Category: Rant

Paypal idiocy

As somebody who gets more than his fair share of spam (see this post for the gory details), I see several attempts a day to phish my Paypal account details. So a few days ago I was a little disconcerted to see something that met every criteria for being legitimate, telling me that somebody had requested a password change on my Paypal account. There were no fake and hidden URLs, the email came from an IP that belonged to Paypal, it used my full name, etc.

And it said that if this request didn’t come from me, I should go to the Paypal page to get the phone number for their fraud contact people. So I did, using my own login bookmark rather than the URL they gave me, in spite of me not being able to see anything wrong with the URL. In a fit of extra paranoia, I even looked at the security certificate on the site.

After making me step through a bunch of voice mail options relating to phishing rather that password change, I finally got to talk to somebody, who said that a glitch in their system sent out a bunch of these and I have nothing to worry about. Ok, fine, why didn’t you save us all some time and effort and put information about that system glitch on your web site?

Today, I got an email asking me to fill out a survey based on my call to Paypal customer support. The only problem is it came from a domain other than Paypal. I’m sure there are quite legitimate reasons why Paypal/eBay would decide not to run their own survey, but in this day and age there is no way in hell I’m going to give *any* sort of information about my interactions with Paypal to a third party. (Ok, this blog post is giving information about my interactions with Paypal to lots of third parties, but that’s different – this is “push”, not “pull”.) Paypal, if you want to survey me about your customer support, you’re going to have to do it from your own email servers and your own web servers.

Not my fault, I hope!

Computer Problem Causes False Stock Quotes

I spent nearly two years working for a company that made the software that, at the time, was responsible for over 75% of all the trades that took place on NASDAQ. My bosses attitude towards quality assurance and testing would have been laughable, if it wasn’t the fact that they could have cost people millions of dollars, and the fact that when I was working there we were losing market share hand over fist to a company that made a product that was faster, easier to use, and didn’t crash all the time.

I’m torn between hoping this failure wasn’t the fault of any of my friends still working there, and hoping that the people in charge will some day get what’s coming to them.

Most of our customers were “market makers”, which is a large step up from stock broker in the heirarchy. A lot of our customers, and three of the people in our company, were at work in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. One person from our company got out. The other two didn’t. One of the people who died was somebody whom I was scheduled to have a conference call later that day when she got back from WTC. I think about Julie a lot when 9/11 comes up in conversation.

Blog update

I’ve never figured out whether the reason so many PHP sites are steaming piles of shit is because PHP is a horribly limited language with inherent flaws you can drive a truck through, or if it’s just the web equivalent of Visual Basic and so it attracts the weakest programmers on the net. But I do know this – unlike every other program on every other computer I own, this blog program is incapable of determining the correct local time and I have to manually change the offset from GMT when we switch from EST to EDT and back. So fuck it – I’m switching the time format to display GMT. Why not? I’m a pilot, I have GMT time prominently displayed on my watch. And it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to.