Recently in computers Category

The Wall Street Journal | Blogs brings us the tale of the TwitterPeek. Similar to the Peek Pronto, and produced by the same company (Peek, the TwitterPeek device is available for a set price ($99.95) with a subscription (six months free, then $7.95/month) or for a one time price ($199.95) which includes "lifetime service" - as long as the service is available, I guess.

While I don't have a problem with Twitter - I tweet quite a bit - I have to wonder if this device will take off like they're clearly hoping that it will. If people aren't adapting to use Twitter on their cell phones - and considering that you can simply send a text message to update it on even the most basic phone - then I wonder who their target audience is.

I myself tweet from my cell phone, the computer I happen to be using, or even my iPod touch. It's easy, convenient, and hassle-free - so maybe they have a point here. I guess maybe my problem is that it becomes yet another device to carry around. Granted, it's purely optional, so I guess it becomes a matter of using it or not, depending on your needs. I wish them luck, but I don't think I'll ever be buying on. Christmas sales, however, will be a good prediction of how the device will do over all. Time, as always, will tell all.

If you've been following me on Twitter, flickr or Facebook, you may have noticed that I'm in the middle of a trip from Connecticut down to Fort Lauderdale. My niece is moving down to live with her mother, and I volunteered/got suckered into the trip. So far, it's been ok - I'll have another post with other stuff like hotel reviews (one not awesome, one really good so far), photos, and other thoughts.

In the meantime.... My brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law have all chipped in and bought my neice and got her a GPS unit. We got a Garmin nüvi 205, which has proved to be invaluable to us so far. Yes, I have printed directions from Google Maps, and from the hotel websites to get us there. But what if we make a wrong turn? Then we're pretty much boned, right? Well, not now. We have, on this trip, come close to a wrong turn or two. And on one occasion, we were driving to get some food and left the GPS on by accident. With this thing turned on, it tells us that we have to give it a second while it figures out where we are, and then tries to re-route us accordingly. It's pretty cool, and I hope she makes extensive use of it.

When we went to New Hampshire for our summer vacation, I borrowed a more "robust" model from a friend for the trip - considering we had been to the area once before, and to the park we went to once before (Story Land), we had some idea of where we were going for things - but what about some more out of the way places? Or if we got lost? Not a problem anymore. If it was up to me, I'd buy one now - never know when it will come in handy.

So far, it's been easy to operate, which is going to be key for my niece. When I got it I had to register it and then download some upgraded maps - almost 3gb worth! Considering it's for the whole US, I guess that's pretty reasonable. It hooks up to my computer (yes, Mac compatible!) via USB, and the Garmin applications (for setup, updating and POI loading) are not only usable, but easy to use and not a complete and total pain in the ass. Very good move, Garmin. After I change the registration info, I hope to have her get the apps for her computer and keep it up to date herself.

Another good purchase I've made recently:
A-DATA 16GB Secure Digital High-Capacity (SDHC) Flash Card. I bought it to use with my ExpressCard SD card reader for an experiment - I wanted to load Mac OSX onto it and see if it loads faster than the built in drive for various reasons - not the least of which was that Snow Leopard was coming out. Testing a newer, faster, leaner OS on a faster interface is a win win situation, and I wanted to see how it might also help out with battery life - unmounting the hard drive while booted from the flash drive would remove a pretty significant drain from the battery, I hope.

Anyway, after taking some photos and videos yesterday, I decided to try to use it in my camera - after a quick reformat, it showed up fine. I can take more than quite a few photos (9999+, and that's just a sign that there's room for TONS of photos), but there's also apparently room for about 135 minutes of video - and I think that might be just for one clip. Can't be sure on that until I have that much footage to shoot - and I think that I'd probably run out of juice before I got to that point.

So, there you have it: two little gadgety things that I've been using for a couple of days, but so far, they're working out well and will probably be becoming a part of my regular geek kit.

Tonight I had the pleasure of setting up an iomega Home Media NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive. Aside from an issue with the firmware (more on that in a second), setup was a breeze, and configuration was super easy - easier than I was afraid it would be. The best part? The Mac software for it is first rate, and the configuration is all web based, and completely platform neutral - something I'm not used to seeing when I buy "network" device that's allegedly cross-platform.

