Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in GreenReaper's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, May 20th, 2012
2:01 am	The inevitable conclusion In retrospect, it's obvious - as books become increasingly less relevant to daily life, they are relegated to being design accessories. Still, I'm not quite sure which is more horrifying; that you can buy books by the foot, or that they had to put green on sale. Current Mood: horrified (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
12:00 am	Furry comics raising six digits on Kickstarter Twokinds recently aimed to raise $25,000 in 30 days to print two graphic novels. They just passed $100,000, with over three weeks left to go. Sure, Twokinds is something of an outlier - an Ursa Major winner which has run for almost nine years now. Still, I think this is pretty big news, and hopefully an inspiration to other aspiring comic artists out there. . . . that said, I really wouldn't want to be the guy packing over 1,000 shipping envelopes with books. Hope Tom gets media mail rates! Current Mood: impressed (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 10th, 2012
8:08 pm	American Express's Serve needs some work Serve is (roughly speaking) American Express's response to services like PayPal and Dwolla. I became a member through RevolutionMoney, which they bought out. ( Here's my recent (poor) experience ) Don't get me wrong - this was initially my mistake. However, the end result was not a good support or product experience. It compares poorly with competitors and I am more inclined to use and recommend them as a result. I do not really blame the support representatives for this, more the system that they are interacting with, which does not appear to empower them to do their jobs, any more than it empowered me to avoid a support request in the first place (by, say, letting me retarget a pending transaction, or telling me the address wasn't linked with a Serve account). Oh, and the kicker? The third-party support response survey I was sent about the phone call timed out (who lets sessions recycle after thirty minutes?!). When I tried to return, I was told I couldn't submit "another" survey, even though I hadn't finished. So I'm posting it here, for all to see. Update (11 May): Serve's social media group apparently has greater access than the front-line support; my issue was escalated and resolved earlier this afternoon. I hope the underlying issues can also be resolved eventually. Current Mood: aggravated (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
2:06 am	Headed to Califur? I'm planning a trip to Califur at the start of June; I've never been, and it's now relatively close. It's also the site for this year's Ursa Major Award ceremonies, and as there's a chance the sites I work on might win, I'd like to be there in person. I know how I'm getting there, and when - Friday evening to Sunday afternoon - but I don't yet have a place to stay. So: if you happen to have a room for Fri/Sat night, and need to fill some space in it, let me know! (I'll also be at Anthrocon, Thursday night until Monday afternoon, but I've got accommodation for that.) Current Mood: organized (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012
8:45 pm	Want to try advertising your projects on Google for free? As a member of the Google Engage for Agencies program (yes, I'm apparently an ad agency . . .), I have a bunch of coupons for $100 worth of Google advertising. If you've not got an AdWords account yet, but are interested in trying it out, see this post. Current Mood: productive (Comment on this)
Monday, March 26th, 2012
6:25 pm	A tasty problem I was wondering why my ice-cream felt all tacky. Next time I'll move it further away from the element. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
5:15 pm	MediaWiki 1.17.3: $bytes != $buffer Heh. Patched to MediaWiki 1.17.3 on WikiFur - I start testing and getting a strange notice whenever I try to login. Fortunately I know where to go . . . #mediawiki! After talking with the developer concerned, it seems I ran into a bug in the new mcrypt code. Good that we found it, but bad in that it'll need another patch of MediaWiki - and because they're about to make another release, there are three versions that need patching (1.17, 1.18, and the 1.19 beta, plus the trunk). Edit: Found another! Broke email confirmation on 1.17, probably just the display of the expiry time on later versions. Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Monday, March 19th, 2012
3:29 am	2011 Ursa Major Award nominations up - time to vote! The nominations for this year's Ursa Major Awards are up, and three projects which I am involved with - WikiFur, Flayrah, and Inkbunny - have made it onto the ballot. If you've not already voted, please drop by and see what's on offer. There's some good stuff, and judging by the two MLP-based nominations, we'll need all the help we can get defending against the brony menace. ;-) Current Mood: hopeful (Comment on this)
Friday, March 9th, 2012
12:22 pm	Measuring a good risk - key factors affecting credit scoring I recently read over the August 2007 Report to the Congress on Credit Scoring and Its Effects on the Availability and Affordability of Credit. It's an interesting document - well, interesting if you're me, anyway. The main purpose of the study was to learn how well credit scoring worked and whether it was discriminating against certain groups (perhaps because key factors were strongly related to sex or race). The cool part from a statistics viewpoint is that they made up their own credit scoring model in order to evaluate those offered by companies for bias. Of 312 credit-related factors, they got down to nineteen that appear to make a noticeable difference to predictions - and for most people, only half of those really matter. ( So what was found? ) ( Perhaps more interestingly, what factors predict success? What's likely to get you a good credit score? ) Current Mood: geeky (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012
