Tag Archives: suck!

A perfectly sucktackular day…

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In which our hero rants about things aggravating him, which are many, and then bends a meme to his own ends.

Okay, first of all, anyone who reads my journal right now won’t be able to see any pictures.

There’s a reason for this. The short form of the reason for this is that of the approximately six billion or so human beings on the planet, about five know how to behave with any maturity when things are emotionally stressful.

The long reason for this is that I have (or, technically, HAD) a business Web site, which once upon a time was registered with and hosted by a small local ISP called “Rapid Systems.” I used this ISP because it is owned by the brother of an old college friend and business partner of mine, and he and I had been friends for quite a number of years. He registered the domain in his own name, not mine.

Fast-forward to last year. My old college buddy and former partner has a falling-out with me, for two reasons: first, he decides (as is typical, it seems, for many people) that he’s going to take sides in my divorce, and second, he owes me money. Has owed me money for a long time. Apparently, he spent the money on something else and doesn’t intend ever to pay me back. So he decides to stop speaking to me, and (I’m assuming) his brother does likewise.

I contacted his brother several times to get the domain name transferred to my name; at first, he kept saying “okay, I’ll do that,” and didn’t, then eventually he stopped responding to me at all. So now the domain has expired. I can’t renew it because my name isn’t on the registration; I can’t re-register it because Network Solutions puts a hold on expired domains.

So you won’t be seeing any images in my LiveJournal until I get this all straightened out. Sorry. I used to host images on my personal site, but it’s been blacklisted by a lot of net blocking software, so until now I had been putting LJ images (save for anything, y’know, sexy) on my business site.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that it’s my business site that’s all screwed up?

So, the meme part. There’s this meme traveling around LiveJournal that tells you to put “[yourname] needs” into Google. Hilarity often ensues.

I did this, and was told by the Great Oracle Google that “Franklin needs a stadium,” “Franklin needs a few hot glue guns,” and “Franklin needs a good nickname.” Not really very interesting.

It gets more fun, though, if you try different variants. Want to see some real hilarity? Try Googling for “[yourname] eats” or “[yourname] hates” instead.

“Franklin eats by gathering five legs in one hand and then pulling the shell away from their still pulsating body.” “Franklin eats from blood stained baskets.” “Franklin eats all the doritoes, and Alby gets pissed, and decides he’s going to invent a bomb to kill frank.”

“Franklin hates the whole idea, but when a drunk gives him a silver dollar and gets him to play a slot machine, everything changes.” “Franklin hates everyone who can walk, and Winston hates everyone who is sober.” “Franklin hates it, but I have to admit, I’m fascinated by it. The amount of snot
that thing can suck down from one nostril is amazing.” “Franklin hates war, but it is his life.”

Hell, let’s keep going, this is fun!

Franklin punches Coach Yesutis and gave him a bloody nose because that was very funny.
Franklin opens the doors of the cabinet and pauses, looking round him suspiciously.
Franklin believes there has been a recent increase in the participation of a younger generation in same-sex activities.
Franklin screams again, praying for Death to come.
Franklin jumps from a helicopter and the bad guys fire machine guns at him.
Franklin tastes like dirt- I don’t recommend it.
Franklin has a diverse arsenal.
Franklin wishes to confine the ‘dark vast forest’ of the soul of man in a barbed-wire paddock.
Franklin knows what to expect from his foe, even with the improved war tactics.

I can’t log on to OK Cupid

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Now, this might not ordinarily seem newsworthy, except that I can’t reach OK Cupid, either.

That, of itself, also isn’t newsworthy. What is newsworthy is the reason behind it, which has to do with corporate greed and very poor behavior on the part of some very big companies.

Two very big companies, to be exact. Level 3 Communications, an enormous and giddily spam-happy ISP, and Cogent Communications, an enormous and less spam-friendly ISP.

Cogent is pricing bandwidth very aggressively, and Level 3, they don’t much care for that. So Level 3 has ended its Tier 1 peering agreement with Cogent.

Essentially, in quick and hopefully not too technical terms, it means that two of the biggest carriers of Internet traffic are not speaking to each other right now. What that means is that the Internet has been split; for many end users, there is no way for people on one side of the divide to reach Web sites on the other, and vice versa. For example, right now most RoadRunner customers cannot reach OK Cupid.

Level 3 has been known to do this sort of shit before; in fact, there’s an article on Slashdot about it. Cogent is dealing with the problem by offering current Level 3 customers free connections to the Cogent network, on account of Level 3 being a bunch of mewling, lice-infested, pus-oozing filthy bastards and all.

Cogent Communications has released a statement about the issue. I can’t read it, because I’m on the wrong side of the divide and can’t reach Cogent’s servers.

By all accounts I’ve seen, Level 3 is being a bunch of right bastards here.

