In this article, someone who got spammed by scammers decides to fight back. This amusing story has been dugg over 2100 times by the time I first noticed it.
Sep 302007
Sep 272007
Useful article for anyone else who had to go through what I just went through:
Another reason to dislike the people at Apple. They don’t make backing up or migrating your records from one PC to another. As Windows is inherently unstable, you’ll have to re-install eventually. And I for one do not wish to have to rebuild my favorites/etc for my MP3 collection. (over 100 hours of music and audio books that I’ve ripped from my CDs, and podcasts I’ve downloaded.)
Sep 272007
Gizmodo.com had an article a little while back about Amazon’s new online music store. This is something that I’ve been waiting for the music industry (and retailers) to do since I MP3d my first set of CDs something like 10 years ago.
So hats off to Amazon and cheers!
I celebrated this news by immediately purchasing the Best of Sting and Pink Floyd the Wall. So “take that!” you freaks over at the RIAA. Give me DRM free music and I’m happy to pay for it. Otherwise, I’m on purchasing strike.
Lane County, Eugene, Oregon, USA (for those who might not know the location where this is taking place)
Need I say more?
Sep 232007
Eileen Bonfiglio (someone I met virtually via LinkedIn) told me that I should blog some of these (now ancient) stories. In one of her questions, ”BestQuestion: What was it?“ I responded:
It’s a technical story. I work in the customer premise equipment telecom industry. The cards that are installed in the phone system have lights on them to indicate an error condition. When the lights are off, everything is fine, when the lights are on, there is a problem.
I went out to a customer site that had experienced a power outage, but after the power outage, they complained that the phone system was broken. I asked them how they knew it was broken. They explained to me in all seriousness that they had tried pulling and reseating the cards in the phone system but couldn’t get the lights to stay on, and this is how they knew it was broken. They asked how to keep the lights on.
I was stunned for a second and then, after having determined that no one on site or on contract had any knowledge about the phone system, responded:
If your phone system looks like a christmas tree, then that means something is wrong. The red light on the cards is like a stop light: Stop. Don’t do anything. Call for support.
I also pulled the IT guy aside and asked him if he would pull cards out of a computer while it was powered up. He responded no. I said “don’t do it to a phone system either.”
Sep 192007
Nifty tool for keeping in touch with what your Senator or Congressional representative is doing;
Sep 192007
Literally means, “[we command that] you have the body,” those crazy latin’s say things funny all the time. [Wikipedia definition | LectLaw definition] It’s one of those protections built in to our founding law. Specifically it is intended to provide a legal remedy against unlawful jailing. If someone is jailed without due process, or if due process was flawed in some technical way, then the write of habeus corpus provides remedy by compelling the prison official to bring the prisoner before a court of law to re-evaluate their prison sentence and determine it’s validity. If the state cannot demonstrate that they have legal grounds to imprison, and that they have followed due process, then the prisoner must be released.
Apparently Bush repealed it as part of the whole Patriot Act wave of changes in an effort to fight “terrorism.”
Normally I try to avoid politics, but this seems too important not to say something…
http://restore-habeas.org/whip/total.php
Look who’s voting against giving us back a legal protection.
Special thanks to the Digg RSS feed for bringing this to my attention.
Sep 072007
Using the physics engine of Half Life 2 by Valve, the developers of Left 4 Dead are working on a cooperative multiplayer in the style of the horror movie Dawn of the Dead (the reimagined 2004 version, not the original 1978 movie).
The developers proclaim that they will have a merit/demerit system that will intelligently track things like “demerit, you jump in front of other players when they’re shooting” … as opposed to “demerit, shooting team mates” … it will of course have demerits such as “team killing” … it will also track meritable actions such as healing a team mate, saving them from being attacked from behing and so forth.
The interesting thing about the merit/demerit system is that once you start playing, your de/merit ranking is life time. That means if you accidently kill a couple of team mates as you’re learning, anyone who plays with you will always know that you team killed. This is intended to be a way to track people who habitually join games to grief people either by team killing or wandering off on their own and not being helpful… something that is punished in this game rapidly and with a vengeance.
The game will throw dozens and sometimes several dozen infected humans at you at a time. The AI is reported to mimic the same kind of intelligence that a movie director would display… this means that you’ll have moments where the pace of the action is frantic and more than you can handle, followed by periods of quiet to heighten the tension of the next encounter. The entire deployment and control of the infected enemies is controlled by the AI, which means that even if you play the same map a dozen times, the infected will never appear in the same place twice.
As the game capitalizes on teamwork, it is immediately appealing to me.
Here’s a gameplay trailer if you’re interested.
Sep 062007
SFGate.com had an interesting article about the “411″ service that San Francisco recently launched using the 311 number. Dial 311 and ask any question. And apparently they get some interesting questions. One caller calls to report Graffitti 5-7 times a day.
San Francisco is offering an interesting and probably valuable service… but considering the cost of living, I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t outsource the call center to some lower cost area (Georgia, or somewhere else in the “deep south” where the housing costs are lower than the average annual salaries in San Francisco.) The call center reps make somewhere between 50k-60k per year. That means that the cost of running the call center is easily a quarter million per year, or higher. As valuable as this service might seem, I’m not sure that it’s worth $250,000+ a year to process calls about the bus system (and how confusing people find the bus system), or deal with crank complaints… As if the police don’t get enough calls from people who are borderline 5150.
Summary: I like the idea as a theory, but in practice it’s too easily abused.
Sep 022007
My girlfriend and I are planning a full four days in Carmel this coming weekend. Today we’re finalizing our entertainment and dinner plans, making reservations. Later today, we plan to head out with some friends and do wine tasting at several wineries in the Southern San Francisco Bay Area, making a stop by my girlfriend’s winery Cinnabar. They have an excellent Bordeaux-style wine called a Mercury Rising.
I hope to take some time later today to pull photos from the last month off my camera and post some shots.
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