eviljim.com: the mac days

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

I need to move.

From Alfonso.  Meme: “Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don’t blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don’t blog about, but you’d like to hear about, and I’ll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on yaoi, favorite type of underwear, graphic techniques, etc. Repost in your own journal so that we can all learn more about each other.”

I must have an unbeknownst fear of heights because watching this video makes me incredibly uncomfortable:

Maybe it’s because I’m switching buildings after a year and a half here at the Google (so, if you had been planning an elaborate way past security to murder me, HA! Too late. Unless you do it before 5:00 PM Pacific), or maybe it’s just been long enough, but today I crown a new “Worst Movie Ever.”

Those who know me or that have ever asked “what do you think the worst movie ever is?” know I have an immediate answer. I have never needed any time to think about it, because the movie stood out as the worst movie-going experience of my life:

8MM is was the worst garbage I had ever seen. It was long. It was stupid. The plot was boring and uninteresting. The “twist” at the end was not even remotely exciting nor was it “a commentary on the absurdity of human preconceptions.” It was just terrible. I remember seeing it in the theater and, despite going to a 9 PM showing, fully expecting to leave the theater and it be daylight out.

But. It’s reign of near 9 years as worst movie ever has ended. Today, officially, it is replaced by the new Worst Movie Ever. This one will be more controversial as, apparently, everyone can appreciate this movie except me.

Atonement is the worst piece of trash that has ever attempted to pass itself as a movie. And I’ve seen “Envy” — I would rather watch Envy twice than watch this even partly again (except, maybe, the chocolate bar scene).

First of all, the beginning was drawn out. You’re placed in this colonial-styled world wondering when something, anything will happen. People show up. There are twins. People are suspicious. A play is written by a little girl who is, as we are told, “quite fanciful.” A strange chocolate magnate acts as one would expect the Monopoly man to act after having a life-altering stroke. You see Keira Knightley’s butt, or rather, just the beginning of it. There is a Keira Knightley sex scene, which, originally was sold to me as reason to see this movie. It is not. The last sex scene sold to me through lies and mistruths was in “Brokeback Mountain” before I knew it was about gay cowboys (not that there is anything wrong with being gay or a cowboy. Also I wrote that as “coyboys” the first time and I don’t know what that means). I feel just as betrayed this time. An urn is broken. There is a bee. At some point you watch people watching things for a good couple minutes.

Also, the producer apparently contracted someone to create a little recurring diddy throughout the movie that involves a typewriter used as a musical instrument. The main character also uses a typewriter. It’s all very apt. Apparently the producer thought it so much so that it’s played every minute. Click-click-CLICK-click. Ding. Fortunately near the end I believe they either ran out of royalty money or forgot about it.

FINALLY something starts happening – a rape occurs and a false accusation is waged by our “protagonist.” You start wondering what really happened and

All the sudden, people are speaking subtitled French and are at war.

It is unclear why.

Then, Hedwig is there. From the Harry Potter movies. That was pretty sweet. Later in the movie you see a bunch of dead wizard children as well. I hate to ruin the best parts for you, but you need to know the truth.

Anyway, you sit through these war sequences, which are relatively pointless and irrelevant (go watch “Saving Private Ryan” instead), until we get to find out what really happened in the first part of the movie.

Or so you would think. Apparently the producer, the same guy who loved that typewriter song, wanted to win an Oscar. So he rented an Oscar award winning picture at random, and decided to emulate it. The movie he picked was “Titantic.”

My general summary of “Titantic” is that the old woman was a liar, and a bit of a tramp (this summary stolen from Seinfeld, because it is so succinct and correct).

So at the end of Atonement you find out that the woman (who we already know as a liar) makes up for her misdeeds by lying some more, except this time instead of to the police, she lies to the audience. Also, if not being liar is enough, she’s got dementia so who knows what really happened? Fortunately, I don’t care. I was just so excited that she was like 90 years old; it meant the movie couldn’t possibly last much longer (this is true; if you are forced to see this film, know that when she becomes old your misery is almost at end).

Do not go see Atonement. It is bad. It will make you unhappy.

The fact that my Homeowner’s Association pays for my $3,800 roof leak repair has made the $260 I pay monthly seem much more reasonable and tolerable.

I was quite startled by Walmart’s architectural choices, seeing this picture in a Walmart page on Wikipedia:

The best part is the first line of the caption got me hopeful that this actually was a picture of a Walmart.

Over two nights and probably 4 or 5 hours:

7 reboots.
4 failed updates.
One update which was progressing quite well at downloading even though the network card was not connected to a network.

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate has been upgraded to SP1.

So far I have yet to notice a single difference in speed, performance, or anything else.

Click for Full Size Image

Attempting to Bootcamp XP on my Mac was a mistake. Two hours later I have a semi-working version of XP SP1 that refuses to upgrade to SP2 (hey, it’s only 3 years old. Of course there are still going to be major, blocking issues).

