I’m back from my Christmas vacation and I survived New Year’s Eve. Overall, the holidays were actually pretty good. I got so many DVDs, I really don’t know where to begin; 24 Season 3 (which I watched while I was in LV), Crusade, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Conan 1 & 2, Robocop, The Last Samurai, Collateral. The last movie has particular significance for me. It really reminds me that everything doesn’t have to be perfect in order for me to go out on a limb and try something. Sometimes, I just have to do and try to adapt to any changes that come my way.

I also got the funniest (well I think it’s funny) calendar. Everyone that knows me knows that I really don’t like cats. This is probably due to the fact that I’m deathly allergic to them but that’s another story. While doing some post Christmas shopping, my friend pointed out this Goodbye Kitty calendar. It’s basically month after month kitties being put in situations that they won’t be coming back from. Here’s a sample:

Time to break the blogging silence. It’s been a whirlwind ride ever since the beginning of the year and I think I’ve just now gotten a chance to catch my breath. Let me explain.

During my last visit to Las Vegas a friend of mine gave me some information about a potential job opportunity there. That week, I had an impromptu meeting with one of the management staff of the company and the owner’s son (Adam). They seemed to like me well enough and the opportunity seemed like the next step in my career so I decided to go for it.

I had a few interviews over the phone with Adam and even got them to bump up the salary. During this whole time, Adam was insistent on getting me down there as soon as possible because they were going to be breaking ground on a new building in a scant 3 weeks. Adam officially offered me the position on a Wednesday and I told him that I would need some time to think about it. Adam said that he would need an answer on Friday. During the entire day on Thursday, while I was thinking about the offer, they were pestering my friend to see if I was going to take it. I called Adam that Friday and officially accepted the position and started making plans to move.

I have a lot of respect for the company that I currently work for and I didn’t want to blindside my boss with the news of me leaving, so I called him (he wasn’t in town that day — ironically he was in Las Vegas attending CES) that same Friday to let him know of my intentions. He was genuinely happy for me which took quite a load off my shoulders (I thought that he was going to freak out). On Monday, I handed him my letter of resignation making everything official. Then everything fell apart.

On Tuesday morning, my friend called me and said that she had heard some negative rumblings and when she confronted Adam he was acting elusive, as if he were trying to hide something. When she pressed him for information, he made a comment about me taking my time getting down there. It was only two days ago that he wanted me there in 1 week and now I was supposed to take my time.

I didn’t like where this was headed. To make a long story short, I called Adam to find out what was up and he told me that his father was interviewing someone else. It’s incredible that this dude offers me a job, knows about his father also interviewing someone and doesn’t have the balls to call me and let me know. I had to call him on rumors that I had heard! There was no way in hell that I would ever work for a company that didn’t make firm commitments and had so little regard for people. So I asked for my job back and once that was assured, then I called Adam back and told him to shove the job up his ass. Ok, I didn’t really say that because I wanted to remain professional and show him that unlike him, some people do have honor and integrity.

So now that everything is undone (with consequences) I’m continuing with my original plans for 2005.

It seems like we’ve had a bit of strange weather here in the last few days. On Saturday, freezing rain was pelting Portland and now it’s almost 60 degrees outside. That’s pretty extraordinary for Portland in the middle of winter.

Interestingly, while driving home I noticed that the most treacherous roads during the big freeze are actually the most safe now because they don’t have mass amounts of gravel on them.

I hate reality TV. I’m ready to watch the latest episode of 24 so I switched it on a few minutes before it started. Why oh why is shit like Wife Swap on TV? It’s amazing the crap that appeals to the American people.

One more thing that’s completely unrelated. The girl that plays Marni (Jennifer Finnigan) on NBC’s Committed is really really cute.

I had to post about this when I read about it. Apparently there was an image of a captured solider posted on an Islamist web site by the Al Mujahedeen Brigade. They claimed that it was going to behead the American soldier, by the name of John Adam, if demands were not met.

However, it turns out that the image of the captured soldier is actually an action figure called Special Ops Cody and the rifle that was pointed at his head was actually something that came with the doll.

I guess they are starting to get desperate over there.

I just got done watching one of the most interesting documentaries that I have seen in a long time. The Secret History of the Credit Card, a special from Frontline on PBS, shows all of the different ways that credit card companies can rip off the American consumer legally. Here is an example; if you make your credit card payments on time, the credit card bank can raise your interest rate automatically if you’re late on payments elsewhere — such as on another credit card or on a phone, car, or house payment — or simply because the bank feels you have taken on too much debt.

If you have a credit card or are considering getting a credit card, you owe it to yourself to watch this show.

You can watch the entire documentary online. I would also recommend reading the 8 things a credit card user should know here.

It’s been about year since I stopped taking Tae Kwon Do due to cash flow reasons. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to either go back to taking Tae Kwon Do or take another martial art form altogether.

During the summer, while watching a local cable access channel, I came across a program about Aikido being taught at a local dojo here (called Budo Dojo). I watched about two or 3 of them over the course of a couple of weeks and I decided to email the dojo to find out if there were any beginner classes starting soon. Sensei Penrod emailed me back to let me know that the next beginning Aikido would begin in January.

I missed the first class because I was working late and was willing to go without until the next session in March but Sensei emailed me back and said that there was still a chance to join in. Maybe it takes little to impress me but I was impressed that Sensei Penrod followed up with me to find out if I was still interested.

Aikido is very different from Tae Kwon Do. One of the most obvious differences is that Tae Kwon Do is a Korean form while Aikido is a Japanese form. Because of this, the terminology is easier for me in Aikido because I’ve taken a couple of classes in conversational Japanese so I know the phoentics and how the language works. The other most obvious difference is that Tae Kwon Do is mostly an offensive martial art form while Aikido is purely defensive. It would be interesting to combine Aikido with knowledge of some form of karate.

Today, during the training session, I noticed that Sensei Penrod moves like water flowing and Aikido in motion, when done by a seasoned practitioner, is quite beautiful.

I like Aikido, by the time that I leave there I feel very relaxed and not stressed at all. Of course that all vanishes when I get in my car and have to put up with the mass hordes of sheep that are Oregon drivers.

The new Battlestar Galactica, which many say is the best Sci-Fi show on TV currently, has been picked up for a second season. It’s not too late to jump on this bandwagon. So get to downloadin’ the old shows.

One more thing, Ron Moore, the series creator and producer has a blog on Sci-Fi’s web site. Just in case you are interested in what he has to say.

change,
everything you are
and everything you were
your number has been called
fights, battles have begun
revenge will surely come
your hard times are ahead

best,
you’ve got to be the best
you’ve got to change the world
and you use this chance to be heard
your time is now

change,
everything you are
and everything you were
your number has been called
fights and battles have begun
revenge will surely come
your hard times are ahead

best,
you’ve got to be the best
you’ve got to change the world
and you use this chance to be heard
your time is now

don’t,
let yourself down
don’t let yourself go
your last chance has arrived

best,
you’ve got to be the best
you’ve got to change the world
and you use this chance to be heard
your time is now

I’ve been laid up with some kind of flu over the last few days. My time off has mostly consisted of me lying on the couch being addicted to Comcast’s OnDemand. I’ve watched all of the episodes of Carnivale using that OnDemand and I must say that it’s definitely one of my favorite shows. Unfortunately it’s only on HBO so a lot of people won’t see it until it comes out on DVD if it all (which by the way the first season is out on DVD for the ridiculous price of 99 bucks or 74 on Amazon).

In mid-February I was authorized to upgrade my seemingly dinosaur like work cell phone to a better more capable phone. My trusty Nokia 8390 had served me well but I was ready for more features, more power, and more capability. As I browsed Cingular’s site for a new phone my eyes came upon the Motorola MPx220 Windows SmartPhone. I had heard about Windows SmartPhones from Scoble (although he has a different model) and I was intrigued by the idea. I did a little bit of research on Windows SmartPhones and I fell in love with the idea; being able to sync with my Exchange Server from anywhere, writing little web apps for it, etc. So I decided to order it; that was the beginning of the end of my love affair with Windows SmartPhones.

First of all, Cingular is a pain in the ass. I truly believe that a good deal of their employees are complete asshats. First the phone was delivered to a “Carlos Santillan” at my office. My last name isn’t Santillan, hell that’s not even close, but it made its way to my desk so I didn’t really much care who it was sent to. The next mistake? The SIM chip had the wrong number on it so I couldn’t use it until they sent me a new one. It gets better; the replacement SIM chip got lost by dumbass FedEx (it still has yet to show up) so I had to go down to a Cingular store and demand that they give me a working SIM chip.

After the fiasco with Cingular was behind me, I was jazzed to use my SmartPhone. I think that lasted a whole 48 hours. The PDA like features of the phone itself were neat and the interface was pretty cool but it failed at its most basic primary function; a phone. I could barely hear anything out of the speaker. If I was in my car or anywhere where there was a little bit of background noise then I wouldn’t be able to hear anything. I would always have to answer the phone in a closet just to hear the other person.

I read that earlier versions of the MPx220 had this problem but it was supposedly resolved with a new version of the “firmware”. Unfortunately, in my case, this had no effect since my phone already had the latest “firmware”. Determined to own a Windows SmartPhone, I went to a local Cingular store to see if I could get a phone that worked. The sales lady put my SIM chip and battery into a brand new (like my phone wasn’t brand new) MPx220 and I had her make a call. She could barely hear the person on the other line. The low volume thing appears to be a notorious defect to these phones.

Considering that the only SmartPhone that Cingular sells is the MPx220, I would think that Microsoft would care not to sully their SmartPhone brand name and they would make Motorola figure out that people can’t hear using that phone.

Car audio is stagnant. As I was leaving work, I had an epiphany about this.

Right before the whistle blew at work, I was sampling some tracks from Queensryche’s Tribe album on iTunes. I only found one track that I liked; Losing Myself. So I bought it. Then I copied it to my home computer (via VPN) so that I could listen to it there. I really wanted to listen to the track on the way home in my car; that’s when it hit me. In order to listen to the track in my car, I would have to burn it to CD. Seems like a terrible waste of a CD for one track. This happens to me all the time. I become fond of a song, I download it and then in order to listen to it in my car, I have to burn it to CD. Why can’t I have a car audio deck with a USB interface, Firewire interface, SD/MMC card interface? Why haven’t the car manufacturers jumped on this?

I rarely ever listen to CDs…the actual media. I buy CDs all the time but the first thing that I do when I get them is slap them into my computer and rip it to iTunes and then I put the CD back in the case. The only time that I’m forced to use a CD is in my car. I would love it if I could buy a deck with a USB interface; something that I could plug a USB keychain into or my iPod into and listen to all the music that I want. If I want to add a track, I add a track without wasting a CD. Truth be told there are some manufacturers that seem to have the foresight to start adding USB and SD/MMC inputs into their car audio decks but these aren’t the majority of them. Most of them still have their head in the sand making CD decks willy nilly.

I personally think that CDs are a dying media. As people grow up with the ability to buy music from iTunes, MSN, Napster, etc. they won’t buy as many CDs. Only hardcore audiophiles that want the CD liners will care to buy CDs. It will take some time but CDs are on the way out.

I read CNN.com every morning. Today, the most important news story was the continuation of the Schiavo case/thing…whatever it is. The headline this morning read “Schiavo parents take case to next level.” I thought to myself, “Great googly moogly! What could possibly be the next level?” Considering that this case/thing…whatever it is has taken up the time of The Senate, The House of Representatives, and the President, I couldn’t fathom what the next level was..then I figured it out. No longer content with dealing with mere mortals they’ve decided to bring it before…the almighty Galactus! Yes that’s right, Galactus the Devourer of Worlds will be taking time out of his schedule of eating planets to deal with this case/thing…whatever it is.

It’s raining again here in Portland. I didn’t get up until noon. It’s probably because my body can’t tell the difference between night time and the perpetually clouded skies of Portland. A few weeks ago, when it was unseasonably sunny I was waking up early, even before my alarm went off. I guess that’s what I get for living here.

Watched Part I of the season finale of the new Battlestar Galactica on the Sci Fi channel.  Now I have to wait an entire week before I can see Part II. {sigh} I can’t get over how good this show is. It continues to push the boundaries of sci fi television as we know it. I especially like how they don’t skirt away from sex in the show, they embrace it and use it to their advantage unlike the Star Treks and others. Besides great storytelling and great acting (Baltar (actor is James Callis) is the best character on the show, completely self-absorbed – I love it!) the reason that Battlestar Galactica is kicking ass and taking names in the sci fi community is because the creators of the show actively participate in the community. It’s something that J. Michael Straczynski did during Babylon 5. Battlestar’s new creator has a blog on the sci fi website which helps him maintain this camaraderie with his fans. Not to mention embracing technologies such as podcasting for episode commentaries and video featurettes.  Contrast this to Star Trek. The writers are untouchable, nameless faces. No wonder Enterprise died. If there is to be a next Star Trek, the creative team should definitely start a blog and actively participate in the sci fi community.

Let’s see what else do I have? Oh yeah, the PS2 game God of War is shit hot as Gabe says. Well, it looks shit hot to me, I don’t have a PS2, so I don’t know how the game actually plays but by looking at the videos of it I might just have to go out and get me a PS2. I love it when he smacks the Hydra’s head against the wall!

One more thing, Nine Inch Nails released their single The Hand that Feeds from their upcoming album With Teeth (scheduled to drop 5.3.05). It’s on iTunes for a buck — apparently it’s been on the radio since 3.16. What can I say, I NEVER listen to the radio.

So, after watchin’ the movies of God of War, I decided to go buy the game and give it a whirl. I borrowed a PS2 from a friend of mine and played it until I beat it (on normal mode). Overall the game is really fun but there were some parts (the tower in Hades) that really made me want to break the disc in two.

The soundtrack for the game is pretty impressive and you can actually download it online from Sony’s shitty music store (I didn’t even know they had one before this fiasco). I like the fact that you can download the soundtrack, but honestly, Sony couldn’t have made the process less appealing. First of all, you have to download their crappy application (SonicStage) before you can download the soundtrack. I think it took me 10-15 minutes to figure this out, but I soon figured out why they did it like that. Soon after downloading the soundtrack, I figured out that it was DRM’d (the reason that you need their application) with Sony’s .oma format. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, I hate hate hate DRM. I’m assuming most, if not all, of the music on SonicStage is in Sony’s shitass .oma format. Congratulations Sony, you’ve managed to make your music unplayable on the majority of portable music players! What a bunch of asshats. Having your music download in .oma format will not help you sell your shitty digital Walkman or whatever you are calling it these days. The only thing that it does is piss off your customers driving them to other platforms (read: iTunes).

Let’s see, what else is happening? Oh yeah, I got registered for my Open Water scuba class which starts on Tuesday. That and my car is borked. On Thursday, when I parked it, I noticed that white steam/smoke was coming out from under the hood. Later on that night, I took it for a test drive to see what the temp gauge would read. I didn’t even make it a block before the temp jumped considerably, by the time I had parked it, it was at the red line. I hope that whatever it is doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

It seems that I can’t write a post without mentioning Battlestar Galactica. This Friday, the season finale of BSG aired. OMFG, this is the best first season finale I’ve ever seen period. Now I have to wait until July (or is it June) to see what happens next. Kudos to everyone that works on BSG!

Not too long ago my company was seeking an industry specific security certification. Some of it covered physical security but a lot of it covered infosec. Information Security is not a goal, it’s a process. During the process of certification, I ran across the book Inside Network Perimeter Security (Second Edition) by Stephen Northcutt (and other authors).

This book rocks. I wish I had this book before we started this process, I think it would have made it a lot easier. If you work with information security in any way you owe it to yourself to get this book and read it. Packet filtering, stateful firewalls, proxies, VPN, policies, IDS/IPS, it’s all in here.

I have two LCD monitors at home. The second one, I bought from one of those mail order joints not too long ago. Ever since then, they’ve been sending me their catalogs. Most of the time I just throw it in the trash without even taking a look at it. Luckily, I didn’t do it this last time. That’s when I discovered Sumacke! Apparently, Sumacke is an anti-dry air and anti-glare eyewear that has a universal fit! Above and beyond that, you’ll be big pimpin’ wearing this modern and stylish eyewear. It also makes you deliriously happy as you can tell from this picture:

I’m convinced some people shouldn’t write reviews. A friend of mine recommended a book titled Freakonomics to me, so I went on Amazon (#2 on their book list) to try to figure out what it was about. These are helpful:

The book is excellent. It really encourages an analytical approach to problem solving while encouraging creativity of thought. This is a rare combination. Likely to be of value to anyone who has to adopt an analytical approach in their work.

What separates this book from so many of its ilk is its ease of use. I’m a dunce when it comes to these matters, but this book spells things out so that I finish it and have a stronger and better understanding of all of the concepts within. Well done, Mr. Leavitt!

Levitt/Dubner present complex ideas in the most straight forward, enlightening way possible. The topics range from interesting to fascinating, and the authors are consistent in their logical prose. The reader is encouraged to open his/her mind, and after poring through so many examples that undermine the pillars of conventional wisdom, the reader emerges with a new world view (as well as great anecdotes to tell friends).
This is a fantastic book!!!

After reading all of that, I’m still not sure I know what the book is about. I guess I’ll just have to buy it and find out.

After reading that Freakonomics was #2 on Amazon’s bestseller list, I decided to take a peek and see what else was on the list. Number 21 on the list is a book titled On Bullshit. Interested in the title alone, I took a look at some of the reviews. Take a peek:

First, let me clarify that On Bullsh*t is a philosophical essay, and not a book on humor. <snip>

On Bullsh** provides a much needed entry point into a societal problem that requires examination. <snip>

On Bullsh#t, by Harry G. Frankfurt <snip>

No question about it there is a lot of bullsh*t out there. <snip>

Frankfurt’s Bull Session on “Bull——” <snip>

You get the idea. I could go on and on and on. A great deal of the reviewers seem to be afraid of typing in a little word like shit even though the book is fucking plainly titled On Bullshit. The title of the book isn’t censored, so it makes me wonder as to why the hell some of these reviewers do this. Seeing a “bad” word isn’t gonna kill anyone especially when you just saw it 10 seconds before when you clicked on the title for the book. Typing the letters s-h-i-t is not going to cause floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, famine or pestilence. Grow the fuck up and type the title of the book. 

