Please.

If you work for a small business or organization without the benefit of either a dedicated IT staff, or somebody who knows what they're doing, and some dedicated, proven, and automatic backup solution, stop what you are doing right now. Do not feign ignorance or incompetence. Set out. Fix the problem. Immediately.

All computers fail. And it is usually their storage mediums (hard drive, etc.) that go first, destroying your data.

I can assure you, the cost of system failure and recovery is far greater than the cost of an external hard drive and a bit of your time. If you want recommendations on how to do reliable, automatic backups, I can give them. They are relatively simple, usually free, and you can forget about them once they are working.

Don't let your entire business' livelihood sit on an iMac on the front counter. Don't make me have to put your hard drive in my freezer to get the heads cold enough to read data again. Don't make me have to guess which files are critically important to your organization and meticulously pore over them guessing at their possible contents. And don't assume I'll be able to fix the problem eventually.

Please.

Sort of wry, dry humor (my favorite), but the following is a guy's take (www.itworld.com) on a "truly honest privacy policy." It's written satirically, but the point he's getting across is a valid one: online businesses are just that, businesses, that are looking to make money in any way possible.

"At COMPANY _______ we value your privacy a great deal. Almost as much as we value the ability to take the data you give us and slice, dice, julienne, mash, puree and serve it to our business partners, which may include third-party advertising networks, data brokers, networks of affiliate sites, parent companies, subsidiaries, and other entities, none of which we’ll bother to list here because they can change from week to week and, besides, we know you’re not really paying attention.

We’ll also share all of this information with the government. We’re just suckers for guys with crew cuts carrying subpoenas.

Remember, when you visit our Web site, our Web site is also visiting you. And we’ve brought a dozen or more friends with us, depending on how many ad networks and third-party data services we use. We’re not going to tell which ones, though you could probably figure this out by carefully watching the different URLs that flash across the bottom of your browser as each page loads or when you mouse over various bits. It’s not like you’ve got better things to do.

Each of these sites may leave behind a little gift known as a cookie -- a text file filled with inscrutable gibberish that allows various computers around the globe to identify you, including your preferences, browser settings, which parts of the site you visited, which ads you clicked on, and whether you actually purchased something.

Those same cookies may let our advertising and data broker partners track you across every other site you visit, then dump all of your information into a huge database attached to a unique ID number, which they may sell ad infinitum without ever notifying you or asking for permission.

Also: We collect your IP address, which might change every time you log on but probably doesn’t. At the very least, your IP address tells us the name of your ISP and the city where you live; with a legal court order, it can also give us your name and billing address (see guys with crew cuts and subpoenas, above).

Besides your IP, we record some specifics about your operating system and browser. Amazingly, this information (known as your user agent string (www.eff.org)) can be enough to narrow you down to one of a few hundred people on the Webbernets, all by its lonesome. Isn’t technology wonderful?

The data we collect is strictly anonymous, unless you’ve been kind enough to give us your name, email address, or other identifying information. And even if you have been that kind, we promise we won’t sell that information to anyone else, unless of course our impossibly obtuse privacy policy says otherwise and/or we change our minds tomorrow.

We store this information an indefinite amount of time for reasons even we don’t fully understand. And when we do eventually get around to deleting it, you can bet it’s still kicking around on some network backup drives in somebody’s closet. So once we have it, there’s really no getting it back. Hell, we can’t even find our keys half the time -- how do you expect us to keep track of this stuff?

Not to worry, though, because we use the very bestest security measures to protect your data against hackers and identity thieves, though no one has actually ever bothered to verify this. You’ll pretty much just have to take our word for it (www.itworld.com).

So just to recap: Your information is extremely valuable to us. Our business model would totally collapse without it. No IPO, no stock options; all those 80-hour weeks and bupkis to show for it. So we’ll do our very best to use it in as many potentially profitable ways as we can conjure, over and over, while attempting to convince you there’s nothing to worry about.

(Hey, Did somebody hold a gun to your head and force you to visit this site? No, they did not. Did you run into a pay wall on the home page demanding your Visa number? No, you did not. You think we just give all this stuff away because we’re nice guys? Bet you also think every roomful of manure has a pony buried inside.)

This privacy policy may change at any time. In fact, it’s changed three times since we first started typing this. Good luck figuring out how, because we’re sure as hell not going to tell you. But then, you probably stopped reading after paragraph three."

Josh, i keep getting people to install heytell. I think you did the whole "maven" thing and I'm doing the whole "connector" thing. Good work!

