August 2005 Archives

This is somewhat of a departure for me. I've been doing some work for my client that involves WebStart, a system that lets you deploy Java applications from a webserver without installing any local tools (aside from Webstart itself, natch). "A perfect avenue for games!"

So digging around, I started looking for games I could run via webstart (which, by the way, runs perfectly under Linux). I found Jake2.

Jake2 is a pure-java implementation of the Quake2 engine, from Id Software. If you have any interest in first person shooters, or haven't been under a rock the last 7 years, you've heard of Quake. I had pulled Jake2 a while ago as a standalone app, and it was 'okay', but a bit bumpy. Since I still had my Q2 maps locally, I was able to just click on the Jake2 Webstart button on Bytonics webpage, say "Here are my maps" and I was off and running.

The game plays perfectly, with a high frame rate on my laptop, and seems to handle many of the issues of running "a full screen app in a window" quite well (the mouse motion does NOT move the 'pointer' off the window, and you suddenly stop moving, easy prey for the nasties lurking about).

I also was able to download a couple third party game maps, and install them into the baseq2 directory, and run around a bit. Only one caused Jake2 to crash out, and that could easily have been because of a bad map. The Id supplied maps were fine.

Next on the list will be to try using the networking code, and playing multiplayer. Moohahah.

My friend unalmas is an Exchange master. She deals with horrific system issues on a constant basis. She documents one particular week long incident, which just drives home how much I love being a Unix admin.

Well, I'm stuck on something. If you or someone you know is a JBoss guru, they should take a look at this posting and see if you or they can offer any help. I'm stumped. :(

Things are settling down a bit around Chez Geek, and I'm starting to get back into the rhythm of working on my laptop full time. Life things being as they are, it makes sense to really keep an eye on where in the area I can find to telecommute. This is more of a challenge than you might think. Not many businesses are comfortable with you just plopping down in their space and sitting for 4-6 hours straight.

Despite that, though, there are a few places that encourage this, or even invite it. Since today I was hanging around Waltham, MA, I decided to see what I could find in the area.

First step, since it was lunchtime, was the local Wendys. Surprisingly, I've had very good luck finding open WiFi access points around Wendy's restaurants - I guess they just sort of invite the open-no-wep-key types to their locale. Today I found 7 (!) accesspoints in range, and easily connected up to one to keep in touch through lunch and a bit after. Alas, Wendy's dining room chairs really aren't that comfortable, so I decided to move on.

I had stopped by the Charles River Public Internet Center once before, but it was unfortunately closed at that time. This time the door was open, but the public area was being worked on, so I couldn't sit down. These folks seem awfully nice, and I think I'll explore doing more formal "Come here and work for a day" arrangements with them. The woman at the front desk was nice enough to point out a local coffee shop that had open WiFi, and was within walking distance, so off I went.

I ended up at "Cafe on the Common" (oddly, no website), right in the center of Waltham on Moody street. There was one other laptop-a-holic when I got there, so I settled into a comfy table, got a big bowl of coffee, and settled in to work. The net connection was a little bit twitchy, but I was able to get 2-3 hours of work in, whilst listening to lovely music.

I'm going to keep exploring other good spots around the area. Finding something a little further west would be nice, since I'll be commuting to Sudbury Valley School for picking up Z when the school year starts - be nice to have someplace within striking distance of that.

"Use Me Up" is a masterpiece. Long before Mick Jagger and Hootie and the Blowfish covered it. I can just jam to it for ages. It's only 2 chords, but what a great groove.

I'm not a computer scientist. I didn't go to school to get letters by my name to learn how languages are built and designed, and I never wrote a compiler in my life. I'm just a fairly high end programmer who writes in high level languages, and builds large applications.

I'm certainly a big user of PHP - less so recently, but since Claimit is written in it, I've been getting my wheels back on it.

But, occasionally I run across design decisions that just don't seem to make sense. Case in point, the 'asort()' function. It sorts an array, in this case backwards (as opposed to sort). One would assume you'd use it like this:

$sortedArray = asort($oldarray);

Not so! This function works, does not throw any errors, but the resulting value in $sortedArray is 'true' (or '1'). The asort function returns a BOOLEAN value (successful completion of a sort??) What actually happens is the asort() function reorders an existing array. So in order to have a new version of the array sorted, or to sort the result of a function call, you use this tortured syntax:

asort($sortedArray = $oldarray);

In my case, I'm actually sorting the returned array from a function call, so we have:

asort($sortedArray = getFiles())

I understand this is a Perl-ism. That doesn't mean it has to be perpetuated further on the masses. Ick.

