I received notice this morning from eBay:

We received a report about a message you sent to another eBay member through our Email Forwarding System. The message violates the Misuse of eBay Email Forwarding System policy. We want to let you know about the report and invite you to learn more about communication between sellers and buyers. To learn more about the Email Forwarding System guidelines, please go to:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/rfe-unwelcome-email-misuse.html

We're taking a neutral position regarding the report we received, but if we continue to receive similar reports, we'll have to investigate. Policy violations can result in a formal warning, a temporary suspension, or an indefinite suspension.

If you have concerns related to this matter, you can contact us by going to:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/contact_us/_base/index_selection.html

Well, I'd like to know about what message this complaint was levelled. But, naturally (this being eBay), there's no appropriate option at index_selection.html, and the best fitting options require that in one field I provide a relevant item number or user ID about whom I'm complaining. My own user ID is rejected from this field.

Over the years, eBay, like many other corporations, has modified its interface and protocols to make them dumber in ways that specifically increase the difficulty of confronting it with responsibility.

eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar, whose user ID is pierre. So I entered that user ID in the field, and it was accepted. Doubtless that, if others do likewise, then the software will be tweaked to prevent it.

I have submitted my paper to a third journal, that recommended by the editor who rejected it at the previous journal.

This third journal is one from an association which, like many, charges a lower submission fee to its members. Even with the annual dues and on the assumption that I only made one submission in a year, I would still save money, so I joined. However, after I registered and paid, I learned that it could take up to four weeks for my membership information to be recorded and provided to me. Hence, this delay between submissions. I'm not sure that the money saved was worth that delay.

In looking for an established notation for a particular sort of permutation, I have run across a large number of tutorials that declare that the notation and formula for a permutation is

_nP_r = n! / (n - r)!

This claim complete confuses the concept of a permutation with the count of possible permutations. It's rather like saying that an American is 306,719,000.

Yester-day, I found a rat's nest under the hood of my car. Literally.

I visited my parents in Tucson from late March until last Tuesday. I parked outside, just off their drive-way, and didn't use my car very much during that time. They live far east of the city center, out amongst the cactus, gilla monsters, and pack rats. I spotted the occasional pack rat under my car, but thought very little of it.

On my way home, I was pulled-over by an officer of the Arizona Highway Patrol, because my passenger-side head-light was out. (He was simply concerned that the problem be addressed, and gave me a written warning rather than ticketting me.) I went to an automotive store on the next day or the day after that, and bought new bulbs. But, when I popped the hood to replace the bulb, I found that the wires to the bulb were frayed and broken. There was nothing there to bang-around. The Woman of Interest suggested that they'd been chewed by a mouse. Rodent damage seemed plausible, and I couldn't think of a good rival explanation. Anyway, I decided that the best way to effect a repair was with a new connector and some butt connectors (metal sleeves, which are in turn ensleeved in plastic, and which are crimped to join wires or cables).

Apparently, I was operating with a sort of tunnel vision when I discovered the chewed wires. Although the rat's nest was quite big, I didn't spot it, sitting on the engine behind the valve cover, until yester-day, as I was effecting the repair. The nest was built of twigs, sticks, and some soft fibrous material. I was puzzled about why I hadn't had an engine fire, until I reälized that the soft fiber was produced by shredding swatches of the hood insulator. That rat really did considerable damage.

None-the-less, its actions weren't malicious, and I rather hope that it either wasn't in the car at all when I was driving, or leapt out before I was going more than a few miles per hour. Otherwise, the pack rat almost certainly was cooked to death or was killed when it hit the pavement. Had it cooked, I probably would have found a body. And if the nest was built between my previous use of the car and when I was loading it to go home, then the rat probably fled as the car shook from that loading.

Another one of the many perturbing errors in Jeffrey's Subjective Probability, this from §4.1:

If I am sure that it was one of the years from 1951 to 1959, with equal probabilities, then my ex(X) will be 1951
9 + 1952
9 + … + 1959
9, which works out to be 1954.5.

One doesn't even have to do any arithmetic (I didn't) to spot the error; for a sequence of an odd number of equally-spaced integers, the average is the middle-most value, in this case 1955.

