The company I hate the most is the phone company. The second company I hate the most is the cable company. At least it used to be. When I lived in Albuquerque, I had Comcast cable internet because they were the monopoly there. Now that I’m in Rio Rancho I have Cableone. The first thing I liked about CableOne is they didn’t charge me a surcharge for just having Cable internet without TV. (In fact I did have their TV service for a short while, but their HD selection was poor and the Motorolla DVR was extremely poor).

In the 3 years I’ve had their service there’s been a few downtimes not related to them, but most of my issues have been at my house. For the last few months I’ve had to reset the cable modem a many times and last week no amount of reseting it was bring back my fix. I went down to my least favorite of stores and bought a new one. No luck, it worked just as good as the other one.

I broke down and called CableOne tech support. It involved me entering my account number into the automated system then being directed to a person within a few minutes. The guy on the phone tried to remotely access my modem and was unable to, so he proceeded to set up appointment for a technician to come out.

He asked when if I could be available the next day and I said I can and the sooner the better. So he tells me to hold on then comes back to the phone and asks if I am can have them come out right now. This is at about 4pm .

There were two cable one vans at my house within a hour. They came in and checked a few things. Then went outside to the side of the house. About a half hour later my internet was working.

Cable one doesn’t isn’t as cheap as Quest but I’m not complaining.

I use in the back up strategy of having one local backup and one remote backup. If your house burns down, I still have a copy of your data thats not in my home. In Febuaray I signed up for a paid Mozy account, an internet back-up provider to take care of the offline backup. I had been trying the free version of their beta software for several months and was happy with the way the software performed. Also, they were the only ones to offer a Mac version.

My goal was to back up just my home folder. The total size of the folder is about 80 GB, with my itunes folder taking up about 30 gigs and my photos folder taking up about 40 gigs. Knowing that Mozy has bandwidth limitations I’ve let it back up in sections. I first let it back up my Documents folder then enabled the Music folder and now I’ve enabled the Photos folder.

It’s taken about 3 months to back up my itunes folder. Thats a long time and the biggest limitation is the upload speed and the amout of data that can be uploaded in a day. Both of which are imposed by Mozy (I will add the specifics when I can find them). I can uplodad an unlimited amout of data.

I have used the restore function a few times for small amounts of data, but if I need to restore the entire data set I can request they send me it via snail mail via physical media for small fee.

They charge $5 a month but I signed up for 2 years at $99. Seems like a good price compared to trying to set up my own server in a remote location.

Due to the new copyright legislation that are going to take effect from today we had to move all of the system outside of Europe.

We decided to move to the desert of Sinai in Egypt since we feel that we'll be safe there. Tiamo has already got himself a permanent place to live and will reside in Sinai from now. Those of you who need to get in contact with him can use the contact page.

In Sinai we've set up the systems with three redundant fibre links. Besides local connectivity in Egypt we also have connectivity to Saudi-Arabia and Israel. Jordan is quite close and we hope to install a link there as well as soon as our budget will reach that level. This way we're actually hosted in Asia as well as Africa.

More updates on this will come later today, hopefully. Everything will be the same as before, we will have slightly higher latency for European and American visitors.

A special note to Ifpi: Moses walked in the desert of Sinai for 40 years. Our servers will be active for at least another 40 as well.

The PirateBay Blog

I've joined the crowd, I found value in Twitter and opened a account. I'm not posting much at the moment but I'm sure my traffic will increase.

You can find me here: http://twitter.com/gregjsmith

If you view subscribe to this site's RSS feed and click on a link to one of my pages only to find a "not found" page, its all thanks to idisk. The problems first start with RapidWeaver, which still insists to publish the whole site instead of just new pages. During the course of publishing 1200+ pages my idisk will disconnect for no apparent reason.

Tiger had some problems like this but Leopard is a whole lot worse. Since the rss feed page is one of the first files to get uploaded, it shows up right away. The rest of the pages can take hours or days to be uploaded. If there's something you want to read, come back in a day or so and see if it finally was uploaded.

The pipe was pretty simple to make. I use my RSS feed as the source, filter based on the item.category XML item and use the output as the new rss feed. I have published this pipe and can be viewed at this link: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ZuZMORNV3BG_9SduLe2fWQ.

