Category: Rants

Dec. 29th is Move Your Domain Day, and other SOPA Rants and Thoughts

While GoDaddy reversed their SOPA stance because of public outcry from fairly big names (and smaller single entities), you should still probably look at other options because SOPA is just such an ugly thing. It would mean the end of major sites with small teams. Naturally, groups like the RIAA are behind SOPA — the same RIAA who pirated $9 million worth of TV shows.

Seriously, if you don’t know anything about SOPA, read up here, here, here (linked to before), here and here. Oregon’s own Ron Wyden is trying to propose alternatives to SOPA.

Many folks (except maybe this guy) are trying to move their business away from SOPA-supporting companies, me being one of them. I manage 60+ domains personally as well as for a few companies I work for, and am slowly moving them away from GoDaddy.com to NameCheap (affiliate link — use that to transfer/buy, and I get a few pennies) for this along with a few other reasons. While GoDaddy.com is cheap, so is NameCheap, and their support/service has been better (and good lord, GoDaddy is always trying to upsell me a boat load of crap I don’t need/want every time I try to renew something there). NameCheap is joining in on the call for a move your domain day on December 29th with $7 transfers, and they’ll donate $1 to EFF for each domain transferred. While I can’t afford to move all my personal domains at once, I will be moving them when renewal time comes up (I’ve already moved several of the company-managed domains I deal with). There’s an easy step-by-step guide to move your domains from GoDaddy to Namecheap.

Why do poorly-written laws like this even see the light of day? Seriously, Congress, it’s not OK to not know how the Internet works (similarly, it’s not OK to not know how Congress works).

</rant>

December 27, 2011

Why The Sudden Fascination and Uproar With Smart Phone Rootkits?

In case you hadn’t heard the news (if you follow tech news at all, it’d be hard to miss), pretty much all the major providers use Carrier IQ software on their smart phones (it’s even a part of iOS on the iPhones, just slightly less sinister and easier to turn off). What is Carrier IQ? It has the potential to track and monitor everything to do on your phone and send it to a third party. Class-action lawsuits are being threatened, and it’s starting to really creep everybody out. There’s an Android Market App to see if you have it on your phone and ways to disable it.

What I find hilarious about all this? Carrier IQ was discovered and disabled by Android hackers at least nine months ago. I know the ACS Syndicate folks released a Samsung Epic 4G ROM back in March with it removed and opened up their tools so others could use them. So obviously this is old news — why the sudden uproar about it now? I’ve been rocking Carrier IQ-free (with SyndicateROM Frozen 1.2) for nearly a year now, and if you’ve been running CyanogenMod, so have you.

Moral of the story here? Root your phone. It’s easy, and your phone will run happier because of it.

December 2, 2011

Reading And Watching Material

Some videos after the jump…

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June 9, 2011

Beaver Fans Are Crazy People

I’m sure I’ve posted this rant before, but seriously, Beaver Fans, are you really that nutty?

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a football game this weekend between one school who’s trying to play for the national championship and one one just trying to become bowl eligible. College Gameday will be there and my Facebook friends feed is full of folks rooting one way or another. Obviously as an alum, I’d like to see the Ducks win, but I’ll be honest in that this game looming on the schedule always worried me when the Ducks started winning all their games.

But my rant is not about this weekend, as we all know who I’m rooting for, it’s about every other weekend of the year when the Ducks and Beavers aren’t playing each other. I root for all the schools in this state — whether it’s OSU, UO, PSU, UP, WOU, EOU, SOU, George Fox, Willamette, Concordia, etc…whatever — unless they’re playing the Ducks, and then I root for the Ducks. Beaver fans, however, want to see the Ducks fail miserably whenever possible and will root for anybody who’s playing the Ducks. I’ve watched a few Duck football games with Beaver fans, and they were rooting for the opposition the entire time. When I watch a Beaver game, I root for the Beavers. Beaver fans apparently are incapable of rooting for anybody other than the Beavers, and certainly don’t want to see any team in Oregon succeed other than the Beavers. As a true Oregonian (yes, those are fighting words), I’d be excited if the Ducks and Beavers were both undefeated and this was for all the marbles.

OK, rant mode off. Go Ducks!

