Dale's blog. Why would you care?
For the past couple of days I have been working on assembling and figuring out the wiring and setup for the newest tool in the tool box. OK, it would be a BIG tool box. I’m just waiting for the rotary tool heads to arrive so I can do some real work with this sucker…
Well, it looks like one or more of the WordPress.com blog hosting site’s server(s) was/were hacked. Among the things the attackers got were, apparently, the keys used to interface WordPress.com blogs with Twitter and Facebook.
If you know me, you probably know I have a fairly low opinion of Facebook and a much, much lower opinion of Twitter (which could simply shorten its name by three letters to improve accuracy). There has been a disturbing, headlong rush over the past few years to concentrate far too many people’s personal lives onto the servers run by Facebook, Google, and a few others. I see this as problematic for a number of reasons.
First of all, I see a very great threat to personal privacy. It may be tempting to use these “services” for their intended purpose, but people tend to either ignore or forget basic common sense. OK, so Google lets you search the entire internet for “stuff”. Great, I love that. But shall we take a Google search as the Gospel truth? Google is a multi-billion-dollar corporation. They make lots of that money by selling advertising space. Where are those ads? In your search results. At the top of your search results. They also provide “free” email through Gmail. Free? Well, not really. Your email is examined, indexed, and used by Google to (can you guess it?) sell more advertising. “OK”, you say, “It’s not hurting me, I get free email out of the deal”. Great. Then you won’t mind if I stand by your mailbox, open all of your email, read it and sell a general synopsis of the contents to marketing companies who will use it to stand outside your house and wave advertising banners as you pull out of your garage – right? I mean, I’ll do it for free, and hand your mail to you after I’m done with it.
For some people Facebook is replacing email – not to mention phone calls, text messages, and in-person meetings. I lost count long ago of how many arguments have spiraled completely out of control due to simple misunderstandings and miscommunication. Some people’s newfound refusal to just pick up the phone and call someone, or drive ten minutes to visit in person and discuss things face to face, has been the cause of at least two family feuds that I know are going on at this moment. Brothers and sisters not speaking to each other, sons and daughters, friends falling apart — largely because we seem to be losing our willingness to communicate in ways that involve more than a few seconds of typing. Hurtful, horrible things that we would never dream of saying to someone in person just seem to slide right out of the keyboard and onto a website, to be seen by people who have absolutely no business knowing your business.
But I’ve strayed away from the WordPress thing. Yes, I run WordPress (the open source blog software) for my blog as well as another. But no, I don’t use the WordPress.com site. Why not? Well, this is one huge reason. By keeping my own data on my own systems, I am responsible for what’s there and how secure it is. I have control over how the site is run, the advertising supporting that site (or complete lack thereof), and whether my blog has to co-exist with those with whom I don’t want to be associated.
I’m sitting at a little table at a Chili’s in the Charlotte airport, writing a new blog entry using my cell phone. While it’s true that the keyboard is a little small for my massive mitts, if I want I can pull out the laptop and use it instead… connected to the Internet through the cell phone, of course.
I made it through the TSA checkpoint with no printed boarding pass, and will board the plane the same way. A new electronic boarding pass displays a 2-D barcode, which I can scan both places. This time I printed a copy just to be safe.
This morning I was able to remotely log into my server at home, and from there make a complete backup of the four web sites I am currently running on a GoDaddy server.
This is some cool stuff.
I finally took a few minutes (or maybe a couple of hours) to play around with QR codes. Those are the odd-looking square bar codes you see in a lot of places now, including on product boxes, in ads and on signs. Naturally there’s a free Linux program to generate them, so I did…
A sample contact card |
HamGadgets news blog |
This blog (home page) |
Link to MasterKeyer product page |
You get the idea. If you scan these with your Android, iPhone or Crackberry you’ll see that you can encode a lot of different stuff into one. I’ll be using these for sure… easy way to point people with smart phones to a web site, or to exchange contact information.
It occurred to me that the weblog was looking somewhat dated. The Blueberry theme was OK when I started it, but I liked the one I picked for the HamGadgets news blog a lot better.