Following links from other reviews on Amazon, I came across a funny review. So funny that I had to blog about it. The book is called The System: How to Get Laid Today! The title of the book alone should tell you all you need to know about the book but for some reason, I was compelled to read the reviews. The best one:

Well, I certainly miss the pre-AIDS days when picking up women was as care-free as changing your shirt. This over-priced yarn states I should maintain eye-contact when on the prowl? Really? Don’t get an ulcer faithfully following the thin advice offered within this book. Want women? Just have one these traits:
Great facial appearance
A stud body
Money coming out your ears
An endowment that resembles the arm of an eight yr old boy holding an apple

But if you just happen to stand 5’4" or make chicken feed greeting folks at the door at major discount chain or are balding while still in your 20’s, then you better plan on the priesthood. I’ll bet the other reviewers boasting of their sexual conquests achieved thru this book’s advice are the truth-bending buddies of the author’s.

The arm of an eight year old boy holding an apple! Now that’s comedy!

It’s no surprise that I hate driving in nowadays. Traffic is a mess
where ever you go and the roads are littered with people that learned
how to drive by driving the bumper cars at a carnival. Imagine my glee
when I found a blog that has a whole category devoted to Traffic
Assholes. He takes photos and describes situations where jerks on the road have made his life a living hell. I think that this post is the best though; you have no idea how many times I have thought what this guy is thinking. Here’s a snip:

If it’s busy traffic and you accidentally turn into the wrong lane, suck it up and deal with it. Accept the consequences of your stupid actions and just go.

Oh, and if the guy behind you lays on the horn because you’ve stopped in the middle of the fucking road, you have absolutely zero right to be pissed off. You’re the one fucking up. Accept it, apologize, and drive your Goddamn car. You are, singlehandedly, the reason we have traffic.

I couldn’t have written it any better myself.

First night at Yellow House. Located in Hoodsport, Washington, Yellow
House is often rented by scuba divers looking to dive at Hood Canal and
the Sund Rock dive site. It’s something that I’ll be partaking of
myself tomorrow morning. This will be an experience for me; staying in
a house full of strangers with the only common bond being scuba diving.
I kept picturing something out of a reality TV show like Big Brother or The Real World
but I don’t think it’s going to get to that point. 2 days and 2 nights
is really not enough for people to get on each other’s nerves.

As soon as I walked in, I was greeted by Emily (a fellow scuba diver)
and asked if I wanted some spaghetti dinner. It’s nice to have a warm,
friendly atmosphere after the rain drenched ride here. I stowed my gear
and picked a bunk downstairs making my way down the stairs that look
like they belong on a Navy ship or submarine. Tomorrow the diving
begins bright and early and to be honest I’m fairly nervous. With the
exception of my dive buddies in class (3 others), everyone else here
has a million and a half dives under their belt. I really hated my
sissy performance in the pool (the first day of class a few weeks ago)
so it’ll be interesting to how I do at a real depth. Hopefully, I’ve
learned enough to keep me from flipping out and doing something silly.
I wonder how I will handle the cold water. I have a full exposure wet
suit, a short wet suit, hood, and gloves but with the water temperature
at 50 degrees it’s still pretty cold. I’m not really built for the
cold. We’ll see what happens.

I got asked my dreaded question tonight after dinner, the one that I
hate answering when meeting new people, “Where are you from?” I hate
that question because it’s always followed by “Why are you here?” By
here, they mean the Pacific Northwest, because understandably it’s
quite a move from Las Vegas, Nevada to Portland, Oregon. I hate hearing
the words “a girl” come out of my mouth in response to that question. I
just know that the next thing that comes to their mind when they don’t
see “said girl” on my arm is “I wonder what happened?” It’s a weird
feeling. Maybe I’ll just lie next time.

After the meet and greet in the living room, we all went to sleep, some early than others.

I was able to borrow a dry suit for dives 3 and 4 today (Sunday). Thank
god too, I’m not sure if I could have finished in a wet suit. Here’s a
bit of info for you. The hobby of scuba diving, especially in the
Northwest, can drive you to the poor house. The DUI (Diving Unlimited International)
dry suit that I borrowed was sold at the time for the whopping price of
4000 dollars! Although looking at their website today it looks like
prices have come down to ~2700 for the most expensive suit. That was a
big shocker to me. If you dive in the Northwest, then you definitely
need a dry suit.

A dry suit is much different than a wet suit for two primary reasons.
One it keeps you dry during your dive. You do feel the cold but with
the water not actually touching your skin, the dry suit slows down the
heat loss dramatically. Second, there is air in the dry suit and as
such when you descend it will create a “squeeze” on the air space. A
“squeeze” in scuba terms is a pressure imbalance in which pressure
outside an air space exceeds pressure inside an air space, resulting in
pain or discomfort. In order to relieve “squeeze” in a dry suit, you
add air to it using a button on the front of the suit. What does it
feel like? Well, if you’ve seen those commercials where they vacuum
pack something in a bag by removing all of the air, then you have a
pretty good idea of what it feels like.

On dive 3 we had to do a 50 yard straight line swim on the surface
(with all of your gear on) to a target by only looking at a compass.
I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never used a compass. I know the basics
of how it works but I’ve never actually used one. Swimming, heads down
just looking at the compass in the rough current of Sund Rock was
difficult at best. In fact, I don’t think that I completed the task to
my satisfaction but we were running out of time so we buddied up and
completed the task for the certification. Next in line was a free
descent (no holding onto a rope like in the first two dives) to 20-30
feet followed by a neutral buoyancy check and the bottom. I was the
last person to have the compass, so during my free descent I had a hard
time holding on to the compass with my right hand while attempting to
put air in the dry suit to prevent squeeze (my left hand was busy
venting air out of my BCD). When I reunited with Billy and Dan, I
shoved the compass at Billy because I didn’t want to deal with it
anymore. We also had to do a complete mask flood and clear which I
didn’t really have a hard time with (although feeling the cold water on
your face as you break the seal of the mask will shock you). For the
second to the last test, we did the buddy breathing where we remove our
primary regulator (the thing in your mouth that you breathe from) and
we get our buddy’s alternate regulator. I was pretty happy with my
performance there except I really couldn’t tell when I was supposed to
breathe on my own regulator again because I couldn’t see the
instructor. Eventually, I saw Billy’s hand come into view to tell me
that I could resume breathing from my primary regulator again. The last
part of the dive was the CESA (Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent)
test with oral inflation of the BCD. Basically, in order to pass this
you have to take a breath in then swim like all hell to the surface
exhaling all the way up. You cannot take in another breath of
air on your ascent to complete the CESA test. It was challenging to say
the least. We were following the rope from the dive flag and while
ascending the current wrapped the rope around my left fin and ripped it
off. When I got to the surface the current was kicking the shit out us
and I told Billy that I lost my fin. I think that the only word that he
said was “Fuck!” before diving underwater to look for it. I’m not sure
how he did it, but about 15 minutes later he came back with it. He’s
like an underwater Superman. After finding it, we took a recreational
swim underwater and saw a bunch of sea critters. By the time that dive
3 was over I was completely exhausted and I could barely pull myself (and about 60-70 pounds worth of gear)
up the hill to the trucks.

I’m home at last. My Open Water scuba trip to Hoodcanal is finally
over. After dive 3, I had to refuel with some food and water and relax
for about 15 minutes. I was glad to find out that I was not the only
one who lost a fin in the water, well not glad for him, but glad that
me losing my fin wasn’t because of my own stupidity, it can apparently
happen to anyone.

After the break, I had to don all my gear and walk back down into the
water. At this point I was really tired and I just wanted to take a hot
shower and take a nap. While on the way to the water, I remember
something that my friend Natalie said to me when I was describing the
pool sessions to her. She said that scuba diving sounded “like torture”
and as I was making my way down there I kept thinking to myself “this is torture.”
I would not be denied though, I got in the water and did another free
descent (this time deeper) where Dan and I did a full removal
of the mask, replacement and then clearing it. Dan was the first to go
and in the middle of it his regulator flew out of his mouth (apparently
he was having a hard time with that the whole trip). Like a true
champion, he didn’t freak out and Billy recovered the regulator and
stuck it back in his mouth. Of course, after witnessing this first
hand, I was thinking to myself, “Shit, that better not happen to me.”
Luckily it didn’t and I was able to remove the mask, replace it and
clear it without any major difficulties. After that, we did a swim
underwater with the compass which I didn’t do too bad in and then it
was time for our recreational swim to look at stuff. He took us to 40ft
(we can only go to 60 feet as Open Water divers) and I can honestly say
that I don’t think that I’m cut out for deep diving. At 40 feet, it’s
pretty dark and the squeeze on my dry suit and mask were incredible. I
was able to equalize them, but I just didn’t like the notion of being
40 feet underwater. It’s probably something that will pass over time
but for my first time down that far it made me uneasy.

After the recreational portion, we ascended and as Billy was swimming
to shore he said “Congratulations, you’re certifiable now.” I’m sure
that to him, we seemed like hapless fools that should be sent to a
mental institution.

So now I’m Open Water Certified! Although I might just be certifiable
too. If you’ve read all of the Yellow House posts and this one you’d
think that I would never want to go diving in the Pacific Northwest
again. Maybe I like being challenged to the extreme, but am I crazy because I want to go again?

I email myself links all the time and today I’m going back and clearing
some of the crap out of my inbox. When I first saw this image, I
thought that my dog (that lives at my mom’s house) looks strikingly
familiar to the robot dog (from the original Battlestar Galactica).
Today, when I looked at it, I saw something else entirely. Made me
laugh my ass off. Man, I hope he at least gives it a reach around.

My sleeping habits have been a bit off kilter for a little while as
evidenced from me writing a post at 3 AM. Here’s how it’s been working
lately: Wake up and go to work, come home and take a nap. Then of
course after the nap, I can’t fall asleep at a regular time. I guess
this’ll come in handy when I have to work late on Wednesday.

So here I sit reading blogs and listening to tracks off of the new Bonham (Jason not Tracy) CD that I got today. The CD (When You See the Sun)
was originally released in 1997, but I never heard of it until a week
ago. It’s got some good tracks and right now I’m hooked on Drown In Me, Out on the Prey, and Rain. It’s a good follow up to his other CD, Mad Hatter.
I only have one real gripe about his CDs. There are never any lyrics to
his songs in the liner! Ya can’t find the lyrics anywhere on the
Internet either and trust me I’ve looked.

One last thing before I try to catch some shut eye; I haven’t read
blogs through a RSS aggregator for some time now. My favorite
aggregator, SharpReader has
one flaw in it. Unfortunately to me, it’s a huge flaw. It’s a Windows
application and it stores information on blogs that you have subscribed
and posts that you have read in XML files on your local hard drive. You might
be able to see where this is going. I read blogs at work, on my laptop,
on my desktop, etc. and there is no built in way to sync all these XML
files together. Sucks! I want the XML files to be read from a central
location so no matter where I go, one instance of the program doesn’t
forget what I have already read. An alternative to SharpReader is Bloglines.com which
is a web based RSS aggregator. I’ve been wanting to getting back into
the blog reading world again and I thought that Bloglines might be the
portal to that world. After giving it a whirl, I’ve found that it
really really sucks. One of the biggest gripes that I have
about it is that the update cycle is terrible on it. I accidentally
messed up my RSS feed 2 days ago and everything is pointing to a dev
site that I have. I have fixed it on my end and pushed the codes
changes live, but Bloglines has yet to update and I can’t “force” and
update either. I guess I can check Bloglines off my RSS aggregator list.

I’m notoriously lazy, but I guess I’m gonna have to write an
application that copies the XML files for SharpReader to and from a
server of my choosing.

My friend and fellow blogger Jason Olson wrote a recent piece on his old blog
about the signal-to-noise ratio in blogging. I couldn’t agree more with
Jason’s opinion. If he wants to write posts on his blog that some
consider trite, inane, and meaningless that’s his prerogative. I would
hate to have to post 100% tech stuff 100% of the time. In fact, as you
can tell I hardly write technical posts at all and that’s the way I
like it. I’m glad that he found a new home for his blog where his friends (that never get to see him because he’s a hermit :)) can find out what’s going on in his life.

I recently took a vacation to Phoenix and Las Vegas where I took a bunch of photos with my new digital camera. I was thinking about using Flickr
to post them but I really like the notion of writing my own photo
gallery.  Re-inventing the wheel? Sure it is but I kinda like
doin’ it and it keeps me own my toes in programming ASP.NET and T-SQL.

I really liked Phoenix (Northern and Scottsdale). It reminded me of home
(Las Vegas) without the ever present gambling influence (something that
I’ve grown to dislike about my hometown). The entire time I was there,
I was in shorts and a t-shirt enjoying the warm weather and sunshine.
When I got back to Portland, it was 45 degrees and raining (big
surprise). It’s as if I flew from Tatooine to Endor. I’m not sure how
I’ve managed to last this long here, cut off from the sun and all.
Considering all of the changes that have happened in my life this year
I wouldn’t be surprised if the call from the sun filled lands is
answered.

Natalie, what have you done
to yourself!? I guess if I made millions of dollars for a movie I would probably do
it too. My opinion, not so hot.

Speaking of hotness, I’ve been watching
my DVD set of Buck Rogers. OMG was Erin Gray smokin’ hawt!
I think I now know where my propensity for blondes comes from. Yes I
know she dyed it for the first season but her hair combined with her
eyes, that smile and those outfits…it does things to a 6 year old
(and no I’m not 6 now. I know I act like it sometimes, but that’s how
old I was when Buck Rogers first hit the air).

I watch about 6 or 7 TV shows regularly. Sometimes I’m too busy to
catch them when they air and I’ll miss them. So in order to stay caught
up with the season, I’ve been downloading the missed episodes using
BitTorrent. I’ll watch them and then delete them after I’m done with
them. Recently,
the MPAA started targeting (read: suing) TV download sites (BitTorrent
sites) in their war to control the visual digital medium.

This is absurd. I don’t download TV shows that are already on DVD,
although some do. I just want to watch the stuff that I have missed.
How is what I do differently from a friend recording a show and giving
it to me? Does it matter if my friend is one person or 10,000? This is
how people like me lose interest in TV shows and stop watching.
If I miss too many episodes of a TV show then I won’t bother to keep
watching the TV show. The MPAA is gonna have their asses handed to them
by their consumers if they can’t figure out how to get the content to
the techno-savvy masses out there. Here is a perfect example. I watch
the TV show Lost. It airs on ABC. If I miss an episode can I go
to ABC’s website and download it or stream it (with the commercials, I
really don’t care about that)? No, of course not. So what do I do?
Download it from BitTorrent. Until the season is over (and the DVDs go on
sale) viewers should be able to legally download this stuff. Until they
can, people will find a way to get it on their own, no matter how many
people the MPAA sues.

When I read stuff like this from the MPAA and the RIAA, I’m reminded of a quote from the first Star Wars movie. “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Ok, I’ve been milling this post in my head for a while now wondering
whether or not to write down or not. The more time that goes by the
more I see it as a public service announcement. I’m here to help. ;)

I’m referring to online dating profiles and what’s wrong with them. This
post mostly applies to women’s profiles, although there are some rules
that are universal. The reason for this? Well, honestly, I don’t spend
time looking at men’s online profiles. If you want me to critique men’s
profiles, I’ll need some monetary incentive.

Before I get to profiles part, here is one universal truth. I think tag
lines are stupid. Does anyone pay attention to these anymore? Maybe
when dating sites were new and the Internet was young is when they had
value. All dating sites need to remove them immediately as their
usefulness has reached an end. Your tag line is your first photo,
period. This is what will get people to check out your profile, not tag
lines.

Profile

1. Spelling. This is one of those universal rules. You are trying to
   sell yourself, so spelling errors should not happen. Would you have
   spelling mistakes on your resume? I think not. You have a computer
   (obviously) so rip open m-w.com and check yourself.


2. Make sure that there are no inconsistencies in your profile. You
   can’t be shy and a social butterfly at the same time. It’s one or the
   other. Don’t ask for a nice guy when you like bad boys.
   

3. According to the profiles that I have read, 99.99% of women like
   hiking. This is bullshit. If this were true, then the mountains, hills,
   and valleys would be overrun with women hiking every weekend. If you
   don’t actually like hiking, don’t put it down. Don’t be a poser.
   

Photos

1. Post a photo. If you don’t, then don’t bother posting anything at all.


2. If your photos are the size of a stamp, don’t bother. Get better photos.


3. Don’t post photos that are 5+ years or older. Get new ones.


4. Don’t post photos with men in
   them. Just don’t do it. I don’t care if it’s your brother, no one knows
   it just by looking at the photo. It just looks tacky.
   With the shoe on the other foot, men shouldn’t post photos with women
   in them. I shouldn’t have to mention this at all, but NEVER EVER EVER
   post a photo with your ex in it.


5. Don’t post a photo with a better looking woman in it. That’s hard
   to swallow. I’ll explain this one. Think homes. Think of a perfectly
   nice but older home. Then think of that next to a newer, bigger home
   next to it. The older one immediately loses some of its luster. This
   rule also applies to men but on a smaller scale because women are much
   less visually oriented than men. For example, if I posted a photo of me
   standing next to Brad Pitt, I would instantly look like Gollum.


6. If your only photo is you in
   sunglasses and a hat then you’re doing something wrong. You aren’t
   hiding from the paparazzi, you want people to see you. This applies to
   men as well.
   

7. Don’t post a photo with only your pet in it. No one is interested
   in dating your dog/cat/bird/llama/monkey/etc. If you want to make it
   clear that you have a pet, include yourself in the photo.
8. Don’t post a photo that’s only scenery. If you want to show that you were at a neat place, you should be in the photo.

I’ve been thinking about patterns lately. My train of thought started with patterns in software development, specifically the book Design Patterns – Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

. If you’ve never heard of it, I’ll try to explain it.

Basically, some software engineer came along and said, “Hey I notice that we, as programmers, keep running into the same problems over and over again and each time we create brand new solutions from scratch instead of reusing what we already know.” So he wrote a book that identifies pattern problems and the pattern solutions for them.