Amazon.com has Windows 7 pre-orders available for up to half off. While I'm not the biggest fan of Windows, I am a fan of saving money - and having tried the Windows 7 beta, I can say that I like it more than I liked Vista. So if you plan on buying it, save yourself some cash and pre-order it now.

TechCrunch seems to be the only website even mentioning Apple's cool "App Wall", which was setup at the WWDC in San Francisco. The icons pulse and such when an application is purchased, but the data isn't shown in real time. It does, however, show every icon available, which is pretty impressive.

I'm still kinda irked that I couldn't go this year....

(Photo stolen from the Tech Crunch article, but it's THEIR photo. Really)

Not for the first time, I was greeted today with what appeared to be IM spam:

molecularcoho: Hey, Jimmy.

agerstein: wrong

MolecularCoho: Who is this Jimmy?

agerstein: thanks to an AIMBot, we've been forced into a chat with each other. i'm actually reading about what causes it right now, so i hope to be able to send you a link on how to get out of it, since i'm guessing you didn't know about this anyway

MolecularCoho: Right, I'm going to go away.

agerstein:if you're still there... you can put $optout on a blank line in this chat, and it should stop you from getting this crap in the future

agerstein: $optout

MolecularCoho: OPERATOR: Are you sure you want to opt-out? If you do, you will *never* be contacted again on the account "agerstein". There is *no way* to opt back in and undo this.

MolecularCoho: If you are sure, type "$optout 59D3". Remember, this is permanent and irreversible!

agerstein: $optout 59D3

MolecularCoho: OPERATOR: You have opted out. The accout "agerstein" will *never* be contacted again. Good bye!

Feel free to email projectupstream@gmail.com with feedback, comments, complaints, etc.

It would seem that Project Upstream is some kind of social networking experiment. I wouldn't mind so much if I had opted into the program, but the way that they just start using you in their little experiment without so much as a warning is disturbing, to say the least. Their website doesn't have any documentation, and if it wasn't for the google search I did (aim facebook coho) I never would have found out about the ability to unsubscribe from their "service."

Hopefully they'll get a clue about their invasiveness - I'll be sending them an email to let them know just what I think.

So, like many other websites, I've been having a problem with various people trying to hammer my site for various reasons: spammers trying to get email addresses, comment spammers trying to put their garbage ads in my posts, people linking to my images to not have to bother with loading the image into their site... the usual things. Lately, I've been getting "spidered" a lot more than usual - someone's been going through my whole website, copying all the content for some reason. If it was Google or Yahoo!, then it would likely be so they can get an accurate assessment of my site to include it in search results and what not. And if it was them, I'd be fine with it. But it's not them.

Instead, it's an IP address - a location on the internet. 195.225.178.15. Not that big a deal, until you start digging. As the screenshot I posted attests, they were responsible for almost 40% of the traffic to my website in the month of June. In July, it's only 3% of the traffic - but I have no doubt that's going to 0% in a matter of minutes from now on.

A while back, when blog spamming first became a big deal, I coped with it in various ways - moving files so that they weren't in the expected locations, disabling them entirely, and generally doing anything I could to keep one step ahead. The MovableType plugin community kept pace with many of the developments in the area, and developed a couple of really useful tools - one was MTBlackList, written by Jay Allen - which has, to my understanding, evolved repeatedly and was probably the basis, in some form or another, for the TypePad Anti-Spam service we have today. Another was AutoBan, which would update an .htaccess file based on people visiting your site to comment too frequently. The idea of my weblog acting as it's own gatekeeper appealed to me, and I implemented this as soon as I could. And it was a good thing to have around.

But it didn't really stop them from coming in the first place - it merely made it harder for them to get in the door and spam after the first few comments. I wanted to make it very hard for them. A little poking around and I discovered Junk Slowdown, written by the same person who wrote AutoBan (who's name eludes me, and will surely come back to me soon). It's job is to literally waste the spammers time. In my case, I have it tied into AutoBan, so that if they get on the blacklist, they end up wasting their time.