Over the last few days, other people have started to use Claimit for managing giveaways. There's a potential for this thing to pick up steam, and I need to do some more work on the code, but in the meantime I thought it might be nice to actually register a domain for it.

Twiddling whois, I see that 'claimit.com' is registered, but the associated 'www' site doesn't have the standard 'Buy this domain!' crud all over it. So I fire off mail to the domain tech contact asking if they'd like to sell the domain.

I get a quick response (nice), saying "I have to check with my partners, but note it won't be cheap." Folks are STILL trying to cash in on this noise, huh? I sent back a very terse letter saying I don't endorse profiteering from domain squatting, and went back to whois.

Well, lookee. 'claimit.net' is not registered. I'll take that instead.

The next question was which registrar to use. Unfortunately, my recent experience with Register.com has been poor to disasterous (2 weeks to resolve a broken address pointer in their database), and their pricing scheme ain't so hot either. So I decided to try Yahoo! Domains for this one. The process was truly slick, costing me $9.95 to reserve the domain complete with A and MX records hosted on their servers. I set up a forwarder so that hits to www.claimit.net will be redirected to claimit.stonekeep.com, and sat down to wait to see how long it'll take to go into the master nameservers, and for DNS to propogate.

Answer: 23 minutes.

I've never brought up a new domain that fast before. Amazing. Stick that in your smoke and pipe it, mister domain squatter.

This one just bit me on the ass tonight.

Why is it that the Gnu Linux heads can't understand that a single documentation format, one that has been in place since time immemorial, should be replaced by one that is inferior, annoying, and requires a whole new set of skills, JUST TO LOOK UP SOME TEXT?

I bring you the idiocy that is 'info'. It is the grossest example of 'emacsification' that is all too common place in the Linux world.

Here's a real life example of this ridiculousness.

Today I needed to write a 'sed' script to do some line processing. No problem, I just need to look in the man page to see how to do a few things. But lo! The man page for 'sed' on my machine (Debian Sarge Linux) doesn't have any useful information. In fact, it has almost nothing at all. It does, however, helpfully say, about line 30:

This is just a brief synopsis of sed commands to serve as a reminder to those who already know sed; other documentation (such as the texinfo document) must be consulted for fuller descriptions.

Very handy, eh? Fine, I just so happen to know that also later in the document it mentions 'info sed'. Okay, so I type that.

The information I'm looking for is simply what the command line arguments are, and how to set pattern matches on substitution. The command info sed puts me... into an interactive menu system. Normally, 'man' pages are searchable by typing '/string'. So I type that. I am now on a page called 'Less frequently used commands'. Very soon I am hopelessly lost in navigating screens and nodes and commands that have nothing to do with what I'm trying to do, which is simply get a command syntax.

Who POSSIBLY thought that translating the simple single page format of man pages, that every Unix admin on the planet knows how to use, into an interactive mini-Emacs session that requires a fair amount of knowledge on how Emacs works to work with makes ANY sense whatsoever?

Unfortunately, the people who make these sorts of idiotic decisions are the same ones that boot up Emacs and never leave it, and assume the rest of the world must know it as well. I have news for ya fellas, I don't. And assuming that eveyrone knows how to use emacs, and therefore it's okay REQUIRING an admin to use an emacs interface to view documentation is narrow sighted and ridiculous.

Stick with the known, standard, common formats. Emacs is not universal. Use the man page system that has been around since the dawn of time. There's absolutely no reason to change it.

I just posted some updates to how our cohousing project, Mosaic Commons, is coming along. Check out the Mosaic Commons blog to see what's new.

Friend of mine noted this, while troubleshooting a fiberchannel array attached to a Debian Sarge system:

linvfs_put_super: vfsp/0xf5b95400 left dangling!
VFS: Busy inodes after unmount. Self-destruct in 5 seconds. Have a nice day...

Since we moved into the new house, I haven't had much opportunity to try and get things in my workspace / room / office organized. When there was energy to move things around, I worked on the public spaces. Hey, it's only my room, right?

