Old Man of the Net

Ok, I realize that there's plenty of people out there who've been on the Internet longer than me. I mean, I really only started using it in 1989.

I'd hit an article through StumleUpon about the 100 oldest domains on the Internet. The first .com domains were registered in 1985. I've had my domain, xanthia.com, for quite a while, but couldn't remember exactly when I'd registered it. So, I hit up `whois`, right quick:

Domain Name: XANTHIA.COM
[...]
Updated Date: 11-sep-2009
Creation Date: 27-sep-1995
Expiration Date: 26-sep-2014

I set up my current, primary email address, back when I registered my domain. So, I've had the same primary email address since 1995 (over 15 years, now!) and just ten years less than the oldest .com domain names have existed.

As a side note, having an email address, that long, means that your address is in just about every spam-bot/address-harvester's email list. All I can say is, "thank god for anti-spam software".

Opt-Out

Not sure how much faith I place in it, but NAI's website/tool supposedly allows you to opt out of targeted adverts.

FiOS DC Network Issues?

I noticed that my browsing speeds were slow and, at best, spotty. So, decided to hit SpeedTest.Net to see what's up. It looks like my connectivity to the (geographically) local test server.

This didn't look too awful for my service tier. So, I thought, "hmm... Might wanna check to see if there might be something NOT reflected in local tests." So, I tried tests to several different locations and got the following:

So, best I can guess is that there's a problem leaving the VZ networks (or at least their DC area links)

What Does Support Mean (WTF, Verizon)?

So, for the past few weeks, I've been having odd networking issues. Periodically, Donna's laptop will show that she's connected but that she has no internet. My XBox Live connection has been unstable. I've been getting pauses and stutters in my NetFlix and Zune streaming. I've had some sound-quality issues on my VOIP (Vonage) connections. Most recently/obviously, I've been unable to download large software packages (e.g., VMware WorkStation, Linux  ISOs, etc.): the DL will get a few tens to a few hundreds of megabytes in and then just stall.

Tuesday night, Donna comes up the stairs, complaining that her internet connection's not working again. I track things back from her PC, to the home WiFi, to the LAN and finally back to the FiOS router. I'm able to get into the FiOS router and notice that it's having issues on its WAN connection link. It's stuck in "getting DHCP address" mode. I try rebooting, full power-cycle and disable/enable the WAN interface. All result in no change. So, I contact FiOS support (by the way: trying to find their number on a cellphone-based browser and then navigate their asstacular call-tree system SUCKS).

Eventually, I get through to a human being and we start working on the problem. He finds that he's not able to talk to the ONT to get diagnostics from it. So, he has me pull the terminal on its batter backup unit and unplug it from the wall. Afterwards, I restore the power and it starts coming back online. Ten minutes later, still no Internet connection and, now, no TV! The tech informs me he's going to dispatch a tech to look at/replace the optical network terminal (ONT). Unfortunately, the first available service slot in two days later (Thursday/today, 16 September 2010). 

Two days of no TV and no Internet... Donna was n-o-t pleased. I pointed out that the LAN still worked, so she had access to music on the NAS. I pointed out that we still have a large collection of DVDs, BluRays and CDs. We even have a couple of XBoxes and other game systems. I also pointed out that she had several sewing projects that this outage could be a bit of a blessing in getting her back on track with them. She was still most displeased.

/me shrugs

The next morning (Wednesday), I discover that the ONT has apparently come back online somewhere in the wee hours of the morning. I have both TV service and Internet. So, it's fairly apparent that, while not yet dead, something is in the process of dying. So, I leave Donna a note letting her know that she may have TV and/or Internet service, but that it may also die, given the prior behavior.

While at work, Verizon calls to let me know that a service slot had opened up for later that day: would I mind the tech stopping by? I'm like "sure" as I really wanted to get this shit knocked out. Three techs (and three service trucks) roll up a little after 16:30. I show them to the equipment. They tear open the ONT and note that its status lights aren't quite right. They try several stabs at getting it into the normal/expected state, but those steps all fail. However, they don't have an ONT with them with which to replace it, so, they replace the router, instead. The service lead tells me, "I'll call you tomorrow to see if things have improved or whether I need to come back out with a new ONT".

Today, things are still flakey. In fact, the new router seems to have introduced some new problems. It starts rolling up on the previously scheduled appointment time and I've not heard from the tech. So, I call Verizon FiOS's support line. Apparently, the ticket had been closed and no one is coming out. I'm like "WTF: he wasn't supposed to close that ticket - he was supposed to call to find out if he still needed to come by." Unfortunately, there's no available techs to come out and do the originally scheduled appointment. So, now I have to wait till tomorrow to hopefully: A) get someone out to do the tech work; B) hope they have the requisite repair parts; C) that it solves the problems and doesn't introduce any further ones.