So if you’re having trouble reaching certain Web sites, that’s why.

Edit: Less than ten minutes after posting this, OK Cupid became reachable. Clearly, I should have complained sooner!

[Friends-only] The legal implications of virus tracking

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A while ago, Shelly’s computer was hit by a nasty piece of malware, which I wrote about in great length in my LiveJournal here. I removed the malware, and wrote up an extensive report about where it came from, how it was installed, how it operates, and most important, who makes money from it. This entry received hundreds of replies, has been linked to from spamfighting and virus-fighting forums,a nd prompted me to put it up on my Web site here, where it generates tons of emails.

One of those emails was from a person claiming to have worked for a company that writes this stuff. This email fills in some of the gaps in the backtracking I did, and names names. The information in the email seems to check out–for example, the company in question is a known source of drive-by spyware and adware, as detailed by Computer Associates here, so I put it up on the VX2 site.

Imagine my surprise when I get hit by a demand letter from a Canadian attorney (note: PDF file) telling me to take the page down and release information about the person who emailed me.

Fun, fun, fun.

So I’ve spent most of the day today on the phone with lawyers. I’ve taken the email off my site, and told the lawyer I’m not giving him any more information about its source; we’ll see what happens next.

On the one hand, it’s extremely difficult and expensive for a Canadian to sue an American. On the other hand, the guys who make spyware and adware do get very, very rich from it. So we’ll see.

It happened last Thursday…

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So there I am, in my office, when suddenly I hear this godawful loud “BANG!” and the entire building shakes. It feels like the building’s been hit by a lightning bolt or a bomb’s gone off or something. I stick my head out the door, look around, don’t see anything, and go back to work.

Ten minutes later, i hear noise outside, I stick my head out the door again, and see this:

Continue reading →

Some things, man just doesn’t want to know…

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…at least not at the godawful hour of ugh o’clock in the morning, when one has staggered out of bed after a couple hours’ sleep and faces an hour and forty-minute drive to an indescribably dull trade show in Orlando on behalf of a client.

But there it was, staring up at me from the lid of a bottle of Snapple:

The starfish is the only animal that can turn its stomach inside out.

Ugh. Thank you, Snapple. Exactly the vision I needed in my head to ease the pain of a way too early morning.

“That’s a definitional issue. The solution to the equation ‘y squared equals negative one’ is not a real number by definition.” I actually got to say that in the course of conversation today. 🙂

Snow Crash seems to have recovered from the trauma of his trip to the vets quite nicely, though being neutered doesn’t seem so far to have made the slightest difference in his personality; he’s just as frisky and playful as ever.

At least somebody’s having fun this weekend…

Randomness at a grocery store, and the suckitude of life

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At the grocery store this evening, between the frozen aisle and the canned goods, two women bumped into each other and started talking about a mutual acquaintance. “Has So-and so gotten married yet?” “No, she’s still not married.” “Really? That’s too bad.” “Yeah, i don’t know what it is. She has to find a husband some time.” “Maybe she’s just too picky.”

Dear God, I didn’t know there was anyone left like that in the world–not for real. Seriously. I thought that was something you’d only find on bad TV sitcoms. This is 2004, not 1904, right? Women do have value that doesn’t derive from their husbands, right?

Later, at the checkout line, the cashier looks at me and says “You know what’s interesting? All these countries that don’t like the USA, and say bad things about America, when something happens to them, who do they turn to? We give everyone in the world handouts and they still don’t like us. Like Russia. And why doesn’t Canada have its own army?”

The Universe of Suck Department: This weekend, Shelly and I were supposed to go to Atlanta with nihilus and phyrra so we could look at apartments, then from there up to Nashville to pick up their car. And as it turns out, next weekend I’ll be in Miami Beach with a client instead. Suck, suck, suck.

Aaaaaaarrrrrggghhhh!

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Shelly wants to get rid of her problematic, virus-ridden, malfunctioning Sony Vaio system and start using my Mac G4 desktop in its place. The one thing standing in the way of doing this is World of Warcraft; the graphics card in the G4 isn’t good enough to play.

The difference between a Mac AGP graphics card and a PC AGP graphics card, besides the price, is just the software in the flash ROM on the card–the PC version contains Intel driver software, the Mac version contains Mac driver software. Since the video cards are firmware flashable, it’s possible to buy a PC AGP video card, get a copy of the Mac firmware as a ROM file, flash it onto the card, and end up with a Mac card.

Power Mac G5 systems come standard with an nVidia GeForce 5200 card, and you can buy the PC version of this card for about $80, so we bought a PNY GeForce card from CompUSA and set about installing the Mac firmware on it.

Doing this is A Big Pain In the Ass.