The way it works is that it sends most of a web page to their spider bot, which happily sucks down content. Notice I said "most of a web page." When it comes to the last, final bit of the web page - the closing body tag - it inserts a wait command that pauses any output from the script for 30 seconds. This means that for everytime that the spider is accessing my site, trying to post fake comments, it's stuck waiting 30 seconds. And since comment spammers like to shotgun their spam, they tend to send a lot of comments the way of the same blog at once. This works to my advantage, because it means that every time they make a request, their spider spends another 30 seconds waiting for my script to finish it's job. Something that doesn't do much to my server - after all, it's a small little script (866 bytes), and it only outputs text - so it would, without the pause, barely cause a blip in the amount of traffic that the server generates. But with the pause, it barely causes two blips - one at the start, and then another 30 seconds later.

Is it working? I suppose. Is it effective? It's hard to say. One of the reasons that spam - and comment spam - is effective is that it really doesn't cost that much. You can buy a list of email addresses online for probably not that much. You can generate that list yourself if you have time to write a little program that will run through the alphabet and generate random email addresses. You could even just take the dictionary and generate email addresses based on that - antelope@, anteater@, aardvark@, and so on. Not that hard to do with a little time and thought. Then you just sign up for a dialup account (spammers are notorious for doing that since it's cheaper than a high speed connection, which would also usually require the normal utility credit check and whatnot) and just start broadcasting the spam. For website comments, it's pretty similar - you can do a Google search for web addresses containing certain words - like mt-comment.cgi, for example - and get a list of thousands or millions of sites using certain software. Figure out the format for a comment post - which can be pretty easy in some cases - and then set your spider loose on the sites, shotgunning your comments all over the web.

Granted, some of the sites will have setup anti-spam measures like I have - or will have upgraded to software that doesn't have some of the security holes that allow things like this to happen - but just like the email spam, they don't need it to work for everyone - they just need a small percentage to get through. The comment spammers work best when they get through because then their URL is a part of the internet for all to see - especially the normal spider engines, the ones that work for Google and Yahoo!. Once the spammers content is out there, they become part of the index of the web - one where many links to your website can be a good thing, and can cause you to become the top result for certain search phrases - which is what the spammers are hoping for.

Does that work? Less and less. Yahoo!, Google, and all the other search engines do what they can to keep the actual criteria for how a site gets ranked higher both confidential and changing - once people figure out how to game the system, the usually tweak the system to stop that from working - so it's a continual game of cat and mouse. Eventually both sides may reach a stalemate, but I don't think that will be any time soon. In the mean time, I'll continue to use any tool at my disposal to keep the spammers at bay - and you should too.

# block stuff that's been spidering my site too much
ErrorDocument 403 /sand-trap.php
deny from 195.225.176.0/22

Finally figured out a good use for the programmer switches that came with the 68k Macs we used to have on campus. And since both my phones are Motorolas, I'm "keeping it in the family," so to speak. I wonder if the phones are more powerful, CPU wise, than some of those 68k machines.......

So, I've had the iPod touch for about three weeks and the news is bad: I love it. I'm not sure how, but this thing has become pretty ingrained into my life already. That's not just fast - its crazy.

I didn't plan on putting that much music onto it - I already have a 30gb iPod and love that, so this would be a good supplement, especially since it's very PDA like in many ways. I managed to get this 8gb model by chance, but I'm very grateful for it. I had to resist using it for the first day - we were doing NSO presentations and it seemed like it might have been a little distracting.....

So, after I plugged in, charged up and configured, the first thing I did was to setup the email. For the .Mac account it was a snap - and so was the GMail and Yahoo! account - Apple was kind enough to to include account "wizards" for certain mail servers to speed things along. Nice. I had some issues with my hosted email and the SMTP server, by that turned out - at least partially - to be my fault by being overzealous with trying to set the specific ports. Ooooops.

Anyway, after getting the IMAP servers setup, things went pretty smoothly in the mail department. Safari is very similar to what I'm used to on the laptop, but the animations that it uses for pop-ups and new windows takes a little getting used to at first. Very nice.