That got me thinking about patterns outside of software development. Ever since then, I see patterns everywhere. Patterns in traffic, behavioral patterns (self and others), relationship patterns, societal patterns, and more. Imagine if someone could not only see these patterns, but analyze them and come up “solution” patterns for them. That’s what I want to do. Can you imagine how rich (monetarily and otherwise) one would be if they did that? Beyond one’s wildest dreams.

My friend Natalie, that for some reason reminds me of the character Carrie Bradshaw (in a cool, writer sense not in a Skeletor looking sense), has started a blog. I like her writing, it’s edgy, funny, intelligent and by the virute of being intelligent, it makes you think.

Every once and a while one has to stand up and say something. Usually,
I ignore people and their asinine behavior but if it keeps happening
over and over again I’ll say something. One of these days I’m going to
run into a fool that has something to prove I’m gonna have to get in a
fight, as it turns out today was not that day.

Here is how it went down today. I’m at the gym and I sit down to do
free weight bench press. Although there are weight racks all over,
these particular benches have the weight racks on them making it a bit
easier and convenient to transfer weight from the bar back to the racks
and so on. In the gym, there are 4 of these standard benches with one
positioned right behind the one that I was at.

I’m doing my first set and the idiot behind me starts removing and
replacing weights from the racks that are on the same bench that I’m
using. I’ve been in and out of gyms for a long time. Most people know
what to do. It seems like common sense, if I’m lifting or getting ready
to lift, don’t go removing and replacing weights from the racks on the
equipment that I’m currently using. Wait until I’m done,
ask me, or find some weights elsewhere. Never, ever in all my time in a
gym has anyone pulled this shit and I certainly wouldn’t do it to
anyone else.

I ignore it and finish my set. Maybe he didn’t notice before he started moving weights around.

I get up to get a drink of water and go back to the bench. I lie down,
getting ready to do my second set and I feel that vibration
on my bench again. He’s doin’ it again! The guy moving shit around was
pretty muscular, I know he’s been in a gym before. I don’t know why he
thinks that this is cool behavior. Finally, I glare over at him and
say, “Can you wait until I’m done before you do that?”

I can feel my words percolate in his pea sized brain. I wait for him to
either acknowledge that he was being a retard or for him to be
obstinate and say something stupid. It takes him about 10-15 seconds to
react; he just nods and says “ok.”

As I said before, I know the guy has been in a gym before but for some
reason he felt the need to be a dick. I put the kibosh on that.

I’ve been doin’ some thinkin’. I know, it sounds dangerous, but I’ve
been doin’ it regardless. Jason Olson’s post on the Tech Ed keynote by
Ballmer started my train of thought. In his post, he says:

“Unfortunately, while I enjoyed the keynote (mostly because of Steve
Balmer directly), it wasnt as good as I was hoping for. This is mostly
because the keynote definitely seemed more targeted towards IT Pros
instead of developers, methinks. While there were several developer
topics discussed, it was definitely geared towards IT Pros.”

I’ll be honest, until I read this post from Jason, I didn’t even
realize that Tech Ed had anything to do with IT Pros (like myself). I
figured it was another conference for developers to go and do what they
do; talk about code, network, etc.

Maybe Jason’s expectations were set incorrectly. Maybe he thought that
Tech Ed was only for developers as well. Maybe he thought that he was
going see Ballmer running around the stage sweating himself and
whipping himself into Howard Dean-esque frenzy while shouting out his
famous mantra, “Developers, developers, developers!”

Jason is certainly entitled to his opinion on the keynote; one that I’m
not debating. What I do wonder is why does it have to be 100%
developers, 100% of the time? Do IT pros even matter?

In the field of IT, there seems to be a us-versus-them mentality when
it comes developers and IT pros and it’s almost as if in this
clique-of-nerds, IT pros are looked down upon by developers (now this
may not actually be the case, it’s just what I observe). It’s
as if we are only IT pros because we weren’t smart enough to be
developers; flunkies of the IT world as it were.  It reminds me of
the movie Meet the Parents where Stiller’s character Focker is
snickered at for being a nurse instead of a doctor; as if he wasn’t
smart enough to be a doctor. At the Portland Developer Dinners…I
mean Nerd Dinners that I attended, I often felt like I would be making
a fool of myself if I said “I’m not actually a developer, I’m a
Sysadmin.” I should add that while I sometimes felt uncomfortable at
the Portland Nerd Dinners, I was never actually made to feel
uncomfortable by the people there. With that being said, it’s hard to
have anything to say when most of the conversations revolve around
refactoring, web services, software factories, assemblies, etc.

Outside the field of IT, developers are often seen as wizards; masters
of evocation that can create vast wonders of splendor out of nothing
while IT pros are often seen as nothing more than
over glorified janitors. Sometimes I feel like I am down in the basement
hoping that my red swingline stapler isn’t taken from me. Is our role
to a corporation less important to those of developers? If so, why? I
believe that developers and IT pros are equally
important to any organization; one works in collaboration with the
other. All the pretty programs, web sites, and web services in the
world wouldn’t be jack squat if someone wasn’t in the background
maintaining the infrastructure behind the scenes. You could have the
best bank web site in the world but without an IT pro managing the
firewall, routers, applying patches, and maintaining the equipment how
many people would use it? The answer is none, it would be unusable.

So back to my original question, do IT pros even matter?

One more thing. Jason,
I know you got a lot of love for me so this post isn’t directed at you,
so please don’t take it that way. Your post just got me thinking.

Ok, I know that this is not hot-of-the-press news, but I’ve been a bit lazy in my blogging duties. Monad, Microsoft’s new command line interface, was supposed to debut in Longhorn. However, as recently reported

, it’s probably not going to make it in after all.

Now, I’m starting to wonder, as many out there surely have, what is it exactly that Longhorn will be anyway? It surely sounds like it going to be more like a “Window XP Version 2” instead of the powerhouse that was originally hyped to begin with. Why should consumers, and more importantly (to Microsoft) businesses buy Longhorn?

The PDC bits better blow our socks off.

Looks like the original members of Pink Floyd (David Gilmour, Nick
Mason, Richard Wright, and most notably Roger Waters) are reuniting for
the Live 8 concert. The last time that this quartet was on stage
together was approximately 24 years ago. Does this mean that we’ll see
a new studio album out of the band (their last studio album was The Division Bell (1994)) out of Pink Floyd? As much as I would like it, it’s probably going to be a one time thing.

The summer TV season is nearly upon us. Probably the most anticipated day of summer premiers for geeks will be July 15th. Stargate SG1, Stargate: Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica (easily the best of the 3 shows) will all debut with new episodes on July 15th.

Rescue Me, one of my guilty pleasures, starts its second season on June 21st. Some other premiers (that I probably won’t watch) are:

• Average Joe: The Joes Strike Back – June 21st (The only
  reason I’m mentioning this is because of the absurd title. I just keep
  picturing a bunch of nerds beating up the girl from the first show.)


• The 4400 – June 5th (Never seen it, although sometimes I think about watching the show.)


• The Dead Zone – June 12th (I watched it once. Thought it was cool that the actor from Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science got work again.)
  

• Criss Angel: Mindfreak – July 20th (A rockstar that thinks
  that he can do magic tricks. My friend Billy used talk about this but
  I’d never seen it. I probably won’t even tune in.)
  

Summer weather has yet to land here in the Pacific Northwest even
though it is mid-June. This is a common occurrence here although I’m
used to being in the “dog days” of summer by the time mid-June rolls
around.

It’s probably a good thing that summer has such a late start here.
People would melt in their skivvies if they were forced to endure a
prolonged summer season without having access to air conditioning for
their homes. I’m still shocked to find the some of the fancier
apartments here don’t offer central air.

Hopefully the summer season will get a particularly late start so that
I can buy two air conditioners (one for my computer room and one for my
bedroom). Every time I think of putting a window AC unit I think that
something like this will happen. This is especially bad considering that I live on the second floor of my apartment complex.

I just read a comment on a popular tech news site. The comment, “live
like you’ll die tomorrow, but plan as though you’ll live forever” was
made in reference to a friend of the poster’s that died at the age of
26 from Leukemia (although perhaps he was looking for the quote “Dream as
if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today” by James Dean).

Now, we’ve all heard these carpe diem sayings before and I think off
the top of our heads we think to ourselves that this is a good
philosophy. What does this really mean though? If you start to analyze
the words it starts sounding like new age-y flimflam. It’s easy just to
tell people stuff like “live like you were dying” but can you imagine a
world where people took this saying to heart?

These sayings are left up to personal interpretation but I think what
they really mean is don’t doubt yourself so much and don’t be afraid to
take some chances but I guess that doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily

I found this while browsing the web this morning. I think I found my next poster.

It’s no doubt that blogging has hit the big time. Adopted by the geek
community early on, today, anyone and anywhere (well almost anywhere)
can create a blog and write about whatever it is that interests them.
Some of these blogs are technical in nature, some are political in
nature, and there are others that are an online diary of sorts.

I read all kinds of blogs but the majority of the blogs that I read are
from people that I know personally or someone I know personally has
recommended the blog. With that being said, I like to read about the
person behind the blog as much as I like to read about their technical
accomplishments, etc.

Now, there are some in the geek community (and probably others as well)
that believe that certain genres of blogs or even types of posts have
no merit, that they are noise instead of signal. This argument
has been covered previously by my friend Jason Olson and I happen to
agree with him wholeheartedly.

I’m chagrined by this air arrogance and
elitism and it came to a head the other day when I read Chris Sells’
post The Scientists Never Survive This. In his post, he wrote “I can’t believe nobody* blogged about ”http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15739502-13762,00.html" target="_blank">this
today!…" and he continued to write, "*by “nobody” I mean “nobody” I
read, of course — I sure it was all the news amongst the “dear diary”
set : )"

Perhaps it wasn’t his intention, but what’s the point of the “dear
diary set” comment? Is this another jab in the signal-to-noise ratio
argument? Even if he did suffix it with a smiley, I don’t believe it
matters. It’s the tone of the writing. It’s like kicking someone in the
groin, smiling and saying, “no offense” or getting a nice steak dinner
with all the trimmings and serving it on a dirty trash can lid. It’s
all in the tone or presentation.

I’m sure that some with the “dear diary set” would consider geek blogs
so mind numbingly boring and so inconsequential that they would rather
tear out their own eyes than read it.

I guess the SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) argument is nothing more than
people’s opinions. Chris has his and I have mine. On that note, ’nuff
said.

Just got done watching Pink Floyd reunited (Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright) on MTV (also shown on VH1) as they took the stage in Hyde Park in London.

I can say that I’m a bit irritated about the whole thing. Not with Pink Floyd’s performance. As a fan, I found their performance excellent, powerful and emotionally moving. These guys haven’t been together on stage since 1981. What I am irritated with is not knowing when Pink Floyd was going to play. I scoured the ‘net looking for this information and couldn’t find anything. You would think that out of the 3,000 people plus blogging Live 8 one of them would have a general estimate on when the bands would be playing. Because of this lack of information, I missed the first song of their set, Breathe, but managed to catch the others (Money, Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb).

As Pink Floyd’s last song was winding down, MTV and VH1 made a terrible, egregious mistake. While Pink Floyd was still playing, they cut to two fucking yahoos that were covering the event. Then as a final insult, they cut away to commercial while the band members were wrapping up and leaving the stage!

Morons! These guys haven’t been seen together for 20+ years. Why not let them play their damn songs and then talk about it? Apparently, I’m not the only one who that thought this was a horrible mistake by MTV and VH1.

Luckily, AOL is rebroadcasting the London and Philly shows on their website and they promise that they will have the entire show on there song by song, on demand. Or you can simply grab the Torrent. This is good news, considering the bumbling of MTV and VH1.

Regardless of all my bitching, that’s not what Live 8 is all about. If you don’t know what Live 8 is about, go educate yourselves and if you are so inclined, add your name to the list. It would be great if our wants for Live 8 were fulfilled but I think that they missed a few vital elements. No matter how much economic burden we pull off their shoulders or how much economic aid we give them, the men and women of Africa will never be able to emerge out of the desperate hole that they are in if the corrupt elements in their government don’t stop betraying their citizens. In addition to this, the roaming bands of thugs that rape, murder and terrorize must be eliminated.

I recently took a 12 day vacation to South Florida. I flew out there
from Portland and the rest of my family flew out from LV. While
there, my cousin Betty and I, took off to Key Largo for some scuba
diving.

This is what I got certified for. Perfect weather, crystal clear 80
degree waters, diving off a large boat. It’s so much different than
my…um…interesting experiences in Hood Canal.

Although, looking back at it, I think getting certified in the 50
degree waters of Hood Canal really made this a cake walk. During my
open water dives in the canal, I constantly struggled to maintain my
buoyancy. I would shoot off to the surface, sink like a rock. This time
around, I was able to control it with just my lungs instead of
inflating and deflating my BCD.

If you are ever in Key Largo, make sure you check out Sea Dwellers. They offer the best service and boat around.

A friend of mine recently decided to get Comcast’s high speed Internet
access in her home. I should probably redefine what I mean by
“decided”, since it wasn’t really much of a choice. Because she is too
far from her central telephone office (CO), she can’t get any form of
reliable DSL, so she “decided” to get Comcast’s service.

Right off the bat, it was a battle with Comcast as they said that they
wouldn’t be able to provision her service without her having a computer
on site. Normally, this is not a big deal, but her only computer (a
laptop) only has a wireless network card and not a wired network card.
In order to be able to provision the modem, they wanted to charge her
to setup a wireless network instead of having me setup all that up
later.

This is all really absurd. When I moved into my new apartment a few
years ago, I called Comcast and the tech came out to provision my
modem. I had nothing in my apartment besides myself, air and some
sunlight. I did not have my computer with me at the time and he was still able to provision it.

I called Comcast in behalf of my friend and they were dead set on
having a PC with a network card ready to roll at the time of
installation. When I told them my story about not having my PC, the
support representative explained that it was a new registration
procedure and that it was necessary. Instead of fighting with Comcast,
I decided to meet the Comcast installer at her house with my laptop.

The day of the install, the technician was scheduled to show up between
2 and 4 PM. We waited and waited and he finally showed up at 4:40 PM.
The guy shows up without a cable modem (although another installer did
bring a modem 10 minutes later) and tells us that the registration
system is down so he isn’t really able to provision the modem (register the modem to communicate on their network). I was
astounded, he shows up nearly an hour late without a cable modem and to
tell us what? “No Internet for you today, folks.” To his credit, he did
call my friend on her cell phone in the morning because apparently he
had some time to do the install then. To his disservice, he failed to
leave a message then, didn’t call us to tell us that he wasn’t showing
up on time because the registration system was down, showed up without
a cable modem, and had such a blase attitude that I thought he might
slip into a coma from boredom. An example of this? At one point she
asked him about the installation charge so that she could write a
check. When asked to confirm the amount, he responded, “Something like
that.” I told her to make the check out for 25 bucks and if he said
something, just tell him, “Well, you did say something like that.”

During the long wait for the installer, my friend told me that in her
experience, this type of poor customer service is a normal thing with
Comcast. I’ve heard others say the same thing about DSL, and telecom
providers (Qwest comes to mind). Are we so conditioned to poor service
from these types of companies that we think that this is normal?

I hate it when the little guy gets trampled by the “Big Corporation”.
Companies should step up to the plate and admit when things go wrong
and offer to make amends with their customers. I love to fight with
companies to see if they step up and do something, so after the
installer left, I called Comcast and complained about everything. I
managed to get her installation fee waived (as it should have been).

There were other problems with Comcast, but I’ll let my other post (soon to be written explain what those are).

Hot on the heels of my other post, I bring you a sobering look at PC security in a Windows environment.

The day after the infamous Comcast “install”, my friend called me up
because she still couldn’t get on the Internet. I dropped by her house,
made a small configuration change to the wireless router and did a
reboot of both the cable modem and the router. I booted up my laptop
and was presented with a Comcast “registration” screen. It was
prompting me to download an application from their server and run it. I
clicked the download button but nothing was starting. I figured that it
might be an issue with their web site not working with Firefox (which
is my main browser), so I started the the page in Internet Explorer and
attempted the download. I still could not download the application.

I unplugged the router from the equation and attempted to “register” by
connecting my laptop directly to the modem and running a registration
program from the CD that Comcast provided. The first thing that happens
when you load the CD is a dialog box comes up and suggests that you
disable anti-virus programs and firewall software before running the
registration program. To make a long story short, I could not get their
stupid registration web page to go away while connected behind the
wireless router and I could not get the registration program on the CD
to work.

I decided to try disabling the Windows firewall temporarily (against my
better judgment) to see if I could get the registration completed. In
the short time (when I say short time, think 2-5 minutes) I was
connected to the Internet without a firewall, my machine was somehow
compromised with spyware (I do have the latest patches and anti-virus
(which I didn’t disable)). Icons appeared on my desktop for XBox,
KMart, and some other crap that I didn’t care about and Internet
Explorer opened popups randomly (as an aside, my primary browser,
Firefox was not affected by the spyware).

Think about this. 2 to 5 minutes without a firewall and my machine was
compromised. This is a perfect example of how important personal
firewalls, anti-virus, and anti-spyware is on Windows machines.

Luckily, I was able to clear everything out with the help of some tools. Namely:

• HijackThis


• Ad-Aware


• Spybot – Search and Destroy


• Microsoft’s Windows AntiSpyware (Beta)
• McAfee’s Stinger
  

Absurd.

I’ve been watching re-runs of Nip/Tuck on FX as well as the second season of Rescue Me. During the commericals, there have been previews of a show called Over There that premiers on July 27th.

The series looks really good and intense but for some people that still
have loved ones in Iraq, this series might hit too close to home.

Blogging is becoming more ubiquitous everyday especially among
non-technocrats. I’ve been neglecting to do some blog droppin’ (think
name dropping) because…well…because I’m lazy. I’ll be doing some updates to the site soon

So here they are in no particular order:

• tristanjones.net


• terrarist.blogspot.com


• dofaz.blogspot.com

I thought I posted about Konfabulator
before, but I guess I didn’t. This application allows you to download
widgets (applets) with an eye candy feel that you can place on your
desktop to monitor weather, sports, news, system processes and more. I
downloaded this in the past but the 19.95 fee to remove the nag screen
was bugging me, so I uninstalled it.

Apparently, Yahoo! just bought Konfabulator and has made it free for all.