Oh well, I at least have basic network connectivity. I just can't program my DVR and I still can't download my VMware Workstation or (RedHat - other distros use BitTorrent and, because of the small individual transfers, I was able to get Fedora, Ubuntu and CentOS) Linux ISOs.

The phone support people have all been very pleasant. The techs that came out were pleasant. Unfortunately, the availability of techs and parts has made this a drawn-out failure of a support incident.

Shoulda Been Using UNIX...

So, pretty much ever third time I click a link on the Microsoft Live/Hotmail/WhatTheFuckEver site, I get a page similar to the below:

 

This page is temporarily unavailable

We're sorry, there was a problem showing this page. We experienced some technical difficulties retrieving the content.

Please try this page again in a few minutes.

 

© 2010 Microsoft Terms Privacy Advertise

Help Center Feedback English

I mean, I never use the damned site. I have it because of my Xbox and MSN-chat. That's it. And, the only reason I was going there, today, in the first damned place was to tweak my privacy settings to cut down on all the damned "friend" invites from all the bots that run rampant on the service. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK. I mean, even if I was thinking of actually using it for more than the bare minimum I'm currently using it for, this would be enough to put that straight out of my mind. Bigtime FAIL, Microsoft. 

This, I Do Not "Get"

I use StumbleUpon, quite frequently, to help stave off boredom. Many other stumblers will suggest stand-alone images that they found within the larger context of a full web page. As such, they will create a direct-link to the image rather than the containing page.

More than a few sites put "hotlink protection" in place to prevent other people embedding the images hosted on their sites from being embedded in other sites. Most cite "bandwidth protection". Now, I'm not going to bother with pointing out that the whole point of the world wide web was to help conserve disk space (etc.) by making it so that any given object only live in one cardinal location and be referenced elsewhere. I'm not even going to bother pointing out that, if you've a copyright to a given piece of work, it's a lot easier to track its usage if you host the work rather than necessitating that people download it and then host their own copy of it.

At any rate, I was Stumbling, once again, today. I hit the Stumble button and was taken to the following page: 

Now, the link seems to indicate that the intended image was a 1600x1220px JPEG. Depending on the image in question, that could be a fairly decent chunk of bandwidth or it could be only a few 10s of kilobytes. Yet, the "blocked" page kicks back a few kilobytes worth of data, as well. So, it begs the question: if your goal is bandwidth protection, why not set your hotlink protection to something that chews up FAR less bandwidth. I mean, as it stands, these guys just come across as utter tools. They might want to reconsider their protection scheme. I mean, every URL that StumbleUpon sends to my browser comes with a StumbleUpon referer. The site owners could put an exception in place for StumbleUpon referers that either displayed the picture or just redirected them to their home page. I mean, at least that way, they can take the free publicity as a means of getting site traffic.

Whatever. I mean, if you're so hard up for bandwidth that a popular 1600x1220 JPEG's going to put you over the top, maybe you should send back something a bit more terse and bandwidth efficient.

Asshats.

Get a Haircut, Hippie!

So, I'm looking at the picture with this article. I get that Tshirts and jeans are comfortable - I wear them a lot, too. But, I can't help but suspect that it's as much affectation as it is a matter of "comfort". There's little about Zuck that strikes me as "genuine". Maybe I've bought too much into the FB-backlash press ...Still, theres something about the guy that just strikes me as choke-worthy

At Least It's Not as Hard as It Used to Be

Nuking out Thunderbird profile directories is unfun to rebuild from. Now I gotta

• reinstall all my extensions
• reconfigure those extensions to what they were.
• reload all my calendars
• restore my address books
• rebuild my virtual identity mappings

At least with the calendars and address books, I had it all stored with my gmail stuff. So, it's just pointing it back at my Google accounts and re-synching.

Still... Sux0rz.

Creative Ways to Die

When I was in college (waaaaay back in 1988-1992), I used to post to Usenet, quite a bit. I was recently digging through the Google archives of Usenet. I found the below "classic" post.
When I was going to college, squirrels were an ever present danger(?) at Penn State's University Park campus. They were everywhere. They were fat. And they were in no way afraid of humans. God help you if you had squirrel-snacks on your person and weren't terribly aware of your surroundings and the swarms of beady eyes tracking you as you transited the quads.
Any way, during this period of time of posting on Usenet, I found the lovely gem of a newsgroup, alt.suicide.holiday. At the time, it was more an avenue for dark humor than the group of insufferable twats that it became. I've always been a fan of dark humor and it was a perfect outlet for my "creative urges". So, I'm kind of happy that the below survived in the Internet's memory...

