Another Eyewear Option

After striking out with Warby Parker and Classic Specs, I had more or less given up on finding suitable sunglasses through a company that offers try-at-home service like those two. (I know about Lookmatic, but nothing they have appeals to me or is the right size.)

Then I learned that New York-based men's clothing store Steven Alan has started offering prescription eyeglasses and sunglasses with frames of its own design. Each frame style is offered in multiple color choices, which I see as an advantage over their competitors (most of Warby Parker's frames are offered in only two color choices, sometimes three).

The pricing is not as wallet-friendly as Warby Parker either, but that's not unexpected because Steven Alan's clothing tends to be higher priced. (Their men's shirts range from about $150-200, in large part because almost all their house-label clothing is manufactured in the United States.) Prescription eyeglasses are $195 and sunglasses are $245, which puts them about $100 above Warby Parker's prices. There is also a $40 upcharge for the high-index lenses that I require, compared to $30 exta at WP. Overall this is still reasonable pricing for a prescription of my strength, but it's certainly not an eyewear bargain. (Non-prescription sunglasses are available for $145.)

The eyewear website says the acetate used for their frames comes from Italy, but makes no mention of where the frames themselves are manufactured, so I would assume they are made in China. I'll know the answer to that question soon enough, because I've ordered four frames to try on. Not all their frame designs are available as sunglasses, so I chose two that are and two that aren't, just to get a sense of how their frames fit and look.

This Week in Awesome (6/1/13)

I let this slip last weekend while I was on a mental vacation, so let's see what I've collected...

As Bill Hader was taking his Stefon character out the door at Saturday Night Live, Entertainment Weekly compiled a "directory" of all of his club recommendations. (EW PopWatch)

Jimmy Kimmel has been skewering reality dating shows with a hilariously inappropriate take on the genre (episode 1; episode 2).

This list of rules of behavior is the sort of thing that shouldn't need to be spelled out; it used to be called "manners," and it was a given that people had them. (BuzzFeed)

And finally this week, movie directors share their favorite unappreciated and overlooked movies. (Flavorwire via Kempt)

Blexbot Content Scraper is Really Nielsen Media Research

I had great difficulty finding detailed information online about an IP address, 216.176.177.162, that appeared in my site log over ten thousand times. But now that IP address is cold busted. It belongs to Nielsen Media Research, a pack of content scrapers. They do not wish to be identified as such, and so they lie, and call themselves a random name like Blexbot. Tomorrow they will be clexbot, and the day after that, wmu-bot. What are Content Scrapers? They are greedy bots that attempt to grab every piece of data from a given site. Interesting bits of this data are then grouped together and sold to companies, governments, or individuals. In short, they grab content and try to profit from it. They do not send traffic. They should be banned by every site, no question about it.

Lookie what the scumbags are doing on a Wordpress site:

216.176.177.162 - - [29/May/2013:06:21:13 -0800] "GET /password HTTP/1.1" 404 2438 "-" "BLEXBot"

216.176.177.162 - - [29/May/2013:06:21:16 -0800] "GET /signup?context=webintent HTTP/1.1" 404 2438 "-" "BLEXBot"

216.176.177.162 - - [29/May/2013:06:21:18 -0800] "GET /reg/join HTTP/1.1" 404 2401 "-" "BLEXBot"

216.176.177.162 - - [29/May/2013:06:21:21 -0800] "GET /forgot_password HTTP/1.1" 404 2438 "-" "BLEXBot"

They're not just content scrapers, they're malicious hackers. Those 404's you see above? That code means they're making up links as they go along, running them up the flag pole to see if anybody salutes. Meanwhile, the web admin gets to have fun wondering what's wrong with his web site that all of these 404 errors are popping up. (There were many more than just the above examples.)

Subscribing by Email

My mail reader informs me of new messages instantly. Partly for that reason, I never subscribe to newsletters. I never want to receive email from any company unless I have had recent or ongoing business with that company. Amazon sends me email when I write a review, or when someone comments on my review, and that is all right as well. Email in response to recent action is all right. However, companies assume that someone wants a newsletter on the slightest pretext. I left a comment on ZDNET recently, and their morons concluded I wanted a newsletter subscription. ZAP! POW! WRONG! If I want to read something, I will visit a site or subscribe via RSS. Only important matters should be transmitted via email. Email is for friends and business contacts only. Has ZDNET never heard of RSS feeds? What dinosaurs! Actually, I don't use RSS either, but if I were of a mind to want a regular newsletter, then RSS is how I would go about it.

Some outfits require a user to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to unsubscribe. Many require typing in the email address. I don't bother with all of that. The maximum effort I'm willing to put forth to unsubscribe is two clicks. I am doing the sender a favor by actually being nice enough to unsubscribe. If a third click or any typing is required, then I won't unsubscribe. Instead, I'll mark the email as spam. The more people that mark such email as spam, the more likely that the email provider, such as Yahoo, will default all the sender's emails to the spam folder for all users, which is right, because newsletter-pushers are indeed spammers.

Bot-Net Attack? What Bot-Net Attack?

I read many articles today about the brute force attack targeting Wordpress sites. My site is secure, and I just laugh at the enormous waste of that stupid bot-net's bandwidth. Each hit taxes my site about 500 bytes, so those scumbags will have to hit my site 2,000,000 times in order to waste one of my gigabytes--but that calculation seems rather liberal to me. After all, my deflate instruction is near the top of my .htaccess file, so I would wager that instead of 500 bytes, the server actually transmits each bot closer to 300 bytes, maybe lower since old 403.html is, after all, mere text, which receives quite optimal compression rates from any compression algorithm worth its salt.

But igor's solution will never be the thing people click on in google. Packaging and appearance are the thing. That is all right, because it is enough for me that my client's site is perfectly impregnable. I want his site to be fast all the time, I want it to look right all the time, and I want black hat hackers and evil bots to fail in everything they attempt.

Upon reflection, I think the stupid brute force attack against wp-login is meant to promote the sales of some cybersecurity firm(s). Let us be clear, it is not a serious attack. It is a stupid and ineffectual waste of bandwidth. Some cunning CEO may have decided to hire a bot-net to launch a stupid, ineffectual attack against everybody, knowing that the ignorant and the easily frightened would shell out money to buy a quick fix, a little band-aid to put on their precious web site to lull them into a false sense of security. I just don't which company(ies) are behind the attack, which stand to gain. There are probably a thousand different suspects.