Problems with the car

Yesterday morning my car refused to start. Actually it tried, the engine ran for couple of seconds and then stopped. When I tried to start it again (and than again), it did not.

What a pity to stay beside the car that refuse to start when it is 8 in the morning and you have to go to the office and you have plans for the whole day and it is 4 days before the New Year! I locked the car and took a bus to go to the office. Then I called the dealer and asked them what to do. They were almost certain the problem was caused by spark-plugs. I was not very sure of that since the car used to start just fine every day even when it was much colder outside. Anyway I bought new spark-plugs and changed them. It was not easy at all, considering the cold weather and the darkness of the evening. Did not help. The car did not start again.

This morning I brought the car to the dealer's garage. My father helped me and towed my car with his. We only had to go a short distance of about 3 kilometers (2 miles) but I was very happy when we finally got to the place safely. My car was cold, the windows were frozen and soon grew misted, the steering wheel and the breaks were tough. I could hardly see where we go. Happily the traffic was not too bad.

I left the car in the garage. They said they would most probably fix it by the end of the day. I hope they'll make it and I won't be left without a car for the whole new year holidays.

In any case I'm somewhat disappointed with the car now. I bought a new Hyundai Elantra in August 2005 and there were no problems with it for the first 1.5 years. Yesterday's problem though was very unexpected and unpleasant for me. I hope it is not going to repeat or I might need to start looking for a new car. I thought I'd stick with this one for 3-4 years...

Banned by Microsoft for no reason

Live Search by Microsoft (also known as MSN) has banned Convert-me.com. I learned it only when I was browsing the stats and saw the number of site visitors from MSN dropped to zero. Before the ban (e.g. in October 2006) there were up to 1,000 visitors from MSN each day.

I went ahead and checked which pages of convert-me.com were in the MSN search base. There were none. You can check it yourself with a search query "site:www.convert-me.com". The similar query for my blog site "site:sergey.gershtein.net" shows that this one is indexed. So I re-submitted convert-me.com to MSN and then checked the results in a couple of weeks. Still nothing.

That's how I learned the site had been banned. However I still have no clue why. We never sent any SPAM. We never used any illegal search optimization. We never had any illegal content. Why did Microsoft banned us?

Unfortunately all my attempts to contact Microsoft asking to re-include our site to their search results or at least let me know why they banned us were in vain. No results. Not a single reply. They seem to be too big to bother.

If you don't think convert-me.com is illegal and should be banned, you can support us by letting Microsoft know about it. I am not sure it could help, but if you can spend a couple of minutes to fill in Windows Live Feedback form telling Microsoft know what you think I'd truly appreciate it.

Your comments on the issue are very welcome.

P.S. (added later) I am very much excited to receive so many comments from you all, thank you very much for your support! I appreciate it a lot. Even if you help does not remove the ban, I am very happy there are people who like our project and who are ready to help.

News Update. On March 5th, 2007 our site re-appeared in Microsoft Live Search. I am sure this would not be possible without your support. Thank you very much!

Ice town is being built

The ice town in the central square of Yekaterinburg is being built. The builders work very fast, they have little time left. They could not start earlier due to the weather. December in the Urals has been unusually warm, all the snow in the city melted away. Two days ago the winter finally enforced its rules and the ice town grew up quickly.

Another good thing about the cold weather is cleanliness. All the dirt and mud we have been experiencing for a couple of weeks is suddenly over. Everything is frozen and covered with white snow. The lines to car washes are very long. Yesterday (Thursday) I tried to sign up for a car wash and learned they were only signing people for Friday. I could not wait that long and went to a wash service with a "live line". I had to wait three hours in the line (almost finished reading my thick Misima book) but now I have a bright clean car. It is so enjoyable to drive a bright clean car, I almost forgot about it!

Sorry, no terminals until 20th of January

The demand for new EVDO terminals grew so fast, we ran out of stock in a week after we started our December discounts. Yes, I admit, we were not quite ready. We did not expect so many customers. We tried and get three more supplies from our terminal distributors, but they were not enough. We were trying to get more, but today they gave us the final answer. The answer is negative. There are no more such terminals available in Russia. The next supply can only be expected in late January.

And that's bad. I'm happy, of course, the demand is so high. But I'm really disappointed we can't fulfill it. And people do complain. Some say we intentionally created this deficit to provoke the demand. Others say we never wanted to sell many terminals on discounted price and the terminals will appear out of the blue as soon as the discount time is over.