One of the great things about it is the email - it's at my fingertips all the time. I normally loathe the Crackberry addicts, but I find that I'm starting to turn I to one despite myself. The ease of being able to swipe and tap an email to delete it, or even just being able to check my email from anywhere there's a WiFi signal - without having to drag out my laptop - is pretty freeing on a couple of levels. Considering that just about everywhere on campus has some sort of WiFi access, it means I can do work from just about anywhere. Good stuff.

One of the nicest features, hands down, is that I can add content to my calendar or my address book at any time. When I as at the doctors office the other day, they asked me to make an appointment for 6 months from now. Normally I drag the laptop out and put it in right there - otherwise, I get the little appointment card, then promptly loose it and forget about the appointment until about a week before. Not cool. With the laptop, I can add it, but that's cumbersome - especially since this office isn't exactly spacious. With the iPod Touch, I just switch to the calendar, add the appointment, and then don't worry about it until it pops up a reminder 3 days before, and then 1 hour before - and I've also got it set to SMS my cell phone to remind me in case I'm not at my desk when the computer tries to warn me.

With the roll-out of Apple's new "Mobile.Me" service, things will get even easier - instead of having to plug into the computer every few days to sync, everything will happen over the WiFi connection in the Touch and my laptop - and I'll be able to view and edit my calendar or address book from any computer connected to the internet. Time will tell if this is a good or bad thing - but I think it will be all good.

This is me, trying to stay awake while things happen around me. Joy.

Oh, and Skitch! is an interesting tool from plasq that allows you to do screen shots (or images captures right from your iSight or other camera), edit them, and the post them to the web. Right now I'm using their servers, but you can put it to flickr, .Mac (soon to be MobileMe), or right into your FTP account. It's pretty cool to play with, and I'm finding more things to do with it each day. Go check it out!

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : The vanishing personal site

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site's disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Now that's pretty darn insightful. Zeldman mentions Jody Ferry's site specifically, and it's a great example: a home page, and then links that take viewers OFF the site.

I've been posting more photos to Flickr than I have to my family galleries. I spend more time on FaceBook - mindless distraction that it is - than I do posting on my own site. And I just joined Twitter, for reasons that I don't know that I fully understand. To what end? I'm not sure.

I see his point - websites used to be all about capturing eyeballs and keeping them on your site. Then people started selling adverts, and it was even more important to keep those visitors coming in and staying in - or leaving through your adverts. Now, with the advent of all these more interesting services, and the ease with which they can be used, more people are just taking advantage of that ease and moving their content elsewhere. Why try to build your own photo gallery - or install someone else's - when you can just point people to your Flickr collection? Why post regularly when you can Twitter? Well, that's not quite the same, but it's similar.

I myself discovered del.icio.us and have all but stopped using the bookmark feature in my web browserS. Why? Part of it is the ease of having my bookmarks so easily available - especially from the multiple platforms and browsers. It's also a lot easier to find bookmarks when I need them - I tag everything going into del.icio.us, sometimes over-tagging them, but it's really easy to find stuff now - rather than spending 20 minutes trying to remember the name of a site, I go to the page for the tag that I believe is the right, and I usually have the link right there.

What does this all mean? I myself have been farming work out to others - and didn't think too much about doing it. Due to the nature of the internet, and the way my account is setup, my photos are public, my Twitters are public, and most of my bookmarks are public. Do I care? Well, sometimes I wonder if I'm sharing too much. But at the same time, I haven't done anything to lock down my family photo gallery - although it would be trivial to do so. I make an effort to keep my bookmarks private when it's not something I want shared with the public. I can do the same thing with my Flickr photos - and have done so in the past. Twitters, well, I guess that's more than a bit like this blog - I can, and do, self-censor. If I didn't, life might be more than a little awkward.

But where does it all lead?

io9.com reports...
Arthur C. Clarke, Futurist and Scifi Legend, Dies
Arthur C. Clarke, author of scifi classics Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, died today at the age of 90 in Sri Lanka. Not only did Clarke create a legend with 2001 (he worked on the film with Stanley Kubrick too), but he also predicted many of the scientific inventions of the twentieth century such as telecom satellites. He was even knighted in recognition of his many mind-bending contributions to the worlds of literature and science speculation. [LATimes]

What's most disturbing to me is that I was browsing some Wikipedia articles about his novels: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, 3001: The Final Odyssey) at about the time that io9 posted the story. Weird.