Damn memory. I’m starting to lose it. Looks like I forgot to mention a blog the last time around. For those that remember silicongelica
(and my infamous statements on her blog), she’s back and this time with
a brand new blog. Now all she needs to do is get some comment system
and a syndication feed going…

Oh yeah, and fix the misspelling of her own domain name! Silcongelica…tsk tsk tsk.

Days after being released on MSDN, reviews for IE 7 Beta and Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn) Beta are coming in.

Two reviews that I especially recommend are Paul Thurrott’s review of Windows Vista B1 and Andrew Rondeau’s review of IE 7 B1. At the end of Andrew’s review, he lists some suggestions for the upcoming versions of IE (B2, RC, and gold). I agree with almost all of his points especially the “new tab button” comment. It does look like a bug and it is confusing.

One of the items that made me raise my eyebrows in Paul Thurrott’s review was the section on the new security feature title User Account Protection (UAP – formerly known as Least Privileged User (LUA)).

According to his review, once UAP is enabled the user gets prompted any time they “try to do something dangerous.” He goes on to say, “The sheer number of actions that trigger this dialog, however, is alarming. Virtually every single Control Panel applet makes it come up, for example, as does installing an application. And so on. It gets kind of tiring after a while.”

Notice something here? First off, in Beta 1, UAP is disabled by default. I hope that this doesn’t carry on to other versions of Vista. Second thing is, I have mixed feelings about even being able to disable UAP in the first place.

In Linux and Mac OS X, root is root and the other users are just users. People seem to understand this limitation feature and use the system as it was intended. If Vista gives the user the ability to disable UAP (especially in the face of countless warning messages) the first thing that they will seek to do is to disable the source of the messages (which is of course UAP).

The other thing that concerns me about disabling UAP is, if a user can do it, it’s probably not that much of a stretch that malicious software can do it too. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait before we see privilege escalation vulnerability in Vista.

The summers here in Portland, Oregon are mild compared to other parts
of the country. However, there are times that the temperature outside
skyrockets and that makes the temperature inside most homes and
apartments akin to the inside of an oven.

Last summer when temperatures hovered in the high 90 degree range for
several days, I swore to myself that I would not suffer another summer
without air conditioning. As most dwellings here aren’t equipped with
central air, I had to get the next best thing; a window air
conditioner.

Window air conditioners present a special problem for me because of the
windows in my apartment. They are “slider” windows which means that
they open and close on the horizontal axis instead of the vertical and
most window air conditioning units are made for windows that open
vertically.

There are air conditioners that are sold specifically to solve the
problem with my kind of windows. The first is to get a “mobile” AC unit
that has a hose for the exhaust. Most of these are quite spendy coming
in at the $400.00+ range. I have two rooms that I want to cool, my
bedroom and my office (houses lots of computers). I would have to get
two units and I really didn’t want to spend that much money on AC
units. So I moved to the next option.

They specifically make slider/casement AC units like this unit,
but the price of it ($369.00) immediately turned me off especially when
regular window AC units can cost as low as $100.00 (depending on BTU).

Being determined not to melt this summer, I formulated my plan. I knew
that I wanted two AC units (one for my bedroom and one for my office).
I knew would need something to mount it so that it wouldn’t fall out of
the window, and I knew that I had to plug the space above the unit
(the slider window is quite large to to bottom).

I ended up getting two LG 6000 BTU AC units for approximately $140.00
each at Home Depot. The 5200 BTU units that I wanted (which were on the
website – $119.00) were not available in the store, so I got the next
best thing. At 6000 BTU, they are plenty capable of cooling each room
(and probably a bit of an over kill considering that I measured the
rooms and I came up with needing a 5000 BTU unit).

I also got two AC-Safe Universal 5000 – 10000 BTU support brackets (I
can’t link from Home Depot (idiots) but if you want to look it up the
Internet number is 193005 and the catalog number is 100091666) so that
I could mount the unit in the window without having to drill holes on
the outside of the building. These are listed at $29.89 each.

Finally, to cover up the gaping hole in the window without looking like
a ghetto scrub, I decided to get clear acrylic to cover it. Although
plywood or cardboard would work, I decided not to make my apartment an
eyesore and went with the acrylic. I got mine from Tap Plastics
as they cut the pieces to size. I live on the second floor, so it’s
unrealistic to think that someone is going to break through the acrylic
but if I lived on the first floor I would definitely get polycarbonate
(specifically Lexan) which is harder to break. Each sheet of acrylic
was $25.00 but Lexan is more. Make sure you measure properly so you get the correct size.

So my approximate total for everything was $389.78 for two units and the materials to make it happen.

I should note something that I didn’t have to pay for; a drill. In
order to mount the bracket, you have to drill holes into the inner
window sill. I found out that my Black and Decker 9V cordless drill
wasn’t up to snuff but I was able to use my friend’s Makita which is a
much beefier 14V drill to do the job.

I had my friend Bob (I refer to him as Mister Jimmy Rig) come over and
help me with the first unit to make sure that I got a handle on how it
was gonna go down. After he showed me the first one, I was able to do
the second one on my own.

Basically, here is how it works:

1. Remove the screen from the window (do not discard)


2. Drill the holes into the inner window sill
   

3. Mount
   the bracket to the inner window sill ((if the screws are being
   obstinate, rub soap on them to make them go into the wood easier)
4. Fasten the safety arm (this leans against the exterior of the
   building with a rubber foot, so there is no drilling on the outside)
   
5. Put in the window AC unit (I had to use wood as shims on each
   side to balance the unit. I’m sure you could buy wood, but you can get
   some spare wood to work at a lumber shop or Home Depot)
6. Put in the acrylic and mark the holes so you can attach the plastic to the AC unit
7. Remove acrylic and gently drill holes into the marks (Do Not push hard on the acrylic when drilling as it will crack it – I don’t think Lexan suffers from this)
8. Screw the acrylic to the AC unit
9. We also screwed it into the top using some clever jimmy rigging
   but you can use tape to affix the top of the acrylic to the window if
   you want
10. Take a drink of your beer, you’re done

NOTE: There is one thing that I found out after I mounted the units.
Because of the bracket and the shims, there are small gaps in between
the window sill and the AC unit. It’s possible that little critters can
get in through that area, but I’m going to spray mine with DAPtex Plus
so they are barred from entry. DAPtex, unlike polyurethane, can be used
by a novice and is easily cleanable with soap and water.

My office, which hit a rather warm 92 degrees this year, is now at room temperature. I’m living the good life now.

Serenity comes out on September 30th. Can you guess where I’ll be on that day? To whet your appetite, there is a new trailer out for it.

Well, I’ve implemented a new search feature. You’ll see it on the right
side where the XML logo used to be (that’s down below under Syndication
now). I pushed the files and the database changes up from my dev site
but now that I see it working on the live site, I don’t quite like the
implementation. I was gonna take it down, but it works well enough, so
I’m going to leave it and just fix the bugs.

I thought it was a mistake when I first looked at my Konfabulator weather widget. According to the widget, the high here for Wednesday will be 96 degrees and on Thursday it’ll be 98 degrees.

I still couldn’t believe it, so I fired up the Weather Channel website
and it’s showing the same thing. With the temperature being 2 degrees
away from the century mark, people without AC are going to die in their
homes.

Looks like I was just in time.

The monkeys and I
have been busy. They must have had a lot of the Jack because they’ve
had me working overtime. I’ve added a bunch of new features, some on
the front end, some on the back end. In addition to that, I’ve done a lot of, and I hate to
use this trendy buzz word…refactoring.

Some of the new things include:

• A blogroll (if you scroll down on any page, you’ll see it)


• No more static mailto: tags on the front page, now it links to an email form


• I finally got my edit comments thing working on the back end just
  in case someone (namely myself) messes up and wants it corrected


• A lot of…sigh…refactoring to make things cleaner

I’ve got to get my friend Ken to make a caricature of the monkeys and I while we are hard at work.

Thanks to my friend Rod for pointing this out. Apparently, my RSS feed
was incorrectly displaying the wrong time format for posts and comments.

The
RSS specifications require that this time format be in GMT/UTC.
Although it was saying that it was in GMT/UTC format, it really wasn’t.

I’ve fixed that bug so it should appear correctly now.

I was reading Bink the other day and I came across this article that’s titled “”http://bink.nu/Article4619.bink">Ballmer: High-end Windows, Office Coming" (the source article is on CNET though).

According to the article, my favorite corporate mouthpiece Steve
Ballmer, said that “Microsoft is planning new, higher-priced versions
of both Windows and Office in the coming years as part of its effort to
grow sales.” In his speech at the Microsoft Financial Analyst meeting,
he went on to say, “We have
plans in the Vista generation to introduce an Enterprise edition.”

Why oh why does Microsoft do this? Go back and read the first quote.
I’ll wait. Back? Good. Do you see anything in there about the new
versions of Windows or Office benefiting their customer base? I didn’t
think so. Nowhere does it say anything about doing this for the
consumers. It’s all about increasing Microsoft’s bottom line. Consumers
don’t want a higher priced version of Windows and Office, they are high
priced as it is.

Out of the 52 comments that appeared in response to CNET’s article none, absolutely none, were positive.

This reminds me of the comic hey-day of the early 1990s. During that
time, comic companies like Marvel, DC, Image and others would release a
comic with 2 or three cover variations in order to increase revenue. I
don’t think that any of the consumers actually wanted this crap and
it’s one of the reasons that I stopped collecting comics.

Maybe good ol’ Ballmer can release a version of Windows Vista with a
foil embossed, fold-out cover that’s been personally signed by him.
That way they can increase revenue because people will buy two copies,
one to install on their PCs and one as a collectors item. That’s what the customers want!

I was reading CNN.com today and came across the headline outlined in red:

ARRGHHH! Outlook has an extremely annoying feature in it and it’s
apparently been there since the early Outlook 97 days.

When you first
start Outlook the default value to “snooze” a reminder is always set to
5 minutes. You can change that time by choosing a different time but
this value will always reset to 5 minutes every time you close Outlook.


I did a search on google to see if you can change the default value and
all of the MS MVPs say the same thing, “It’s hard coded value and
cannot be changed.” Personally, I consider this a bug and I’m irritated
that it’s been around for so long.

I’m going to come out of the closet here. I’m a GUI and wallpaper addict. I think that the hack to the UXTheme.dll is one of the best things to happen to Windows XP (although I personally use StyleXP).

I think I change my Visual Style and wallpaper (to match the Visual
Style (after all it’s all about coordination)) on a monthly basis but I
often run out and have to cycle through my old stuff. I think it’s hard
to find quality stuff out there. A quick stroll through some of
the sites out there will show you that anyone can make a shitty ass
wallpaper and Visual Style as most people don’t know a thing about art,
art composition, color theory, UI, etc.

Hrrrm…Maybe I should add a new section to my sidebar that shows what VS and wallpaper I’m currently using…

I’ll preface this post by saying that the contents
of it deal with death, grief and loss. I personally don’t deal well
with any of those subjects so I understand if any of the readers out
there skip this post.

I stole the title from an Ah-Ha song, but for some reason it jumped into my head.
This isn’t TV and as such, the sun doesn’t always shine and things
aren’t always perfect. I’ve been torn for the past two weeks about
writing something about this. I’m was torn by the idea of honoring
someone’s memory in a way that I can or if it cheapens their memory by
writing about it in a blog. I’ve obviously chosen the former.

My uncle and godfather, whom my family and I visited recently in
Florida, passed away on July 25th after battling through that weekend
with a failing liver and kidneys. He was 80 years old.

I regret to say, that because of distance (he lived on the East Coast
and I live on the West Coast) and sheer stupidity, I didn’t know my
uncle as much as I wish I did. With all that being said, I can safely
say that he was a great man. Although he didn’t invent anything,  and he didn’t win a
nobel prize he was still a great man for other reasons.

He, like my father, left his homeland (without any reassurance of ever
seeing it again) to come to a country with no possessions and without
the the ability to speak the language. All of this to provide a better life for
his family. He left the newly created communist Cuba, never to see his
homeland again all when he was my age. Because of men like my father
and my uncle, I am able to have the freedoms that I currently have.
Most people don’t risk as much as he did in their entire lives,
especially for a future that uncertain, that is one of the reasons why he was a great man.


My family is small and because of his passing, it’s shaken me more than
I was prepared for. Add to that the fact that my father, mother, and
Tita (Spanish for aunt – pronounced “tee-ta” – she’s like a mother to
me) are just a handful of years away from his age and it really starts
to get to me. What I would give to go to a free Cuba where I could walk
with my mom along Varadero beach, The Malecon, and visit
Cienfuegos…but enough of that.

I don’t really have much to say as I think I’ve said enough. We miss you and love you Tio Rene.

Last year, I rode in my first bicycle “marathon”. That event, the Providence Bridge Pedal, took me over 6 of Portland’s bridges including the two largest ones; the Marquam and the Fremont. Although it was very challenging, I thought that I did fairly well.

This year, I signed up for the Bridge Pedal again. Last time was a challenge and this year I decided to step it up. Instead of the 6 bridge run, I’m going to do the 10 bridge run. Although I thought that it was 38 miles, the map says it’s 35. I have a feeling those 3 miles aren’t really going to make a difference.

It begins next weekend so we’ll see what happens. Let’s hope that they don’t have to peel me off the pavement.

I was going to go to the bike store today and pick up all the gear that
I need for the Bridge Pedal next weekend. Instead what I ended up doing
was finding nirvana.

Nirvana, as defined by Merriam-Webster online, is “a place or state of
oblivion to care, pain, or external reality”. Some of you might be
asking yourselves, “How did he do this?” Truth be told, I’m not really
sure how I achieved it, but I can theorize it.

First thing is first, I woke up at ~12 pm. Normally, I would be kicking
myself for waking up so late as I usually try to get up at around 9 am
on weekends. Today, I didn’t care. I was alright with the fact that I
woke up at noon.

For the rest of the day (which was a perfect weather day – that
probably attributed to my state) I did much of nothing. On any other
Sunday, my mind would be flooded all sorts of thoughts; things that I
need to get accomplished or things that I should be doing. I’ll give you some examples: usually I’d be worried that I spent too much time being a hermit and that I should be out there
having some sort of human contact or that I should be out there
enjoying the wonderful weather doing what people normally do when the
weather is great. My mind would be so caught up with what I thought I should be doing (or maybe it’s what I think the world thinks that I should being doing) that I couldn’t relax.

Somehow, I changed that mode of thinking and decided that it was ok
that I didn’t talk to any humans today, that I only left my apartment
once, or that I spent most of the day just reading my new book Freakonomics.

About halfway through the day, I found that I was really relaxed,
more so than I can remember being. I stopped caring about the external
reality and just focused on the internal reality. Reminds me of a line
from a Babylon 5 episode. I can’t remember exactly how it goes,
but it’s something like this; “Everything out there distracts us from
everything in here.”

I don’t know how the FX Network does it, but they are like the crack of TV stations to me. With the exception of one show (Battlestar Galactica), all of the other shows that I watch are on that station.

In the past two months they have made me a fan of three shows. I
consider this pretty hard to do considering that I think that most of
the stuff on TV is crap. First, they debuted Over There which is a gritty war drama set in Iraq. Tonight, I watched re-runs of two premiere episodes on the network; Starved and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
As comedies, I have to say, that both are funny and creative. This is
rare because I think that most sitcoms are oh so boring.

Next month, Nip / Tuck returns for their third season which brings the count of shows that I watch on FX up to five (Rescue Me being the fifth).

Unfortunately, I like doing other things besides watching TV and I hate
missing episodes of shows that I watch (especially dramas). It would be
nice to be able to record shows for playback later, however, I refuse
to bust out my VCR. Considering this, it might be
time to invest in a PVR/DVR. That reminds me, I downloaded a video segment
from two guys showing you how to put together an open source PVR/DVR
solution (MythTV – you’ll need Linux to run this). While the video is
informative, I think that there is a lot of information that is not
covered. I might have to test this and see how it stacks up to other
commercial solutions.

Some of you might recall my first Public Service Announcement.
It generated quite a buzz amongst my meager readership. I’m sure if I
had more of a readership, I could have outraged more people.

Some will argue with me and some will agree with me, but you can’t
argue with the facts. The book that I’ve been reading recently,
Freakonomics, has a small section on online dating. The section is rather humorous and actually support some of my theories.

According to the text, a man who does not include a photo gets
one-fourth the volume of email response of a man who does post a photo.
Women are more severely punished by not posting a photo as she only
gets only one-sixth the response. It gets better. According to the
survey material, “a woman’s looks are of paramount importance” to men, which
again proves one of my theories; men get “hooked” into reading more
based on a woman’s looks. Interestingly enough poor photo choices might be the reason that 23% of women
never get a single email.

Don’t worry though, women do their fair share of discriminating. In
fact, it’s a miracle that men try at all because according to the book, fifty-seven percent
of men don’t get a single response. Also, men that didn’t make the benjamins
also suffered as “a man’s income is terribly important” to a woman.

Pretty stereotypical on both sides huh?

It would be interesting to find out the details about the
fifty-seven percent statistic. For example, of these men, what was the
average number of emails that they sent out to women? Based on the
numbers of emails that were sent out, are these odds better or worse than going to your local
watering hole (or whatever venue you pick) and attempting to pick up
women the old fashioned way.

I could read an entire book about this stuff.

Regardless, it looks like I need to take my photo rules and send
them off to Cosmo or something because women keep making the same
mistakes.

Take for instance, this photo.

Out of the choices below, choose the one that most closely matches what you think of her.

1. She’s a nice girl looking for some fun
2. She’s a nice girl looking for a relationship


3. She’s filthy whore that, when drunk allows men to fondle her and take down her pants
   

4. I’ll make up my own funny answer, thank you very much!
   

I’ve been thinking a lot about money recently. I think it all started when I watched a re-run of 30 Days,
Morgan Spurlock’s documentary TV show that aired on the FX Network. In
the episode that I watched, Spurlock and his wife (I think it’s his
wife) lived on minimum wage for 30 days. Watching the two of them
suffer and work though it was really tough.

In the same week, I read an article on Forbes.com; Most Overpriced Places In The U.S. 2005.
Guess who came in at number 3? If you guessed Portland, Oregon you’d be
right. With a median home price of $243,000 how can a family earning
minimum wage ever afford that? In fact, how can an average family
earning $40,000 a year afford that?