I’ve gone back and forth on just buckling and installing Vista instead, but I don’t want to. I think I might expunge Vista from my life. There’s just absolutely no reason to run it.

From what I understand I can “slipstream” SP2 onto my SP1 disc and then burn it, though I have to do something special to make the disc bootable.

Installing (rather, attempting to install) XP has made me realize what I’m leaving behind and how happy I am with my Mac. Perhaps this is the main reason Apple developed Bootcamp — to keep switchers in line by occasionally reminding them of their alternative.

PS: If you attempt to run Windows Update before activating your copy of XP, it will redirect you to a page. This page will have a small line at the top saying to activate Windows, and the remainder of the 99% of the page tells you your XP is not authentic and you should buy an authentic copy for $149. The one line of text explaining you need to activate has a little zippy you can click on, which expands to add text on how to activate. So, they hid the most relevant text on the page, simply to give more space to something the user probably doesn’t even need. The whole page is horribly confusing and quite possibly has stolen money from innocent people.

I am extraordinarily proud with myself.

Yahoo is sending 3 requests a second to my webserver for no apparent reason, requesting files that do not exist, and using a HTTP/1.0 browser (WTF is up with that? Can Yahoo not access virtual hosted websites? Are you serious? Is it possible they are further behind than Microsoft?)

I realized this when trying to search my logs for an IP that a spammer used to sign up for a webhosting account with — at first I thought *he* was flooding my site with requests to prevent that information from being available to, say, figure out who he is.

The requests already violate common sense, check this out:

[Fri Sep 7 15:13:13 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.215] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:13:13 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.215] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:14:21 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.219] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm
[Fri Sep 7 15:14:21 2007] [error] [client 209.191.87.219] File does not exist: /home/sites/sitesurvival.com/public_html/1ktnm

First off, don’t request the same URL twice in the same second. The reason this does not make sense is obvious. Second, if you receive a 404, that file does not exist. It is quite unlikely that some random jib of content was created between your first and second request (which are only separated by one minute).

Also, it’s complete rubbish to NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF CORRECTLY AS A ROBOT:

209.191.87.219 – - [28/Nov/2007:20:19:45 -0600] “GET /nmfjopqw80gty HTTP/1.0″ 404 284 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

This gives me no information as to who is constantly barraging my server with requests.

Going through the last 50,000 requests (which only reaches to about 15 hours ago) over 49,000 are requests from Yahoo for non-existent pages.

I noticed the following story in my Google mail:

And this made me reminisce.

You probably won’t know it unless you ever did paste-up on the staff of a newspaper (my experience being from my high school newspaper), but typically headlines are not written by the same person who wrote the article. This is typically because it’s unknown what size the headline will need to be — it’s often not until the day of layout that the width, height, and specific layout of a story is determined.

So the two things you need to know:

- Those people laying out the stories for the paper also write the headlines.
- Paste-up is typically a several hour tedious process. I never even had to do the worst parts, because I wasn’t an editor, but I helped out a lot. I thought it was fun; most people didn’t share my opinion.

Paste-up is putting together a puzzle, except every piece is looks the same, it’s just a different size. Also, you can kind of cut pieces of the puzzle off. Or split them in half. But doing so sometimes means that other piece you already cut needs to get glued back together and put somewhere else…

Anyway, enough rambling. By the time you start writing headlines you know how much width you have and are given a point size. This means, since printed fonts are not fixed-width, a varying amount of characters that again you have to fiddle with to fit yet not be too short.

(We used a WordPerfect 5.1 macro for this, if you were curious. I’d include a WordPerfect 5.1 screenshot, but it’s completely unnecessary. Close your eyes and imagine a completely blue DOS screen. Now imagine gray fixed-width characters which represent variable-width characters. Or just Google it you lazy jerk).

It’s pretty much the only creative part of the entire paste-up process I got to participate in. As such, I tried hard to write some great headlines.

Let me tell you: there are not many literary devices one can employ in 5-8 words. Allegory? Characterization? Certainly you can’t build an entire climax in there.

The headline writer’s crutch is alliteration. It’s the only thing you can do to make a headline pop.

Thus, you get so many “W”s in a headline.

Personally, though, I think this shows this guy’s a newb… “W” is the widest point-size character; I would have tried to alliterate on “I” or something, to get more words in.

My personal best was an entire headline — 7 or 8 words — with words starting in S. I had to fight my editor (Ericca Pollack, if I recall correctly) and eventually our teacher said it was OK. I need to dig up that Tiger Tales (more alliteration! I told you!) if I still have it. I’m still very proud of it.

I’m leaving on an airplane in a few hours to go to Vegas to celebrate a traditional Thanksgiving with my family.

Seeing as I recently picked up an iPod Touch, I figured I should throw some video on it in case I don’t sleep through the flight (which is at 6 AM — in other words, the need for videos is actually academic).

