Category: blows against the empire

not many people (except us “old webguys”) are thinking about looking for a service number through a searchengine instead the website of the company – it just doesn’t make sense in their minds to find it faster through an independent party than through the company by itelf.

David from Germany dropped a note to remind me that not every telephone infrastructure is set up like ours here in the US. My bad: I have reminded people of that myself enough times (this is the reason why internet uptake didn’t explode in Europe as it did in the US: they used to pay for every minute of connect time, so “browsing” was not likely to be a winning leisure time activity without some changes).

Of course, it might make sense for Amazon.de and the other national franchises to handle customer service according to local expectations.

That Wave from the album Nonsuch by XTC

[Posted with ecto]

here’s a good idea . . . .

Amidst talk of giving up in the face of comment spam and turning off comments — what makes the weblog phenomenon work — there was this gem of an idea.

Why can’t someone develop a MT plug-in that uses one of those image based verification tests that prevent automated sign ups to web mail or automated harvesting of things like ticketmaster.com. (I regret that the answer might be patents and IP).

Howard Dean: Winning Back America

Better the occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity, than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.    Franklin Delano Roosevelt

the nice people at the American Family Association are running a poll to ferret out how people feel about who should be allowed to get married. Looks like the forces of rationality are winning this one:

If you haven’t voted, please do.

Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent: In praise of a seditious beverage

But the real problem was the coffee-houses’ alarming potential for facilitating political discussion and activity.

I remember spending some time here in the dying days of FizzyLab.

Holbrook: Christmas Music in the Hotel

I decided to take advantage of the confluence of several factors — my new iBook and it’s CD burner, my iPod and the iTunes Music Store account I opened, and the fact we don’t have a lot of holiday music — to try making a holiday themed CD.

Fun, fun, fun . . . . the Nutcracker Suite was worth the trouble all by itself.

The links will take you to the iTunes Music Store for a sample or a sale . . . .

Not all the tracks I picked are available there, but you can find some other stuff there to fill out a disc, I’m sure.

NB: all the info was exported from iTunes and the links were created with the the iTunes Link Maker.
Continue reading “Christmas music on demand: another good use for the iTunes Music Store”

If you tried to reach this server from midnight to around 9:30 this morning, it looks like you were out of luck, owing to a confluence of unhappy events.

This machine (and it’s predecessor) have had the same public IP address for about 3 years and as many network providers (@Home -> AT&T -> Comcast). For some reason, I was assigned a new address last night and the dhcp client software couldn’t or wouldn’t take it: it just kept the old one.

I tried removing power from the cable modem with no success. I ran the dhcpclient software by hand but nothing happened. I killed the existing dhclients process, and ran it again, the result being I was assigned an address of 0.0.0.0. Eventually, I used the Windows Workaround and rebooted: that resolved it.

But then, I learned the client software to the no-ip.org name service I have been using is unable to read the old style config files. Since I haven’t had the address expire in all this time, I never encountered this problem. So I had to dig around to find the right information to make a new config file. So www.paulbeard.org was working again.

An added wrinkle is that I am now using paulbeard.org as a domain as well, hoping to move to that, as time goes by. I use ZoneEdit to manage DNS since I don’t want to run it here on the wrong side of a flaky network link, and I had to update them with the new address . . . . .

bleacgh. It’s enough to make me migrate to TypePad . . . .

Chasing Bush – Tracking George W. Bush throughout his UK visit

Free Speech Zone, noun; tightly controlled space for protests and informational displays located outside viewing and hearing distance from anyone who could benefit from the words being spoken.

The Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988 had “protest zones” that were fenced off from the sidewalks, but they were located directly across the street from the Georgia World Congress Center where the convention was being held. Where one was designed to minimize inconvenience and traffic problems for the general public, the new method seeks to protect members of government from hearing from the people they represent.