One of the things I like is that it’s totally customizable… I can move, add and delete things at will, change the colors, the background, everything. I like it. Oh, and I’ll be posting pictures of the new truck in a couple of days. It’s awesome. 😀
Lisa and I spent several hours at a car dealer this evening, in a huge waste of everyone’s time. I hadn’t planned for it to be a waste of time. If they had what I was looking for and we could come to an agreement on price, I was ready to buy. Unfortunately (or maybe not, for me), the car dealer games cost them a sale.
The first price they came up with — after leaving us cooling our heels for a bit too long — was, of course, ridiculous. Less than blue book trade value for my current truck against retail for the new one. Now my ’03 Sport Trac is a pretty desirable model in great shape with low mileage, good tires and a nice aftermarket in-dash nav system and backup camera. It’s going to sell quickly and without a lot of time or money spent cleaning it up. We politely declined, and it was time for Round 2. I told the guy we were several thousand dollars apart, and gave him a number I thought was more fair… from which Lisa then suggested we trim another couple thousand. Half an hour or so later, we get the answer; it’s still a couple thousand higher than Lisa’s figure.
By this time I’d had enough time to think about what we were doing about that I had pretty much talked myself out of buying that truck — at any price. It lacked a few options I really wanted, and had a few I specifically did not want. By the time we finally decided we were done and asked for the keys to my truck (which had disappeared, of course) the sales manager made a last ditch effort to get us to take it for a thousand under even Lisa’s number, which I thought was pretty low anyway. Sorry, too late.
If we’d been able to dispense with the idiotic games, if we hadn’t been left waiting on negotiations for so bloody long, we might have considered taking a truck home with us. The guy could have come up with an offer a thousand or even two higher than their last offer, right off the bat, and we might have done the deal. Maybe. I would have regretted it later, but they’d have made a sale, and it still was a very nice truck. Problem was, they felt the need to play the kind of stupid games that have given car dealers a bad name. And we’ve seen it all before and recognize all of it for the nonsense it is:
We walked in around 4 PM and didn’t get out of there until well after 7. By that time I was tired and hungry, Lisa was about ready to fall over, and they had managed to convince me not to buy the very nice truck we’d driven. And quite frankly, the whole experience pushed them down a couple of notches on my list of places I would buy from.
I’m going to give the next guy a 2-minute rundown of the stuff I am no longer willing to put up with, under any circumstances, and see if he still wants to deal. No running off to the manager — if I’m in a chair more than 5 minutes without a warm body with a number on the other side of the desk, I’m out the door. Make a deal or find me someone who can. I don’t pay sticker price, I don’t take lowball trade offers, and please don’t piss on my foot and tell me it’s raining.
Lisa and I were shopping a week or so ago, and were intrigued by a package of falafel we found. We’d both heard of falafel, but had never tried it. It sounded pretty good — so we bought some.
I have to say, this stuff is horrid. We’ve tried it in various forms — plain, dipped in ranch, with salsa, cut up in a fish taco, and last night I gave it a shot with some feta cheese — then with feta and ranch. Nothing doing. The only way to make this stuff palatable seems to be to mask it’s flavor (reminiscent of wet cardboard and pencil shavings) with salsa, and lots of it. Honestly, I’ll try anything a few times to try to get it right, but the remaining half of these little hockey pucks are probably going to become plant food.
I don’t know how hummus can be so good, and falafel so nasty. If you know of a way to make these things palatable, please let me know!
OK, so I haven’t posted in a while. Who cares? It’s not like anyone but me reads it anyway. In fact, *I* don’t read it either.
Lisa and I went out for a ride on our shiny new bikes from The Bike Way today. One lap around the eastern half of Zorinsky — the part with the dam. Not bad, for not having been on a bike for any distance in a couple of decades. I’m sure I’ll be feeling this tomorrow, and not in a good way… but it was fun and I’m glad we got the bikes.
Wow. What beautiful snow we have. It’s one of those where every tree branch carried a thick, white frosting, makes the entire neighborhood look absolutely beautiful. Of course now I have to go out, fix the snow blower and clear it all off of the driveway and sidewalks!
That’s OK. Sunday afternoon when we land in San Juan it will all be forgotten. 🙂
Finally got the new office / ham shack pretty much finished, cleaned up and took a few pics..
More to come later on.