I’d been hankering to re-watch Firefly for the hundredth time, so I figured I’d pop the series on my iTouch and enjoy.

Last time I attempted to convert a DVD to anything else it took about a day for one DVD. With this outdated knowledge, I decided to acquire some AVIs of the show, even though I already own it, as I figured that’d run a lot quicker.

While that acquisition was taking place, I figured a dry run would be in order. I had the entire Arrested Development series on my HD, and figured there’s nothing wrong with taking one of the funniest shows in history along as well.

Things did not go well.

I found a piece of free software — ffmpegX — that would convert the AVIs to MP4 (iPod format) but it didn’t have a built in option for iPod Touch/iPhone size. Also, it wouldn’t let me add more than one AVI at a time, and it would reset the settings each time I tried to load a new file. This led to incorrect settings and skewed pictures and all sorts of unhappiness.

So everyone was talking about this other thing, VisualHub, so I give it a go. Converts the first video quite fine, so I drop $22 to get a licensed copy.

Of course, once I do that, it decides to no longer work and all the converted files have audio off by many seconds. Tweaking options didn’t help. They were useless.

“Bah,” I say to myself.

Then I remember some co-workers telling me about Handbrake, a nice little tool to convert DVDs straight into whatever you want – DiVX, iPod Touch, ASCII, etc. I figure I can rip the first disc overnight and the second today — I’ve got a few cores now so I assumed it would take at most 12 hours each.

I was wrong – apparently the state of DVD conversion has come leaps and bounds since my last attempt. To convert the whole DVD (which includes ripping the content and decrypting it from the disc) only took about 1.5 hours for a bit over 3 hours of content.

Not only that the quality was leaps and bounds better than re-encoding the AVIs I had downloaded. Despite the same bit rate, they looked fantastic. I understand re-encoding causes quality to suffer, but the AVIs were pretty good quality, so I was surprised to see it cause such a large difference.

Huzzah! I will have Firefly on the plane. How exciting for me. I might rip Arrested Development, too.

(By the way, one HUGE thing — despite ripping stuff, consuming both cores 100%, the Mac responded instantly throughout the entire process. Even playing a video file while ripping didn’t skip. I was shocked that I could both encode AND still use my machine. On my Vista box, which was a 3 ghz machine, I couldn’t do *anything else*. I could hardly open a run window).

Amazon announced their eBook reader today, The Kindle. As an Amazon Junkie, I of course must give my opinions:

- “We wanted Kindle to be completely mobile and simple to use for everyone, so we made it wireless. No PC and no syncing needed. Using the same 3G network as advanced cell phones, we deliver your content using our own wireless delivery system, Amazon Whispernet. Unlike WiFi, you’ll never need to locate a hotspot. There are no confusing service plans, yearly contracts, or monthly wireless bills—we take care of the hassles so you can just read.”

Amazon is the first company to realize integrating wireless at no cost to the user is HUGE. Sprint is brilliant working with the company to provide this (it’s something, I think, a large number of devices will start to do). It’d be ridiculous for someone to expect me to pay a service fee for my eBook reader. While I don’t expect the Kindle become widespread, I expect this concept to catch on.

- The price is way too high, and I suspect Amazon knows that to be the case. I’d expect, especially with the service tie-ins, the price will drop to their cost or lower in a year or two. Especially considering they’ve got you as far as purchases go — you have to buy your books from Amazon — they’re going to make a good amount of money off of you just on the book purchases.

- It’s ugly as Betty

- Once again, as I felt with Amazon Unbox, they’re in a position to do combination purchases. For example, with Unbox, if you buy Season 2 of “Lost” you should get a free digital copy (you don’t, but you should). With Amazon, if you buy a hardcover, you should get a free or extremely discounted eBook copy (no more than, say, 99 cents). After all – you already own the book. If Amazon did this, I’d most likely buy this hideous device and also buy all my books from Amazon.

- Prices are reasonable for lots of things: 99 cents a month for full, wireless delivery of blogs isn’t bad (again, seeing as you grab them over a cellular network adds that value), $9.99 for a hardcover release isn’t bad, $.10 to send any document wirelessly to your reader isn’t bad (free cable-based support is allegedly there; if not, it should be). Some blogs appear to cost $2; that’s getting a bit expensive.

- This is a great delivery method for newspapers, and I can see their relevance returning if devices like this catch on.

- Free access to Wikipedia on the device and an integrated dictionary are awesome. I certainly could have used the latter when reading “Name of the Rose.”

If you travel a lot, I could see the expense making sense (though if it was half the price, it’d make it a no-brainer). Clearly they need to get Apple to design them some hardware.

The huge negative, of course, is the simple fact that I own a lot of books — I even own a lot of books I want, but have yet to have the time, to read. I don’t want to re-buy those books in order to read them on the new device.