Reefer Madness was actually really good! I didn't think it was going to be for me, but ended up enjoying it throughly. The Wildberry Theatre is a pretty great venue. John Fraiser, Eden Barrington, and of course Sextretary were all fabulous. I am definitely recommending it. It IS a generational thing. Even though i expected an older crowd i was still surprised with how many more "grey hairs" than young people were in the audience.

Be prepared to see Sexretary as many of you have never seen her before! Perhaps the orgy scene is only uncomfortable if you are sitting next to her mother!

Also, a cautionary tale: if Jesus offers you communion, feel free to take it. Unless you're Jewish. However, apparently, you're not supposed to actually eat it. Jesus told me after the show the cracker i ate was not fit for human consumption as it had been numerous places including down his pants. whoops. It did taste a little stale.

Stills from the set of "Game of Thrones": http://www.ew.com/...26_20442931,00.html (www.ew.com)

Tickets are on sale now for Reefer Madness, now independently produced and perfomed at Wild Berry Theater. Tickets are a little pricier, but they're cheaper online, here (alaskawildberryproducts.com). Please come if you can!

The poster's a little ridiculous. So is the show.

GCI moves to end unlimited Internet usage plans

http://www.adn.com/...ited-internet.html (www.adn.com)

I hold no love for GCI, on a personal or professional level. They are, however, the most reasonably priced high-end, low-latency residential Internet service in Anchorage. As their customers know well, their bundling is cruel. Previously, in order to get unlimited bandwidth (such that the company can't charge you if you end up downloading large quantities over a given time period), you have to pay at least $150 a month, and be forced to buy cable TV service and a phone line on top of your Internet service. I believe GCI's previously unlimited plan started at 6Mb/sec (laughable in the lower 48).

According to this article, GCI is now moving to "limited only" service plans. This means that no matter which plan you have, or how much you are paying, or paying for, you will have an upper limit to the amount of data you can transfer before you start paying overages. This means that, depending on your plan, if you end up transferring (note that "transfer" includes both upload and download, as well as all networking overhead requisite to the TCP/IP protocol), if you exceed your 50GB or 125GB, GCI will start charging you extra. As a consolation, GCI is also "upgrading Internet speed for its customers this year at no extra cost."

This is not great. This is bad. And will not solve the problem GCI is trying to solve (the saturation of their network as a result of a handful of users). Here's a few reasons why:

• Cable modems, up until they get onto GCI's network, are not "switched." If you've had a cable modem in an apartment complex or a neighborhood, you'll notice that your traffic conflicts directly with your neighbors, because all cable modems on the same "junction" all transmit on effectively the same wire. The reason it isn't immediately apparent that you're fighting with other customers is that coax cables have the ability to transmit at extremely high rates (Gigabits per second, if I recall). For example, non-digital cable used to transmit all standard-definition channels at all times. So, theoretically, the only way to directly affect another customer is to be on the same cable circuit as them (ie, be in a geographically similar place).
• The only way one customer can indirectly affect another customer is once traffic gets off of GCI's cable modem circuits and on to their network proper. Once their, the traffic is routed through devices called switches. These switches are designed to be able to pass the maximum amounts of traffic between each of its ports simultaneously. For instance, a Gigabit switch with 20 ports should be able to handle 20Gigabits of traffic passing through the device at any one time. These devices are pretty awesome, unless you're having 19 of the 20 ports trying to access the last port. In that situation, you have 1 Gigabit / 20 throughput. This is an example of network saturation, such that the network infrastructure (not the limitations of each transmitting device) cannot support the traffic. This is possible at every ISP, because ISPs constantly oversell their services betting that all users will not be using their service at all times, and that customers expect to not get what they pay for.
• The quantity of bits one can download is proportional to the speed at which you can transfer bits. The faster your rate of transfer, the more quickly you can transfer bits. This is obvious.

GCI's imposition of a required bandwidth cap in response to perceived harm to customers is silly. Even more silly is to impose a bandwidth cap, and to then increase customer speeds so that customers can chew through their alotted bandwidth even more quickly. If they indeed have the ability to tell which of their customers are using the most bandwidth, then they should have the ability to tell what the people are doing.

I think that this is an example of GCI failing to recognize a change in network usage trends. More customers, and more frequently, are streaming high definition movies from services like Netflix and Hulu, or at the very least, consuming more bandwidth than their previously assumed models of "people check email, do a few web searches, and log off." Video and music streaming are now the norm, and GCI has more than likely horribly oversold their network, and they are unable, either by way of policy, or by way of their technology, that they cannot limit certain customers and the services they are accessing.

This is probably the best case against network neutrality I've seen.

