eviljim.com: the mac days

It is really cold here.  This temperature is from my mom’s car, which doesn’t account the wind chill (which makes it about -32 C / -25 F).

19 below

For the past two years, we’ve had a QA morale event of Gingerbread House building.  Also for those past two years, I’ve decided to make gingerbread things instead of houses.  This year’s:

Front of it

Side of it

Interestingly enough, almost everyone had a different suggestion as to what this thing actually is.  As merely the artist of this object, I can’t say what it is.  What is important is the viewer’s interpretation.

So, what do you think it is?

Back in Illinois, I stopped by a local gas station and wanted a fountain soda.  I was quite impressed with the selection in the machine, and the sheer size of it.

For 16 weeks I’ve been taking a series of Improv classes, aptly titled Improv 101 and Improv 201 at Jet City Improv.  As an added bonus, at the end of Improv 201 you get to do a live showcase.  And as such, some Youtube is now needed.

Orchestrated Story:

What Happens Next:

Serious Scene:

Those are the parts I’m in, but if you’d like you can always check out the entire playlist for our whole showcase.  I was fortunate to sign up into a class of absolutely fantastic and creative people.

One thing that I find incredibly annoying is that both main-stream candidates have claimed they forsaw the current problems we’re facing in the economy.

Here’s McCain:
“My friend, I’d like you to see the letter that a group of senators and I wrote warning exactly of this crisis. Sen. Obama’s name was not on that letter.”

Obama has said very similar things as well.

Here’s the thing: you’re a group of senators.  You are some of the most powerful people in the country, and able to evoke change in the system.

Yet instead of doing so, you just wrote a fucking letter.  And I’m supposed to be impressed?  I’m supposed to vote for you because the best thing you could do, when faced with certain economic disaster, was compose up a little letter?

I’m not sure what I’d prefer: blisfully ignorant or bluntly incapable.  Oh what’s that?  We only get the second option?  Guess we’ll have that then.

So, it has become quite clear that the current societal structure is about to crumble, leaving us in anarchy.

What do you hope your new job will be?  I’m hoping something like a court jester or storyteller.  Like the King will call me to the dinner table, where they feast on those giant turkey legs they have at amusement parks, and I’ll tell them about heroic knights and goblins.

Yours?  Are you planning to start training for it?

Maybe I’ve grown more liberally sensitive and hippy since moving out to Washington, but I’m pretty sure this email I got from Best Buy is sexist.

Sexism Picture

The best part is the woman is too stupid to even know the proper name of the washer, and simply refers to it as a thing.  Awesome.

I’m on youtubes.

A while back I happened upon the Wikipedia entry for Muffin Top.  Needless to say I was amused that on the entry there is a picture of a blueberry muffin.  To portray, I suppose, the general effect a muffin top would suppose upon one.

When, in need of a reference on this exact topic, I loaded the Wikipedia page again today I happened to notice the introduction of a new picture; this picture of a portly girl who suffers from the page’s topical malady.

Often in jest, one supposes that an enemy would be listed in the dictionary under “Idiot”, “Buffoon” or their actions under “tom-foolery” or “skullduggery.”  Sadly this girl must now live her life as the epitome of Muffin Toppiness.

At least until she finds out and edits the page to remove the image.

This here website.  I wasn’t part of the launch, though, I switched off a few months ago.

Somehow, I was convinced to bike another 50 miles this Saturday.  It is allegedly less hilly.

1) When it shows you the upgrade dialog, it quite clearly notes if you’re going to need a reboot or not — both on the short view (”You need to install 1 update”) and the list view of updates.  The list view even tells you which updates require a reboot, and which do not.

2) After upgrading, it runs itself again to check for more updates.  Vista/XP desparately need to do this (it seems like I always have to run it 2 or 3 times to get all the updates).  Strangely despite implementing this awesome feature, the Mac never seems to need 2 or 3 waves of updates.

(The main reason this is nice is it popped up while I was remoted in.  I didn’t want to have to reboot since VineVNC server is somewhat crappy and doesn’t consistently start up until I’ve logged in).

Dear Target: you suck.

A few months ago I purchased an Odesa Firebowl from Target.  What I received instead was a piece of garbage that would not assemble.  The screws were made of too soft a metal, so when I screwed them in with the provided Allen Wrench, they stripped instantly.  This prevented my firebowl enjoyment, so I took the partly assembled item back to Target (I made sure I brought back all pieces).

Unfortunately, I bought it on sale a few months back.  I hadn’t yet assembled it since it had been either raining or snowing consistently.  I still had the receipt though, and they still stocked the item, so I didn’t think this would be an issue.  How very wrong I was.

Target’s policy is, according to the representative, the manager, and her manager, iron clad.  Nobody at the store has the power for any reason to accept a return past 90 days under any circumstances.  It doesn’t matter that it’s a defective product, that it’s branded with Target’s name on it, and that they still carry it.  If the receipt is over 90 days, you’re out of luck.  If you don’t have a receipt, you’re out of luck.

