Nano-Plasm review by the famous Jack Brummet

Jack Brummet of All This is That has a review of my book Nano-Plasm and it is a positive one! W00t! ______________________________________ Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover

Motherfuckers at Chase blow Quicken Credit Card transition

Important: Your last download must be completed on or before June 26th at 7:00 PM ET. Download as close to the June 26th date as possible. Failure to do so may result in missing transactions.

These motherfuckers. I dutifully fire up Quicken and ask it to download and it says, "Sorry, too late!" As I write this it is 8:45 a.m. (PT), or 11:45 am (ET), so there should have been plenty of time to spare.

So I called up the motherfuckers on the phone. I was put through to an online specialist. "Sorry, there's nothing we can do! The programmers started early! But don't worry, we won't lose any of your transactions!"

I said, I see no reason to believe anything you say. And she said, "Well, there's nothing we can do - there's no way to troubleshoot this - that's just the way it is."

In fact, I doubt they will lose any transactions. What are the odds of that? And also, I think it secretly downloaded my transactions anyway, and THEN put up the error message, because it downloaded a transaction from three days ago, and I haven't connected in three days.

What's even dumber is the entire transition plan. They want everyone to download on this day, as close to the deadline as possible - that could be hundreds of thousands or a million people. Next, they have a detailed timeline as to when you must stop using the old card and must start using the new card - like I'll remember that.

Finally, now, almost all of our cards are with Chase, which is scary. I like a little diversification in my credit services.

Anyway, as George Carlin might have said: motherfuckers.
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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Fake Steve Jobs and friends say Good Bye to George Carlin

I recommend the PhotoCranks here that say good bye to George Carlin.

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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Yahoo?

A web-based letter generator to help people resign from Yahoo.

Be sure to try out the various drop-down menus.

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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

The Fourth of July

Here is a ragtime version of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" and "God Bless America" played by yours truly (with a little digital editing [very little - but that was hard to play straight through]).

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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft?

Gates and Paul Allen and original Microsoft employees from Albuquerque.

I was told the following joke by a person who claimed to know the person that delivered the punch line and that he heard the story from that guy. But I contacted that guy who denied he ever said anything so crazy, although he is old enough that this could have happened.

The joke is:

Bill Gates announces the name of his new company. "I'm going to call it Microsoft!"

And the mystery person, who was allegedly present at this moment, says, "Why? Are you naming it after your dick?"

But I'm pretty sure this never happened, in spite of the detailed attribution (which I am politely not passing on to you).

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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

CD Sales Down, LP Sales Up | The Onion

CD Sales Down, LP Sales Up | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

"'LPs may be nice for the audio tourist, but wax cylinders have a warmer, more natural sound.'"

Way back in the day when people still argued about CDs I was visiting with a sound engineer at 525 (a very fancy video post facility down in California). His point was pretty simple: if CDs sound a bit "grainy" to you, just turn down the treble. Records, it turns, reproduce the same 22kHz signal that CDs reproduce, except when they get a scratch or a nick, they sound awful. So LPs were mastered to account for that, hence the warmer sound, which is basically just less treble, in ultra-simple terms. This audio engineer (I wish I remember his name) said that the ear fatigues more quickly at the high range of human hearing, and so turning down the treble knob also makes long term listening more pleasurable.

I've tried it, and it's kind of amazing. First, you miss the brightness of your music, especially, of course, from a CD. But after awhile it does feel warmer and your ear compensates and listens more closely to the high end.

It's actually pretty cool. Just turn down the treble, give it five minutes, and then see how it sounds. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

More recently, an audio engineer at the Pacific Northwest Audio Engineering Society said that CDs were a bit coarse and grainy in the early days because early CD players didn't have very good filters. Turning down the treble helped even more back then but the trick works even today.

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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

MSFTextrememakeover: Eight Years of Wrongness

MSFTextrememakeover: Eight Years of Wrongness

I don't know what to say. The article is brutal. What's worse is that it's very well written. FSJ* would be proud.

Ballmer announced he would retire in 10 years. Does anyone think he will last that long? Methinks the sharks are circling.

___________

* FakeSteveJobs
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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Web sites that can be used in meetings to make editorial comments

TFF*: Instant Rimshot

-also-

PFF**: Sad Trombone

-or even-

Instant Crickets

_______________
*Too fucking funny.
**Pretty fucking funny.


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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

MediaDefender

The Culture of Ownership: (by Molly Wood of CNET)

Over the past weekend, the online video network Revision3 fell victim to a distributed denial of service attack that took down their entire site and even crippled their internal email servers. And upon investigating the source of the attack, they discovered it had originated from MediaDefender, an antipiracy “defense” firm (owned by digital media entertainment company ARTISTdirect) that claims to use “non-invasive technological countermeasures employed on P2P networks to frustrate users’ attempts to steal/trade copyrighted content.”

What they really do is poison peer-to-peer networks with blank files, decoy files, and use what amount to targeted denial-of-service attacks to prevent users from accessing, uploading, or downloading files that Media Defender has been hired to protect. And what they did in the case of Revision3 was inject a bunch of torrents into a Rev3 p2p server that the company uses to legally distribute its own video files. And the way they injected these torrents was by exploiting a vulnerability in Rev3’s server configuration. And when Rev3 stopped its servers from pointing to MediaDefender’s faux torrents, the MediaDefender servers went DDoS nuclear. So, first they hacked Revision3, and then they trashed the place, all in the name of copyright “protection.”