3:14 pm	GreenReaper live on FurCast I'm going to be interviewed on tonight's FurCast. The show starts at 8PM Eastern (in about four hours), though my interview's around 9PM. Wish me luck! (If you have any burning questions that you want answered, you can ask them here.) Edit: The show is over now, but my answers to the above questions are up, and you can catch the actual interview (with more details) at 73:16 into show FC-76. Current Mood: pensive (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 19th, 2012
2:47 pm	Deducting the cost of your slacker boyfriend Got any [boy/girl]friends living with you, but not contributing their fare share? Take them as a dependent exemption. (Also works with grandma/grandpa, even if they're in a home.) Current Mood: amused (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
10:25 am	Interviewed by "Hugs" My interview in Russian furry magazine Hugs is now available (p. 6). Not sure how many people here can read it (angel51431, I'm looking at you), but there's a picture of me being interviewed by Pillgrim, drawn by Душевед. Edit: Here's the ( English version ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
1:23 am	Amazon trying to reduce associates' income Here's some recent changes in Amazon's associate agreement (for people who earn money off links pointing to Amazon's products). Amazon's announcement of these changes focused on the benefit to associates who used a link to myhabitat.com, who have 30 days to earn rather than the usual 24 hours. They failed to highlight the change that stops you earning if a user who clicked your link follows any other link to Amazon, not just that of another associate. Is this reasonable? Arguable. I suspect they've run the numbers and found quite a few people look around before putting an item in their cart, and in that case you might well lose out on what would otherwise have been a valid sale. They are also forcing all non-small-claims disputes to go through arbitration. Wonder which lawsuit that was inspired by. Current Mood: annoyed (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
9:50 pm	Post to Google+ via email Did you know you can hack together Google Voice and Gmail to post to Google+ via email? I tried it and it works. Now, if only it worked for Pages! I already have an email trigger that fires when people submit to Flayrah - I could easily do one that had the post teaser in it as well. (Of course, if G+ supported RSS import, this wouldn't be an issue . . .) Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Saturday, January 28th, 2012
5:11 pm	Pony-play of a textual variety Last night I added four articles about newly-formed MUCKs/MUSHes to WikiFur's 'My Little Pony multiplayer worlds' category. It seems the world of text-based online roleplaying is as alive as ever! Current Mood: amused (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 6th, 2012
10:29 am	Meet the new Yerf, same as the old Yerf Oh, I forgot to mention here - I run the Yerf Historical Archive now that ArtSpots has closed. Didn't see that coming when I first dropped by a decade or so ago! (There's still a number of images to add from backups, but most past Yerf artists are represented to some extent. Search planned for later.) Current Mood: chipper (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 26th, 2011
9:07 pm	Correspondants on the front line The BBC is doing some pretty hairy reporting (additional video, audio) from Homs in Syria, with a two-man reporting crew smuggled in by gun-runners. Hope they make it out again. (Comment on this)
Monday, November 14th, 2011
3:26 pm	Pre-publication pitfall for contextual advertising The idea of contextual advertising used by Google AdSense/AdWords is great - match ads to the content, and readers are more likely to be interested. Of course, you'll only get relevant ads if Google can see your content - and this goes beyond robots.txt. For example, many content-based sites have some kind of review process. The editors and submitter may be able to see the submitted piece, but anyone else trying to view the page it's on will get a 403 error - including the 'Mediapartners-Google' AdSense bot. This doesn't work so well if that page is at the same URL as the one your readers access. The bot will try to crawl the piece when it's first submitted, fail, and won't try again until it's "old news", leaving your users with ads irrelevant to the page content. Whoops. The solution is not to show the ad block until the article is published - or provide a crawler login, but do you really want it basing ads off the first draft? Current Mood: nerdy (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 24th, 2011
4:56 pm	How Discover tried to act smart, but just looked dumb Some computer is out at whack over at Discover Personal Loans. They just sent me a promotional flyer comparing a loan of $16,000 at 7.99% APR against . . . wait for it . . . a loan of $16,000 at 7.99% APR. They then magically achieved thousands in savings by assuming that I'd pay off this loan in 48 months, rather than with minimum payments. (That's assuming you actually get 7.99% APR from them.) ( Why this is stupid: ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 20th, 2011
1:09 pm	Cell phone service on ~$5/month? It can be done! Whenever I need more service on my Tracfone, I drop by Turk Forums to see what promotions are on. I normally get about 40 extra minutes out of it, out this time there was a rare 60 bonus minute option available on 60 min/90 day cards. Great! I already have double minutes, so that triples it. But when I go to purchase, I notice ( some "supersize" options . . . ) Current Mood: pleased (Comment on this)