This is both humorous and sad

But when novices who've had a few drinks get a hold of crowbars, drills and Sawzalls, the results are sometimes less than satisfactory.

A number of house bloggers were interviewed for this article, including myself. Many bloggers believe the reporter of the story, Jennifer Saranow, misrepresented herself.

The reporter told me she was writing a story about such work parties. People helping people. That sort of thing. When I described the plaster party to her on the phone, she expressed the usual polite surprise that people still help each other like that.

Then the reporter admitted the story was not a feel-good story about people helping their neighbors. It was a story about people throwing renovation parties to save money and inviting inexperienced friends over to mix alcohol with demolition - friends who ended up screwing things up or getting injured.

1902victorian.com's account of the story is pretty good. I recommend reading the whole thing.

I was contacted via my blog, but I took several weeks to get back to the reporter. By the time she had interviewed me, I think she pretty much had the story written and didn't dig too much. I did have a demolition part with plenty of beer but there was no excitement like some drunken friend taking out the wrong wall. I'm not mentioned in the story.

The City of Rio Rancho has canceled it's contract with Azulstar for free (and fee based) city wide wi-fi access. According to the Albuquerque Journal (annoying ad viewing required), Azulstar owes the city $33,000 in electricity charges and continues to rack up the charges.

The letter, dated Sept. 20, said the wireless company failed to honor terms of the contract regarding payment for electricity charges, providing a satisfactory business plan and proof of its financial ability to offer continued service in the city of Rio Rancho.

There is always Road Runner Wireless, which is not sponsored by the city. Of course, their website looks like it was designed in 1995. Tables are not for layout.

Wikiscanner is a tool to determine who is anonymously editing Wikipedia. Well, not the specific person but what organization the IP address belongs to. For example, the tool shows that some one from Exxon made favorable edits to a entry about the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The Santa Fe New Mexican checked to see what edits were being made by state employees.

But I was disappointed. Doing a WikiScanner search of the name ``State of New Mexico,'' with the location of Santa Fe, I found relatively little activity from state computers related to politicos.

Most of the edits by state employees appear to be unrelated to politics. No scandal here, move along.

Glenn Piller, an auto-racing enthusiast, has stamped the back of more than $40,000 worth of U.S. currency, from $1 to $100 bills, with simple red-ink promos for his new Web site, www.ArizonaAuto Racing.com.

I'm sure he's not the first one to think of this. Thankfully It's not legal but it's not clear to the feds if it's advertising or not.

Kim Bruce, spokeswoman with the U.S. Secret Service, which enforces laws against misuse of currency, said federal law forbids the use of money for advertising or any changes to currency that makes it "unfit to be reissued." At issue is whether his stamps constitute advertising, because no product is being sold.

azcentral article

The new Web Gallery iPhoto/.mac integration is a big step. It's still no flickr. Hopefully Apple doesn't wait several more years to innovate further.

Check out my first gallery here: http://gallery.mac.com/gregjsmith#100020

Update 08/05/07 9:45 PM RapidWeaver 3.6.2 was worse than 3.6.1 which was worse than 3.6.0. Couldn't even publish without crashing before finishing. Here's hoping for a better result from the next version

RapidWeaver 3.6.2 is released today. I will find out if it fixes on major issue that I have had. When publishing RW would regenerate all 1000+ entries which can take a good hour.