And did you know that he was among the first to posit the idea of a geostationary communications satellite?

So, lately Ethan has this habit of staying up late. Really late. Like 11:00 one night. So tonight, when I finally convinced him to try to turn in, he decided to fall asleep on me. I'm not a fan of it, but if it helps the boy, what can I do, right? So he was talking to me while I did some work, and cuddling, until finally, he stopped talking. It took a minute to really "take" (he has played possum before, only to all but jump on me when I tried to put him in his own bed.

In case you're wondering, the photo is a la my laptop, and the "flash"/glow you see is the display - when the photo is taken via the "Photo Booth" software, it flashes the screen when it takes a photo. I don't know if that's part of the countdown it gives or if it's intentional for a flash, but it's there. Anyway, there the fat guy is, sleeping.

So, the problem with the new version of the backend that runs this site? It's that it requires a version of MySQL that I don't have access to. That's all geek to you, hopefully, but the long and the short of it is that an upgrade would need to be done to the server before I can upgrade my software. I don't really think that's going to happen anytime soon. This leaves me flustered, flumoxed, and irritated. But enough about that.

I bought a SATA drive a few months ago to go into a USB enclosure. It's super fast, but... not quite fast enough. So then I recently managed to get an external SATA enclosure (two drive) and an SATA Express Card for some super-duper high speed fun (editing a few videos, mostly). I tested it out a couple of times, and it was very nice.

Today, for fun, and since I don't use my computer much at work, I decided to see how long it would take to backup the computer via this new highspeed connection. A long time, apparently.

RIght now, it's doing about 130mb/min. I started it almost 3 hours ago, and it's done just over 20gb of backup, which is about 6gb/hour. That means that for the other 115gb, it would take about 19 hours. That's not... optimal. Of course, I have Mail, Photoshop, and a slew of other programs all running in the background, so that's not helping things. Regardless, it's not as super-duper fast as I had hoped it would. It is, however, still fast. And faster than the USB connected drive.

Now if only I could afford the 3TB of storage that I would probably need for all my data.....

Last night Ethan was cranking, so i picked him up and brought him to the kitchen - as he had been mumbling something about the kitchen.

We stepped into the kitchen and i said:
You have entered the kitchen. Cabinets abound. There is a sink and several counters. Exits are south, north and west.

He pointed at the fridge, so i turned, and said...

You are facing the fridge. Other objects available are a stove, sink and microwave. Cabinets still abound, and there are more counters. Exits are north, south and west.

He looked at me.

I said "Time passes....."

He looked at me again.

I did a little face sucker action and said "You have been eaten by a grue"

He didn't care what his final score was (5 points), but I think he might want to play again tomorrow.....

A quick note to say that I'm now completely off the internet. For a whole weekend. Part of me is really cranky, and another part doesn't care simply because Cablevision no longer gets my money (well, after they finally send us a bill for the correct amount).

The problem stems from cancelling the TV service - the phone rep didn't understand me when I said "I also have a cable modem provided by Cablevision under a separate account" and I didn't realize fully what "disconnect you from the cable system" meant. Mostly my bad, but I feel that the phone rep should share at least some of the blame. What happened is that Cablevision feels that since I'm no longer a paying customer, then I shouldn't be on their network at all. You see, you can get basic cable for free if you're still connected - they can't stop the signal without a physical disconnect. The problem is, as I said, that I get my internet from them too. I hadn't fully fleshed out all my options for a replacement for them when it came to the fore on Thursday night - no internet. I called to complain, and Cablevision was nice enough to offer to send someone out between 10 and 7 the next day - provided I would be home in case they needed to come inside the house to check things.

Not for nothing, but if the internet stopped when you disconnected me from your wires, why would your tech need to come inside the house? Needless to say, I declined. They said that they could see about getting someone out on Saturday, but that was also not much more than a "we'll see what we can do, but no promises unless you're willing to stay on hold for 15 minutes" sort of thing. I passed on that too.