Today I spent some time cleaning up my workspace, prepping to do more work on it (new lights, chair arrangements, etc). It's much tidier now, and I can look at it and go "RIght. New light there, new monitor there... and..."

But while it's clean, here's what it looks like. Since I work fulltime at home, I spend anywhere from 8 hours to 'all my waking time, save trips to eat and use the loo' in that spot.

This is a fair warning to folks running Debian Sarge. Recently there was a security update of Sarge (aka 'Debian Stable') to bring Firefox to a package identified as "mozilla-firefox 1.0.4-2sarge2".

This update is UNSTABLE. Loaded extensions (I believe) are causing constant segfaults in the application, and running with an empty profile (firefox -p, new profile), odd behaviour in certain mime type handlers is happening. Also, hitting ^H or viewing the history window causes an immediate segfault and crash.

I would recommend people running Debian Sarge NOT upgrade their install of FireFox until this is resolved.

Update: this bug is reported already in Bugzilla, but has not been addressed. The link(s) are:
Bug #324516 (^W crash)
Bug #324617 (History window crash)

As reviewed over on Digital Preview (www.dpreview.com), Canon has announced the EOS-5D. This is the first digital SLR camera to have a full sized 35mm sensor. At a mere $3500, a steal, and clearly out of my budget, but what a sweet camera. 4368x2912 resolution.

Many many moons ago my friend Cathy turned me on to Roman Dirge's 'Lenore' comics. In one particular strip, Lenore is singing the bunny foo foo song.

Well, some bright light went and made a shockwave video of it. Note, it makes little sense unless you have the sound on, and in fact, it loses something in the translation, but it's still gruesome and cute.

Apparently this is just one of an entire series of vids. I think I'll wait until I'm truly catatonic before watching more. The killer bear picture is very cute though.

Here is a great exchange between an online comic artist and someone who disliked that he was using his comic for lefty commentary. The resulting email exchange is fascinating.

Mad pr0pz to Fraterrisus for this link.

So now that I'm done with "The convention I was stressing about" (I'll be heading back to Boston tomorrow), it's back into the long term contract I picked up a few months ago. A lot of very cool Java coding that's abstract, fascinating, intense, and occasionally screamingly frustrating.

But it also means I get to think about other things, all of which will cost money, which is workable, but it's not like we have bottomless pockets just waiting to be plumbed.

So, my wishlist... projects, ideas, things I want to to, stuff in the works, etc.

I get to watch a little TV when travelling - it's a great 'run away!' space for me where I can avoid all the chaos that are conventions. Every once in a while I get to watch something that just leaves me cracking up everytime I play it over in my head.

While watching Mythbusters the other night (a great show no matter how you slice it), the topic was "Free Energy". The boys decided to test several 'free energy' offerings on the internet, and see if they actually work or not. Needless to say, all of the various offerings failed miserably in their tests.

In the "summary" part, where Jamie and Adam are 'discussing' the results of the tests (usually rather woodenly and obviously pre-scripted), Jamie (the more taciturn of the two) asks Adam (who is far more animated) "So Adam, does the all this talk about Free Energy make you feel all warm and fuzzy now?" And Adam, in a very matter of fact tone, replies "Sure Jamie. In fact, it reminds me much of things like the Easter Bunny and Santa clause, because it's A FANTASY!!!" (the last line delivered in a loud voice directly into the camera.)

This show is definately one of the good 'uns on TV nowadays.

From the same folks who brought you the geek hierarchy (a truly masterful project - be sure to look at the super-huge unabridged version), heres' some handy household hints. One I found particularly amusing:

Keep Computers From Taking Over The World

First, take note of the year. Before 1974, you must confront the computer with a paradox such as "I'm lying right now" or ask it to compose a love poem. Between 1974 and 1987, you should guess the ridiculously obvious backdoor password. After 1987 you should upload a virus to it using your Apple

I'm in Tampa working a convention this week. Since this was a "I pay for everything" trip, I booked a flight on the cheapest airline I could find, which ended up being Song Airlines (apparently the 'cheapo' side of Delta). $170 round trip from Logan to Tampa. Not too shabby.

