires. Keep track of the original wiring. Save the screws.
2) Remove the mount from the Lowes socket and attach it to the base with the screw from the intermediate base. Twist and bend to get it as close to center.
3) You’ll need to strip the existing wires that were not part of the intermediate bases.
4) Combine your whites and blacks and attach with a twist on electrical wire connector.
5) Reinstall
Since these sockets are bigger I needed to bend the socket a little before the light covers fit but overall the fixture looks great.
Pictures. yeah close ups are out of focus but hopefully helpful.
This is the bottom of the intermediate bulb base. poor focus. This is where you will find the screw to remove it.
Here is how the medium base (lleft) compares to the intermediate base (right).
The new base had 2 screws. I removed them and used the screw from the intermediate base since I knew it fit the fixture.
Old Wiring.
New Wiring
And now I have CFL joy.
January 7th, 2008
Tony Primerano
I bought a Honda Fit on New Years Eve. What was I thinking?
I drove my 1996 VW GTI for 11 years and over 120,000 miles. I bought it back in December of 1996 after the oil pump on my 1988 Jeep Comanche died while I was at my mom’s house for Christmas. Before the Comanche I drove a 1977 Mercury Cougar XR7 that I bought from my mom when I was 16.
- Cougar had a 351M 5.8L V8 (173HP) 4000 lbs (23.1 lbs per horse)
- Comanche had a 2.5L 4 cylinder (117HP) 3000 lbs (25.6 lbs per horse)
- GTI had a 2.0L 4 cylinder (115 HP) 2557 lbs (22.2 lbs per horse)
- Fit has a 1.5L 4 cylinder (109 HP) 2551 lbs (23.4 lbs per horse)
There seems to be a trend in engine displacement and weight.
I’m pushing 40 and I’m on my 4th car. I had a friend in high school who had bought over 10 cars before he was 20.
Why the Fit? Honestly I did not expect to like this car. Before I drove it I drove
- Mini Cooper. This car is really cramped inside and there were some interior design flaws that I would not have expected from a BMW.
- VW Rabbit — I loved my GTI but I can’t spend another 10 years in the same car
- Mazda 3 — I liked this car but I didn’t love it. And it was a bit heavy
- Scion XD — I wasn’t impressed and the front end is really high. it looks a little goofy
The fit looks tiny but it is well designed inside and has more interior space than the other cars. It also only weighs 2551 lbs which is about the same as my 1996 GTI. Cars keep getting heavier and I love light car for city and rush hour traffic. Yeah, I know some people prefer to drive tanks for safety but I also own a 1986 Kawasaki Ninja 250 that I stopped driving when I had kids. I gave up the motorcycle for safety but you won’t find me in a Hummer anytime soon. 
There were a few things that I didn’t like about the Fit that were being addressed in the 2009 model but I became convinced that my GTI was not going to live to see November 2009 (New Fit Launch date) so I headed to the dealership on New Years Eve. I figured I would have more negotiation power on the last day of the year. They only offered my $500 for my trade in and I asked them if they would match an offer from CarMax. They said they would, so I came back an hour later with my $1200 trade in offer from CarMax and they matched it. They also matched a price I was quoted over the internet.
So my car buying tips of the day are
- Always get a CarMax trade in offer 1st
- Always get an offer from the dealer via their internet department 1st as this is better than what you get when you just show up.
That’s the story. I hope the Fit gets better gas mileage than my VW. The Golf was advertised at 23/30 but I got 30/34. The Fit advertises 27/33. Lets see what I get out of it. My notes will be here.
January 4th, 2008
Tony Primerano
A few days ago I was having my old AC unit removed and my AC technician noticed that I had a PEPCO Kilowatchers box on my AC Unit. “You won’t be needing that on the new unit” he said. Sure enough they killed the program 3 years ago. These boxes allowed PEPCO to turn off AC units during peak hours to prevent brown outs and help them reduce expenses. In return, people who volunteered to add this box to their AC Unit would get paid each time they were turned off. I think the max was 1 hour per day. So much for trying to get by with fewer power plants.
When I moved into my house in 1998 the power meter was setup for Time of Use (TOU) billing. The off peak rate was about 1/2 the normal rate and the peak rate was a few cents higher than the normal rate. Since my wife and I worked during the day, this saved us money. I kept the AC off during the day and turned it on again when the rates dropped. A few years ago PEPCO changed the off peak rate to be almost the same as the normal rate so I dropped the program. There was no longer incentive to participate.
Just this week I heard that utilites pay 10x more for energy during peak hours. Giving me 50% off my off peak rates seems like a huge win for them and me. I don’t understand why they removed the incentive.
My guess is that since they no longer own any power plants, they are no longer concerned with having to build new plants to keep up with demand. Any increase in peak power can just be passed onto consumers and they profit regardless.
Time of Use programs have the power to reduce the need for more plants and they allow us make better use of our existing infrastructure. Perhaps the government should push for reasonable TOU programs so we can reduce our peak energy usage.
December 16th, 2007
Tony Primerano
I was going to write about how much I hate December but instead I’ll attack www.