I called AT&T from work and signed up for a DSL package. I'm not happy about it, but I think I've made it clear that I want Cablevision out of my life. They overnighted me a kit, and I hooked it up, and.... nothing. A call to their tech support for new installs reveals that they can't hook me up for some reason, and they'll get back to me about it. I expect to get a call on Monday, but who knows. I'm not happy, especially since what I received from them (a wireless router/DSL modem) is not what I requested (a DSL modem) since I have all the extra fancy stuff I need already at home.

At this point, I fully expect them to tell me that they need to replace the equipment outside the house (a terminal, I think it's called) since it's a few years shy of being ancient. Oh, and quite dirty. But we'll see how that turns out on Monday.

More updates as events warrant.

Oh, and thanks mom and dad, for letting me use your internet while Ethan took an entirely too long nap.

CL&P Blog: All Criticism of This Website Is Hereby Forbidden

CL↦Blog brings up the topic of Dozier Internet Law's website and, more interestingly, their "User Agreement."

Ooops. Apparently I've managed to mess up - I just linked to them, so I've violated the "User Agreement" of their site:
We also do not allow any links to our site without our express permission

There I go again - I quoted part of their website, which violates another part of the "browse-wrap" license agreement:
Dozier Internet Law, P.C. has a lot of intellectual property on our site. For instance, we are the creators of all of the text on this website, and own the "look and feel" of this website. We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so. In addition, you should not make any copies of any part of this website in any way since we do not want anyone copying us.

I think I might be in a lot of trouble now. Good thing I have a handy dandy user agreement of my own. (For the record, even thinking about my website means that you agree to the terms. Of course, I really should modify the agreement to say that you also owe me $5 for loading the site. I think I might have stumbled upon a new "revenue stream" for the site...)

Anyway, this type of heavy handed bullying has been tried before - and it usually fails before it even gets to the courtroom. On the rare occasion that it makes it that far, cooler heads usually prevail.

I wonder if Dozier will come after me? Time will tell.....

NIKE MISSLE BASE KC-SILO 60 - (eBay item 300156975741 end time Oct-31-07 05:23:14 PDT)

Sure, it's 60 acres. And sure, the Missle silos are filled with water. But there's an 800 sq. ft. fortified bunker you can live in. I'm thinking....
* 1 silo filled with water for free diving
* 1 silo with cargo netting for climbing
* 1 silo turned into a rock wall/climbing area
* paint ball in some of the land
* "agri-tainment" in other bits
* there's still room for the old homestead....

Of course, as Rudi pointed out, it's still in Kansas. Not that I have anything against Kansas - I just don't know if now is the best time to uproot the whole family and move.....

Clearly, it's been a while since I posted. In the post move ruckus, I was dealing with the normal change stuff, but when I planned the move, I seem to have forgotten just how extensive my old website was. All kinds of crazy stuff that I don't recall creating/linking to - but it's there, so I must have done it. Apparently.

Anyway, when I'm not checking out the missing file error log, then I've been tweaking things. Oh, and working on the continued success of raising the kids and all that other fun/crazy stuff. Which reminds me: parentingchronicles.com seems to be offline, largely in part due to the way that the site is configured. Sorry, can't change it now, but that will be fixed shortly (I hope).

What's new.... Well, the kids are almost done with school for the year. We had the kindergarten picnic earlier this week - it went well, I thought - and we also bought a new camera: The Canon PowerShot A560. It's a super-fancy 7.1MP digital camera with 4x optical zoom and some other fancy stuff - like the new Automatic Face Finder thingee, which is all the rage with the cool kids of late. If your camera doesn't have that, then you're camera is old and weak. Really. You should just give up and go home ;).

Anyway, like I said it's a great camera. The LCD is 2.5", which is pretty big - much bigger than we're used to. It makes it easy to see what you're getting a photo of, and makes it really easy to make sure you got the right shot. The only bad photos I've taken so far have been the ones with bad poses - or the usual eyes closed thing - I don't think there's a feature that can fix that, but I keep looking....

We've only taken a few photos with it so far, but as I said, they've been mostly good ones. :noah: has a T-Ball game today, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to get some good photos during the game. If not (it will be me and three kids), then I'm hoping to be able to post some of the photos from Kindergarten picnic the other day.