Problem 1; The nVidia flash ROM utility only runs from a floppy disk and only in DOS mode. Why PC users put up with crap like that, in this day and age, is beyond me. (The Mac version of the nVidia flash ROM utility works in the GUI just like any other program, but can’t be used because if you put a PC card in the Mac, you have no video until you run the flasher, and if you have no video, you can’t…err, run the flasher.)

Problem 2: Getting the Mac ROM image is A Big Pain In the Ass. It’s hard to find the ROM image because…well, I don’t know why. Apple goes after people who distribute the ROM image files, which is kind of weird because Apple does not sell video cards. If Apple did sell video cards, it’d make more sense, because Apple would have a vested interest in keeping people from buying PC cards and flashing them, but as Apple does not sell video cards except as included with Mac systems, this makes little financial sense.

And finally, after five hours of formatting floppies, installing the nVidia flasher utility, installing a PCI graphics card in the PC so I can flash the AGP card, and searching online for a kind soul with the Mac graphics firmware image, we come to Problem 3…

…which is that the GeForce card I bought is a PNY branded card.

Okay, just for the record: Never, ever, ever buy a PNY-branded video card.

A PNY-branded GeForce card is cheaper than, say, a Creative-branded GeForce card, and as it turns out, there’s a reason why. PNY, you see, uses different (cheaper) RAM and a different (cheaper) RAM controller on their video cards.

So, the firmware that turns a PC GeForce card into a Mac GeForce card works in any GeForce card except PNY-branded cards. PNY-branded video cards, when flashed with Mac firmware, won’t work, because the cheaper, slower RAM in the PNY-branded card is not accounted for in the Mac firmware.

Suck, suck, suck.

The good news: i kept a copy of the original PNY firmware, so I flashed it back and the card is good as new. We’re taking it back tomorrow. The bad news: Shelly still has to play World of Warcraft on her crap Sony PC, which is no end of aggrevating, and I’ll never have those five hours of my life back again.

Random things and stuff

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First: Got a Christmas card from jul3z…thanks! It was awesome.

Second: Rather than reposting it here, I’ll just point to a snippet from Scientific American about a possible mechanism behind life extension from Scientific American in papertygre‘s journal. (datan0de, if you haven’t seen this yet, you should.)

Third: Spending the evening this evening with S; Shelly’s spending time with S‘s boyfriend this afternoon. Yay!

Fourth: Spending part of the upcoming weekend with phyrra and nihilus…yay again!

Fifth: I had about two hours invested in a 2,000+-word post, with links, that got eaten by LJ…grr. I foolishly typed it in Explorer for PC, so it’s gone. Is it just me, or if an error occurs when trying to make a post, should the LJ page actually print the text of the post along with the error message? That way, you wouldn’t lose it if something happened…

War, war, waaaaar in Iraq…and daddy wants a new computer!

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So far, the United States has spent a grand total of approximately $139,744,240,000 on the war in Iraq, not counting indirect costs or human lives.

*blink*

That’s roughly $474 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. You know, I could kind of use that money right now.

Or, put another way, that is:

– Enough money to build 69 space stations, with sufficient money left over to double the size of the Space Shuttle fleet;
– Enough money to give full college scholarships to 3,493,606 college students;
– Enough money to multiply the Federally-funded programs on AIDS and cancer research by 46 times, with enough left over to double the amount of health insurance subsidies available to low-income citizens;
– Enough to multiply Federal law enforcement and anti-terrorism budgets by a factor of five, with enough left over to double the number of guaranteed student loans;
– Enough money to increase the budget for national parks and wildlife preserves by two hundred and sixteen times;
– Enough money to rebuild every single interstate and US highway in the entire country, with enough left over to pay the salaries of 305,690 new police officers (at salaries two percent higher than the national average);
– Enough money to give every single schoolteacher in the country a $22,000 a year raise;
– Enough money to multiply the total national budget for education by two times, with enough money left over to double the budget for the EPA and double the budget for the National Science Foundation and pay for another Space Shuttle and triple the senior citizen prescription drug benefit;
– Enough money to clean up every single Superfund environmental site, with enough left over to double the Veteran’s Administration fund and wire every public school and library to the Internet.

I wonder if the war on Iraq represents the best value for that money.

GAAAAHHH!

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Well, i had a post ready to roll about the weekend’s interesting events, which include a trip to a gun show with friends (among other things), but it’ll have to wait. This evening, while I was eating popcorn, watching a movie on TV, and getting ready to post, my laptop failed. Suddenly, and quite without warning. The video hardware on the logic board has failed–I can still back up the laptop (and have been doing exactly that) using a FireWire cable, but the laptop itself is shot.

Since the laptop is vital to what I do for a living, I’m going to need to have it repaired or replaced. Depending on how expensive this is, it may mean I don’t go to San Francisco this January.

Suck.