Here’s a quick update to this earlier post I made:

The broken destination sign has been fixed, however, I saw another one on another bus that was also broken, but I didn’t think to note the fleet number so I don’t know for sure whether it’s fixed or not. From now on, I’ll be more careful about recording the fleet numbers with any maintenance issues I find.

Speaking of fleet numbers, I’ve decoded them. The first number is always 8, the next 2 are the last 2 digits of the year, and the last one is a counter for the year. SO bus 8994 is the 4th bus they bought in 1999. I’m not sure if the year is the model year of the bus, or the year they got it. Some of them have different numbers inside the bus so they may have got them used from other transit systems.

The consultant’s report that they are constantly referring to suggest that trial runs of new routes should be at least 1 year long.  They seem to be ignoring the advice they paid for with the Two Nations Crossing trial by only having it run for a few months. They shouldn’t just be cherry-picking only the options they like out of it.  They are also ignoring the pleas of the box store workers who are asking that the bus run until 10pm so they can finish their shifts and take the bus home. Hopefully they won’t give up too soon and declare the run a failure without giving it a proper trial.

Speaking of the consultant’s report, not much else has been done with it, other than asking other levels of government for more money for a new garage and sub-terminal at the Regent Mall. Where’s the extra advertising, re-branding and route number / schedule simplification?

Speaking of improvements, why aren’t they promising any with the UNB universal pass? The students are going to vote on having to pay an extra $100/year for some vague hints that the transit system will be slightly less useless in the future. For STU, they were given the details of the service improvements before they went to vote.

How long has it been since Aliant transferred their wireless division to Bell? I think it’s been a while, however, there are still Aliant Mobility ads inside the buses. I suspect that they leave them up even after the contract has expired so the ad panel doesn’t look too empty. If you want to save on your advertising budget, just run an ad for a month and Fredericton Transit will leave it up for years.

They repainted some of the buses and they no longer put “Fredericton Transit” across the doors. Now they don’t have to worry about using the right font when replacing the doors.

Why don’t they join forces with other local transit agencies and bulk purchase? Surely there’s a price break when you purchase 20 units at once? It seemed to work with road paint. They could even do something as simple as keep a centralized parts repository.

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While browsing an old newspaper (from Nov 5, 1887) that Google graciously scanned in, I came across this familiar sounding ad:

Text reads: WORKING CLASSES ATTENTION! We are now prepared to furnish all classes with employment at home, the whole of the time, or for their spare moments. Business new, light and profitable. Persons of either sex easily earn from 50 cents to $5 per evening, and a proportional sum by devoting all their time to the business. Boys and girls earn nearly as much as men. That all who see this may send their address, and test the business, we make this offer. To such as are not well satisfied we will send one dollar to pay for the trouble of writing.  Full particulars and out – Pt free. Address George Stinson & Co., Portland Maine.

It sounds almost the same as these more modern ads:

Many people are amazed that there are people that still fall for the Nigerian scam. After 122 years, people are still falling for this one. My prediction is that in the year 2131, people will still be falling for the Nigerian scam.

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With all these stories about identity theft and crime on Facebook, I thought I’d give a few pointers on keeping yourself secure.

1. Make sure you don’t have anything set to “public”.  There’s a lot of information on there that you don’t want random people seeing.
2. Keep the personal information to a minimum. Can you trust all your friends? Really, all 500 of them? Can you trust that their accounts will never get hacked?  No you can’t, which is why you shouldn’t have your address or your date of birth on your profile.  These can be used to gain access to accounts.  If you wouldn’t want it in the phone book, don’t put it on your Facebook. Don’t forget that some applications will steal your data; you will probably never know which ones are doing it.
3. Beware of long-lost relatives, they probably aren’t long lost relatives.  Eventually, they’ll come up with some sob story and ask for some money.
4. Beware of impostors, sometimes people aren’t who they say they are.  If it seems a little suspicious, put them on a limited profile until they can prove they are who they say they are.  Ask them something they would only know if you met them in person where they said they met you (such as Junior High)
5. Don’t say that you’re away from home.  One of your idiot friends will tell one of their friends who will break in to your house and steal your stuff.  Post your vacation pictures after you’ve come back.
6. Don’t advertise parties or else you’ll find 200 people showing up at your house and trashing it.  Also watch out for idiots who post stuff on walls about your party, don’t invite them.
7. Use a good password, don’t use ones that are easy to guess. If you login with a Gmail or Hotmail account, don’t use the same password for both.  If someone does get your Facebook password, they’ll get also have your e-mail password.
8. Facebook will never phone or email you asking for account details. If they do, then they aren’t really Facebook. They are just trying to hack your account. 99.99% of account hacks are caused by people giving away their account information to strangers.
9. Beware of hacked accounts. Your friends may have given out their passwords.  If you get an urgent message from them saying that they are in jail in Mexico and need money for bail, it isn’t really them. Remember that they will have a lot of personal information in their account (and they will be able to see your account).
10. Remember the golden rule: if it sounds fishy, it probably is.

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about privatizing parts of our health care system. Some people claim it will be the end of the world and the model won’t work out.