And later down the page:

"YouTube says a Viacom victory, then, would make it unsafe for any online service provider, be it an ISP, a video upload service, or simply a website operating forums, to keep running in an even remotely open fashion, for fear of massive copyright infringement liability, and that safe harbor unquestionably applies to them. In fact, they say, “YouTube fulfills Congress’s vision for the DMCA.” On the other hand, Viacom claims YouTube is not the type of service provider meant to be protected under safe harbor."

I read about the DDos attack on Revision3, and then in a later blog entry I read about the attack on ISPs, and my excessive associative brain put the two together and I came up with this:

It is trival to put MediaDefender out of business. All that is required is for every ISP to agree that these guys are slimey weasels and to stop selling them service. One or more ISPs out there are helping MediaDefender by providing them service. The RIAA and related goons want ISPs to shut down (or at least fink on) random subscribers who might be downloading copyrighted material without permission. (Lots of people download copyrighted material with permission. A side question - how does an ISP know what the context of the download is?)

Anyway, the RIAA is out to make life as an ISP miserable. It seems only fair that the ISPs return the favor. In fact, I would suggest that whoever is providing Internet services to any record company just stop right now. No email, no web service, no torrent attacking, nothing!

Let the record labels live without Internet service for a month or two and then we'll see where the power lies. Can you imagine the screaming? And yet those same bastards will happily cut off service to anyone. Fuckers.

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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Amazon Web site hit by technical failure

Amazon Web site hit by technical failure - Internet- msnbc.com:

"As one of the Internet's giants, Amazon attracts massive amounts of traffic and money. Analysts forecast the company will bring in more than $19 billion in revenue this year. Last quarter, the company recorded $2.13 billion in sales in North America."

$19 billion a year is about $2 million per hour of revenue for Amazon.com. So the outage only cost $4 to $5 million revenue dollars, depending on how long you think the outage lasted (estimates vary from 2 to 2 1/2 hours) - not a tragedy, but very annoying, I'm sure.

At 10:16 a.m., the Web site began reporting troubles. Five minutes later, it fully went off line. It was back up to 60 percent capability around noon. By 1 p.m., the Web site was at 100 percent, White said.

Still, those are big numbers. Someone was sweating bullets.
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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Loyalty Program Offers Freebies (but Read the Small Print)

Your Money - Loyalty Program Offers Freebies (but Read the Small Print) - NYTimes.com:

"What he has found is that it doesn’t take a lot to get diners, for example, to do what restaurants want. One Chockstone gambit involves using the customer’s receipt for a come-on. Return within 10 days, perhaps, and you can get a free dessert, the slip says.

“It’s amazing this stuff works so well,” Mr. Lipp said. “What we’ve found is that people can be bought for a cookie.”"

You should see what our dog will do for a single kibble.

This card, a run-of-the-mill gift card that many customers choose to reload regularly with money, has become a juggernaut. Already, it is the payment vehicle for one in seven Starbucks transactions, and consumers both loaded and redeemed more than $1 billion on the cards in the company’s most recent fiscal year. Starbucks figures it will activate 50 million of them this year alone.

One billion dollars routed through Starbucks! Holy Crap! That's a lot of money.
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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Video Games Live announces 50 new shows!

Video Game News, Video Game Coverage, Video Game Updates, PC Game News, PC Game Coverage - GameDaily:

"From humble roots in 2002, the video game concert series run by game composers Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall has fifty dates confirmed over the next year, from Canada to Europe and back again."

And to think I knew him (Tommy) when he was a tester. See the video I shot oh-so-long-ago.




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How to crash an in-flight entertainment system

I'm reading "Security Engineering", one of the greatest books ever, and the following story fits right in with it:

How to crash an in-flight entertainment system

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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

ThinkGeek :: External USB SATA Drive Dock

Too cool for words:

ThinkGeek :: External USB SATA Drive Dock



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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Wow - who knew? Microsoft Windows on 2,048 processors

Microsoft Tests Speedy New HPC Server: "That particular test had HPC Server 2008 running on 2,048 processors to deliver over 75 percent of the theoretical peak performance for a single application, a company spokesperson said.

"We employed the unmodified HPL code to solve a linear system with 681,984 unknowns in a little over 3 hours at an average speed of more than 18,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second," the spokesperson said. "The program had a total memory footprint of almost 4TB.

"The cluster consisted of 256 compute nodes equipped with two new quad-core Intel Xeon E5450 processors running at 3GHz clock speed each. All nodes are connected with each other by a fast InfiniBand fabric with a 288-port switch from Cisco Systems. The cluster nodes were built by Fujitsu Siemens," he said.

Amos said trials are ongoing in the HPC Server 2008 group and that Microsoft will continue to ramp up its R&D in the high-performance computing space."

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© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Gas Prices around the US of A

USA National Gas Price Map

Gas is expensive here in Seattle! But not as expensive as in LA. But that's about the only place where gas costs more.

I keep hearing about gas hitting $4.00 a gallon. What are people talking about!? It's about $4.50 here for premium.
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