In fact we did not plan to create the deficit or to limit the sales. We did not plan such a big sales, that was our mistake. When we saw we can't fulfill the demand, we even gave discount for one more model that we have in stock and that is available from our suppliers.

The bottom line for me is the thought that December is a crazy time for people. Sales can increase much more than it is expected and we'll need to take it into account when preparing the sales plans.

Law, morality and social responsibility

Just a quick thought that I found interesting. Law, morality and social responsibility are the three different levels of the system that allows people to live in the same society. The law is the lowest level and the most formal one. Social responsibility is the highest and the least formal. Morality is in the middle. Lower levels require less thinking and less intelligence - one is required to obey to the rules. Higher level do require more thinking and do not provide ready to use rules.

This way more intelligent and responsible individuals can go with higher level of the system and exercise social responsibility while less developed people can not go further than only respect the law. Sticking to the highest level generally implies not only exercising social responsibility, but also enjoying the social responsible environment. Which leads us to a well-known idea that those who give much to the others are rewarded.

I love tomatoes

I love tomatoes any time of the year. My wife does not agree with me. She thinks tomatoes can not be good in winter. She thinks in winter they taste like a piece of gum. So in winter I eat tomatoes alone.

I can't deny, the taste of tomatoes change during the year. They are best in August and September. They are probably worst in winter. The worst of the worst ones are winter tomatoes from Turkey. They don't have a taste at all.

In any case I prefer to have tomatoes with my dinner even if they don't taste quite good. If they have right color - bright red, it's just fine.

By they way, according to cooking conversion page, one liter of chopped tomatoes weigh 680 gram.

Dirty December - the pig year started early

Yekaterinburg is incredibly dirty these days. The temperature went up from -25C to +5C and all the snow is melting fast. Everything is covered with dirt. I could never understand where all this dirt comes from. Yes, I know there are lots of construction sites in the city and the trucks mostly prefer not to clean their wheels, so they bring the dirt from there to the streets. But it can't be that much!

The cars are dirty, I have to periodically wash the windows and the lights or I can't see anything while driving. The people on the streets are dirty because it is not possible to keep clean while walking. Terrible! And this is December!

Hope it won't last too long, the winter should be back soon anyway and the snow will cover all the dirt.

The sales raised so much we're running out of stock

The November was not good at all and all the actions and ad campaigns did not help. The sales were too low. Finally we made substantial discounts and everything changed. Now we lack supplies. All the terminals we get are being sold withing days. Our suppliers can't provide more, so it looks like we're going to sell all we have by the middle of the month. I don't know what we'll do if we run completely out of stock. The discount is already announced and we cannot rise the prices before December 31st. Well, in any case this situation is much better than the low sells we used to have, but what will we be saying to our customers when our stock is empty?

United Russia forum made traffic collapse in Yekaterinburg

It's really a collapse. All the city is covered with police, they put men along all the streets in the center of the city. The roads are getting closed in various parts of the city simultaneously. Traffic jams are tremendous. People have to wait for hours in their cars.

Why they had to make their meeting in Yekaterinburg? Why could not they choose some good rural place with a good nature and all the facilities? If the elections in Russia were not a fake, the United Russia partly would definitely lose a lot of votes in the fifth biggest city of Russia. But since it does not matter, they don't care.

The people's protest does not go beyond posting to the forums. People are afraid. Yes, the time when you were afraid of the KGB is returning slowly but steadily. It so damn pity. I did not like Yeltsin's Russia at all, but the Russia of Putin is a thousand times worse. And it is getting even worse each day.

Sick and tired of SPAM in the forum

It looks like people post spam without any reason for that. What could be the reason to post a completely meaningless message that is simply a set of unrelated words? Or even worse, a set of what looks like words, but are just a series of characters? And the number of such posts in the convert-me.com forum continues to grow.

Of course I come and clean all such messages regularly. I have some visitors who volunteered to help me with the cleaning. I am very grateful they offered the help.

I've also set some restrictions to fight spam. One can't post a message with any external link in it if he/she has not registered in the forum. Certain known spam words (like "viagra") are detected, and the message gets deleted automatically. There is no reason to discuss drugs on units conversion forum, so it's definitely a spam message.

The question, that I can't answer is why do people post meaningless spam. I understand why they post links to adult sites, illegal software, etc. That's their way to make money. But what do they get when they post a meaningless message? Are they just happy they could get through all the spam filters without being spotted? It was not too hard, actually, the filters don't have an intellect and can't check the meaning of the post. What they try to prove with their posts? Why?