Also, in the same week (coincidence?), I read an interesting comment (one of the few intelligent ones) on Slashdot.org.
Some of the comment is marred by political jabs and propaganda (which I
have omitted for brevity) but the rest is pretty good. It’s a pretty
dismal prediction, but is it true? Read below and be the judge.

…We will become a
nation where 4% of the population lives in gated and guarded communities, and
everyone else will live in an apartment, in places filled with violence, and we
will be called sub-human.

Remember, it was not that long ago when
families only needed one person to work, to pay the bills, to feed the family.
The past 10 years, most families have both parents working. And in the next 10
years, we will see both parents working multiple jobs.

How can any country justify having CEO’s
that make $10,000,000+ a year, and having janitors who make $5.75 an hour? I hope my kids don’t have the future I
think they will. A small studio, with advertising inside the apartment that
can’t be turned off. Working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, and still not having
enough to eat good food. And having a police that exists not to protect people,
but to keep the poor out of the rich neighborhoods.


The
comment certainly portrays a different America than the one that we are
living in now…or does it? It’s not that far of a stretch to think
that in the near future both parents will be working multiple jobs just
to break even (I’m talking about middle-class parents here).

A
few days ago, I had the misfortune of watching Bill Maher’s new stand
up on HBO. Most of his show was right propaganda and I hate propaganda of all kinds. I hate it when the “right”
spews it and I hate it when the “left” spews it.

During his
“performance”, he started talking about America’s drug of choice; any
form of speed. In his example, he mentioned America’s penchant for
drinking coffee and attributed this to feeding what he calls the Prime
Directive; greed. In other words, we drink coffee so that we can stay
awake and go to work long hours so that we can feed our greed.

That’s
where I had to turn it off. That’s when it struck me, Maher has the
fiscal freedom to stand on a stage (getting paid who knows how much
from ticket sales and HBO) to talk about American greed. However, some
of the working people drink America’s speed to stay awake while working
two jobs just to make ends meet.

I wonder, if he was forced to take a
minimum wage job (or two just to survive) would he still be talking
about how coffee is bad or would he be sucking it down and hoping that
it would keep him awake while he worked a 12 hour shift washing dishes?

This
all leads me to a question that I posed to my friend. I think that what
we all really want it fiscal freedom. Is it possible for regular people
to attain? She says it’s a fallacy. I’m inclined to believe her. There
are exceptions to this rule; the celebrities, the music stars, the
Brins and Gates of the world, but these aren’t the norm. What we strive
for might just always be out of reach.

The PhysOrg site has photos of one that occurred during the launch of Atlantis. Also, one of the comments left on the site also has a link to more photos of transonic clouds. Really amazing stuff.

I think most people that read my site know about Slashdot. It’s probably one of the most popular technology and science news aggregators out there. Then came Digg.
According to their site, Digg is “…a technology news website that
combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical
editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but
rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the
homepage, the users do.”

It’s pretty inventive and as one person
called it, “addictive.” One thing worries me though. I wonder how long
it will take the spammers and morons on the Internet to promote their
pr0n sites and adware crap sites right to the top? Until that time, I’m
adding it to my daily reading list.

I’ll admit, I’m a gadget junkie. It’s one of the reasons that I work in
IT, to play with all the new gear that comes out. So what happens when
Apple releases a revolutionary new mouse? Naturally, I have to get it.
Luckily, instead of spending my hard earned cabbage on it, I got one for
“review purposes” through work.

I’ve been using it for a few days now and I think I’m up for writing
about my impressions of it. The mouse, which looks like a fancy bar of
soap, appears to have no left and right buttons but it will actually
sense what click you intended by where you pushed down. That’s pretty
slick. I’ve found the sensor mechanism to be pretty accurate but there
are times where I think I’m in the position to be right clicking and
nothing happens. It’s possible that I just haven’t spent enough time
with it to be know the “sweet spot” or it could be that it’s always
going to be like this.

The side buttons I don’t like that much. My trusty 4 button IBM mouse
had one side button (on the left hand side of the mouse that you
activated with your thumb) that allowed you to click back through web
pages. I found the thing damn near indispensable. On the Mighty Mouse,
I have a hard time knowing whether or not I actually pressed it. It’s
hard to hear the click button and I get no tactile sensation that let’s
me know that I actually pushed it. Very frustrating. Again, maybe in
time I will get more familiar with this feature. The right side button,
in Windows, is to me, useless. In a web browser, all it does is take
you to your home page. Not only that, but it’s damn near impossible for
me to click.

The middle button, which has been referred to online as “the nipple”, is
like a little trackball. On a Mac, it allows you to move up and down
and diagonally as well. There is no special software that can be loaded
onto Windows for the mouse, so Windows uses the stock mouse drivers for
it and as such you lose most of the functionality of “the nipple”. On
Windows, it works just like a normal scroll wheel and third mouse
button (which I think is necessary since I use the middle button to
open new links in tabs in Firefox – I don’t think I could live without
it). It’s neat that it knows that you are middle clicking even though
there is no button there.

A lot of people have been griping about the cord and I’ll do the same.
The USB cord is absolutely tiny. In order to connect it to my PC, I had
to get a USB extension cable as it normally did not reach to my PC.
According to my friend that owns a Mac this is because you can plug
your mouse into almost everything on a Mac. They keyboard, and the
monitor. Mac Heads probably have USB ports on the sides their head. I
consider such an oversight unacceptable.

If you have a Mac,
get it, if you have a Windows PC go get yourself a Logitech mouse (it’s
probably cheaper and have more features).

I left my house early this morning to I meet Jon and Greg to take on the
Providence Bridge Pedal (check out the animated map). 1 city…10 bridges…34 miles…south side to
north side.

We started at around 6:45 am from Naito Parkway and then immediately get onto our first bridge.


1: Morrison Bridge

First bridge, it was easy peasy. Didn’t look through the grating to the
river, tends to give vertigo. Woman biffs it right after crossing the
bridge and nearly takes Greg with her. We keep going (she’s all right)
down Water Avenue and then it’s a jaunt down the Springwater Trail. I’m
amazed at how fast we went through the Springwater Trail; we were at
the next bridge before I knew it. Greg and Jon still with me? Check.


2: Sellwood Bridge

Nothing much to tell about this one. Gorgeous view from the top. Greg
took a photo from the top and we continued on our way down Macadam
Avenue to the next bridge. I almost lost Jon and Greg but caught up
with them at a light downtown.


3: Hawthorne Bridge

Third bridge, still going strong and still got my peeps with me. Then
disaster hits. The Hawthorne winds us back to Water Avenue where there
was an insane amount of people. There was so much confusion and no one
telling the bikers were to go that I easily lost Jon and Greg in the
crowd. Got my front tire caught in the rail road tracks (easy fix) and
then I almost went down the Springwater Trail again but I figured out
that the people lining up (with red vests (red vest =10 bridge) were a
later 10 bridge start time). Because of my detour, I’m sure that Greg
and Jon are ahead of me. I Finally figured it out and went up a couple
of streets to the next bridge.

4: Ross Island Bridge

The had only one lane blocked off for bikers which means that it got
crowded quick. I saw some of the bikers head into the closest car lane
(but sticking close the bike lane) and I decided to get ballsy and do
the same; after all I’m trying to catch my lost cohorts. Again the
bridge ends and then the road loops around downtown and I start getting
confused as to where I’m supposed to go. I yell out (to the volunteers
on the side of the road), “Which way is 10 bridge?” They ignore me, I
hear another person ask the same question and she answers, “I don’t
know, have you seen me before?” I’m starting to see a pattern, most of
the volunteers are completely useless. Mental note: don’t pay attention
to them. Also, bike is starting to make strange clicking noise in
between 30th and 32nd gear (hrrrm….)


5: Marquam Bridge (Top Deck)

The entire top deck was closed off for bikers. At the beginning of the
race, Jon, Greg, and I said that if we got separated we would stop at
Marquam and Fremont and scope for the lost squad members. I stopped at
the River City Bicycle hut and had them check out my bike. Looks like
the tires were low (I must have a small leak because I went to RCB
yesterday and they pumped them with the compressor) and I also found
the culprit that was making the noise. Looks like part of the wire was
rubbing up against the chain but only when in those gears (the other
gears move the chain away from the wire). We crimped the wire and I
looked around for my comrades and then left. Remember, by this time I
thought that there were long gone. Off to the next bridge.


6: Burnside Bridge

Bridge is flat and uneventful except for the homeless people saying
that there was an accident at the bottom of the hill when their wasn’t.
Damn crackerjacks.


7: Broadway Bridge

This bridge was recently overhauled so the pavement was nice and
smooth. I’m still going strong, which is a good thing because the
bridge that kicked my ass last year (I’ve affectionately named it
Leviathan) is coming up. Get off the Broadway, loop around Albina 
(the uphill battle started here) then Russell and finally Kerby and off
to…


8: Fremont (Top Deck)

It threatened to kick my ass but I shrugged it off. It was a climb but
nothing like last year’s (we came from the other side this time). I’m
getting hungry and don’t want to eat my power bar. I look for the
bananas that they were handing out at Top Deck Marquam. No such luck.
CRAP! I take a few swigs of my Gatorade and I don’t even wait for Greg
and Jon. Hell, they are probably done and sipping margaritas at the
finish line. I shoot down the hill down to Vaughn. Mental Note: I
installed one of the clip pedals wrong and unless my foot is against
the far edge it starts rubbing against the pedal arm; time to get some
Shimano shoes and clippy pedals.


St. Helens Road (not a bridge but it kicked my ass)

For some reason, I thought that Vaughn (which turns into St. Helens
Road) was all downhill. Boy was I wrong. It’s all freaking UPHILL. I’m
starting to lose energy and willpower. I constantly hear other bikers
yell, “On your left!” as they pass me. Old, young, it doesn’t matter.
Everyone is passing me. I half expected to see some old people pass me
using their walkers on their way to Denny’s.

I’m starting to lose concentration and go from shifting down to the
easiest gear to shifting back up to get more torque. For the longest
time, I can’t see the next bridge, which is the St. John’s Bridge.
Finally I see it. Good lord, it looks monstrous and it’s way above
where I am at now. How the hell am I supposed to get to that!? Then I
see, it a LARGE upslope to the bridge. I steel myself for the pain, I
try to stand up and generate more torque but my quads are burning. I
sit back down and decide to ride it out in low gear. A Rubenesque black
woman passes me going up the hill. I’m not sure what she put in her gas
tank, but I think she’s got some NOS under the hood. Finally, I reach
the crest and stop. I scarf down my chocolate power bar (which is
melted) and then I have to stick the wrapper in my empty water bottle
because there are no trash cans. I wait there for a good 5 minutes
trying to recover some strength. By now, I’m sure that Jon and Greg at
the finish line.


9: St. John’s Bridge

Look at this beast. What a monster. There were a lot of people camped
out on the sides recuperating from the terrible climb up St. Helen’s
Road. I don’t stop and push on. The bridge isn’t hard, but I expended a
lot of energy before it. One more bridge to go. But before I do that, I
have to ride back down into town via Willamette Blvd, Greeley and then
Interstate. Maybe it’s because I was tired but how the hell is St.
Helen’s Road uphill and the way back is uphill too? It’s a short hop to the last bridge…


10: Steel Bridge

There was a small incline right before this and I stood up to achieve
maximum torque. There was no way that I was slowing down. I crossed the
finish line and finally got a banana from one of the volunteer girls.
As I’m eating my banana, Jon comes from behind me and zips past me. I
yell at him and he stops. I ask him where Greg is and he says, “right
behind you”. I guess they weren’t ahead of me after all. :)

There is no greater feeling than challenging yourself and succeeding. It’s a great day to be alive!

My friend Jon has posted some great photos from this year’s Bridge Pedal. You’ll note that I don’t appear in any of them…but I’m sure you know why.

Lifehack.org has a list of the top ten Google maps implementations. One of the best ones is the CheapGas
implementation. As gas prices soar through the roof, this little gem is
gonna come in handy. Since I mentioned gas prices, I should mention
that the Chicago Sun-Times has an article
saying that gas prices could hit 5 bucks a gallon in 2006. I’m not sure
if the author (quoting oil expert Craig Smith) is out for shock value
or not, but seeing the gas prices reach the 3 dollar mark it wouldn’t
surprise me if they were right.

I’ve been busy the last few days making some [more] modifications to the site.

The first is a URL Rewriting engine so that instead of getting
unfriendly URLs like this one eddorre.com/comments.aspx?post_id=5,
you’ll see this: eddorre.com/posts/5.aspx. Makes it easier for
people to read and supposedly makes it easier for search engines to
spider. Some of the site still uses the unfriendly URLs but I’ll
transition that over soon. Although I would like to take credit for
writing the engine myself, I can’t. I used Scott Mitchell‘s engine that he posted on MSDN.

The second is a simple thing really. It’s a “remember me” checkbox on
the comments page. If you have the box checked (checked is the default
value on page load) and post a comment, I’ll save your name and url to a cookie. Next time you visit the comments page, I’ll
load those values in again so you don’t have to type them in all over
again. I don’t store anything else besides these values. If you don’t want cookies written to your machine, uncheck the
box before posting the comment.

I should note that while I do write and read cookies in this manner, I
don’t store any user information for personal use or distribution. The
only information that I log is what the web server normally logs.

Got a bunch of wireless tidbits.

The other day my laptop lost the ability to communicate with my
wireless router. I tired the usual, rebooting the wireless router,
disabling wireless on my laptop and then re-enabling it and of course
rebooting the laptop. No matter, what I did I could not get a signal.

I was going to refresh the WEP keys on the router, but I forgot the
administrative password (bad admin, bad!) so I had to wipe the config
and start over again. I used my old article, How to Setup a PPTP Encrypted Wireless Network
(updated!) to get the config up and running in minutes, with some exceptions. I
used to recommend that the user use 128bit WEP. With the weaknesses in
WEP, I don’t recommend that anymore. I switched over to WPA using TKIP
and a PSK (Pre-Shared Key). I could probably use WPA with RADIUS, but
it was late and I just wanted to read some articles with my laptop in
bed.

Now it’s all working again. The laptop seems to detect the wireless
network faster now, but I’m pretty sure that it’s because I changed the
wireless channel and not because of WPA. Before changing this, I used a
tool to scan for wireless signals. After a brief scan, I chose a signal
that was rarely used by other access points or routers. If you have
frequent dropouts of your wireless network or if the speed degrades, I
would suggest changing the default channel. Too bad WAPs and wireless
routers don’t self-modulate to choose the least busiest channel.

In wireless news, McAfee is going to be releasing software
that automatically configures access points and routers to make them
secure. Could this be the end of the unsecure wireless network era?

Here is a site that mixes wardriving with google maps. Go ahead, enter your address and see if your device is listed…

Microsoft’s LogParser tool is hot. I’ve been meaning to check out this tool for a few months but I never had time until recently.

LogParser, which uses a SQL engine for its queries, can query a
impressive array of input formats. Some of those formats are IIS logs,
csv files, XML files, Windows Event Logs, the Active Directory, the
registry, the filesystem, and more! The output formats that it
generates are equally impressive. Those include GIF charts, datagrids,
direct import into SQL Server, XML, and more.

If that wasn’t enough, the tool is completely scriptable using JavaScript, VBScript, or C# and VB.NET.

Yesterday, I was just hacking around figuring out the syntax and today
I wrote a full blown script to query my Active Directory to retrieve
all of the server objects. Based on that record set, then I query the
Application and System event logs on each server looking for only
warnings and errors.

Here is a snippet of the code to select objects out of the Active
Directory. I’ve replaced my domain with the fictional contoso.com
domain:

Everyone that reads digg (my new favorite
tech news site) knows that Google has setup a XMPP Server (more
commonly known as Jabber) at talk.google.com. The rumor is that Google
is going to officially release their IM service tomorrow but you can
still get to it today.

All you have to do is point your favorite Jabber client
to the Google server and put in your gmail account credentials into the
proper fields (obviously you have to have a gmail account).

This site
already has instructions for GAIM, Trillian Pro, Adium, and iChat. I’ve
gotten it to work with Trillian Pro and Exodus but have had no success
with Pandion (I think it’s because this program always uses encryption).

I’ve been using Exodus (a
free client) with our internal XMPP server at work for years now so I
figured I would write some instructions on how to use it with Google
Talk.

The instructions for this to work in Exodus are below:

1. Enter in <username>@gmail.com in the Jabber ID: field


2. Enter in your password


3. Remove the check mark next to the box marked “This is a new account”


4. Click on the Connection tab and remove the check mark next to the
   box marked “Automatically discover host and port” and enter in
   talk.google.com into the host field leaving the default 5222 in the
   port field


5. Click on the Encryption tab and make sure that the SSL mode that is selected is “Encrypt the connection whenever possible”

According to this site,
Google will actually release a client tomorrow so that you don’t have
to use a third party client. This marks yet another entry into the
crowded IM market. With so many competitors it’s becoming impossible to
use separate IM clients (Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, and now Google). Luckily,
Trillian solves all of this, but I can’t help to wonder if Google’s IM
client will do the same thing. If it does, guess which client people
will be using?

If you want to message me to test your client and configuration, email me and I’ll give you my gmail username.

Update:

Google released their Windows client. You can get it at talk.google.com.
To be honest, I’m a little underwhelmed with the IM portion. I was
hoping for something that could interface with the big three but that
feature is not in this release. What’s really hot is the call feature.
If you have a microphone and speakers you can call buddies that are on
your list; not groundbreaking but it’s very seamless.

The interface is very “Google”. It’s has a very clean UI without
emoticons or anything. Well, I’ll let you download it and test drive it
for yourselves.

When I played D&D (I know ladies, I’m even hotter now, huh?) I was confounded by a rule called multiclassing. Without going into much detail, in D&D when you create a character, you pick a class (a good analogy for what a class is, is an occupation). Most people pick one class (fighter, wizard, rogue, etc.) just as most people only do one job.

