Meankids and Kathy Sierra

So someone starts a site to deliberately bash another blogger, then is shocked, just shocked, when the bashing gets vicious. Spare me the bullshit. What happened is precisely what they encouraged to happen.

This is like the small number of pro-war protesters on March 17 at the DC antiwar march and rally who spat on Iraq war veterans, insulted marchers carrying pictures of their children who’d been killed in combat, and screamed an unending stream of sexual insults at women.

Pondscum all.

Where to report spam

A seasoned sysadmin tells you what to do and where to report spam.

PrimoPDF

PrimoPDF is free, and allows you to print to a PDF from anywhere, a seriously useful tool, check it out.

MyImager. Online image editing

Sometimes I need to edit an image for, say, a blog post, from another computer that doesn’t have an image editing program installed. MyImager.com is free, and will do the basics like resizing and optimizing quickly and easily. So, now editing an image from anywhere is simple.

How to label cables

Use these to identify the spaghetti of power cords, etc. that we all have. Fasten the marker tie on, then label it with a permanent marker. Then you’ll always know what each cord is for.

I stow all the cables etc. for a specific product in a large baggie, also labeled using a permanent marker. This really helps in finding stuff faster when it’s at the bottom of your gear bag.

Online hotel and plane reservations

We’re travelling on business now, the trip was planned at 4 days and will end up being 8. So, we had to change the return flight and add more days to the hotel stay.

That’s when the problems started. The travel site we used to book the flight kept me on hold for 90 minutes while they tried to rebook it, then said, sorry, we can’t do it. So, I called the airline directly (who previously had me on hold for an hour with no answer, which is why I called the travel site), and this time got through quickly and they rebooked me in 5 minutes.

The hotel booking site was a nightmare. I called, asking to extend our hotel stay. The price was too high, so I said no. Consequently, I found they’d not only booked the extra days, they’d raised the price retroactively for the days we’d already been in the hotel. Since I can document their weaseldick behavior, we’ll have no trouble getting the credit card company to reverse the extra charges the hotel booking site tried to gouge us with. And we’ll never use them again. What pondscum.

Henceforth, we’ll use such sites to get an idea of price, then book directly through the airline or hotel. No more middlemen if we can possibly avoid it.

Scoble says ‘Microsoft sucks’

and gets quoted in TimesOnline UK

Which shows the increasing power of bloggers. Plus, he’s right. Microsoft doesn’t get it.

VCs going green

The attention of the world’s biggest venture capitalists has left the computer world and moved to the world of environmentalism.

Who’s leading this charge? John Doerr. The VC behind Google and many of the world’s hottest companies.

This is huge.

Comment spam flood

My main blog, is getting way more comment spam this past week or so. It was averaging a few hundred a day, now it’s more like 1500. Anyone else getting this?

Ubuntu doesn’t work with my wireless

Aargh. We moved, and the new house is all wireless. My Ubuntu computer was wired in the old house. Tried to configure the wireless to work and no luck. Checking the Ubuntu forums seems to indicate that one of the most popular wireless routers, the LinkSys WRT54G is not supported.

No, I’m not going to run 50 feet of cable just to get Ubuntu to work. There’s so much to like about Ubuntu but maddening  incompatibilities like this make me wonder if it’s really ready for prime time. This is worse than Windows.

New Microsoft security feature

Microsoft’s antivirus deletes users’ e-mails

Not just one email, either, it deletes the entire freaking .pst or .dbx, which means ALL emails are gone. It’s difficult to understand how a supposed world class company could let a bug that bad get through the testing process.

It just works

Someone really likes their new Airport Extreme

Airport! Extreme!

Want to know how we installed it? Chris plugged it in. Now it works. That’s it. Done. Plug it in: works. One step.

It’s pricey though, $175. But it does stream from your iPod and the ‘turn it on and it works’ is a real nice feature indeed.

All wireless at home

In our old home, we had wireless notebooks and wired desktops. The desktops had been wireless but were extremely flaky to the point of being unusable while the notebooks were sometimes flaky, with a lot of weak signals and losing the net.

Even putting a Range Expander in the same room as the desktops didn’t help, so I went wired with them.

We just moved and everything is wireless, and the signal is strong and steady. The difference is 1) the new 5.8 MHz phones that don’t interfere with the wireless like the 2.4 MHz phones did and 2) the houses are further apart here so there’s less interference from whatever the next door neighbors have.

So, no need to run cable all over the house!

New cordless phone

Decided to replace our cordless phones (that are still on the moving van) with new 5.8 MHz phones that won’t interfere with the wifi. Found a quite excellent cordless phone (43-5860) at Radio Shack. The base set and two satellite phones was a moderate $100. The satellites don’t plug into a phone jack, just into a regular power outlet. Programming it was easy, and keeping the speed dials numbers in sync between them just takes a few menu selections.

I’m always kind of startled by what Radio Shack has. They are ubiquitous, have lots of stuff on hand, aren’t even slightly flashy, and the quality generally is quite good with reasonable prices.

Hawaii Kona - Purple Mountain Farm

Sweet Maria’s has the green beans in stock, and once you start roasting your own cofee, well, store-bought just tastes old and stale. Plus, you save money too. This Hawaiian Kona is $17 a lb. vs the $25-30 per lb you can expect to pay for roasted.