The middle manager was actually quite nice about the whole thing — she even mentioned that the problem has come up a lot before with people that have registries; if the gift-giver doesn’t include a receipt and you get a duplicate, you’re out of luck, unless you plan on calling up and asking for a copy of the receipt.  The store manager completely erased all good-will she generated when he told me “nobody can override the policy” and was generally rude (he told me not to even bother calling the 800 number since they won’t accept the return either).  He also said he doesn’t care if a product is defective or what the situation is.  90 days, that’s it.

So dejected I took the half-assembled firebowl back to my car.  As I left, a truck drove by and stopped, the driver asking if Target had any more in stock.  I told him they were junk, they don’t assemble, and they won’t take a return despite that.  I told him to go to another store (Fred Meyer) and get one that will actually go together correctly.  He said thanks and drove off.  A few seconds later, as he was exiting the Target parking lot, he stopped again, thanked me, and said that was the only reason he had been coming to Target.  He then drove off across the street to Fred Meyer.

That felt good.  That felt like fate.

So I purchased a new firebowl because I wanted a firebowl, and I’d already bought the wood to burn.  I take that one home and it doesn’t assemble either!

Fortunately Target’s iron-clad policy is in my favor this time; we’re well within the 90 day window for returns.  I load it up in the car and head back to Target.

On the way in, a couple people in an SUV ask why I’m returning the firebowl.  I tell them what I told the other guy — it’s junk, won’t assemble, etc — and they said they were considering buying one but, now, will make sure not to buy it at Target.  Again, awesome.

I go back to check out a sale on Xbox 360 points while Aarthy returns the firebowl.  I figured it’s best I stay out of it anyway; I said some rather choice words to the two managers the previous day.

One of the people who was working the return counter told all the other representatives NOT to help her.  When she got to the front of the line, the girl who was available was quickly assaulted by the other employee who accused Aarthy of lying about the firebowl, attempting to defraud the company.  She got hostile and was quite agitated.  When Aarthy didn’t leave, she called the manager.  The manager told her to accept the return (after about 5 minutes of her tirading).  He didn’t apologize for her irrational behavior; he just said she was “protecting the company” (not sure why they aren’t interested in protecting the customer — we  just bought two products that were both defective).

Long story short: I got the return, Target lost two immediate sales, and I don’t plan on going back anytime soon.

Who do these draconian policies make sense to?

Thanks to the magic of a Google Maps mashup, I was able to generate a rough graph of the height gain of my bike ride.

Click for a bigger copy.

Saturday I biked 49.3 miles.

My previous highest was about 28 miles.  28 flat miles.

My biggest takeaway from this is the American Diabetes Association apparently feels OK about lying about hill-related facts.

You can see the free socks they gave us as sported by me in the above picture.  I got the skull & bones socks; Alfonso’s were Rolling Stones (I win).

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle the 45 miles, but upon hearing the entire route only had 3 hills, I decided I could.  Sure, it was a pretty big increase but there’d be rest stops.

There were more than three hills.  There were three BIG hills.  But there were many, many more smaller hills.

There was also 2/3rds of the way through one hill that lasted SIX MILES that for some reason, they didn’t feel counted as a hill (six miles is no exaggeration.  It was uphill for six miles).

The worst part about the six mile hill was anytime we’d crest a hill, they’d make us turn off the street where the hill was ending so we could climb some other hill.

The elevation raise for the whole ride 3,417 feet.  I think our average speed was about 13-15 miles per hour, though going downhill I hit about 35 mph at one point.  Going uphill my average was about 5 mph.  Or stopped, panting for breath and/or electrolytes.

You may wonder why on a 45 mile bike ride, I ended up going 49.3.  That is because Alfonso and I decided to bike to the event.

We did not bike back home - Aarthy came and picked us up.

More pictures on picasa, or linked to me on Facebook.  Not many, because we were busy biking.

This weekend I’ll be biking:

• 45 miles to help fight diabetes.  Both via research and by getting myself on a bike.
• 25 MORE miles, to help promote beer, I guess.

I miss my sedentiary lifestyle.

4 days ago, I completely forgot about my 10 year anniversary.

It was the 10 year anniversary of my first domain name, and the creation of FreeCenter.com. You can take a 10-year-old-gander at my first domain here.

Wow.

Thinking back, it was actually a pretty monumental thing for me. Back then, I was just out of high school, working for a the Joliet Park District and/or Babbages, making — I think — $6 an hour.

A domain name cost $100 to register. My feeling was I wouldn’t spend $100 to register the name until I had earned that through my website (previously it was located on a subdomain of a free hosting company, Hypermart).

Once I hit the $100 threshold — it took a few months — I gave that money to Network Solutions and grabbed up FreeCenter.com. Shortly thereafter I purchased SiteGadgets.com and Amusive.com, bastions for remotely hosted content and a nice portal to link to my endevors (respectively). By that point I had earned out those domains, as well.