We've also got some exciting stuff going on in the schooling front. Miss Abigail (Miss B or just plain :abby: ) is making the exciting from pre-school to Kindergarten. We don't know who her teacher will be next year (although we're liking Ms. Griffin after all of Noah's success this year) we're sure she'll do fine.

Noah is moving up to the multi-age program. I think I've covered this before, but it's two classrooms that are both 1st and 2nd graders. It's a co-operative learning environment. I don't know much about the theories behind it, I just know that the school has had a lot of success with the program, they're proud of it, and :emma: had a good time with it when she was in the program. If our luck holds, Abby will be in the program in two years, which would mean that she and Noah will be together in some of their classes. Hopefully they'll do a little better dealing with each other than they do now - but since that's in two years, I'm hopeful that things will be ok.

:ethan: is progressing nicely. We're not doing anything formal with him, but he's a bit of a sponge when it comes to learning things. He's working on colors, knows a shape or two, and is just a great, funny little monkey. He's got more than a few words under his belt, and he's starting to put toddler sentences together, which makes everyones lives easier ("I want cookie" is much more likely to get a cookie and no tears than "That!" and a lot of pointing in a general direction). Plus, who doesn't love hearing "Daddy!" shouted when he spots me coming home and then a big hug from a little monkey? The other kids are all "Oh, hey, your home - can I have a snack?" or something.

Well, I think that's enough updating for now. Emma's got a party to go to, I have to get ready and then get the other three ready for the T-Ball game, and then there's supposed to be some time for some lawn mowing later today, I hope. Well, maybe. Photos and updates, and will hopefully resume on a more frequent basis starting later today - depending on how T-Ball goes, I should think.

So, on October 4, I was browsing a site, checking out pricing for some computer gadgets. As I occasionally do, I decided to do a price check on some network cameras. I don't _need_ one, but they're kinda cool, and I'd like to get one if the prices ever come down below $50 - they might be handy to have so I can see what's going on at home when I'm not there - enough said.

I noticed that one of the adverts on the search results page was to get a free camera. "Sure, but what's the catch" I said to myself - I've been down this road before, and never bothered to go past the page where they explain that they'll spam you and everyone you know if you sign up.

Having not posted anything of substance in a while, I thought it was about time that I did so.

The Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE) Act is supposed to be a good thing. Turns out that it's been hacked quite a bit by various people (aka special interest groups) to allow them to disregard the network neutrality agreements. What is network neutrality? Check out the wikipedia link (new window) for more info.

Basically, the way things are worded now, if the bill becomes a law, then your ISP will be able to "tax" websites for access to their customers. If, say, Google doesn't pay the fee, then an ISP could slow customer access to the website, or block it entirely. They could even, theoretically, make it so that when you go to Google, you end up at their own search engine. And blogs that are critical of the ISP? Oh darn, you no longer have access to that site - it's now on the black list.

It would also allow companies to do whatever they wanted on their own networks - in the mid-90's, Cox Cable blocked the common ports used for VPN access - "forcing the state of Washington, for example, to contract with telecommunications providers to be sure its employees had access to unimpeded broadband for telecommuting applications." (Wikipedia).

If you enjoy the internet the way it is now - where you can access a wide variety of information in a timely manner (based on the level of your internet access, of course), then you need to take action.

You can:
Contact your Congressperson (via the House website, or MoveOn.org)

Sign the Save the Internet Petition

Spread the word.

So I'm curious to know what, if any, my sites Page Rank is. According to the site prchecker.info they can get that info if I put their image on my page. It's there, let's see what they have to say for themselves....

After a quick preview of this post, I'm weighing in at a four. I don't know if this is good or bad - but there it is. I'll have to dig a little deeper, I think...

As you may have noticed, I've changed the look of the homepage a little bit: I added Technorati tags to all the posts. I also added a link to bookmark each post on del.icio.us.

But the point of all this? I've borrowed from someone else's work and modified it a bit to make the same keywords that it links to technorati also link to del.icio.us.

Slashdot | Stargate MMO Announced

I obviously won't hold my breath on this one, but it's possible - POSSIBLE - that this time the game might get developed and actually come out! I say this because some other company was working on something apparently was making decent progress, development wise, when the plug was pulled.

