BunkBlog

Thank you for playing. Rabbit Hole Day was a fun time for all.

We now return to our regularly scheduled surrealism.

Only 1 in 6 computer users can tell the difference between a search result and an advertisement.

That’s just sad. No wonder spam won’t die – people are too dumb to *not* click the damned stuff.

Most recently finished book – L.E. Modesitt’s The Ethos Effect.

Although I usually like Modesitt’s science fiction, this one was written a bit differently. I guess I’m just noticing the Tom Swifties too much or something.

Anyway, throwing out the sometimes leaden dialog, the ideas of this Parafaith War sequel are interesting. One of the things SF excels at is showing us extremes of contemporary situations so we can see them from a different viewpoint. Things in this one that you may have heard about in recent years in real life: racial profiling, incarceration without trial or charges, religious fundamentalists driving bad government decisions, and military actions with no apparent logic behind them.

Fullerton is installing free wifi in the downtown area.

One thing in the article which trips me out is that Fullerton is handing laptop computers to every student in 3rd through 8th grades. I don’t understand the rationale behind that. In that age group, one would hope the schools would be more interested in the “Three Rs” than in broadband wireless access. No matter how much of a technophile I am, I still think the basics are important to build on.

This is a requested design this time: We Learn Korean So You Don’t Have To. I plan to add one that changes it to “because you can’t” tomorrow, since I don’t think the DPRK is a really credible threat in most people’s eyes.

The shirt design is similar to the ones they sell at DLI, but DLI doesn’t do mailorder. 🙂

Forty cents is all that stands between me and a commission check from CafePress – my first in over two years. This has more to do with the change in the minimum check amount (from 10 to 25 dollars) than any slacking of interest in my exclusive wares, or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Microsoft has a Google Desktop competitor now. Um, wasn’t that the point of the astoundingly slow and useless “indexing” feature they forced into Windows XP? I’ve never seen an increase in speed in the search results from an indexed drive compared to a non-indexed one, but um…why would Microsoft come up with an add-on program for something that they claim is already built into the OS? I guess they know it sucks too.

Meanwhile, the indexing feature on *nix boxes works fantastically well, indexing things without slowing down the machine while you’re using it and delivering search results in milliseconds. Hmm…

With the recent What Would Chthulhu Do sale, I’m 40 cents from getting a commission check from Cafepress. Since they raised the minimum from ten bucks to 25, I’ve received no checks. That’s about two years now. I actually got two checks in 2002, for a total of 28 bucks. Not exactly paying for any extravagant vacations, eh?

I’m still surprised that someone bought the WWCD shirt. It was a joke!

Not only does it take Freeservers more than a week to put my information in the domain registry for the domain that the Cancer Society is paying for, but the registrar (register.com) still says Freeservers is in control of the domain and I can’t do anything to administer it.

This is completely unacceptable. As soon as these chuckleheads get things so that I can do something, I’m leaving both Freeservers and Register behind. I can’t believe it can take two weeks to change webhosts. Two days, maybe.

BTW, this is for the San Angelo Relay for Life site, not this one. I never chose Freeservers – I inherited it.

What exactly is so confusing about the following question?

Question: I’ve inherited the sanangelorelayforlife.org site, and I am going to move it to a different host that has a relationship with our local community. I notice the domain is seemingly registered to the Freeservers parent company. How can I transfer the domain to a different admin/tech contact?

Apparently, to the Freeservers administrators, it means, “what are my name servers” and “please ignore me” among other things. It has taken 10 days of incessant emails to the Freeservers people to get a reply that even seems to be in relation to my original query. Getting them to actually comply, well…we’ll see what happens tomorrow, I guess.

I added a style switcher and a bunch of styles to the blog. Now you can all see things in different ways, depending on your whim.

Is it not nifty?

In case I don’t mention it enough, my webhost (Greg) is the coolest guy on the planet.

I recently got saddled with took over the local Cancer Society website for the Relay for Life in the spring. The previous person used Frontpage to create the site on Freeservers. This combination makes my head hurt. Frontpage is evil, makes bad code, and is a bitch and a half to maintain. Freeservers are overpriced (funny for a company with “free” in the name), underpowered, and annoying.

So, I ask my webhost if I can use some of my excess capacity to host this small (30 megs) site, under my own account that I’ve been paying $75 per year for. His response? Well, normally that would be no problem, but I’d like to give you a separate account for the .org site free of charge, for as long as the Cancer Society needs it.

That just totally fucking rocks.

I’ve added another photo to the photo gallery, a satellite shot of my old high school. I’m having way too much fun with World Wind.

Google has introduced yet another search tool – Google Print. This is like Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature, which lets you do full-text queries of any book in the database.

Neither of these two services cover public domain works, over 10,000 of which are already scanned in and converted to readable ASCII text. I guess if you can’t make money at it, Amazon doesn’t see a benefit; but Google probably isn’t making much money off of this to begin with, so I don’t understand why they haven’t hooked into Project Gutenberg in some official way. Yes, I know that Google can be used to search PG archives, but linking it to the print.google.com URL would be cooler.

Shoot, with the availability of print-on-demand machines, Google or Amazon actually could make money off of public-domain books. Wouldn’t that be an interesting profit-generating idea?

In case you needed another reason to slam Microsoft, the Windows OS has been used by the Air Traffic Control folks in LA, rather than the Unix systems that worked for decades. It hasn’t been pretty.

The servers are timed to automatically shut themselves off every 49 days, because otherwise they’d crash. Are these the kind of high-reliability systems we should be using for something as essential as keeping track of multi-ton flying bombs filled with people? Just a thought.

You are Shockwave. The fact that you don’t have a face says it all. No one really knows what your true intentions are but you, and your intentions are dictated totally by logic. You approach everything with a cold and objective approach. You think you should be in charge because you believe it’s only logical. It has nothing to do with ambition. However, if you are faced with anything emotional, you just can’t understand it. Rock on with your logical and secretive self.

Transformers Generation One Personality Test
brought to you by Quizilla

Slashdot has an article about the new World Wind software from NASA. Naturally, this causes NASA’s servers to choke from the load of trying to serve up a 200+ megabyte file to every geekboy on the planet.

Solution? Several bittorrent files have been posted. Now I’m grabbing this monster file in under 30 minutes, instead of looking at a day. Good thing Orrin Hatch hasn’t gotten this Peer to Peer stuff outlawed yet. I wonder if there is some other substantial non-infringing use out there? 🙂

What a difference a build makes. The 0.9.3 build of Firefox was a little weird for me, causing me to reload pages from dynamic scripts at times. The 1.0RC is faboo, though. I’m trying to decide if I should kill NewzCrawler for the built-in RSS feeds in the bookmarks page. I’m thinking not. The newspaper format I can generate from NewzCrawler is just much cooler than the headline-only feeds in the Bookmarks list. Still, it’s interesting to see a new way of deploying RSS feeds to users.

Jack Valenti and his ilk can go roast in the deepest bowels of heck. I was inspired by a recent article about getting TV episodes from BitTorrent, so I followed the links to a site that hosts the pointers (torrents) that allow people to share the files. I wanted to watch an episode of Andromeda I missed. Well, I can’t connect to most torrents, because my IP is blocked. Why is my IP blocked? Am I a narc? Am I a mole for the RIAA? No, my IP is blocked because I use Cox for myISP (the only choice for broadband above 400kbps here). Cox, for their part, rolls over with such speed when the letters D M C and A are thrown at them that other P2P users have begun ignoring us entirely. Great. Cox has 8% of the internet market in the U.S., and we’re now effectively cut off from the newest avant garde pieces of the internet.

The DMCA sucks ass.