Version 3.6.2 - August 2nd 2007

• Application Updates
• iMedia Browser now supports Aperture
• iPhone theme added
• Preview/Edit mode now animates when switching to code view
• Sidebar now supports add/remove link feature
• Sidebar now supports image manipulation via the Image Inspector
• Master Styles can now be set and managed from the Page Inspector
• Apply to all pages option no longer renames all pages index.html
• Snippets now saved correctly
• The link panel now supports linking to photos in user-created photo albums
• The link panel now supports linking to tags and categories
• Long plugin descriptions now render correctly
• Preference window now uses the unified look
• Scroll arrows now work in the Header/CSS/JavaScript/Prefix tab text fields
• Show/Hide Snippets menu item now sets itself correctly
• Show/Hide iMedia Browser menu item now sets itself correctly
• Get info button now toggles Page Inspector
• Adding/removing Quicktime movies no longer result in a crash
• Theme colour tags no longer cause exceptions when exporting
• Editing of fields in media inspector now marks page as changed
• Fixed up some issues with colour tags not being applied to certain pages
• .Mac publishing now uses Smart Publishing again
• Base URL is now checked for .mac address if publishing via FTP
• Various Theme rendering issues fixed
• Various other fixes and enhancements
• Blog Updates
• Users can now specify a custom RSS link for site such as Feedburner
• Now has an option to make the sidbar a php include (Reduces upload time!)
• Users can now customze separator between Comments and Trackbacks
• Now generates the correct file names in the RSS feed
• Theme developers can now style comments and trackbak links
• Various other minor fixes
• Contact Form Updates
• Now works correctly when info strings are empty
• iFrame Updates
• Now displays the correct page in Preview when the document is first loaded
• Movie Album Updates
• Generating thumbnails for movies that have a greater height than width now works properly
• Photo Album Updates
• Fixed an issue with the flickr RSS feed support for Flash Slideshows
• Images are now rotated correctly, if they have been edited in Preview.app
• "Select All" and "Select None" buttons now only affect the current selection
• Fixed sizing issue where images were sometimes 1pixel to large
• Now converts unicode characters correctly

When I wrote about Albuquerque's (or just the Mayors) desire to have city wide WiFi, I was wondering why Rio Rancho's efforts were considered to be a bad thing. Apparently the city feels the contract with Azulstar is in breach.

According to the letter, the breaches include incomplete installation of equipment, inconsistent coverage, minimal customer service, improperly installed equipment, nonpayment of PNM electricity bills and nonpayment of a bond for almost $30,000 owed to the city.Azulstar cancelled the insurance on its equipment on April 19, which violates the contract. The company also did not complete an application for a permit required to install the equipment.

There's some other interesting tidbits in that article as well, like residents of the city are suppose to get 8 hours of free service a month. I wonder how that works

There is competiton. Roadrunner Wireless Services, Inc. has antennas up all over the city. I get a strong signal at my house from their various access points and pretty much everywhere I go in the city. Yet I have some reservations about a company that's about the latest technologies, yet their website looks like it was designed in 1995. It doesn't load properly when viewed on the internet. When viewed from their access point, your treated to layout done in tables, a starry background and animated gifs.

Listpic is a alternative to interface to Craigslist for viewing listings. It shows only the listings with photos and shows the photos first. I have used it nearly everyday since it came out to quickly see what people have for sale.

All the pages indicate that it's been blocked and point to this forum to complain. According to comments in this Apartment Therapy Chicago post, the owners of the website have received a "Cease and Desist" order.

Hopefully Craig Newmark will make a comment that they plan their own such interface, or I see a user revolt on their hands.

Update 7/7/07 9:12 PM: Response from Craig

Here's some honest info... < craig° > 06/07 18:15:20

I'm swamped, traveling, so here's the short version regarding the listpic thing.

The listpic technology was taking a lot of bandwidth from our servers making it harder for the vast bulk of people who visit our site.

The listpic people are aware of this and other issues, which they do not disclose.

Perhaps they should disclose those reasons here, and also, maybe explain their attempt to monetize our site.

thanks!

Craig

I’M IN UR NEWSPAPER WRITIN MAH COLUM

Categories and Tags work basically the same way. You can enter a list of categories or tags on each of their lines for each entry, RapidWeaver will generate a page for each individual category or tag. My previous blog only had categories, I never tagged anything. I'm finding categories so easy to enter that I'm creating a lot of them.

I'm thinking that many of the things I'm entering as categories should be tags and I should reduce my categories to just a few. But what few categories should I use? Or maybe I should just not categorize anything and just tag it all?

Where's the official internet blogging "categories and tagging" guide?

Update 06/07/07 10:26 AM Thanks to EdBrenner on the RapidWeaver forums I read this article on categories and tags. Based on that, i've decided to start tagging entries along with categories. I've started tagging some older stuff, but with a 1000 entries, it's going to take a while

The Mayor of Albuquerque wants free WiFi for everyone in the city.

a two-tiered wireless Internet signal covering the entire city that will support not just the basics of Web surfing, e-mail and the like, but phone service and video. Those two tiers are a free, 1 megabit signal for anyone and a premium service at 3 Mb for a "reasonable" cost.