What you should take away if you don't read this:

A one-to-two hour high definition movie / show from Netflix or Hulu ranges from 4-8GB. The Netflix and Hulu streaming clients have functionality that detects your maximum download rate and adjusts the quality of your stream accordingly. The streaming clients try to maximize your bandwidth to get the best picture quality. Last I checked, the streaming clients don't have functionality to limit video quality, so you will always be transferring at full speed.

So, if you're switched over to these plans, and you do a lot of streaming, be careful to monitor your usage.

I feel like I know these people. And we must do better.

http://www.flickr....-72157624926542026/ (www.flickr.com)

(Thanks to Mike for the link)

Holy shit:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-ball/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher (www.wired.com)

Researchers use Twitter to predict stock market trends three days in advance with +80% accuracy using archived tweets from 2008 and historical stock market data.

Tickets are on sale now to the most exciting musical of the season. I'm playing the shortest chorus girl (surprise!). It will be spectacular.

The New "Hit" Musical
Directed by M. Christian Heppinstall
Book and Lyrics by Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney
A VSA Alaska at Out North production

This zany musical satirizes the anti-pot cult film classic of 1938: Reefer Madness (also called Tell Your Children ). Follow the adventures of American teen idol Jimmy Harper as he ends up in the electric chair for murdering his girl—Mary Lane. Along the way, he bumps into a really cool Jesus, a nymphomaniac, a baby that looks like a guy, college drop-outs, yummy pot brownies, Satan, reefer den addicts, zombies, a pagan Goat Man, and President FDR. Post-show discussions are moderated by Akeela, Inc. and ACLU of AK.

MATURE CONTENT: Sexual situations, drug references.

SHOW TIMES:
Friday, November 5 7:00 PM
Saturday, November 6 7:00 PM 10:30 PM

Friday, November 12 7:00 PM
Saturday, November 13 7:00 PM 10:30 PM

Friday, November 19 7:00 PM
Saturday, November 20 7:00 PM 10:30 PM

Friday, November 26 7:00 PM
Saturday, November 27 7:00 PM 10:30 PM

You can buy your tickets from CenterTix.net here. http://alaskapac.centertix.net/eventperformances.asp?evt=750 (alaskapac.centertix.net)

This event is part of Out North's Live Art series. Get your Live Art Subscription Booklet here and save money. <http://alaskapac.centertix.net/eventperformances.asp?evt=747 (alaskapac.centertix.net)> .

DAY OF SHOW: CenterTix sales end at 4:00 PM. Will Call and the last few tickets for sale (if any) will be available at Out North 30 minutes before event starts.
NO LATE SEATING Please plan to arrive early. Latecomers seats will be sold to waiting patrons.

How many people are aware of the IPv4 Address Exhaustion problem with the current implementation of the Internet?

XKCD did a pretty interesting bit on who owns which addresses in 2006. At the time, the green bits were "unallocated," that is, not owned by anyone, the rest were assigned to various companies or registrars.

I'll note again, that was a rough estimate in 2006. Rough estimates in 2010 (http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/) (ipv6.he.net) put the time until we literally run out of unassigned IPv4 addresses to give to people at less than a year (~200 days).

ISPs (like AT&T) are making efforts to rearrange their IPv4 addresses to free up space, segmenting their internal networks from their external networks (and thus freeing up potentially unused internal addresses with externally routable IP addresses), but not everyone is terribly cooperative, and not everyone has a flexible enough network design to allow for this.

Thus, in the near future, ISPs are going to have to switch over to an almost entirely "new" Internet, running the IPv6 protocol, which contains a much more expansive address space. Certain services won't be available on IPv6 (for instance, the idkfa server has no IPv6 support), or certain programs will not work without considerable updates to allow for the new addressing schemes. Modern operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) already support IPv6, but that doesn't mean their programs will, nor will they be bug-free.

Just saying: next few years on the Internet should be interesting.

Let us go ahead and title this The Thread MrFood Can Safely Ignore.

Some friends of mine from the Environmental Design program at Texas A&M went on to do some fun (danprovost.com) things (tomgerhardt.com) in NYC for graduate school. After entering the work force they're continuing to do cool things, including personal projects outside employment. Yesterday they introduced a pretty fun product called the Glif (theglif.com). It is a kickstand and tripod mount for the iphone 4. Their design principles orbit around simplicity, functionality and elegance; and this little guy is a great showcase of their talent and ingenuity.