What I didn't count on was the entirely pleasant experience of it all. Song has a great checkin system at Logan. I was initially dismayed at the horrifically long line at the Delta desk, then I glanced over and saw the 'Song Checkin Kiosk'. The kiosks were great, and after asking for my credit card (which they siad on screen they were using only to get my name - a neat trick I thought), my reservation came up just fine. I was able to reassign my seat to an exit row right on the screen, and off I went to drop my bags in for checked baggage.

All that done, I had an hour to kill before my plane departed, and after playing Spaceward Ho for a while (a great little game for the Palm), I was able to board, only to find that my seat, which was labelled as an exit row... wasn't an exit row.

The attendants were very pleasant, checked the bookings, and said "Try 16A, that row isn't booked." "Thanks!" and I plunked myself down.

The first thing I noticed was that all the airline seats had a little display in the back of the headrest, facing the person behind. I'd seen something similar before - usually it's for showing in-flight movies or the like, but this seemed a little more robust. It was just idling while we were at the gate, but after takeoff, the system powered up and I was presented with... a menu system! It was a touchscreen. Well okay!

It turns out this is a Linux based in flight entertainment / media system that Song airlines installed in all their 757's. You can build your own MP3 music list from their library (which was okay - I listened to Eurythmics Greatest Hits, Purple Rain, and Depeche Mode while I was doing some coding). There's also a great scrolling display showing the position of the plane on the trip, but that wasn't the coolest part.

In the menus, there's a 'Games' section. Okay, why not. Wait. A trivia game. No, A NETWORKED trivia game! Holy cats! You can play the trivia game against other people in the plane. When you start it up, it asks you for a name to use in the score list (I typed 'GEEK' on the little keyboard that came up), and voila, you're in. The games are 20 questions long, and scores are kept for the game and for the entire flight. Your seat number is shown as well, so you can get an idea where the people you're playing against are sitting on the plane. The top player for a while was someone named BOSOX in seat 1A. I suspect it was the pilot. :)

This game definately made the 3 hour flight go very quickly - it was interesting hearing folks all around going "Ohhhhh! Michael Jackson did that? Huh!" when a question came up that folks were guessing on (Who collaborated with Paul McCartney on 'The Girl is Mine'?), and then seeing everyone getting the easy ones right ("Spock, from Star Trek, came from what planet?"). You're scored based on how fast you answer - if you answer right off the bad, 500 points. As you think about it, the score drops down eventually to 50, then 0.

The system also had movies on demand, basic television, and other goodies. It's great to see such an outstanding system on a 'bargain' airline.

This is just too cool.

Havel and Ruck will create a large funnel-like vortex beginning from the west wall adjacent to Montrose Blvd. The exterior skin of the houses will be peeled off and used to create the narrowing spiral as it progresses eastward through the small central hallway connecting the two buildings and exiting through a small hole into an adjacent courtyard.

Every once in a while I run this test just to see if I'm drifting around. I think I've changed a lot in the last 10 years, at least since I first took this test, but to me things seem to be on the level. Maybe I'm just more aware of myself than I used to be.

Catya, who has a background in these things, points out that this test represents how I perceive myself, rather than who I am as defined by an external metric. Understood, but it's still interesting nonetheless.

this online version is as good as any that I've seen, and resulted in me as INTP. In the 4 categories(Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving) the strengths of each came to 22 50 1 11 (those are percentages).

Summarized:

• slightly expressed introvert
• moderately expressed intuitive personality
• slightly expressed thinking personality
• slightly expressed perceiving personality

There's a great link to Keirsey's summary of the iNTp category. "Rational Idealist Artisan Guardian". Say what you want about these things, but this summary IMHO speaks pretty well to me:

Of the four aspects of strategic analysis and definition, it is the structural engineering role -- architechtonics -- that reaches the highest development in these Rationals, and it is for this reason they are aptly called the "Architects." Their major interest is in figuring out structure, build, configuration -- the spatiality of things.
 
As the engineering capabilities the Architects increase so does their desire to let others know about whatever has come of their engineering efforts. So they tend to take up an informative role in their social exchanges. On the other hand they have less and less desire, if they ever had any, to direct the activities of others. Only when forced to by circumstance do they allow themselves to take charge of activities, and they exit the role as soon as they can without injuring the enterprise.
 
The Architects' distant goal is always to rearrange the environment somehow, to shape, to construct, to devise, whether it be buildings, institutions, enterprises, or theories. They look upon the world -- natural and civil -- as little more than raw material to be reshaped according to their design, as a formless stone for their hammer and chisel.