Of course Comcast and Qwest don't like it. I say screw 'em. Qwest especially doesn't seem interested in offering extra services and Comcast would probably force everyone to pay $10/month for cable before you can use it. It's the technical issues and money that will keep this from happening.

One wireless provider estimates it would cost $25 million and would require a access point on every building in the city, I think that's overblown. They cite the problems that Rio Rancho has had completing it's network. I thought Rio Rancho had completed it's network.

I hope they try it anyways. I could use some free wifi when I have to drive into Albuquerque

Lindsay Lohan - You’re killing us
May 29th, 2007
Please bear with us as we address a number of issues related to server problems and lag. A huge surge in Lohan readership is pushing our servers capabilities. We will update here when we have additional details.

The Sitemeter Team

Sitemeter is a website tracking service. I have one of their free accounts. This is funny.

While reading news on Reuters today i noticed they want the pubilic at large to share photos and videos of news events to them so they can use them in their news stories. However, they won't pay for them.

Their terms of use are as follows (emphasis mine):

By submitting material (including a picture, a video, other images, audio and/or text) to Reuters, you are agreeing to be bound by the Terms of Use for Submitted Materials which give Reuters a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to publish and use any material you submit and to a use of your personal data in accordance with Reuters Privacy / Data Protection Policy. You must own the copyright in the material you submit. Reuters is under no obligation to publish any material submitted. Material and any your personal data submitted to Reuters may be posted on and shared with any third party site that Reuters uses to receive your submission or to host and display such material.

Is Reuters hurting for cash, is that why they want free pictures? It doesn't look like they are doing so bad. Can I use their copyrighted material for commercial use for free? No, it appears not (I can use it for personal use for free).

A New York times article from 2006 says they will pay if they distribute the picture to a client. None of that is in the terms and I wonder how that whole process works. Do they give you an option? What kind of price to they offer to redistribute the photos?

Puppy scams are popping up in Arizona online and print classified ads, where the seller appears to be local and offers free English bulldogs or Yorkshire terriers. But when contacted by email, the seller says he or she is in Africa on a religious mission and promises to ship the dog overnight for a few hundred dollars.

Uh, that's enough right there to raise the red flag on me. If I Couldn't pick up the animal in person, then forget it. Apparently some people are not quite so savvy. savvy?

Link

I haven't written anything about the AppleTV since getting it. Mainly because others got theirs before me and pretty much everything that can be said have been said. I do think this is the future of TV and video podcasts will change everything.

There's a lot of content out there now, but for me only a few float to the top.

• DiveFilm High Definition - Incredible underwater video in high definition.
• "Tiki Bar TV - "Cool drinks in a swank pad". Well edited and entertaining. You would think these guys are professionals.
• Wallstrip - A financial news type program, but more interesting than CNBC.
• ABC World News - I looked at many news programs and liked ABC news the best. Besides the fact they don't have a lot of commercials for themselves, they bookmark the podcast. THis makes it easy to skip the individual news stories you don't care about.
• Diggnation - A couple of guys on a couch, reading the tops stories from Digg.com. Not sure why I like it but I do.
• MacBreak - A mac specific podcast with Leo Laporte.

You don't need a AppleTV to check these out. You can download and watch them in iTunes for free. So far, I don't know of any podcast that costs money.

It's easy to set up iChat to use Googles new jabber based chat.

1. First you will need iChat
2. Then you will need a google mail account
3. Create a new iChat account in the prefts
4. Select a account type of Jabber
5. Fill in the Jabber id With your gmail account
6. Put in your gmail email password
7. set a server of talk.gmail.com

Update 08/27/05 2:05 PM: Google has some instruction for setting up iChat with Google Talk along with other clients.

AOL is giving away what it has received as bounty from spammers in a clever promotion.

AOL has the perfect backstory of seizing a New Hampshire spammer's goods -- including a shiny yellow Hummer H2, $75,000 in cash, and 33 gold bars -- to play into its latest giveaway campaign. When you've got a hot car, a pile of greenbacks, and some bullion, everything else just falls into place. That's why AOL isn't just rewarding one lucky entrant with a high-end SUV. A daily entry form features a self-serving trivia question aimed at giving away another $1,000 each day.

For those that use craigslist, you should be aware.