They're going through kickstarter (kickstarter.com) to try and fund the Glif as a marketable product. Within less than a day they've superseded expectations have as of this moment raised almost twice as much money as necessary (the original goal being $10,000 in 30 days) . It's less of a plea for donations and more of a pre-ordering process if you like what is being offered. The website is littered with other awesome entrepreneurial gems. These guys have been plugged by leading industry designers (namely John Gruber at Daring Fireball (daringfireball.net)) and other such snooty, elitist Apple product fappers.

I'd encourage even non-iphone4 users to check out the website (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danprovost/glif-iphone-4-tripod-mount-and-stand (www.kickstarter.com)) to at least see an example of good product design.

What must one do to fix the problem that causes them to be able to load all websites perfectly normally, except for one? I checked Facebook before going to class this morning and when I came home a few hours later I tried to log back on, but after entering in my log in information I'm greeted, on Google Chrome at least, with a white screen that reads:

"This webpage is not available.

The webpage at https://login.faceb...hp?login_attempt=1 (login.facebook.com)might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address."

Below that is an expandable option to "Learn more about this error" that reads:

"Error 118 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out."

Every other website works perfectly fine, but Facebook has not worked for a number of hours. Any ideas of what is wrong?

My new Falcon Northwest TLX laptop arrives in less than 12 hours!!! W00t!

Made two batches of beer on Sunday. The first was an all grain attempt at an american brown ale. Should end up nice an dark with a little bitterness and good hop aroma. Currently the yeast are seriously going to town on that shit and its pretty fun to watch through the side of the glass cardboy. Our other beer which is a clone of Pyramids Snowcap winter ale, had a great start to it, but seems to be faltering on the fermentation end of things. Granted I had to improvise an airlock by shoving a damp rag in the top to keep out air bacteria from spoiling the beer. While I doubt that would affect fermentation I'm still madly trying to obtain another airlock and perhaps another batch of yeast to toss in there in hopes to keep in from going bad. At any rate in about 8 weeks we'll have beer, either 4 gallons or 9 gallons in all that'll be ready for drinking.

If it turns out ok I'll bring a couple bottles up for christmas.

Anyone know anything about Asus laptops?

This is pretty cool: http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ (www.thewildernessdowntown.com)

Essentially, you enter the street of address of where you grew up, and it makes a music video out of the street view and satellite pictures.

This is probably the first example I've seen of HTML5 kicking Adobe Flash's ass in terms of interactive content. Kinda hope things go this way in the future.

Any suggestions on a cheap "media center pc" I can buy to connect to my TV and stream video from my computer? I currently run W7 ultimate and a linksys e1000 router with standard 128 bit security.

Please come see Overnighters this Sunday!

Perhaps you've heard of them: four playwrights get a topic at 8 PM, stay up all night writing a 10 to 20 minute play inspired by their given topic. And then the director and actors put together a show that goes up the following night at 8 PM.

They're at Grant Hall and you should come on Sunday if you want to see a friend. Only 10 dollars!

Over the weekend I bought the flight simulator X-Plane for my iPhone; I got the fancy version that works on 4G. I've been flying a bunch in an F-14, launching from a carrier, shooting down an enemy airplane, then landing on the carrier again. It took me a while to get the carrier landing - there was a lot of go-arounds because I missed the arresting wires, and also a lot of me flying into the ass end of the ship or into the big tower on the deck. Anyways, it's pretty amazing what the iphone is capable of. I'm pretty sure this flight sim is better than any flight sim I had before (the last one I had though was during high school).

I was reminded today at lunch of this scene in "Unforgiven": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SO5VO2ixWY#t=1m0s (www.youtube.com)

One of my favorites. Anybody else have a favorite scene to share?

Note: Above I "deep-linked" the Youtube video to skip to 1 minute, 0 seconds into the clip. To make more sense of what's going on, skip to the beginning of the clip.

Video for Ratatat's "Drugs" : http://vimeo.com/13877453 (vimeo.com)

Cake was pretty impressive live, I felt.

From a week or two ago on Slashdot: "100 Million Facebook Pages Leaked on Torrent Site" (it.slashdot.org)

"A directory containing personal details about more than 100 million Facebook users has surfaced on an Internet file-sharing site. The 2.8GB torrent was compiled by hacker Ron Bowes of Skull Security, who created a web crawler program that harvested data on users contained in Facebook's open access directory, which lists all users who haven't bothered to change their privacy settings to make their pages unavailable to search engines."

Only really affects people who aren't paying attention to how their profile is being displayed to public search engines, but still scary given that the guy's immediate action afterwards was to throw up a torrent.

Muahaha, at last a stump to stand on while I shout my upcoming SteamCon glory! And should the Green Man allow, some pictures of the construction process.