Purchasing the domains, especially the first, had some feeling of success. My websites, specifically FreeCenter, started as a sandbox to learn Perl from. And if I could make a hundred bucks off this internet in a few months, I bet putting my mind to it, I could make a bit more.

In unrelated life news I had decided to drop out of college and pursue a full-time job at the NHMA as, basically, an IT monkey. I still tinkered, of course, and as the now-realized bubble built up I got wrapped up in it. I quit my full time job because I finally hit a month where I earned more from my website than I did at my full time job (scales were slightly different. I made more that month from my website than my yearly salary at said full-time job). It helped that I also loathed it.

Now that I no longer had to sit in a cube for 8 hours a day reading the archives of Calvin and Hobbes (this was the start of my obsession with webcomics, by the way), I started taking my new “job” a little more seriously.

One thing I did was move from shared hosting to a dedicated server. Here’s my first ever dedicated server specs, purchased on 5/13/1999.

CeleronA 300 Mhz, 128 MB of RAM, 6 GB EIDE hard drive, 50 GB data transfer, 16 IPs, RedHat 6.0, and sadly no tape drive (it speaks well that there is even a blank for that on this contract).

The setup fee was $245 and I paid $295 per month for that.

February, 2001 I upgraded my server — for a setup fee of $175 and a monthly fee of $430 I was bumped up to a P3 800 Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 18.1 GB SCSI HD. Still no tape drive. I bumped up again on September 21, 2001. There was an additional 128 MB of ram and my processor was bumped up to 933 Mhz. My monthly fee went down to $375 (prices dropped dramatically between those two dates, as you can tell).

But a lot of stuff happened in between my first and second servers. More or less my entire contribution to the .COM bubble fell between those dates.

Here’s a random smattering:

• In February, 2000 the now-defunct LifeMinders offered to acquire FreeCenter.com.
• In April, 2000 About.com approached me about acquiring my Internet dominion. Talks were short; I hated About.com and still do.
• Somewhere around here I got an offer for my company from eFront, who basically attempted to defraud the entire internet. Yeah, I saw through that.
• Finally, I got probably the most serious offer from iBoost. Actually, this needs its own paragraph so I’m breaking out of this bulleted list.

iBoost was a “content agregator” — they attempted to buy a bunch of sites in an attempt to build up a huge advertisment base they could sell at a premium (similar to eFront, but much less fraudulent). Of course this all seemed well and good in 1999… but wait, I don’t want to spoil the story for you.

The CEO flew out to Chicago and we met at the Chicago Chop House (I figured it’d not look that great to meet in my mom’s basement). After that we talked numbers and was invited to fly out to LA to take a look at their operation.

Who passes on a free trip to California? Not me.

I flew out there, toured their office (they actually had a fairly large office), and saw a bit of LA. I remember going to see “Boiler Room” in a theater there with a few of the staff, including Chris Ueland, who was one of the founders of ml.org (if you were on the internet before 1999, you knew ml.org). I also was also introduced to the dulcet tones of Less Than Jake for the first time; one of their CDs is an album I insist upon listening on the first spring time day each year; all the windows rolled down (and now that I have one, the sunroof open).

I decided not to sell. In retrospect this is probably one of the most intelligent and fiscally correct decisions I’ve made in my entire life. Shortly after they folded, I suppose they just couldn’t deal without me. Or maybe it was the entire Internet crumbling in value. Probably one of those two, at least.

It would appear they scrapped the whole content thing and founded a fairly large hosting company in its wake.

Through the rough times after the bubble burst, I managed to keep my company profitable. I switched server providers and settled upon paying about half what I was. I returned to JJC, followed up with a degree from UIUC. You probably all know the rest, blah blah blah Microsoft, blah Google, blah blah.

There’s obviously still a lot about my life that’s defined by my entrepreneurialship, even if it is much less than I’d like. My business ticks on, and when I have time I try to work towards building the ideas I have, or improving what I’ve already created.

Negatives exist too — it’s hard for me to really vacation; if my server crashes, if someone’s spamming, or if a customer needs help, those are my responsibilities. It somewhat sucks to have to check your email every day when you’re in Hawaii. Or, you know, anywhere. But especially Hawaii. And, of course, it’s kind of a pain to basically have two jobs.

Even still, despite the fact that I’ve often thought of saying screw it and quitting my job, I’ve never thought of chucking off my company and being a normal employee like most people. And I suppose that’s why I have it, in the first place.

You’re? Really? Come on.

Oh and I shouldn’t even be getting this email - while my balance IS below $4.51…  it’s negative and thus I have no balance to pay.

Nothing too important, just felt it necessary to share this link.

Admittedly, this is about 10 years ago, but does anyone remember the “My Briefcase” feature?  It never worked.  It was so bad that some PM at Microsoft had to invent two accountants and a hypothetical situation.

The situation isn’t even realistic.  They were “meeting halfway to swap disks” and suddenly by using the My Briefcase feature they have a network.

(I also like that on the sidebar, there is a group called “Hidden Group” that is not hidden.  It was much easier to find than the dragon).

click to see