It's my hope that they'll develop it similar to Quake or Unreal Tournament - making it so that you can play alone or online with others - this way, people like me who aren't all about the eye-hand co-ordination have a chance.....

NerdTests.com Fun Tests - Computer Geek / Nerd Quiz

Kyocera | News release:
KYOCERA Inaugurates First-Ever Solar Grove

Kyocera today announced that it will hold a public dedication for its first-ever Solar Grove(TM); an array of 25 "solar trees"(TM) that converts a 186-vehicle parking lot into a 235-kilowatt solar electric generating system -- on Friday, June 24, 2005 at its North American headquarters and Kearny Mesa plant, located at 8611 Balboa Avenue in San Diego.

I've long wondered why such things don't happen more often - doesn't it make sense to use the solar power that's otherwise just making cars hot? Harnessing this amount of solar power will be equivalent to the electrical needs of 68 typical San Diego homes (based on an average consumption of just under 6200 kWh a year).

Now imagine something like that at the local mall. Or at the local high school. Heck, you could probably power all of Bradley airport if they covered all the different parking lots that are near there.

MarteyDodoo.com » SPAMIS is Spam

I've only received a few of these, but it's to a specific address that I only use for administrative things having to do with... well, let's just say it's not an address I give out to anyone.

What I don't get - even after reading Martey's notes about it - is why the idiot thinks that sending out SPAM that borders on libel is going to help him.

Whatever.

b3ta.com : Its my new Barbie USB Drive

Quite funny - wish I'd thought of it first!

First and foremost, for all you blog spammers out there: cut it the hell out. I'm sick of your links, your insipid attempts to make things look "legit", and the fact that I have to take time out of my life - time I don't usually have - to clear your crap off my website is not amusing me. One. Bit.

I made this analogy of the problem to my parents one day:
It's like when you come back to your car after shopping at the mall, and find that someone was kind enough to shove a menu for a new restaurant under your windshield. Only with the blog spammers, you come back to your car and find that your whole windshield is covered with menus, five or six levels deep. NOT AMUSING.

I took it a bit further, adding that the spyware and virii I've been dealing with at work have me on edge - if I see a PC now, I avoid it unless I have to touch it - and then I feel all dirty after. Anyway, the continued analogy.... You get back to your car, and after getting rid of a metric ton of crap from your windshield, you then find that someone has broken into your car, moved the seats and mirrors, and then taken the liberty of changing all the presets on your radio too. Dirty low life scum sucking idiots.

Second order of business: this website as you know it. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this blog. Well, not a lot really, but it's been a background process that's been processing while I'm busy doing other stuff - sorta like how your computer will continue to print something even though you've moved on to another website. Anywho, here's the thing: I don't do this enough.

Add to that the other blogs I try to maintain (computerboy comes to mind, among others) and you can see that my goal of at least one post a day to at least one blog is failing. Miserably. I also have a photo album blog thing I've been trying to update, and the "family news" site for the family website - not super-important stuff, but it's there, and I'm not updating it like I should - or feel I should - and it's grating on my nerves. Or nerve - might be the last one... ;)

So, I'm going to embark on a tear down of this and some other sites, and re-do and integrate and mess around with and just generally break some stuff. It's going to get bad - much worse - before it gets any better. The long-term goal is to have one site for me, one for the family, and have my site publish to some of the other sites via some tricks I have up my sleeves. I realize that no-one out there cares about this stuff, but unless I write it down, I won't feel motivated to do anything, so what the heck, here it is. Call it a late New Years Resolution - number one in a series, collect them all.

I've also been checking out some other blogs lately. Sure, I've been doing that for years, but it's been a while since I looked at some of the other parenting blogs, and realized just how little I blog about the kids. Part of that is a privacy concern, what with the way the world is all messed up now, but I think I might be able to get away with it. Maybe.

Another thing I noticed is that when I blog, it's not the same as it used to be - I used to put up links throughout the day, and casual observations at the drop of a hat. Now-adays it's these longer posts, usually after I've dealt with some hairy computer problem, which of course makes me NOT want to post at all. It sucks, but that's life, right?

End transmission.