It's a wonder these companies can function at all.

I have a convention in Florida this week, and to make things a little smoother, I was planning on having a pair of flat screen monitors shipped to the hotel. It was time for some upgrades to my home systems anyway, so a pair of new monitors would come in handy.

I got a call back from eCost saying "Sorry, we don't ship to hotels." (this a good 5 hours after I placed the order - so this conversation started at 8:05pm. I get on a plane tomorrow morning at 10am).

"Why not?" "It's not our policy." "But I'm going to be there, just ship it." "It's not a valid shipping address." "Why not?" "It's not on your credit card." "So?" "So we can't ship to it."

*pause* *deep breath a few times*

"Okay, so how can we solve this?" "You have to add this address to your credit card." "WHAT?" "Yessir." "I'm not going to do that, this is a one off shipment." "That's our policy sir." "I'd love to see that in writing." "Sir?" "Never mind. I'm a guest at that hotel, I arrive tomorrow night." "Then we can use a signed letter from the manager of the hotel stating that you're a guest there. It has to be on the hotel letterhead." "You're joking! It's 8:30 at night, there's no way we're going to get that in time for this shipment. Why don't you just call them? Want the number?" "No sir, I ahve it." "Good, call them, I'll wait."

*10 minute on hold*

"Sir, they won't verify you're a guest there, since it's just a reservation, you're not there yet." "Oh for petes sake. This is absurd. Who are you trying to protect here?" "We're trying to prevent fraud and stealing sir, we've had problems with hotels before." "And who are you trying to protect?" "Us, from being stolen from" "Okay, listen carefully..."

(by this time, btw, we've escalated to the 'supervisor', which I suspect wasn't a supervisor at all, someone in billing) ... "Listen carefully. The only person you're protecting is me. You don't want someone using 'my' credit card to ship items and have them stolen. I'm the owner of the card, I authorize you to ship it. Ship it please." "Yes sir, as long as you update your credit card with the appropriate information" "I'm not going to alter my credit card information for a one off purchase." "That's our policy sir." "If tha'ts your policy, why did you change it 3 times in the last half hour?" "..." "I'll put this bluntly. Unless you take me, an existing, well established customer of yours, and help me solve this problem, I'm cancelling this $600 order, and never doing business with you again." "We will help you, sir, but you have to do something for us. Alter your credit card information." (this really got my goat. Quid pro quo? WTF?).

"Fine. If you won't make this order work for me." "You jsut need to alter your credit card sir" "No." "That is, of course, your choice." "Fine. Cancel this order. I want a mail within 1/2 hour confirming that this order is cancelled, and there will be nothing billed to my account." "You will have that sir."

And that's the end of my business relationship with eCost. I'd council others to take this story into account when doing any business with these folks. It's now 25 minutes after that conversation, and I still have not gotten the mail. We'll see.

Update I just got a message from the 'Credit Card Processing' group at eCost saying she has 'removed the authorization' for this transaction. I've specifically asked for the section of their policy where they state they will ship only to a hotel when getting a signed letter from the hotel manager on letterhead.

Did you know that PUPILS spelled backwards is SLIPUP ? These and others are the results of my ongoing addiction with TextTwist. I run it on my Kyocera 7135 palm phone, and have figured out the wiggly ways to keep a game going between stops and other life interruptions.

I was just amused at that palindrome.

The folks over at Penny Arcade are having a rough day. Apparently Gabe doesn't quite grok the concept of backups in the total Zen sense...

I can remember being so proud of him three years ago when he braved the Morlocks at CompUSA and picked up a little USB backup drive. Now, I'm not even sure he knew what he was buying. This is what he did when he got it: he copied every crucial thing off of his computer, to the backup drive, at which point he imagined some mysterious process was, shit, I don't know. Mummifying his data. Our data, everything we've ever done.

I'm not, like, Mr. Computer guy, but this I know: there are no small men in a backup drive who will rub your data with oils. Oils of any kind.

He brought it to me like a wounded thing, scorched around the front, as though it had fallen through the atmosphere.

Read the strip, and article including Tycho's response.

Take a peek at the Deluded Blues website, and click on 'Bios'.

W00t!

I don't know who Mr. Welch is, or who theglen is, but this is one of the funniest lists I've seen in a while. Anyone who has ever done ANY gaming, prepare to not get anything done for the next 20 minutes or so.