However some choose to “multiclass” meaning that they choose to be, for example, both a fighter and a wizard. The general rule for multiclassing, if I can remember correctly, is that you can’t actively increase your skills in both classes at the same time meaning that you can’t get better in both of your “occupations” at the same time – it’s one or the other. This rule always confounded me but I think I’m starting to get it; I’ll give you an example. I went to the gym today and unlike the brawny man of a years ago, I totally sucked. I might as well have had a t-shirt on that said “Lackey Weakling” on it. Within the span of 3 or 4 separate exercises I went from having an ok amount of energy to be completely out of gas and being famished. After I get home from the gym and get done eating and cleaning up after myself it’s about 10:30 PM and I’m really tired. I really want to code and stuff but I’m way to tired. If I were to have skipped the workout, I could have easily been coding.

So therein lies my dilemma. It seems that in order to be good in either working out or coding, that I have devote my energy into one. Is it really possible to balance the two?

I email myself links all the time to remind myself to blog about stuff.
I’ve been lazy. So you’ll excuse me if I link drop
for a bit.

Annoyed by those pop-ups in that happen even while using Firefox? Try this configuration change.

Brat sent me this blog link. Her friends biked from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco and took photos all along the way.

How to run IE 7 Beta 1 alongside IE 6.
I don’t know if this really works. I haven’t verified it myself but my
friend Jon said he was having some trouble getting it to work. Jon, did
you get it to work?

Wanna know where those cell towers are at? This Google Maps implementation will let you know.

Getskinned.org has some really nice stuff to help you modify the look of your apps. Including Visual Styles for Windows XP – check out LunaQQ.

That’s all for now.

It’s not a big secret that I’m no fan of DRM. The abbreviation actually stands for Digital Rights Management,
but perhaps more appropriate definitions are Digital Restrictions
Management, The Devil’s Restricting Machinations, or Digital Screw the
Consumers Until the Cows Come Home.

DRM was originally intended to stop people from pirating content and
distribute it over the Internet. Unfortunately, this is completely
ineffective and does nothing except piss off the legitimate customers.
No one, with the exception of the fat cats, likes DRM. I’ll give you
the perfect example.

This Tuesday, I went to Best Buy to get the latest CD from 30 Second to Mars; A Beautiful Lie. Jared Leto‘s
little band seems to have quite a cult following considering that the
first one store that I went to was completely sold out and I had to go
to a second one (I was gonna order it from Amazon, but I couldn’t pass
up the 7.99 sticker price).

Once I got the CD, I noticed something sinister on the package; a
little copy protected symbol that referred to the back of the CD to
read the details of these “features”. Turning the CD over, it was
clearly marked that it would only work on a Mac or a Windows computer
(sorry Linux), you could only burn it 3 times, and you couldn’t
transfer it to an iPod (only a WMA portable device).

I bought the CD anyway all the while wondering if it would really stop me from playing the music that I purchased on the devices of my
choosing. I soon found out, the answer is yes and no. The CD comes with
it’s own version of Windows Media Player and on a Windows PC, plays
DRM’d Windows Media Files. I found it impossible to crack the DRM on
the hidden .wma files on the CD but there is a way to rip the tracks to
mp3 and therefore iTunes and a non-WMA portable media player (my hats off to a fellow on the Internet for showing me the way).

Now, I could post the secret of my success on my blog, but I have a feeling that if the jailers of our fair use rights got wind of it, I would get hit with cease and desist citing the other tool of the devil, the DMCA. So if you want to know, you know how to get a hold of me.

That’s the perfect example of how DRM sucks. I never use Windows Media Player and making me use it to play the music that I purchased legally,
in my opinion, is vendor lock-in and flat out illegal. When I buy a
DVD, I expect it to work in any DVD player (the whole region encoding
issue aside), not just Sony DVD players or JVC players.

Luckily there are heroes out there like DVDJon that stand up to the big companies that are working to restrict our media rights.

If you bought Velvet Revolver’s CD Contraband, you might be aware of the MediaMax DRM system that comes with the CD.


This site, hosted at Princeton, is a thorough analysis of the MediaMax DRM system including how to disable it.

I should note that the MediaMax DRM system is not the same system that is on the new 30 Seconds to Mars CD.

Found this at the EFF‘s website. This guide, titled The Customer is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music, is a must read for everyone that buys music from online services.

Ever since I bought the latest 30 Seconds to Mars CD I’ve been thinking a lot about DRM, Microsoft, and customers.

DRM, in the entertainment media sense (i.e. audio files, movie files,
etc.) serves absolutely no purpose for customers. There are no features
in DRM which actually benefits customers. It doesn’t make anyone’s life
easier, better or more rich. It’s an invention by companies to maintain
their revenue stream.


Scoble, Microsoft’s most public mouthpiece, talks about
company-to-customer relations often in his blog. He’s always quick to
point out
that companies that don’t listen to their customers are doomed. It
makes sense. As a company, your customers are your lifeblood. If you
wrong them enough times, eventually they will seek an alternative.

Unfortunately, in Microsoft’s case, one of the problems is that they
have too many customers; too many people or groups of people to please.
The DRM on the CD that I bought is a perfect example. The CD used DRM’d
Windows Media Audio (.wma) files to protect the content.

How does DRM’d .wma files help me as a customer? The answer is, they
don’t. I’m not the customer, the recording company is. The two are
mutually exclusive. The record company doesn’t care about the customer,
they just want to protect their revenue stream and Microsoft is helping
them. So in this case, Microsoft is alienating one customer to please
another.

Before I go any further, I should say that when I write Microsoft in
this post, I mean the corporate entity and I’m not referring to
individual impassioned developers or groups of developers that actually
care about the products that they are working on and shipping.

Continuing on the note about customers and Microsoft, let me discuss IE
(Internet Explorer) 7. I truly believe that the newly reconstituted IE
team is passionate about giving their customers a great product to use.
What I don’t believe, and I don’t think anyone does either, is that
this move is completely altruistic. It’s not as if Bill Gates woke up
one day and said, “You know, IE 6 is good but our customers deserve
something better, so by golly, I’m going to give it to them!”

Everyone knows that the only reason Microsoft rebuilt their IE
team (after disbanding it) was because of Firefox’s rising popularity
(heck, even Microsoft’s employees admitted to using it instead of IE on
their blogs). In this case, who is
the customer? If you guessed the users, it’s my opinion that you have
guessed wrong, it’s the shareholders.

Firefox only had one customer to please; the users. They set to build a
better browser and they did it. Not because someone was cutting into
their little slice of the pie but because they wanted to make a great
product.

Microsoft, the entity, seemed to have stopped caring about their most
important customers (their users) a long time ago. If you don’t take my
word for it, read Dare Obsanjo’s post on the subject. He should know, he actually works at Microsoft (although I’m not sure how after posts like those).

Microsoft knows what they need to do, now it’s time to see if they actually do it.

How long does it take for an unpatched Windows XP computer with no
anti-virus to get compromised when connected to the Internet (using a dial-up modem)?
According to this article and video, about 8 seconds.

It’s been an interesting week in technology (and it’s not over yet).
First of all, for those that don’t know, the PDC (Microsoft
Professional Developers Conference) has been underway since Monday and
they’ve been unleashing new stuff left and right.

Some of those include:

• A PDC Build of Microsoft Vista (User Interface Video, Exploring and Using Vista Video)


• A PDC Build of Microsoft Office 12 which showcases the dramatic new Office User Interface – a must see (Diving into the New Office Video). Probably the most popular video with 60,000 views already!


• Microsoft Workflow Foundation. I’m still unsure of what the hell
  this really does and how it fits in with their other products (when I
  have time, I’ll check out the video).


• New version of Sharepoint (Video)


• LINQ, which stands for Language INtegrated Query. From the
  channel9 website, LINQ “makes query and set operations, like SQL
  statements first class citizens in .NET languages like C# and VB.” I’ve
  just scratched the surface of this, but it looks pretty cool so far. I
  guess it’s time to watch the video. When you are done with that, head over to this site for some more LINQ resources.


• Information about the ATLAS project which brings AJAX technologies to ASP.NET.


• Microsoft Expression
  which includes Graphic Designer (sorta like Adobe Illustrator and
  Photoshop(?)), Interactive Designer (think Macromedia Flash) and Web
  Designer. Being a web dude myself, I think Web Designer (code named
  Quartz) is probably the thing that I’m most excited about that’s been
  shown at the PDC so far. I want to get my hands on this software in the
  worst possible way.


• There’s more but I’ll let you mosey on over to Scoble’s for the rest…so far, tomorrow is another day after all.

In non-Microsoft tech news, meebo has been released to the public. If you ignored all that Microsoft stuff, listen to this.

Meebo, is an AJAX (web application by virtue of using AJAX) IM client
that allows you to chat on AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, and ICQ. Google Talk,
schmoogle talk. This is hot!

It’s still a beta alpha so don’t expect things to work
perfectly. I’ve tested the login but at the time that I logged in all
my buddies were sleeping, so I’ll test the actual chat portion tomorrow.

Before anyone uses this service seriously, they need to put up their
privacy policy and use SSL. I’m not sure how they missed that when they
went live, but according to their blog they know about it and they are going to fix it.

Oh yeah, and Google released a blog search which only searches blogs. Technorati and Icerocket and others must be sweating it.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on XHTML, CSS, and design lately to
find out what I would need to make this site standards based.

In my research, I’ve found something interesting. Although developers
and geeks are quick to rally on the to the cause of web standards,
rarely any sites out there actually use them. Everyone out there
crucifies Internet Explorer for not following standards, but what’s the
point? If Internet Explorer was standards compliant, would it make a
damn bit of difference or would we continue to code non-compliant web
sites as long as they “worked?”

Out of all of the sites on my blog roll, only three actually validate.
Those sites are IT Notes, Molly.com (with warnings), and Jason Mauer
(validates as XHTML Strict! – way to go Jason). Interestingly enough,
usability and style sites like 37signals and 9rules also fail to
validate and even large sites like the beloved Google and CNN.com fail to
validate.

If so many of these (functional) sites fail to validate why is it so
important to adhere to the standards? Are they just rules that are
meant to be broken or should we web developers actually be paying more
attention to them?

This summer, I took a vacation to south Florida and in doing so, I
spent a significant time waiting in the airport. Most modern airports
have free wireless Internet access after the security check in points
and the airports that I’ve frequented (Portland, Phoenix, Houston, Ft.
Lauderdale) were no exception.

Most Wi-Fi networks in the airports follow a recurring motif; an open
AP (access point) that allows you to access the Internet. It’s really
convenient and easy to use but unfortunately, the problem with this is
that your communication to and from the Internet is not encrypted
whatsoever.

I don’t usually worry about this lack of encryption though. I have
access to a VPN server at work and at home so what I usually end up
doing is using the Wi-Fi at the airport then making a VPN connection to
my home network and then remote controlling and browsing, emailing, and
IM’ing from the remote controlled machine. Naturally, this is all
encrypted and I feel warm, safe, and fuzzy.

That safe feeling lasted until I couldn’t establish a VPN connection
from the Ft. Lauderdale airport. I instantly felt naked, as if my
thoughts were open to everyone and anyone. I still connected though but
I just used IM and didn’t read any of my email (corporate or home).

This got me thinking, there are probably a lot of business types out
there that use the free wireless at the airports, Starbucks, etc.
without thinking about the security of the information that they are
sending throughout the air. That thought, spawned another thought; I
envisioned a VPN service that people could use to encrypt their
wireless sessions to and from the Internet using OpenVPN. Since OpenVPN
is a TLS/SSL based VPN, it’s doubtful that someone would block the
outgoing port.

As luck (and laziness) would have it, I sat on the idea. Tonight
(morning) I opened up digg, and found this headline, “Google to offer
secure WiFi VPN.” Sound familiar? Yeah the premise is the same.
Luckily, I didn’t get into that game because Google would have crushed
me.

In order to use the service, you have to download a Windows application. Before you use it, familiarize yourself with the FAQ and the Privacy Policy.

One thing that always disturbed me about starting a service like that
was the potential to provide haxx0rs with “a free ride” to the
Internet. Think about it, now you can roll up to someone’s unsecured
wireless network in the ’burbs, start up your Google Secure Access and
start hacking away using an encrypted session.

I installed Google’s Secure Access VPN client and I’ve made some observations.

I’m not sure if the setup program created it or if the the client
itself created it but there is a new network connection in the Network
Connections control panel. This seems to be your standard PPTP VPN
connector.

Opening the connector is see that the username is listed as 0633492659
(seems to be a randomly generated number by the client as the second
time I connected I was assigned this number: 2466407433)
and there is no password saved. I’m assuming that the Secure Access
Client fills in the password, but that’s just an assumption.

Looking at the properties, I see that the connector is connecting to
vpn.google.com, and there are several advanced security settings
specified. According to the connector, the server requires encryption
(disconnects if the server declines) and the following options are
checked under Allow these protocols:

• Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP)


• Microsoft CHAP (MS-CHAP)


• Microsoft CHAP Version 2 (MS-CHAP v2)

All of the other options are unchecked.

Once I opt to connect the Secure Access Client, it starts the VPN
connector and automatically connects me. The following information is
listed in the Details section of the VPN connector:

• Authentication: MS CHAP V2


• Encryption: MPPE 128


• Compression: (none)


• PPP multilink framing: Off


• Server IP address: 192.168.230.1


• Client IP address: 192.231.7
  

Doing a quick Ethereal packet capture from my laptop, it looks like the
Secure Client makes some SSL calls to vpn.google.com before connecting the VPN network connection; it probably does
this to get the username and the password to connect to the VPN.

This post is about a dream that I had. If you don’t like reading about other people’s dreams, just skip this one.

Often my dreams are very grand in scope and follow an almost movie like script, so you’ll forgive me if this is rather long.

I remember running down a hill somewhere in the suburbs of Portland,
Oregon. As I reached the bottom, I passed through a gas station parking
lot where my ex-girlfriend was standing smoking a cigarette. I ran past
her hoping that she didn’t notice me but lady luck was not in my
corner. She immediately recognized me and started following me. The
more I ignored her, the more determined she seemed to want to talk to
me.

I ran into a large multi-story bookstore attempting to lose her but she
was right behind me. This is when things started to crystallize for me.
Her insistence on getting to me was not just to talk, I believed that
she was out to get me or the person that I was attempting to protect.

In the dream, I was what I call a Scion (although that’s never
mentioned by name in the dream) of God or perhaps one of the Seraphim
itself.
The Scion’s job is to protect people that have the power bring about
the end of the world from harm and manipulation by dark forces. These
people (called
The Gifted from here on out) usually don’t know that they have such
extraordinary power and usually are oblivious to their importance in
the cosmic scheme of things. If a Scion fails to protect one of The
Gifted, the dark forces usually use him or her to bring about the end
of the world. Interestingly enough, the end of the world, is not really
the end as it gets recreated again and the cycle begins anew. The
Scions live throughout the end and remember everything from past
worlds.

The Scions (I was one of several) have no extraordinary powers with the
exception of knowing who The Gifted are (and where they are at) and the
memory of worlds gone past. Unfortunately, the enemy of the Scions
(called The Enemy from here on out) do have extraordinary physical
powers (strength, speed, agility) and therefore Scions usually tend to
try to run away from them. All of the Scions are male, while conversely,
all of The Enemy are females. I don’t know why, that’s just the way it
is. One more thing, while Scions are naturally immortal (they can’t die
of old age), they can definitely be killed by The Enemy.

As I was hiding from my ex-girlfriend, it started dawning on me that
she could be one of The Enemy and was attempting to either kill me or
get to The Gifted that was assigned to me. I went to the elevator to
try to go up a floor. I pushed the “up” button and waited for the
elevator to come down.

As I was waiting, she saw me! It was one of those moments in the movies
where you’re waiting for the elevator while some danger is getting
closer. Just as she was upon me,  the elevator came down and the
doors closed in her face.

I  knew that The Gifted that I was assigned to was in this
bookstore, so I started searching for him/her. After a few minutes of
looking through what appeared to be the warehouse portion of the
bookstore, I found him. I’m not sure why, but it was a childhood friend
of mine named Wayne.

Thinking that The Enemy was still here to get him, I tried to get him
out of the bookstore urgently. Naturally, he didn’t want to go. I’m not
sure what I told him, but I seemed to impress upon him the idea that he
was in immediate danger and we headed out the fire escape to the back
alley.

That’s when I saw her. A beautiful blonde woman leapt from the roof
into the alley just a few feet away from us (told you they had special
powers). I immediately started running with Wayne in tow. At this
point, I realized that my ex was just a plant. She wasn’t The Enemy,
she was just really annoying.

Although we attempted to get away from the blonde, she eventually got
to Wayne (the details of how it happened blur). What I do remember is
there being a lot of wind, lighting, and dark clouds all over the
place. The world, was seemingly coming to an end.

I found Wayne in a trance while the world was falling apart around us.
Still unaware that he was causing it, I laid it all on the line
(normally you aren’t supposed to tell The Gifted about the immortal
struggle that they are involved in); I told him that he was causing
what was happening and told him, “Look dammit, the world is gonna end
if you don’t do something. I’ve seen it happen once and it’ll happen
again if you don’t act.” The information seemed to hit him hard, but it
seemed that he was starting to understand.

And as luck would have it, that’s when I woke up. {sigh} Oh well, c’est la vie.

Hollywood, call me. I got plenty more where that came from.

I’ve covered the great developer toolbar

for Firefox before, but it looks like Microsoft has come out with their own for Internet Explorer (works with 6.0 or later). 

It’s still in beta, so download and install with caution.

A friend of mine recently asked if Meebo

, the AJAX Web based IM product (which allows you to chat on AIM, MSN, Yahoo! and Jabber of GoogleTalk in one interface), was finally encrypting their passwords.

At the time that I wrote about meebo, they had made two colossal blunders. One was not encrypting passwords and the other was not having a privacy policy defined. Well, they’ve fixed both.

The privacy policy has been defined and according to their main page they are encrypting passwords with 1024-bit RSA keys.

Just to make sure that the passwords were not being transmitted in clear text, I opened up Ethereal and started a packet capture. Indeed the passwords are being encrypted when they are sent.

13 months ago, I watched the season 1 finale of Rescue Me on FX. At the very end they played Rubyhorse’s song Fell on Bad Days over some ending scenes.

I downloaded the song but I could never find the lyrics to it. The
other day, while puttering around on the web, I decided to give it
another shot. I didn’t find any official lyrics, because they can’t
seem to update their own website (way to go guys!) but I did find some
unofficial lyrics. Using that as a template (thanks to the guy who
posted them originally – I forgot your name – sorry), I modified some
of the words to what I hear. So here are my unofficial lyrics to the
song.