Path: gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!psuvm!thj100
From: THJ100@psuvm.psu.edu (Thomas H Jones II)
Newsgroups: alt.suicide.holiday,alt.tasteless,talk.bizarre,alt.horror
Subject: damn tree rats!
Message-ID: <90102.012900THJ100@psuvm.psu.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 90 05:29:00 GMT
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 54
Posted: Thu Apr 12 06:29:00 1990


    was kinda funny (well, only if youre a sadistic bastard like myself), but
recently a friend of mine was out feeding the local "tame" squirrels which
infest our campus.  those little suckers gotta be about the fattest squirrels
youll ever see.  theyre kinda cool, though, cuz you can just get some nuts and
such, bend down, make a ticking noise and theyll come running to you (after
playing their stupid "im a timid little creature of the forest *blink, blink*
game) and you can hand-feed them.  any way, he did this and things went ok for
a little while till the little f*cker decided that he wanted to see if the
protein you get from flesh (in this case:  human) is any better than the pro-
tein found in the acorns and peanuts.  he bit down and held tight.  supposedly,
it didnt even come off when my friend started to shake his hand around.
    any way, it got me to remembering other things ive seen these squirrels do.
ive seen them jump other people who were feeding them.  ive seen them hop up
on fence posts to beg for food.  and ive seen them JUMP on people who have nuts
in their backpacks and try to get at the nuts (you should see the way people
spaz when *that* happens.)  you ever see those nature films that show sharks in
feeding frenzies?  well, if you go to the student union building and get a bag
of nuts from one of the machines on the ground floor, you can get the squirrels
to do the same thing just by placing the open bag in an open space and calling
the squirrels over.  just amazing to watch sometimes.  (another fun thing to
do while theyre all frenzied is to run screaming into the middle of the group
and tree them.  they sit there chattering at you until you go away and let them
down.)

    any way, on to the suicide part (and, yes, it involves the killer squirrels
from hell, as they are locally known.)  here's my plan:

    go to a local grocery store and buy a coupla bottles of peanut oil (peanut
butter will sufice, but its messy.)  now, if its a sunny day, you can make the
whole suicide look like some kind of terrible accident and all the little tree
rats will be exterminate after your death.  ok, back to the sunny day:  take
the peanut oil and thouroughly coat yourself in it (actually, if you have a
bathtub available, it would be good to take a nice long bath in it so that it
can be soaked into your skin.)  once nicely coated in the oil (people will just
think its suntan oil, hence the desire to do it on a sunny day) go outside to
someplace you know that squirrels hang out (which around here is EVERYWHERE you
go. *argh*)  just lie down and wait.  if you arent feeling particularly pa-
tient, use the squirrel attracting sounds.  assuming that all goes well, a
swarm of ravenous squirrels will gather around you and go nuts (pardon the pun)
and gnaw off all the nutty tasting skin.  it will probably hurt like all hell,
but if they remove a significant portion of your skin, you will die of blood
loss, shock or, if you get "rescued", infection.  maybe even leave a note
saying you kept having visions of the planters peanut man and that he told you
that peanut oil made a great tanning lotion?  eeuu... grisly.  makes my stomach
turn just thinking about it.
    wonder if theyd use it as a base for a movie like the birds, only about the
arborial vermin which infest our campuses:  _Death_From_Above:__A_Story_of_
Mutant_Squirrels_

Dear US Bank:

I get that you make your real money on the mortgage interest, but do you have to make it so freaking painful to pay extra principal?

Logo Madness (Google)

Went to Google and thought I'd gotten a bad URL: today's logo is just very subtle

Not Social

It is my assertion that Twitter shouldn't be considered "social media". What's social about tweets? If anything, Twitter is anti-social. I mean, what's social about bleating about random shit happening in your day - if there's no conversational component to it. Twitter ain't conversational.

Broken, or Just Pointless

So, C|Net has implemented Echo to help foster the social aspects of their site. Now, I can understand wanting to get in on the FaceBook-esque dollars. I can even understand the Twitter love affair, to a degree. What I don't understand is, "what is the value add of Echo when all it's doing is listing pages of re-Tweets?" I mean, re-Tweets add nothing to "the conversation". Re-Tweets are garbage, from a conversational standpoint. When you're doing something akin to just saying "yeah", it doesn't really foster conversation. Echo, as implemented on C|Net just seems to be a way for them to display, "see, people think our stuff's good". If that's all they're gonna do, shouldn't they just put the old 1990's style hit-counters on their pages?