Most people are unaware that there are already a lot of private interests in our health care system. The biggest private involvement is your local doctor’s office. If you look any official documentation, you’ll see that you paid a visit to the “Dr. Smith Professional Corporation”.  Yes, your family doctor is a corporation. Medicare pays out a set rate for each office visit. Out of that, your doctor then has to pay for the receptionist, nurses, rent, tongue depressors, etc. Anything left over is considered a profit.

How is this different than someone buying an MRI machine, and then charging Medicare for each time it gets used?  Wouldn’t the most obvious solution be to just extend the model that exists already?

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Fredericton mayor Brad Woodside has been getting a fair amount of press about his pro-Costco Facebook group.

He created it to prove that there was a clear majority of people in favour of the Costco. Of course, the anti-development people decided that they would use this Facebook group to promote their cause. That was his first lesson, if you create a Facebook group on a controversial subject, there will be controversy in your Facebook group.

He also left the Links and Photos sections open on the group, these got filled up with anti-development links and photos pretty quickly. So what does Mr. Woodside do? He takes down those two sections (while keeping the discussion boards and wall open). Two of the deleted links were anti-development and the other one went to a link on this site. The discussion board and wall soon filled up with cries of censorship. His second lesson is that any time any site maintainer removes a posting, there will be cries of censorship. It didn’t matter that he removed postings from both sides of the argument, there were still cries.

A kind individual set up a poll on an external site as it was becoming too hard to judge how many people were actually for the development. The poll asked whether you were in support of a Costco on the woodlot, somewhere else in the city, somewhere else in the province, or not at all. Mr. Woodside advertised the poll in the group and sent the group members a message about it. For the first few days, the poll registered a fairly consistent 80% of people being in favour of putting the Costco on the woodlot.  It only took a few days, but on Saturday, the poll suddenly read 55% against putting the Costco in the woodlot. That was Mr. Woodside’s third lesson, if you have an open poll, it will get hacked or swarmed. Hacking involves finding a flaw in the duplicate detection system that prevents someone from voting several hundred times. Swarming involves encouraging people who don’t have anything to do with the original discussion to go and vote on that specific poll. They may have gone onto a larger discussion forum and had anti-development people from all over the world vote on this poll. Without having access to the server logs, it’s impossible to tell which one it was in this case.

So now the poll gets closed as it was pretty obvious that it was tampered with. That leaves the discussion board.  That just got swamped with cries of censorship and it ended up being impossible to discuss anything.  That caused the discussion boards to close. Now all that’s left is the wall, the same few people are now continually reposting the same thing again and again so that it stays near the top. It won’t be long before those posts are purged and even more claims of censorship are given. The mayor’s fourth lesson will be that online discussions will spill over into other places. I can bet that this experiment will haunt him for a while. Expect to hear about it in the old media in the next few days.

I believe that Facebook can be used by city officials to connect with the people. Hopefully this experience doesn’t discourage them, as great things can be accomplished with social media.

**UPDATE** This made it on Fark.

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Here’s a nice clean dose of honesty:

I suspect that Dollarama has programmed their debit machines to say “POS Merchandise” forgetting that most people will think that POS stands for “Piece of S…” rather than “Point Of Sale”

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Are you seeing a lot of repetitive ads promising free money? Here’s what it’s all about.

First, we’ll look at some of those ads. You see them a lot on Facebook but they have also been showing up on many other sites recently.

The majority of those will go to a site that looks like one of these:

They will tell you how Google will magically hand their money over to you. They both use the same picture of the same cheque, that should hopefully ring some alarm bells. Most of the sites black out the name on the cheque. You can make the assumption that the cheque wasn’t theirs. One of the sites photoshopped their name onto it (badly).

There is one other picture of a cheque which is different:

This one is a Government of Canada cheque. The person who made that ad failed miserably as they didn’t even bother to show a picture of the right cheque.

So what do you get with your $2?

You get enrolled into a subscription service where you have to pay $40-$80 per month for access to read their howto tips. Do you ever click on a sponsored link when you do a Google search, only to find a page that redirects to another Google search? The service just tells you how to make those redirection pages. Essentially, you pay a little bit (a few cents) to get your result listed in the search, but you’ll bring in a few more cents by running ads on your search page. You can do this without spending a lot of money to get started. Your biggest startup expense will be the membership to Google Cash.

The service may very well provide other tips on how to make money on search results, these may include fake blogs and other such things. I haven’t subscribed to it myself, so I can’t be 100% certain.

Will it actually make me money?

No. With so many people doing this, you won’t get many hits on your pages.  This is called dilution. You won’t get the volume required to actually make a big profit.  If you’re lucky, you’ll get enough to cover the money you spend on the service, but you probably won’t.

Google is working hard to stop these sites from showing up in their search results. In order for them to stay at #1, they need to be really sure that the users get valuable search results. Getting search results that are full of junk will drive people away from Google. You may have some success at the beginning, but after a few weeks, you’ll find your page down at the very bottom of the search results.

So can you make money with this at all?

Yes. It’s called affiliate marketing. For every user you get into Google Cash, they give you a commission. Just run some ads on Facebook and watch the money roll in (or not).

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He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.
Andrew Carnegie

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