Max Beatty

To date, I’ve been a mem­ber of Face­book for 24% of my life. I’ve grown up with them, lived through their redesigns, and sorta kinda under­stood their grow­ing num­ber of fea­tures. Today, they’ve added the Sub­scribe But­ton. By opt­ing in, you can remove the syn­chro­nous foun­da­tion of the plat­form which is what I’m choos­ing to do.

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Cliff Jiff­i­son sent me an email last night that wasn’t very nice. I believe it was in response to a post I made about Groupon over a year ago. The point then, now, and always was that Groupon should be doing more to pro­tect mer­chants, cus­tomers, and Groupon alike. I fol­lowed up with some sim­ple ideas to make that hap­pen. Still, Cliff felt the need to send me this:

So you post how to cheat the restau­rant you bought a groupon with? And appar­ently your proud of this and it looks like you might even be solic­it­ing busi­nesses to hire you for web work? Your a crook and a thief and a liar. Why not post how to short a bartender(when he is real busy) by show­ing him a $20 then hand­ing him a $10?? Your just a dis­hon­est a-hole. No won­der you need the inter­net to find friends. You look like a douch­bag anyway…

It looks like Jiff­i­son is a made up name, but I replied to the email address pro­vided — cliffjiffison@yahoo.com. If he or any­one else would like to have a con­struc­tive con­ver­sa­tion about any of the mate­r­ial I post, please feel free to con­tact me.

Some mass tran­sit sys­tems choose to oper­ate in a man­ner where you must have Proof-of-Payment at all times while onboard. Gen­er­ally, this is in the form of a paper ticket. These paper tick­ets can be pur­chased from loca­tion aware vend­ing machines at each sta­tion. These machines allow patrons to pay with credit cards, autho­riz­ing trans­ac­tions through a num­ber of highly com­pli­cated finan­cial net­works, for which a paper receipt is printed to show Proof-of-Payment.

Mobile Bank­ing

In this same mag­i­cal world where some­one can go from the street to a seat in a mat­ter of sec­onds thanks to a mag­ne­tized piece of plas­tic, there also exist wire­lessly net­worked hand­held com­put­ers that fit in your pocket. They, too, have the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with the highly com­pli­cated finan­cial net­works and can almost instantly show recent pur­chases to cus­tomers. Most times, they show more detailed and leg­i­ble infor­ma­tion than the pieces of paper printed by the vend­ing machines.

Math Proofs

The paper receipt and mobile bank­ing receipt can not be proven to be equal with­out some other valid piece of infor­ma­tion to tie them together. Trust­ing the valid­ity of the finan­cial net­works and authen­tic­ity of the mobile bank­ing receipt, you can prove you bought n+1 tick­ets with­out n tick­ets or a paper receipt.

For exam­ple, I buy two tick­ets with a credit card from the vend­ing machine and receive three pieces of paper: two tick­ets and a paper receipt. One ticket and the receipt are lost. A mobile bank­ing receipt is pro­duced for the amount of two tick­ets. If that receipt and the ticket that was not lost are pre­sented, it should be accepted as Proof-of-Payment.

On Cal­train, this is not the case. Keep your 19th cen­tury paper scraps and avoid $250 cita­tions (or make the guy from out of town take the fall).

Early today, I came across a blog post describ­ing how to tell if some­one is fol­low­ing you on Twit­ter. It was lim­ited to just the Twitter.com inter­face so I thought I’d expand on their native apps for Mac and iOS.

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I’m mov­ing this week in large part because of Con­ser­vice, a third party billing ser­vice used by lazy land­lords. Land­lords aside, Con­ser­vice is a very shady com­pany. A tweet of mine attracted a response from another unhappy cus­tomer who pro­vided the fol­low­ing details on just how slimey they are.

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