Q&A Instead of "Real" Search?

So, FaceBook is coming up with a Q&A "service". It's going to be a zero-privacy, zero-filters proposition. Basically, anyone can ask, anyone can answer and there's not much you can do about it. Intentional anarchy. Well ...with one exception: it won't be indexable by search engines. Speculation being that this is a shot over the bow of Google with the hopes being that it would be a "first stop" for people that have questions. That people would hit FB Q&A, get their answers and not have to go the next step to Google (et. al.) and FB could reap the advertising rewards.

Now, I've used a lot of forums over the years. Some were truly designed to be help-oriented. But, generally, the first responses given - particularly in tech circles - were of the form, "did you RTFM" and/or "did you Google it"? So, clearly, there's plenty of people that either can't be bothered to do research on their own or are willing to wait for answers rather than finding them on their own. I guess this is part of why KGB was born (haven't seen commercials recently, but their website's still there, so, they're probably still around). Granted, useful answers can be found - particularly if you display a level of clue in the asking of your questions. But, if you've got clue enough to ask your questions well, you frequently aren't going to be use a simple Q&A site.

I've also used a few, more entertainment-oriented Q&A sites. They were always a mixed-bag, however.

One of my favorites was Wis.DM (RIP). It was a lot of fun. I still don't know whether its creators intended for it to be serious or not. Not sure anyone that those who became regular users saw it as a site for serious answers - mostly it seemed to just a way of initiating discussions (and flame wars - made me miss Usenet, sometimes). Unfortunately, it died. It's users scattered to the four winds, but many stayed in touch (a few of my FaceBook friends I know only from Wis.DM). Some found homes on new Q&A sites - some making their own in an attempt to recapture some of the magic that had been the Wis.DM experiment.

I've tried a few other sites, since then. Unfortunately, for what I was looking for - semi-interactive entertainment - they were too serious or so pointlessly stupid as to be unbearable. The first place the Wis.DM crowd fled to was Fluther. Unfortunately, it was very restrictive - particularly for someone, like me, who likes to post a lot. Worse, Fluther's community and moderators didn't react terribly well to the recreational questioners that flooded in when Wis.DM died. However, they apparently have a niche and they're doing well enough, these days.

Google once tried a Q&A service, but it was kind of a bust. They shuttered it at least four years ago. 

Yahoo still has their Q&A site. My primary experience of it is through sites like YahooAnswerFail.com. It didn't have the social aspects that Wis.DM did and tended to have lower utility than Usenet did. So, for people like me, though, the lampoon sites that have more value than the actual. They act to distill the most humorous aspects of the site into convenient, easy to find morsels.

I just don't see that FB Q&A is apt to be any better than Yahoo answers. We already have a couple FaceBook humor distillers (e.g. FailBook and LameBook). Do we really need an FBQnAfail.Com site? The world can always use more humor, I suppose.

Oh well. Should all be interesting to see how it all plays out.

An Idea Too Late

How do I patent the idea for virtual currency FOREX-type markets?

Shifting Perspective

I sit here at my office, downloading the latest NetBackup 6.5.x update client bundle. It's a 1.4GB GNUzipped TARball. Chrome's downloader says it's going to take 40mins+ to download. This seemed like a really long time. I look at the download rate indicator and it's floating between 200KB/s and 750KB/s. This feels amazingly slow.

Given how long I've been crawling around on teh Intarwebz - over twenty years now - one would think I'd have a bit more perspective. I mean, when I first started using the Internet in early 1989, the Internet backbone operated at like 56Kbps. I mean, this was back in the day when X.25 and frame-relay were still in heavy use. I remember when having a 1200bps modem was the shit.

Still, when I sit at home, I'm connected to the Internet by over 25Mbps of FiOS. The internet itself now consists of many multi-gigabit links acting as its "backbone" (given the number of major transits, can't even really call it a backbone, any more). So, when I'm pulling a file at the office at 1Mbps, I'm feeling the comparison to my current connection at home. While I'm cognizant that this 200-750KB/s is significantly faster than what my first exposure was, it's too far removed from my current thinking.

Then again, I remember the first "huge" hard drive my dad brought home: it was 40MB and as big as an LP player (remember those?).

*sigh*

I'm old.

Open Tweets?