Fell on Bad Days – Rubyhorse (Unofficial lyrics)

Fell on bad
Fell on bad days
Oh your wicked
Oh your wicked way
Left me cold
Left me cold
Oh your dark
Oh your dark hair
Weaved for me
Weaved a cold snare
Left me hung
Left me hung
I know it’s there, but I still can’t see
I feel my faith disappear
Touch your skin and raven hair
Oh the devil’s deviled way

On the west
On the west wind
I hear your voice
Still it’s tempting
Like a siren
Like a siren
I know it’s there , but I still can’t see
I feel my faith disappear
Touch your skin and raven hair
Oh the devil’s deviled way

It doesn’t feel so bad now
It doesn’t feel so bad now
It doesn’t feel so bad now
It doesn’t feel so bad now…

While I’m on the subject of Rubyhorse, I was on their website and I noticed something. This image is from their navigation menu:

Notice the item highlighted. It reads “bored.” Who knew that this
would lead to their message board? Now I don’t know if you’re supposed
to click there when you’re bored or if they actually meant
“board.” If it’s the former, then that’s a major usability issue. Name
your navigation items something meaningful. If it’s the latter, well
that speaks for itself.

I’ve lived in Oregon for a while now (although I still refuse to
call myself an Oregonian) and all throughout, I’ve lived on the west
side of town.

With the exception of my first job, all of my other jobs have been
on the east side of town. This is good and it’s also bad. I love the
west side of town, but that’s just because I’ma ‘burb boy and that’s
all I’ve really known. The bad is US Highway 26.US Highway 26 is the
freeway that runs from the west side of town to the east side of town
is US Highway 26.

Historically, and I’m only counting since I’ve been here (~ 1997),
US Highway 26 (referred to as 26 from here on out), has been a complete
disaster.

If you wereheading east bound after work, you could expect to see a
complete clusterfuck of traffic before the first off ramp (the zoo off
ramp). To make this easier for people that don’t live here to
understand, I’ve grabbed some satellite images from google. Here is the
first image, which is what I was just describing.

That’s a terrible place for a slow down considering that you still
havevery long ways to go to get to the where the bulk of the burbs are
as evident by the next two images here and here.

What does this have to do with Vancouver? Well, since Vancouver has
been “the place” to live 26 no longer slows at image 1, it actually
slows down at image 3. Image 2 is just a filler to give you a scope of size.

That’s great for me. Unfortunately, the traffic has just shifted
somewhere else because I5 North is a complete disaster and is
un-drivable until approximately 7-8 PM.

Thanks Vancouverites!

I’ve been neglecting the RSS feeds on my site. Apparently when I coded the URL rewriting stuff, I broke the comments RSS system and therefore comments were unreadable using an aggregator such as SharpReader. I’ve now fixed that so that comments get properly enumerated again.

There were also errors that stopped my main feed from validating. I’ve fixed those and now it validates (with warnings).

To top off all the RSS coding that I’ve been doing today, I’ve created a new RSS feed for those readers that never actually visit the web site using a browser.

If you visit the site using a web browser, you’ll notice “media” sections on the right side of the page. Those sections are labeled “read”, “listen”, “watch”, and “play.” In those sections, I have links to what I’m currently reading, listening to, watching, and playing.

Until now, the “media” content was only accessible by viewing the site through a web browser. I’ve not made those into a separate RSS feed so that you can subscribe to it in your favorite aggregator. The URL for the feed is http://eddorre.com/mediarss.aspx

.

Here is something for the geeks out there. Anyone that has ever played a RTS (do I even need to say it? Real-Time Strategy) game will find this incredibly funny.

What would happen if World War II was a RTS game? Find out by reading the chat log

.

Here is a little sample:

Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an ass
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL
benny-tow: hahahh oh shit help

Jon, Josef, Terra, and I all went to go see Joss Whedon’s Serenity on Saturday. As a fan of Firefly, I was guaranteed to love it and I did. I can’t imagine someone that liked the series but didn’t like the movie.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet and still want to (without
spoilers being ruined for you), I wouldn’t read anything below this
point.

Although I can easily say that I love the movie now, when it was
over I was a bit conflicted. Maybe it’s because I was still
reeling from it. You see, in the movie, two major characters from the
series die. The first one, is Ron Glass’ character Shepherd Book.
Although a regrettable loss, you knew it was coming the second that
Serenity made planet fall on Haven. In his last moments, he got some
one-on-one exposition time with Nathan Fillion’s character Malcolm
‘Mal’ Reynolds. We got to grieve and be mad for his death before moving
on with the story.

It’s been rumored that Ron Glass asked Joss to be written out of
Serenity due to health reasons, but as of yet, I can’t confirm that.
Hopefully, Ron is doing just fine and he just lost some weight for the
role.

The second one came as such a shock that I think that everyone in
the theater made one collective gasp when it happened. After pulling
the crew through a disastrous landing, Alan Tudyk’s character Hoban
‘Wash’ Washburn, was impaled by a huge grappling hook spike in the
middle of his line “I am a leaf on the wind…”

First of all, I really like the character of Wash. I thought he was
great, so I was completely shell shocked when I saw him get impaled.
The minute I saw it I thought to myself, “How the hell is Simon (the
doctor) going to fix that?!” Then, right after his death, the audience
was rushed into another do or die situation leaving us with no time to
grieve for Wash. Damn you Joss, if you weren’t such a good storyteller,
I’d wring your neck.

For those that are too torn up over the character deaths in Serenity, there is hope.

During an interview in Melbourne, Joss had some interesting things
to say about his characters. Notably, “In fact, if there were a sequel
I can say, without hesitation that he [Wash] in fact would be in
it. And not in a cheesy twin brother way. I can’t stress that enough.”
and “The only sweeping statement i will make is that two people i plan
to see again are Book and Wash, and not in the aforementioned cheesy
way.”

All in all, I hope that there is something after Serenity. I love the characters and the storyline too much for there not to be but the future doesn’t look good
considering the movie’s less than stellar box office grab on its
opening weekend. With all that being said, no movie had a stellar
opening weekend with Flightplan (1st) earning just 4 million more than Serenity (2nd)).

This is old news

, but I just had to put in my two cents about it.

I had the displeasure of using Sony’s SonicStage music jukebox and music download application this year and I hated every second of it. I’m glad (and so is Engadget) to see Sony killing this bastard of an application.

The writers of Engadget say it best when they say “…But SonicStage: after you go gently into this good night, please, do not rest in peace. We hope you toss and turn in your grave for all eternity, SonicStage, and then some.”

I’m sure it’s old news, but I installed IE 7 Beta 1 on both my laptop and my home workstation and I have found that it will cause Trillian to crash if you don’t have an updated msn.dll file.

In order to fix this navigate to c:program files rillianplugins and rename the msn.dll file to msn.dll.old. Download

the new dll file and place it in the directory listed above. Trillian should work normally again.

I have three browsers (Firefox, Opera, and IE7B1) installed on all of my XP workstations. All of the browsers use the popular tabbed browsing interface. 

While I think that tabbed browsing is the coolest thing since sliced bread, I’ve noticed something about all of them that drives me nuts; there is no way to close a tab by right clicking on a page itself and selecting an option for “close tab”, the option just doesn’t exist.

Most of these browsers are similar in the way that they close tabs. You can right click on the tab (not the page itself) and select the option to close the tab, you can press CTRL-W to close the tab or click the “x” button for each tab (located to the right in IE7B1 and Firefox, located on each tab in Opera).

I don’t know if there is an extension for Firefox that allows me to do this, but I think that it’s something that should be built into all of the “tabbed” browsers.

I’m gonna submit this to the IE7 team to see if they can add it into IE7.

After watching Serenity on Saturday, the crew and I went
over to McMenamin’s to get something to eat. People here love
McMenamin’s; it’s an Oregon thing. To me, it’s nothing special.

You can imagine how bad the service was when tried and true
Oregonians were calling the one that we went to (the one off of Cedar
Hills Blvd. and Jenkins Rd.) one of the worst McMenamin’s ever.

I think we were waiting for well over an hour to get our food and
that was after we pestered some other waiter (we never saw the guy that
originally took our order again) for it.

Anyway, while there, I spied a little pamphlet on the table with the
words Dr Theopolis on it. It was explained to me that Dr Theopolis, in
this context, is a local band. However, to me Dr Theopolis is the
little circular robot from Buck Rogers; you know the one that Twiki
wore around his neck.

Then it struck me, the look of wearing big clocks and jewelry around
your neck was not popularized by Flava Flav and other gangstas, it was
Twiki that was the original gangster.

If you don’t believe me, peep the thug yo, all pimped out with his bling bling goin’ on.

Damn, you can tell that he’s keepin’ it real. It must have been a
pain to act the part of the sidekick to Gil Gerard, I’m sure he wanted
to let loose with his gat and gank them all.

Twiki is an OG fo’ real!

CNN is running an article
that surveys Americans for their stories on how they are coping with
rising gas prices. The forward to the article reads, “It’s made the
behemoths of the road — so popular during the past decade — look like
extravagances, and made hybrids into the next cars du jour.” In one of
the stories, Bill, from Georgia, raves about his hybrid’s average
of 45 miles per gallon in the city.

With gas prices teetering on the border of ludicrous, hybrids are
becoming all the rage. Obviously, getting a better gas mileage on your
car sounds great, but will it save you money in the long run? This article, and many industry analysts say the answer is no.

According to Joe White, Detroit Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal,
who looked into trading his Subaru for a Prius said, “…at roughly $3
per gallon for gas, he wouldnt recover his financing costs. Joe figured
that at his annual mileage, he’d save about $746 a year in fuel costs,
but it would take too long to recover the  premium he’d pay for
the hybrid.”

Stuart Waterman, the author of the Autoblog post goes on to write,
that for someone buying a hybrid car (that didn’t already have one),
“it would take nearly 16 years just to break even.”

Of course trading in your huge gas guzzling SUV for a hybrid would
definitely save you some money, but then again trading that in for
anything more economical would save you money, even if it wasn’t a
hybrid.

Maybe the right way to go is to buy one of the newer diesel cars.
According to my friend Robert, these newer diesel cars burn gasonline
in a much more economical fashion than regular cars do and therefore
they achieve a gas mileage rivaling, if not beating those of hybrids.
Now, that’s just what he tells me, so I have no real data to back
that up and frankly, I haven’t really looked. Any hard data on this
would be very interesting…

Either way, if your sole purpose for getting a hybrid is to save
money on gasonline costs, you might want to take a long hard look at
the math and see if it really makes sense.

I’ve been using Google before anyone ever knew what Google was and the general rule has been, Everything that Google touches has been gold…until now.

Google’s latest gig is an web based RSS reader. This isn’t necessarily revolutionary since blog lines and the like has been doing it for a while, but since it’s Google I decided to take whirl.

The first thing I tried to do was import my feeds from SharpReader. I exported the OPML file and then tried to import it. It failed and gave a nice error: Your OPML file could not be imported. Please make sure that it is correctly formatted and try again.

Great, that means nothing to me; at least tell me where your parser is choking at. There is no way that I’m inputting 36 feeds in by hand.

Second thing I tried to do was import my own feed by hand. I click on Add a Feed and then type in the feed URL: eddorre.com/rss.aspx. It finds nothing. The problem? I didn’t type in the http:// in front of eddorre.com. Why is this a problem? Name another protocol besides http that uses RSS feeds (I guess you can use feeds:// but what non-technical person knows this?). Shouldn’t automatically be smart enough to figure that out?

The next and last straw was attempting to delete my subscription to my site. it selected unsubscribe from the drop down list and answered yes to the dialog box. Nothing happened. I was still subscribed.

Speaking of un-subscribing…that’s exactly what I’m going to do with Google’s RSS reader.

Even if it is in beta, it shouldn’t suck this bad.

I found this on digg.com, but I figured that I would repost it here. It a demo of the Tactiva TactaPad which is a great new user interface and it could be the interface of the future.

I was pretty impressed with the demo myself. It really reminded me of
the way Tom Cruise’s character interfaces with the computers in The Minority Report.

It’s gonna be interesting to see where this goes.

I’ve been doing a lot of blog reading lately about Web 2.0 projects and companies. It seems like they are springing up everywhere.

Most of the projects that are deemed Web 2.0, use AJAX technologies,
which if you read any type of technical articles you’ll know that this
is the hot new buzzword.

Anyway, I’ve jumped on the bandwagon and started going to some of these
sites and checking them out. I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Here are
some of the ones that I’ve checked out recently:

• del.icio.us (Online Social
  Bookmark Manager – yeah I was late on this one, but I don’t like the
  idea of all my bookmarks being available to the public. I’m just now
  starting to get the hang of it.)


• Previewseek (Search Engine that allows you to preview pages – must see, this is shit hot)


• Basecamp (Online Project Management Software – I’ve already started one project (free) to test it out)


• Ta-Da Lists (Online To do lists – from the people that brought you Basecamp)


• Memeorandum (Let’s you see what’s the most popular subjects being blogged about – there is a political site and a tech site)


• Flock (Next generation web browser – they are still in pre-beta so you won’t find much on their site…yet)


• Rollyo (Create personal search criteria…I really haven’t gotten the purpose of this yet)


• Zimbra (From their website,
  Zimbra is an open source server and client technology for
  next-generation enterprise messaging and collaboration. Tell me that isn’t a mouthful of mumbo jumbo. Think online version of Outlook.)
• Orangoo (Simple online RSS reader – hopefully better that Google’s RSS reader suckiness)


• Remember The Milk (Another online to do list – this can send you reminders via IM clients – neato)

A.J. Jacobs, a writer for Esquire magazine, recently outsourced his
life to some companies in India. The result? Well, as he put it, “Yes,
America, we’re cooked.” The article is a hilarious read.

For those that have subscribed to my media (what I’m reading, listening to, watching, playing) RSS feed
or visit the site and check the right sidebar, you’ll notice that I’ve
added a Ruby (a programming language) book and a Ruby on Rails (a web
development framework) book.

I’ve been hearing about both technologies for a while but recent blog
reading has pushed me from being mildly interested to, well, to the
point where I bought two books about it.

If it goes well, I might consider writing the new version of this site in Ruby on Rails instead of ASP.NET 2.0.

I haven’t made up my mind really, but one of the things that I really
dislike about ASP.NET is it’s marriage to the IIS (and therefore) the
Windows platform. Of course, that’s another way that Microsoft locks
you into things.

Maybe some time after Microsoft’s Office Software and OS software
cash cows are taken away from them, what’s left of Microsoft will let
IIS work on other OS’s.

Don’t get me wrong, ASP.NET 1.x has treated me right and there are
things that I really like about the platform (my favorite thing is the
separation between code and presentation). We’ll see what happens.

So what does this have to do with “a new stack?” Well, everyone in the industry knows what the LAMP (Linux-Apache-mySQL-PHP)
stack is, but I was thinking about if and when I get around to using
Ruby on Rails; I won’t be using the LAMP stack, but I’d use elements of
it. With that in mind, I present some new stacks:

• the LLiMR (Linux-Lighttpd-mySQL-RubyonRails) stack


• the other LLiMR stack (Linux-Lighttpd-MSSQL-RubyonRails)


• the LLiPR (Linux-Lighttpd-postgreSQL-RubyonRails) stack.

You heard it here first. :)

One of my hobbies is scuba diving. This year, I got certified
for Open Water diving (via PADI) and I’ve been diving in Hood Canal and
Key Largo. I’m looking forward to a lot more diving in the future.

If you are certified or want to become certified and don’t know where all the cool spots to dive are, the Travel-Dive website is for you. Not only is it written by divers for divers but it’s probably the best looking dive site I’ve ever seen.

VMware has released a free VMware “player” that allows you to run a virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC.

Here is how it works. Someone using VMware Workstation, GSX Server or
ESX Server creates a virtual machine. Once they do this they can copy
the files created by that software to any
Windows or Linux PC and that PC can run the virtual machines using the
free player. No need to install another license of the full VMware.

Think of it as the VMware version of Adobe Reader. You can’t create
PDF’s but you can still use the ones created with the regular version
of Adobe Acrobat.

Cool stuff indeed.

This past Saturday, I was determined to get Ruby on Rails
installed…in Linux. I could have gone the easy route and installed in
Windows, but I wanted…well I want to branch out from the standard
Windows world that I know.

It turned out to be a 12 hour exercise in frustration. All I can say
is, thank god for VMware. Without it, I would have lost my sanity.

I first started my little exercise with OpenSuse10. It’s a brand new
free version of Suse…and looking back with hindsight, I’ve come to
the conclusion that it might be too much on the bleeding edge.

Whenever I tried to compile Ruby, it would give me an error. Everytime
that I thought I was getting closer to the solution, it would blow up
in a different fashion. So I deleted the virtual disk (the virtual
equivalent of tearing your hard drive out of your machine and flinging
it off a 10 story balcony) so I tried one of the other Linux
distributions that I had downloaded; Kubuntu (the KDE version of
Ubuntu). I’ve used quite a few distributions of Linux over the years
(and have always come back to Windows), but this one has to be one of
the worst ever.

The install of Kubuntu was fairly easy. Too easy. Not only did it not
ask me for a root password, it didn’t ask me to create a user. I went
to create a directory on /var/tmp and naturally you have to use the
root account to do (sudo mkdir /var/tmp/carlos). When it asked for a
password I was flabbergasted. I didn’t give it one. I tried a null
password and the word password. When it didn’t take the second one, I
shut off the virtual machine and deleted the virtual disk. Time to
install another distribution. This time I tried Fedora Core 4.

I had to reinstall it twice because I’m such a newbie, but on the
second time I was able to download Ruby and Rails and succesfully
install them.

If I can recommend one thing for the Ruby and Ruby on Rails community,
it would be to make the install easier. If you think I’m out of my
mind, read this blog entry.
If that doesn’t make you frustrated with the install then nothing will.
His documentation is one of the reasons that I stuck through what I
did. I knew that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, even for a
Linux newbie like me.