SCAM: site faking craigslist

Just to let people know in a hurry, the site

www.pay-craigslist.org

has no relation to us, and we're escalating dramatically now.

Please get the word out.

Thanks!

Posted by craig at August 3, 2005 11:03 AM

If you visit Google News on any regularity you will see that it shows top news articles based on how many sources there are. If there is a 1000 news sources However, like 900 of them are the same exact copy of a Reuters or AP article.

It might useful for Google to show the importance of a new story based on how many news sources are carrying it. But if every news source can just "copy and paste" the same Reuters article then exactly how important is that news story? Me thinks a better algorithm is needed.

Also, it would be more useful if when seeing the listing of the stories it filters all all but the source, Reuters in this case, and says "900 article contained the same text, click here to see them all" or something to that extent. I want to see original reporting, not the copy and paste.

Lastminute Auction is a handy site that shows all the ebay auction that are under a dollar and have less than a hour to go. Right now there are about 8500 auctions and they are categorized. There's probably a way to do this with ebays search feature, but now you don't have to try to figure that out.

A seattle coffee house has turned off it's free WiFi for the weekend. With surprising results.

Strongin said that the five-year-old cafe added free Wi-Fi when it seemed their customers wanted it a couple of years ago. It initially brought in more people, she said, but over the past year %u201Cwe noticed a significant change in the environment of the cafe.%u201D Before Wi-Fi, %u201CPeople talked to each other, strangers met each other,%u201D she said. Solitary activities might involve reading and writing, but it was part of the milieu. %u201CThose people co-existed with people having conversations,%u201D said Strongin.... Worse than just the sheer number of laptop users, Strongin noted, is that many of these patrons will camp six to eight hours%u2014and not buy anything. This seemed astounding to me, but she said that it was typical, not unusual. The staff doesn%u2019t want to have to enforce the cafe%u2019s unspoken policy of making a purchase to use the space (and the Wi-Fi), and on the occasions that they approach a non-buyer about a purchase asking, %u201CCan I get you a beverage?%u201D the squatter often becomes defensive, explains they%u2019ve bought a lot in the past or just the day before... They%u2019ve gone two weekends with no Wi-Fi, and so far, they%u2019re pleased with the results. The staff %u201Cloves it,%u201D she said, and regular customers are %u201Ccoming up to us and thanking us.%u201D They have received a few nasty emails. But Strongin said that last Sunday was one of the best revenue days they%u2019ve had on the weekends in a while. %u201CIt was kind of a bold move.%u201D

I frequent a local coffee shop called Satellite. I always buy a ice tea (sorry, not a coffee drinker) and muffin and make use of their free WiFi for several hours.

Now You Know... (Warning: Site is not safe for work!)

1. make sure that everything you write is vapid and unintelligible and redundant.

2. make it obvious that you are ripping off other bloggers and that you are trying to always one-up them with your witty banter and personal stories that nobody cares about and you wonder why it's not working for you, this is because you exclude writing from an objective vantage point oh and ps you're fucking boring.

3. when something big happens in the world, DON'T WRITE ABOUT IT. remember when hunter s. thompson shot himself and how every fucking blog you went to had the same na na na he meant so much to me na na na NA crap like they knew the guy personally and it was one big circle jerk competition of who could write the longest tribute like they were his brother, wasn't that annoying? fuck that, you are a moron douche bag who has a two month old blog, you don't know anything about anything so fuck off.

4. if you want to look like a desperate piece of shit blog then link everybody who so much as whispers in your direction. linking and blog politics in general have got to stop, this groupie blog culture is retarded which brings me to my next point.

5. just because you have a blog and you meet some kid from the internet and then THEY start a blog, this does not make them more interesting and it sure as shit does not make you more interesting either and it also doesn't make you BEST FRIENDS ps. nobody cares who you have met in real life and therefore listing who you know in real life on your blogroll makes you about as cool as the smell of hot garbage, fag.

6. post pictures of your face a lot. here's a fun thing to do, go through your archives and see how many photos you have of your stupid face, doing the same pose and holding the camera the exact same way and then read what you've written, same. old. crap.

7. do not lend insight or have any depth whatsoever in what you write and always state the obvious, write about things like you are the only person in the world who knows about them and go into great detail about everything you do, every place you go and so on because your readers are stupid and have never ever been to a wal-mart before and they don't know what double-dutch is because you are a fucking genius and we are not.