December 2, 2010

Reading Material

April 5, 2010

Reading Material

January 7, 2010

22 Below

It was only -13°F this morning at my house, but it was a balmy -22° at my co-worker’s house in Sunriver this morning. The SROA weather station had the low at its office at -19°F overnight (it’s gotten up to -5°F at my office — here comes the heat wave!). La Pine and Sunriver-area schools were cancelled and there were power outages in some areas. Thank goodness I don’t rely on electric heat in my home.

In other words, it’s frackin’ cold out. You whiners in Portland who are complaining about the cold up there (it’s currently 24°F up there), you got nothing on us.

There’s no sense in leaving the house if you don’t have to. This will help to keep you indoors today.

Stay warm!

December 8, 2009

Beaver Fans Are Irrational People

You may not know this, as the press and promotion has been pretty quiet, with no hype or trash-talking whatsoever</sarcasm>, but there’s a relatively big football game tonight. While I’m rooting for the Ducks today (graduated UO class of ’00), I just want to see a good game, and will be happy knowing that Oregon (the state, not the schools) will be represented in the Rose Bowl no matter what happens and will hopefully smack Ohio State around. I just want to see a good game.

Unlike Beaver fans (at least all most of the ones I know), I’m actually capable of rooting for the Beavers when they’re not playing the Ducks. I root for the Ducks and the Beavers year round, and I want to see both schools succeed. The only time I’d root more for the Ducks is if they’re playing each other. Most Duck fans I know are capable of that kind of thought. However, all the Beaver fans I know are incapable of rooting for the Ducks. They’re incapable of rooting for anybody other than the Beavers, unless it’s a team that’s playing the Ducks — they’ll root for them all day long. I watched many of the Beaver’s games on TV this year, cheered them on. But I think the only time a Beaver fan watches a Duck game is to cheer on the opposing team.

The Ducks are favored in the game, but I think it’s going to be closer than the 10 points or so that folks say they’re going to win by. I see this coming down to a field goal or something equally as close.

(And yes, that headline was intentionally written to incite folks — just wanted to see who came out of the woodwork to comment.)

December 3, 2009

Links For The Day (And Technology Sucks)

I’ve dealing with an accounting “upgrade” that has caused me nothing but trouble and more work the last 48 hours (and a hardware upgrade on a client PC that needed more RAM because Quickbooks said so). Since the first of the month was the beginning of our fiscal year, the software needed to be in place ASAP (it didn’t help that Costco cancelled my original order and caused a three week delay in getting it). It’s finally working after working out some quirks with the new version of Quickbooks and Windows Server 2003 (see my link above for the gory details), and I now have my backup system of Karen’s Replicator (backing up to multiple hard drives and date-based directories around the network) and Ahsay OBM in place (after rebuilding our offsite backup server after a motherboard failure — another time killer), so I can finally sleep a little bit better.

So instead of something witty or resembling humor on here, here are some links I’ve had sitting around for the last couple days that I’ve wanted to share:

November 2, 2009

Anybody Know How To Find A Property Manager For A Specific Home in Bend?

Or, does anybody in the City of Bend PD who’s reading this have nothing to do tonight?

I know the Sunriver police department maintains a list of which homes are managed by which company in Sunriver (a list that property management companies in Sunriver also have copies of). Anybody have any idea if the City of Bend and/or property managers in Bend have such a list? I won’t get into why, but let’s just say that I think a property management company would want to know what kind of folks they’re renting to in a neighboring house that does nothing by keep us up nearly every night (and while I’ve called the non-emergency police line a couple times, it hasn’t done any good). As we speak, they’re in their backyard (about five or six of them with several more inside) about 20 feet from where I’m sitting in my living room having a drunken discussion about something that involves throwing around the F-Bomb as much as humanly possible. And I’d like to go to bed at some point here in the near future.

These guys have parties like this at least 3 or 4 times a week and have all summer. Then during the day, they’ve got a crappy garage band that pounds away on the drums and guitars in their garage. Their drummer can’t play, either, and I know a thing or two about music and I know bad music when I hear it. The guy can’t even keep any sort of resemblance of tempo, and that’s the drummer’s most important job.

I never thought I’d say this, but I pray for the cold weather to come so the idiots will go inside.

September 15, 2009