I hope that your install goes better than mine, but here is what I did:

This is unrelated, but I thought that I would post it here. When you
install Suse10, Fedora Core 4, and any other OS into a virtual machine,
it’ll complain that the VMware tools are missing. Installing from the
RPM does nothing. You actually have to do this:

1. On the VMware window itself, click on VM and select Install
   VMware tools. This should automatically mount the DVD to
   /media/<name of device>. In my case, it was in my DVD burner so
   the entire path was /media/dvdrecorder.


2. I copy the tar.gz file to that temp directory (although I found
   out that the location of that temp directory might not be a good idea,
   but that’s a tale for another post). Using this command (at this point
   I’m su’d as root which is this command: su root) mv
   /home/carlos/Desktop /var/tmp/carlos/.


3. Then I unpack the files using tar -xzf  /var/tmp/carlos/<name of file>


4. And then finally I change into the newly unpacked directory cd
   /var/tmp/carlos/<name of new directory> and run a
   ./vmware-install.pl.


5. Answer all of the questions and then choose my resolution.
   Unfortunately, to take effect, you’ll have to reboot and that command
   is, well, reboot. Finally I can see virtual machine at 1024*768.

Installing Ruby:
Note: During both installs, I had su’d to root. Command is su root.

1. Download the latest verison of Ruby (at the time of this writing it’s 1.8.3).
   

2. Move the tar.gz file to the tmp directory or your could unpack it
   there. The command that I used was mv /home/carlos/Desktop/<name of
   file> /var/tmp/carlos/.
3. Unpack it: tar-xzf <name of file>.
4. Change into the newly created directory: cd /var/tmp/carlos/<newly created directory>.
5. Run this command: ./configure.
6. Run this command: make.
7. Run this command: make install.
8. If the gods have smiled upon you, then Ruby has been installed.

Installing Rails:

1. Download the latest version of Rubygems. At the time of this writing it’s 0.8.11.


2. Move the .tgz file to the tmp directory. The command is: mv. /home/carlos/Desktop/<name of file> /var/tmp/carlos/.


3. Unpack it: tar -xvf /var/tmp/carlos/<name of file>.


4. Change into the newly created directory and run the command ruby
   setup.rb. NOTE: This is where it would fail to install on OpenSuse10. I
   could never get past that point with that OS.


5. Run the command gem install rails —include-dependencies.


6. If the gods have smiled upon you, then Rails has been installed.

Have a beer, you earned it.

After you’ve installed Ruby on Rails, you want to know what you’re doing. I strongly suggest that you purchase Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition and Agile Web Development with Rails, but there are online tutorials that will get your started in case you don’t have those books.

View or read them in this order:

• First, whet your appetite by watching this little 15 minute video (it’s in .mov format so you’ll need quicktime). BTW, I was told that the editor that the presenter is using is TextMate which is only available for OSX. :(


• Read Rolling with Ruby on Rails by Curt Hibbs.


• Read Rolling with Ruby on Rails Part II by Curt Hibbs.


• Read Really Getting Started in Rails by Amy Hoy.


• Read Four Days on Rails.

Finally, here are some good links that might help you on your new endeavor.

• Ruby on Rails Howtos.


• Securing your Rails Application


• Ajax on Rails by Curt Hibbs.

Blogniscient has redone their website. The old layout was unusable and
was known to cause epileptic seizures if you looked at it for a long
time (I’m lying about that last part, but it sounded funny – just take my word
for it, it was bad).

In the interest of keeping up with what’s new, I checked it out. Their
redesign is way better than what they had up there before, but
ultimately there is one huge, terrible fatal flaw. The links to the RSS
feeds are not on the main page. This is simply unacceptable for someone competing with sites like Memorandum and Digg.

In an age where we are bombarded and overloaded with information, new
web sites like this need capture our attention. By not having their RSS
feeds on the front page or easily accessible, Blogniscient fails at
capturing our attention and therefore fails altogether.

I tried, I really tried, to add the RSS feeds to SharpReader and I met
with failure every single time. Why should I bother to read this site
if they make it so hard to syndicate their site?

I use SharpReader which attempts to auto-discover RSS and atom feeds.
It’s good, but not perfect so I wasn’t surprised when the autodiscover
failed (heck it fails to discover the right one on my site!). Usually when this happens, I visit the site and look around for
orange XML icons or something that says RSS or ATOM. On their main
page, I found none. In order to actually find a feed, I had to
click on a category, scroll down (about halfway down the page) and find
the RSS 2.0 feed section. When I finally copied the link to their tech
RSS feed into SharpReader to enumerate it, I got a 404 error (it seems
to work today). Oh, Blogniscient {sigh}.

There are so many things that they can do right. First off, add a link
rel in the <head> of your main page. Make this link to the
"all"categories section. Something like this:

RadRails is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Ruby on
Rails. The new verison (0.4) released today has some great new features
including:

• Syntax highlighting: RHTML, Ruby


• Code Assist/Content Assist: RHTML, Ruby


• Code templates/snippets for commonly used Rails commands

Here is how I surf the web. If I come across a link that I think might
be remotely interesting to read, I middle click it, which makes it open
in a new tab in Firefox (in the background) and then I resume reading
the original piece.

I was reading Mike Wieringo’s blog posting about Nickelodeon’s cartoon titled Avatar: The Last Airbender.
I’ve caught the show once or twice and I’ve been intrigued by what I
saw. The post was interesting enough to warrant me reading the comments
so I middle-clicked the comments link.

Guess what happened? A new tab was opened with this in the URL:
javascript:HaloScan(‘113016016158276655’);. The page was blank. Obviously, this is supposed
to be a window that’s opened by Javascript.

In terms of usability, this is terrible. Why is the application attempting to make me browse in a certain way? I
should be able to decide what I want to do with links (open in a new
window, tab, saved on my desktop for later, etc.). The application
shouldn’t be forcing me to do anything.

I was annoyed, but I wanted to read the comments, so I clicked on the
comments link and a Javascripted window opened. This window, was as
bare as you can get. No menus, no navigation, no nothing. No biggie,
right? We’ll see.

The third comment mentions that the 1st season will be released on DVD on January 24th and then goes on to give a link. So, in my usual browsing fashion, I middle-clicked this link to check it out.

I pause for a second, not noticing a new tab open up. Damn Javascripted
window! Although I can open new tabs in this mini-window, I can’t see them and I can’t have that link open in the parent folder!

Arggh! I think at this point, I just gave up and moved onto another blog. It’s not worth the frustration.

With that in mind, here are some usability tips for links and Javascripted windows:

1. Never force your users to open links how you want them to (get rid of the those target=“blank” attributes). Always allow them to open links in the way that they chose.


2. If you have to use Javascript to open a window (I can argue that
   you never should use this method but if you have to…), the newly
   created window should not have links on it. It can have textboxes,
   submit buttons, radio button, checkboxes, etc., but it should never include links. If you put links in the mini-window, expect your user to click on them.

I’ve been listening to quite a few podcasts recently and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend.

Some podcasts have started to put musical jingles to introduce the
program before the interview begins and then afterwards when the
program ends. The Ruby on Rails podcasts in specific, do this quite frequently.

This jingle is usually recorded direct from the source and therefore
has excellent sound quality. This is not a bad thing. The podcast
interviews themselves are almost always somewhat hard to hear.

What ends up happening is that you’ll turn up the volume to hear the
interview and then the jingle (either from the next queued podcast or
the end jingle) is played AT EAR BLOWING LEVELS!

It reminds me of watching TV on one of those sets that doesn’t automatically lower the volume for the annoying loud commercials.

Guys and gals making podcasts, I know that podcasting is new and I know
that you may not have the best equipment, but please spare our ears.
Either re-master the entire thing with one sound level or drop the ear shattering jingle and just have a nice spoken introduction.

You’ll be guaranteed not to lose listeners this way.

I’ve been chronicling my distate for DRM (Digital Rights Management) for a while now (see: Digital Music, DRM Music Madness, Happenings, I’ve Seen the Enemy and the Enemy is DRM, MediaMax DRM, DRM User’s Guide, and Customers and Microsoft) so I thought that I would comment on Sony’s latest DRM woes that’s been burning up the tech headlines.

Record labels, believing that customers that buy CDs are contributing to music piracy, have started implementing DRM schemes that discourage people from ripping the music tracks to their computer.

Sony’s latest attempt (see: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far by Mark Russinovich) to curtail this behavior comes in the form of surreptitiously installing software (called a Rootkit) on your machine that can cause damage to the operating system (in this case, Microsoft Windows) and has been known to report some information over the Internet without the user’s consent.

This is probably the best thing that’s happened in the fight against DRM so far. You’re probably thinking that I’m nuts, but bear with me.

This is good because Sony’s draconian implementation of DRM has catapulted the issue of DRM into the spotlight. In fact, there have already been two class-action law suits filed against Sony and I’m sure more are on their way. It’s possible, that if a judge rules favorably (against Sony) in this case, that CDs laden with Sony’s DRM will have to be removed from store shelves in California.

The outcome of this is bound to have ripple effect on the music industry for a long time.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a list of the CDs that has Sony’s DRM on it.

Penny Arcade has re-done their website. At first, I thought I hit the wrong site or something, but it’s growing on me. According to Gabe, the new version of Penny Arcade runs on Ruby on Rails.

Instead of me talking about it, it’s best just to quote his own words:

Penny Arcade right now represents one of the largest implementations of “rails” on the intertron. I went and looked at a website about rails and then I got a headache. From what I gathered its either some kind of cutting edge programming language, or a way to liquefy a mans brain inside his skull. I’m told that it means the site looks better and loads faster regardless of whatever hippy web browser you decide to use. Fuck M$!

In my first post about Firefox extensions (read: Firefox Extensions), I detailed some Firefox extensions that made my browsing experience better.

I’ve recently did another round of installing extensions, so I thought that I would share what extensions I use.

• Tab Mix Plus (Allows you to undo a closed tab)
• View Rendered Source Chart (Good for web development)
• Slim Extension List (Makes items in extension list shorter – so you can see more at once)
• PDF Download (Gives you an option of downloading or opening a PDF when you click on a link that links to a PDF)
• IE Tab (Allows you to open links in a tab using IE!)
• HTML Validator (Validates pages – helpful for web development)
• ForecastFox (Puts the weather forecast into your status bar)
• ColorZilla (Eyedropper, ColorPicker, and Page Zoomer)

When the Playstation 2 launched in October of 2000, I didn’t have enough money to pick one up. By the time that Christmas rolled around (and I did have enough money), the console was sold out everywhere (except for Ebay for thousands of dollars) and I blissfully spent my money on something else. To this date, I still don’t own a Playstation 2 (although I borrow my girlfriend’s console from time to time).

The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s 2005 and Microsoft has released their Xbox 360 console and guess what? It’s sold out everywhere.

Microsoft has been very ambitious with their launch of the Xbox 360 opting for a worldwide launch in the span of a month (by contrast, the Playstation 2 launched in April in Japan and in October in North America). Unfortunately, this means that demand is far outweighing supply.

Most retailers’ websites say that consoles won’t be in stock until February or March of 2006. Microsoft contends that it’s shipping out new units each week, although few gamers have seen light of the new shipments.

I’m not sure what Microsoft’s goal was for their launch, but in my limited knowledge of marketing and economics, it doesn’t sound like a good idea.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Microsoft is playing a dangerous game with the patience of people wanting to get an Xbox 360 before Christmas. One only has to look at the comments on popular Microsoft blogger sites like Major Nelson’s and John Porcaro to figure this one out. For instance, a small post by Major Nelson about a Madden demo generates (to date) 179 253 comments, the majority of those being negative.

Microsoft’s ambitious worldwide launch might work against their console in the new wave of the console wars. If the retailers are truthful and most orders won’t be fulfilled until February or March 2006, then Microsoft might actually have a hard time selling those units. Why? Well for one, they’ll have pissed off customers on their hands. I don’t know of anyone that loves Microsoft (except for the people that work there), most people tolerate their existence because they have to, but love Microsoft; no way. Making customers angry will just drive them to another product. Secondly, even if you’ve saved your money after the Christmas season waiting for a new console, who says that you’re going to buy an Xbox? If the retailer’s time frame is correct, why not wait for the Nintendo Revolution or just hold out for the Playstation 3 which are literally around the corner from February/March 2006.

One other thing, I commend Major Nelson and John Porcaro on their blog. If it weren’t for them, we’d have no information from Microsoft about the Xbox 360 and Microsoft’s supply issues. Unfortunately, this is not enough. Not everyone reads these blogs. As I stood in line at Best Buy on the 22nd, I realized something. Most of the people that were standing in line weren’t hard core gamers; instead they were moms, dads, grandmothers and grandfathers sent on a fools errand to try to get one of these things as a gift. They don’t read blogs (hell, most of them didn’t know the difference between the core system and the premium system) and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t read gamer specific blogs like Major Nelson and John Porcaro. In their case, the information that they get about the Xbox is…nothing. What does this equate to? More pissed of customers.

I’m sure that Nintendo and Sony (especially Sony after their DRM debacle) are viewing this launch with great interest. Hopefully, they are taking notes on how not to piss of their customers.

My friend Billy posted a comment with some exciting news about the fight against DRM. Billy works for the Las Vegas library district and they’ve started pulling all of the CDs with DRM on them. They’ve also refused to buy any CDs that have DRM technology on them.

That’s gotta hurt the record labels that insist on punishing their customers that buy CDs with DRM laden crap. This is fantastic news.

I wonder who I have to talk to, to convince Oregon library districts to do the same…hrrmm…

As Billy puts it, “You piss off your customer enought and they stop buying your product.” It’s that simple.

About 3 years ago, I joined Bally Total Fitness. I chose Bally’s for a few reasons. For starters, at the time, there weren’t a lot of other clubs in the Portland metro area (24 Hour Fitness, LA Fitness, etc.) so my options were limited. Secondly, I knew someone that worked at the gym that used to be up the street from me (I since then have moved).

I’m lucky enough to get reimbursed for some of my dues through my company. Every December, I have to fill out an expense reimbursement form with my monthly dues on them. This should be easy right? Unfortunately, it’s a battle each and every time.

First of all, their website is horrible. Let’s count the ways. First, as a web developer that is interested in standards based development, I can see that their site break rules left and right.

No DOCTYPE is defined, deprecated elements are used, tables are used for layout instead of CSS (in their defense, this site uses tables for layout but I’m working on a CSS version layout), inline Javascript functions are defined on the page instead of in separate files.

Next we move the account information section. There is a link that reads “Show me my account information.” The link is a Javascript popup window (this is a classic abuse of a popup window) that has a form with two fields; membership number and last name. Can you see the security flaw here? They gladly give out account information (albeit very limited) to anyone that can match the two criteria. Think this is hard to come by? Think again; both the membership number and your full name are printed on your gym card. If you lose it, anyone can easily type in the information into the website and away they go. That’s like printing your PIN number on your ATM card.

The information that is listed in the membership information screen is less than useless (maybe that’s why they use such shoddy security). I can make a payment and I can see when my next payment is; and that’s pretty much it. Nowhere on here can I get an itemized list of my monthly dues for the year.

Not finding any pertinent information on their site, my next option is to contact them. Right under the “Show me my account information” link is an extremely useless bit of text. It reads “Please contact member services if you have any questions about your account.” That’s it. No number, no nothing.

The CTO/CIO responsible for web application development needs to run, not walk, to the store to get Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. These amateurish mistakes can be easily solved by reading and applying the Steve’s knowledge in web usability.

Since, no number is listed for Member Services, I have to look for one. There is a Contact Us link at the bottom of the page, which is one of the saving graces of the website and it usually appears on every page.

I click on the Member Services link on the contact form (one click too many) and I’m given 3 ways to contact them. Mailing address, email, and a telephone number. One quick look at the telephone number and I see that it’s not a toll free number (1-562-484-2980). Why oh why is the telephone number not a toll free number?

If I’m not pissed yet, I certainly am now. However, I want my money so I call the number. It’s busy. You read that right. It’s busy. This is 2005, no one should ever get a busy signal when attempting to call customer service for a national company.

So I wait 15 minutes and try again. This time, I’m given the standard “All agents are busy” stuff. Fine, I’ll wait. I end up waiting 30 minutes (on a toll call) to talk to someone (which could have all been resolved by having the information on the website). When I finally get someone on the line, she tells me that she has to print out the information (all 3 years worth – for some reason they can’t do it on yearly basis, which is absurd) and send it to me via snail mail.

For a minute, I thank the heavens because I believe that I have invented time travel and have ended up in the year 1987. Unfortunately, my visions of being richer than Bill Gates vanish as the words sink in. She has to mail it to me. No fax, no email, no nothin’.

By now, my calm has seriously been damaged and I want to reach through the phone and strangle the lady. How can a corporation be so incompetent?

I’m glad my membership expires this month, because I’m certainly not going to renew it.

Let this be yet another lesson, if you piss off your customer, they will go to a competitor’s product.

I watched the X3 (X-MEN 3) teaser online the other day and it was stunningly…boring. I don’t think I’ve ever been so underwhelmed to watch a sequel as I have with this movie (I lied, that doesn’t count the Harry Pooter (yes, I misspelled his name on purpose) movies but then again, I don’t like any of those).

Granted, this is only a teaser trailer, but if the trailer is any indication of the movie, then the word formulaic would be an understatement.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Magneto and his bunch are bad and do bad things, the X-MEN are good and fight Magneto and his bunch. Humans want to kill all mutants and therefore Magneto wants to kill them first; because of this the X-MEN have to protect the defenseless humans.

Didn’t we see that in 1 and 2?

Work is still continuing on migrating this site from ASP.NET to Ruby on Rails. The reasons why aren’t really the basis for this post, so I’ll exclude them from it.

The majority of Ruby on Rails sites run on Linux or a form of UNIX, so I figured that I would take the plunge and do so as well. I consider myself to be a pretty accomplished Windows administrator, but in the realm of Linux, I’m but a wee young lad.

With that in mind, I’m browsing Amazon.com to see if there are any books that might help to soothe the learning pains.

In addition to learning Linux (the right way), I’m also interested in learning Linux web servers the right way as well. Probably the most popular web server for Linux is the Apache server, but I know that LightTPD is starting to gain ground especially amongst Ruby on Rails developers.

Imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find any books on LightTPD. Now, I know that this is a fairly new web server, but I’m used to technical books being written on alpha and beta releases, so it was quite a surprise.

Too bad I don’t know more about it or I would write my own. I think it would sell like hotcakes (if written right).