Now I love the World Wide Web but I hate typing www for web sites. I’m specifying http:// and I’m hitting port 80, i expect a web page. So why do so many sites still expect you to type www. then the domain name? My site works fine with http://tonycode.com/ or http://www.tonycode.com/ but there are still plenty of sites that just plain break if you don’t add the www. A friend of mine worked at a startup and he mentioned the company name so I entered http://companyname.com/ and I got some guys personal web page. As it turns out one of the employees was using the base domain as his personal web site. No one at the company noticed because they always typed www first. I wonder how many people like me landed on this guys page instead of the company page. Needless to say this was corrected after I brought this issue to the attention of my friend.
That was a few years ago but there are still plenty of examples today. Here is the most recent one I stumbled on
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ works correctly but http://berkshirehathaway.com/ returns a directory listing error. Come on Warren, surely you can get Bill Gates to fix this for you. Any competent IT professional could fix this issue in a few minutes. Of course the site is running on Microsoft IIS so maybe this takes days. I live in an Apache world were everything is easy and free.
Ok, enough picking on Warren and Bill, I own stock in both of their companies so they have the last laugh anyway. But please fix the www. I never type www. unless a site won’t work otherwise.
Did I mention that I hate December?
December 11th, 2007
Tony Primerano
It all started when my uncle’s web site was redesigned with flash. EVERYTHING was done in flash. The address, the phone number, directions, etc. Basically the site was invisible to search engines. I tried explaining to my uncle that search engines would not find anything to index and people googling him would no longer get any results. I told him that he should have the people who design his site put the basic information (address, phone, business name) in plain HTML so search engines could find it.
My uncle is not a techie and didn’t fully understand what I was saying but he did contact the site designers. Apparently they didn’t understand what I was asking either. Instead of pulling out crucial information they added a new index page to his site that lets people choose between a broadband (flash) or dial up (jsp) version. What the?? The JSP version of the site was no lighter than the flash version. Obviously the designers didn’t have a clue either. At least search engines can crawl the JSP site but now there is twice as much to maintain.
Rather than try to convey technical requirements to teams unqualified to build web pages, I decided to build a site that would help other businesses like my uncles. If typing your business name and city does not give you the top result on Google, with a map to your business, your web site is not doing its job. I have a solution. I call it BizLocale.com.
Goto bizlocale.com and enter your business name, address and phone number and website address and see if your search results don’t improve in the coming weeks. The bizlocale.com domain is new and google hasn’t started crawling it actively but I hope that will change in the coming weeks. The site is still pretty rough and I have no proof that entries on this site will show with maps in google but I suspect they will.
BizLocale is also great if your name is not part of a business and people try to search for you. For example. John Doe works in a doctor’s practice called Smith and Associates. On BizLocale he can create an entry for Smith and Associates with his name as a contact. This works great for all sorts of businesses and I see it as a useful tool for people who run businesses out of their house.
The bizlocale.com entry can be your only presence on the web and it should help. In addition to entering contact information there is a text area where you can describe your business and enter keywords. This could be all web presence you need. BizLocale is about empowering local search so having a fancy web site is not a requirement.
November 25th, 2007
Tony Primerano
I occasionally find myself setting the wrong date on my camera and ending up with 100s of pictures that need the dates edited on them. In the past I made these changes with programs that made me edit the dates one picture at a time. I want to set the year ahead or the hour back on 100s of pictures all at once.
JHead to the rescue! Just today I discovered that I needed to set the date back on 100 pictures that I had taken since daylight savings time. With jhead I just stuck the pictures with bad dates in a folder and ran
jhead -ta-1 *jpg
then I changed the actual timestamps on the files to match the EXIF data with
jhead -ft *.jpg
Now that my pictures had the correct hour I was hoping to see my pictures and my daughters in order in picasa. For example. The picture of Maia taking a picture of a boat should be followed by the picture of the boat.
It wasn’t! Turns out her camera was 5 minutes ahead of mine. With jhead this is not an issue.
jhead -ta-0:05 HP*jpg
jhead -ft HP*jpg
This moved the time on all her HP pictures back 5 minutes.
Now the pictures are in order and I’m happy. ya. I’m just a little anal.
Here is my picture
Here is what Maia got
More jhead notes are on my wiki
http://tonycode.com/wiki/index.php?title=Photo_Notes
November 18th, 2007
Tony Primerano
Here in Montgomery County Maryland, work is slated to begin on the Inter-County Connector (ICC) that will connect Montgomery and Prince George’s County. This road might have been worth building if it landed further north on I95. Think BWI airport access for folks and businesses in the I270 corridor.
Take this a step further and extend I370 to Rt 28 in Sterling VA. Finally, another river crossing that would be used by millions and reduce beltway traffic. I’m not sure why Montgomery County is so scared about building another bridge into Virginia. Are they going to take all our precious jobs? Get a clue they already did. All the software engineering jobs migrated to the Dulles corridor over the past 10 years leaving us with Biotech and government jobs. While these are good jobs, having 3 airports withing 40 minutes of Gaithersburg (non-rush hour) would be a huge benefit to business in the I270 corridor.
And don’t give me any crap about protecting our farms in the western part of the county. Better to build a road though them now before they too are sprawling suburbs.
October 21st, 2007
Tony Primerano
I survived another round of layoffs. My manager had 0 layoffs in his group of about 40 people. We are the exception though, several of our colleagues are being shown the door. Its been a depressing day.
October 16th, 2007
Tony Primerano
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