Nifty: the status.net engine's being used to make a lot of community-specify Twitter-esque forums/communities

Twitter Followers (Pt. 1)

Always kind of amusing when you've go more bots as followers than actual people

Twitter Followers (Pt. 2)

Of course, when you've got a lot of accounts on random sites that your friends aren't using, that's to be expected

How Much Social Media Do You Need

Ok. Perhaps I've gone a touch "overboard". However, I'm the kind of guys that, if there's a setting, a dial or a check-box, I gotta mess with it. Such is the same when it comes to meta-posters offering to link me to different posting sites, even sites I previously never knew of or had no use for. At any rate, I initially went to ping.FM to set up meta-posting (primarily) for FaceBook and Twitter. Prior to ping.fm was also (infrequently) using things like BlogSpot/Blogger, LiveJournal and Tumblr. For better or worse, ping.fm lets you link to a LOT of sites. So, "because they were there," I also set it up to post to:

• Google Buzz  (more a placeholder, since it self-aggregates from other sources)
• GTalk (more of a record-holder/reminder, because updating my IM status seems silly)
• AIM (more of a record-holder/reminder, because updating my IM status seems silly)
• LinkedIn (more of a record-holder/reminder, because I don't really post to professional-networking sites)
• Tumblr
• Identi.ca
• Brightkite
• Plurk
• FriendFeed (more a placeholder, since it self-aggregates from other sources)
• Jaiku
• Blogger
• Plaxo Pulse (more of a record-holder/reminder, because I don't really post to professional-networking sites)
• Bebo (this already existed because of my AIM account, so, "why not link it")
• hi5
• WordPress.com
• Delicious
• Koornk
• YouAre
• Multiply
• Flickr
• StatusNet
• Vox
• TypePad
• StreetMavens
• Posterous
• Photobucket
• Yahoo Profiles
• Yahoo Meme

Also ended up finding some other ones due to relationships the above ones have (e.g., Fire Eagle - a Yahoo Property - because of signing up for BrightKite). Speaking of which, it seems like Yahoo and Google are both trying (or have tried but never did away with) other social media sites. I'm guessing some were small buys or indirect acquisitions.

Prior to writing this post, I'd never really found where the "Yahoo Profiles" was going to. I mean, I don't really see a link to it off my Yahoo dashboard. I know that profiles.yahoo.com mutated to Yahoo360, but that had seemed to die. Turns out, though, that profiles.yahoo.com still exists. (/me shrugs)

A number of these sites seem to be a niche looking for occupants (e.g. StreetMavens). Some don't seem well-suited to linking via Ping.FM because Ping.FM's media uploader is rubbish. So, even though I can link Flickr, Multiply, Photobucket, etc., I can't really use Ping.FM to post media to them. So, they're more "placeholders".

On the plus side, without Ping.FM, I wouldn't have known that there was an "Open Status" project acting as an OSS version of Twitter. Ping.FM explicitly lists StatusNet and Identi.Ca for this service.

Because Ping.FM's posting interface is such rubbish - but mostly did what I was looking for - I sought out alternatives with better posting interfaces. That's how I ended up on Posterous. Unfortunately, Posterous: doesn't link to nearly so many networks; while it has a much better web-posting interface, the site navigation is rubbish - they really want you to use the email submission engine. That engine's pretty cool, but a little rough around the edges. Their mail parsers frequently get things a little wrong (such that, if you want your Blogger/BlogSpot, WordPress and Tumblr to all look the same, you frequently have to go to each site and "fix" things). The data's all there, just the presentation isn't consistent or spot-on. Oh well, emerging technology. They show a lot of promise. And, if they can get their recent performance issues out of the way, I can foresee considering one of the premium offerings they hope to put together.

Neither Ping.FM nor Posterous yet supports some of the more fringe services, yet (FourSquare, HotPotato, GoWalla, etc.). But, a number of those services seem to be more in the vein of hangers-on than free-standing services. They seem to mostly leverage Twitter and/or FaceBook for their readership.

/me shrugs

Been an interesting experience. Getting to see a lot of different approaches to social media. And, it's helped me avoid "putting all my eggs in one basket". Given that social-media has really replaced diary-keeping, it seemed prudent to spread things out. Damned few of these sites seem to have what look to be good, long-term business plans to assure their long-term existence. Worse, even fewer seem to have a way of getting your data back out. I've already had sites die and take my data with them (e.g., wis.dm). I don't want whole chunks of my journaled-life to simply evaporate each time a company goes out of business, has data-integrity issues, etc. 

Yeah, I could host my own - and, in the past, I did - but that removes most of the "social" aspect from things. While most of what I write is for my own consumption, I do also like being linked to other people enough that I can see and comment on what they're doing.