Addictions
Sam Malone on KTRH radio this morning. He was talking about this new study that decaf coffee isn’t caffine free (gee,really?) and was polling his callers about their addictions — not alcohol or drugs, but anything else.
One caller talked about his wife – she’s addicted to Star Trek, and watches it from DVD for 4 hours every night — to the extent that if power fails, she reverts to a portable DVD player with a backup generator!
Personally, I’m not quite that bad. My wife thinks I’m addicted to the computer and Anime, but I really only have one overriding obsession: Dr. Pepper, and when I can get it, particularly Dublin Dr. Pepper, bottled in Dublin, Texas, southeast of Fort Worth. Dublin DP is made using the original formula, with Imperial Pure Cane Sugar instead of corn syrup. The real sugar makes a sweet drink, but not syrupy sweet, and I prefer to think of this drink as my personal Nectar of the gods.
So you’ve now read about my addiction…what’s yours?
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New site layout complete!
the SpywareInfo Forums or any of the sites listed at the Alliance of Security Analysis Professionals site.
For help with Tivo2Mpg, see this thread at the DealDatabase Forums.
Other than that, I’ve added NoIdea.US to FeedBurner. the syndication link can be found in the footer of this page, or by clicking on the “feedburner” icon in the right column.
Welcome back, and thanks for reading!
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Almost finished….
This has become my TODO list for updates….
fix image pointers and links in imported stories
apache rewrite rules for staticpages, articles.php, links.php from old layout
copy links from old site to new links database
update links script to log clickthroughs
shrink the outer columns a bit for more space in the middle.
RSS parser for layout side box (US-CERT or such)
Update the “about” box.
Finally, reconfigure apache from the test domain to ‘new’ site!
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Open Season on Christianity
Open Season on Christianity–A Little Respect Is Harder to Find. The quote that attracted the most attention from me is this:
“The gallery owners know that although Catholics will be offended, they won’t harm them.” He added: “If they were to do the same to Islam, all hell would break loose.”
What do you think?
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Oni-Con 2006 Announced
This year, Oni-Con will take place October 20-22 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Information on hotel rooms will be coming ASAP. It’s good to know that last year’s hotel fiasco isn’t going to stop a good thing…
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ISP (dis)Services
OpLink in the last year and a half. Unfortunately, we will be moving soon (end of lease, and some problems with our house) and several of the houses we are looking at are in areas not covered by Oplink.
Right now, we live just between Houston and Katy, Texas, in the no-man’s-land of Harris County. However, we do get some “benefits” of Houston, since SBC (or “the new AT&T”) provides our phone service. Oplink runs over the SBC phone system to provide DSL service.
Unfortunately, SBC doesn’t provide phone service into the heart of Katy. That luxury is provided by Consolidated Communications. Which means my only choice for DSL service appears to be Consolidated Communications.
This wouldn’t be so bad, except…
To get the same level of service that I have with Oplink, it would cost over $80 more per month. That is, I pay $65 a month right now for 1.5 Mbit/384 kbit plus a block of 6 static IP addresses. I am allowed to run servers (which is where this site, and several others, as well as email, are hosted). I have virtually unlimited bandwidth (which is nice when there are several thousands of people trying to download a malware fix file).
Consolidated requires a business account to host servers, at a cost of $59 a month, plus $20 a month for static IP addresses (I currently use three). And that only guarantees me 1 Mbit/384 kbit rates. So, for $110 a month, I can get less features than I currently have, with less customer service (I’ve had to deal with Consolidated’s attempt at customer service for some clients). I don’t even know if they have bandwidth caps; haven’t checked on that yet.
So, what about cable modem service?
Well, since the only option for that seems to be RoadRunner (thanks, Time Warner….) I checked into their pricing and features. To get a single static IP address, I again have to have “business class service”, and it would cost me at least $129 a month. For a block of 5 addresses, it’s nearly $200 a month! Therefore, that becomes a non-option.
I just talked to Earthlink, who offers cable modem service in that area as well. Unfortunately, they don’t even have an OPTION for static IP addresses.
So, it looks like I’m stuck. I know, I’ve got at least a month before this becomes a real issue, and we may find a different property that we like that falls into the SBC service area. Until then, I’ll keep searching….
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Merry Christmas
[brief rant on]
Will all you Christmas-haters please stop persecuting the rest of us in our “land of the free”? I do love the irony, however, of using “happy holidays” to substitute for the seasonally-proper “Merry Christmas”…looking at the origin of the word holiday, from dictionary.com:
[Middle English holidai, holy day, from Old English hlig dæg : hlig, holy; see holy + dæg;, day; see day.]
Enough said? It always comes back to the religious! I’ll bet that next year, “Seasons Greetings” will be mandated as it doesn’t make any reference to God, Christ, holiness or anything non-secular….
[brief rant off]
So,
Merry Christmas
to ALL, even those who aren’t so merry!
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