The list.

Hobbit nabbed a great picture of me passing clubs with Phil and (unfortunately I can't remember his name - Jim? He's the fellow on the right) while we were at Baitcon last weekend.

This is probably the most juggling I've done in the last year or two, and Phil and Jim were great passers. We didn't, unfortunately, have 9 of the same clubs, which really does throw off balance when trying to do smooth patterns, but we made due on our own. My arms were really tired after a good 45 minutes of this, but it was great shaking the dust out of the ol' hands.

Pursuant to my last post, I have to share this quote from T. H. Mitchells essay on the nature of of the judeo-christian definition of 'god'...

This is from Carl Sagan's "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" [p5-6] :

We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who it's antecedents might be. We long to see the orphan's file. Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invent reassuring fantasies about our parents--about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were. As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault. We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep. As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was made for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for 5 centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride.

Just beautiful.

I like to take the time to poke fun at establishments, and the ever twisted maze of the religion loosely referred to as "Christianity" is such an easy target, it's sometimes hard to wonder where to start. It's a never ending pile of suppositions, assumptions, and dogma stacked on folk tales and nomadic story-telling, which should be trivial to tear apart.

Well, someone has. Again :) I give you the Super Secret Mitchell Facts.

T.H. Miller has taken years, slowly detailing all the inconsistencies in Christian dogma. All the holes in the stories and the paper-thin structures that hold this world-wide self-delusion together. A really good example of his detailed analysis is his essay on the nature of the judeo-christian god, and he speculates on why is it human beings feel the urge to create a mythical being in their lives for guidance.

I stumbled upon his works after subscribing to the excellent community Convert_Me, an intelligent forum for folks to discuss religion in an framework that is pre-disposed to "If you want to argue seriously about a belief structure, this is the place to do it."

The cohousing group I'm in, Mosaic Commons, is hosting a slideshow this friday in Berlin, MA. Curious about what we're doing, or just interested in cohousing in general? Cmon down!

Remember the cool game Grow and Vanilla from Eyezmaze? Well, they updated Grow so it's now a sort of RPG-esque game called, simply, Grow RPG.

Once you finish your build, your little guy goes into the world and tries to fight off all the monsters and scary things that have happened. Hopefully, your town is big enough with enough health points so he can survive the battles!

Can someone explain this to me?

Some bright marketer somewhere decided that shopping mall revenues weren't high enough. In a burst of creativity, and noting all that wasted empty space in the middle of the halls (never mind those pesky shoppers), it was decided to populate this space with oh so charming pushcarts, just like those lovely street vendors we think we're all so fond of.

Well, the pushcarts turned into kiosks, and the kiosks turned into little stores. Somewhere along the line those stores became the haven of cell phone vendors. Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, Nextel - they're all there, several times over. Right next to each other. Where one could easily tag the other with a spitball.

So in this rich capitalistic cutthroat environment, the kiosk owners decided it wasn't enough to let the customers come to the vendors. Since they had already moved the more obnoxious sales droids out of the small stores into the kiosks, the droids still weren't satisfied. Now they needed to accost walkers-by with questions about their cell phone service.

Now, see, here's where I lose it. I go to the mall to shop. Sometimes to get something to eat. If I'm interested in buying something, I will go into the store, or stop by the kiosk. If I'm walking by, and desperately avoiding eye contact with the salesperson, and perhaps even talking with my son running along side me, what POSSIBLE reasoning would lead you to decide to interrupt me with "Sir, may I ask you a question?"

Even worse, these freaks are preying on the social expectation that it's considered rude say "No" in response to that. My answer to this is, fuck it, THEY'VE already broken the personal space barrier and intruded into my world, when I expressed absolutely no interest in their product or their services, and THEY are expecting me to defend myself as to why I am not interested in their product.

It really makes me consider NOT going to a mall because of these bozos. By the design of these space, I have no option other than to walk those halls to do my shopping there. What's next, someone physically stopping you and not letting you pass until you prove you cannot possibly afford what they're selling? How about the old vacuum cleaner tactic of spraying dirt on you so they can demonstrate what a cool cleaner they have.

And the malls wonder why retail sales are down, and online sales are up. Hey malls, here's a prime example. If you make the shopping experience more annoying, people will stop coming to the malls.