8. when you write about going to a show, write like you discovered the band and you are all best friends, people love that because name-dropping never gets tired and also the mostest most bestest part is an intricately detailed account of the conversation you had with famous whoever the fuck.

9. be arrogant.

10. when you're being unoriginal, act otherwise.

Get amber alerts via text messaging on your cell phone or pager.

AMBER Alerts come to SMS - Engadget - www.engadget.com: "Starting today, AMBER Alerts, the service for bringing attention to missing children, will be available on cellphones via SMS. Cellphone users simply have to sign up on the Wireless AMBER Alerts website and enter the areas they would like to receive alerts for. Apparently, 90% of US cellphone subscribers are currently covered by the service, with most of the rest receiving coverage in the next two months. There%u2019s no charge for the service other than the usual carrier imposed SMS fees."

Many news sites are requiring registration to read news articles on their sites. This registration doesn't cost anything but your personal information. Some people, like myself, don't want to give that information away. A service called BugMeNot popped up that gives you a username and password that you can enter into the site without having to go in and enter all the information. You skip the registration but the information they have about you, the reader, is bogus.

This is bad for the news site since they use that information to target advertising to their readers. Why should I care about that, I got to read the news article? 

Google Labs has a new feature.

What is Site-Flavored Google Search? Site-Flavored Google Search uses a Google search box to deliver custom web search results, based on a profile filled out by a site's webmaster. The profile reflects the content of the website, and when the site-flavored search box is placed within the pages of that site, users are able to view search results that are "flavored" to be more relevant to them. To put a Site-Flavored Google Search box on your site, click the "Start here..." link above.

So without further adue, here is one for the site you are currently visiting...

I was on the edge of my seat watching this, "Luigi's departure now gives Koopa enough time to lay seige to the castle. The toads try in vain to defend their princess." Here is part 1, but the actions starts with part 2.

On Christmas day I hauled my PC with us over to my Girlfriends sisters house. My "brother-in-law" and I both play a game called Aces High. It's a flight combat simulator using World War II vitage planes. It's PC only game and one of the few things I use my PC for.

Usally he brings his rig over to my house, since I have the broadband. He hooks his PC into my router and it's up and running. He has dial-up so the plan was for me to hook my PC to his PC via ethernet and he would enable internet sharing. With my Mac way of thinking I figured I could use a regular ethernet cable to connect the two. That's because Mac released in the last few years have auto sensing ethernet jacks. That means that the ethernet port knows what the wire configuration needs to be depending on how you have them hooked up. Otherwise for this sort of computer to computer connection you need a cross over cable that has some wire swapped.

Neither of the ethernet ports on our PCs had auto sensing ports. And we didn't have a cross over cable. Hmmm... What to do. I had an idea! I hooked my Powerbook up to his computer via ethernet. Internet sharing worked with my Mac since I had the auto sensing ethernet jacks. I also have firewire ports on my PC and Mac. So I connected the Mac to the PC via a firewire cable. Enabled internet connection sharing on the mac via the firewire port and enable the firewire network port on Windows. I turned off the firewire on the the Mac and viola! The PC had a network connection via the Mac which had one via his PC.

Believe it or not Aces High was very playable with both of us on his dial-up. I think it's because A: He has a very clean line and gets a pretty fast connection for dial-up and B: Aces High has low bandwidth requirements.

I think this is important because some bloggers just may not get it (regardless of what software you use). Especially the younger types. I don't talk about my work here. My work photos stay at work. I will often start a blog at work, just as I surf. But only during lunch and break. Unfortunately i have to produce results so i really don't have a lot of time for this during the day anyways.

"The virus arrives in a compressed file via e-mail with a subject line of "our private photos." The message text says: "All our photos which i've made at the beach ... " and is signed "Kiss, James." according to this article . It's being called "Mimail.C". It appears that it turns the victims machines into Spamming machines. Since my PC stays turned off most of the time and I don't use it for email I'm not to worried. Normally I would say if you open the email you got what's coming to you but I will probably be the one to get the spam.

[Update:] Turns out that this virus does not generate spam but tries DDOS attacks on anti-spam sites.