Some of you will recall my highly-localized tradition of anonymous Butterfinger bars. Last night, I went to the local CVS pharmacy and bought an eight-pack of Butterfinger Mini bars, took it home and gift-wrapped it, and then snuck it under the miniature Christmas tree on my neighbors' table.

While at CVS pharmacy, I encountered Chris, who was despairing over an immediate lack of consumer choice. He had an urgent need to replace a mislaid umbrella. He had checked at the local Rite Aid and found none. At CVS pharmacy, his choices were amongst just two children's umbrellas, one with a race-car theme, the other a pink princess thing. Recognizing that the ironic charm of the latter would be quickly exhausted, he chose the former.

My very best seasonal wishes to my friends who are reading this. As to the rest of you, I eye you with suspicion. Don't try nothin' funny!

One of the Corsair 8GB Voyager USB flash drives that I bought seems to have completely failed, before I even received the mail-in rebate for it. Grand.

I got a note the other day referring to 12:00p.m when its author plainly meant noon.

Okay, now, folks, p.m. stands for post meridiem — after noon. Noon isn't after itself. There is a 12:01 p.m., a 12:00:01 p.m., a 12:00:00.0…01 p.m.. But if there is any 12:00 p.m., then it would be mid-night; which, awkwardly, is also the only candidate for 12:00 a.m., since noon also isn't before noon (ante meridiem) either.

Calling noon 12:00 m. would just confuse people, as they'd take the m. as standing for midnight, but 12:00 n. is nicely unambiguous.

The Windows installation on my computer is currently spending many hours to accomplish something that should take less than a minute.

Most computer storage systems have a sort of thing that some of us know as directory and others know as folder. People speak and tend to think of files as being in these things, but actually files are only in these things in much the same sense as a persons are in a phone book. Hence, directory is at least the less misleading term (paper files being in paper folders more as people are in buildings). Directories are usually themselves implemented as files, which then makes it trivial to put directories in other directories.

Logical disk C on my computer entirely resides on one physical hard drive. I have a directory on C such that I'd like to move it from one parent directory on C to another on C. What that literally means is that I would like to add a listing for it to another directory, remove a listing from the earlier parent, and change what the moved directory lists as its parent. I don't want to relocate the files that it contains to another part of the logical drive; I certainly don't want to relocate them to another physical drive. I don't even want to relocate the directory in question. I just want to change which parent directory lists the directory in question (and what it lists as its parent directory). So I did a cut-and-paste from one folder to another, something on the order of twelve hours ago. The move is still in-process; the progress bar indicates that it is less than half done. The disk drive is in a state of near-continuous activity, and the dialogue box is listing the subcontents of the directory one-by-one.

(Sadder still, this move is in preparation for moving the files in question to a different physical device, which will take considerable time no matter which operating system is used.)

In the wake of a ruling by the Supreme Court of the State of California that required the state to recognize and effect same-sex marriage, there is a measure, Proposition 8, on the ballot to amend the state constitution to halt recognition of further same-sex marriages. I oppose this measure, though (as I have stated various places) what I really want is for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether, and to treat marriages simply as private contracts. (I think that participants should see marriage as far more, but that's not the business of the state.)

This after-noon, I stopped at the San Diego headquarters of Vote No on Prop 8 to buy a couple of bumper-stickers, one to actually slap on a bumper, and one to put on the case of my note-book computer.

The guy who greeted me there was a fool. Instead of just selling me a couple of bumper-stickers, he tried very aggressively to get me to make a substantial donation, starting with the idea that I should give them the equivalent of a dollar an day for a year, by donatiing $365. There isn't a fr__king year left until the election; there's about 40 days. Had he begun by suggesting a $40 donation, well, I might have gone along with that; as it was, he had my back up, and I said no to the other sums that he suggested. I gave them $5 and they gave me the two bumper-stickers that I'd sought. In addition to the bumper-stickers, I left with considerable annoyance.

Another irksome thing, not the fault of Vote No on Prop 8, was that I had to fill-out a d_mn'd form, because I'd made a political contribution, however small. It was a gross violation of my rights as acknowledged by the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but if I didn't fill-out that form, and truthfully, then the money could be confiscated by the state.