Year: 2005

“Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

— Winston Churchill

Is it just me, or is Kim Jong II a pretty scary dude? I saw a picture of him today and couldn’t help digging through the internet to find another scary figure from history…

In a move that’s at least as funny as various terrorism investigation blunders, the RIAA managed to file a lawsuit against a woman for allegedly sharing more than seven hundred songs on peer-to-peer networks.

The catch? The 83-year-old woman didn’t own a computer, and in fact died before the lawsuit papers were delivered.

Priceless.

Today’s a good day. I finally managed to beat the mighty Trevor Bauer, who is the top-rated player on my da Vinci Chess site. He’s by far the best player of the 200 or so in the “club”, and he has continually whomped me in our games. I’ve managed to come close to beating him before, but he would come up with something clever to force a draw.

Today I made a few clever moves and he saw his untenable position and resigned. Woo hoo!

(Of course, I shouldn’t be too cocky about it… he’ll probably smash me in our next game.)

“It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.”

— John Andrew Holmes

Tonight I had the rare joy of a successful and (relatively) quick re-configuration at BitRelay. Usually when I go to my co-location facility to upgrade a piece of hardware or reconfigure the firewall or whatever, something that should take five minutes ends up taking several hours.

I’m in the process of moving all my servers and equipment to a new facility, where the infrastructure is much more robust. It’s all part of the business maturing from its original fly-by-night operation into a truly professional hosting company. I’m excited for the change (although it’s going to be somewhat complicated to keep a hundred clients up and running during the switch).

So anyway, tonight I was installing my new firewall. The one I had, graciously sold to me by Chancellor, definitely had some troubles. I’d attempted to install it on two occasions at BitRelay, failing both times, and still couldn’t get it running even at home. With the Big Move only a week and a half away, I was suddenly in dire straits because I needed a serious firewall to replace the $2,500 paperweight I had.

Enter my pal Warren, who had a used one he was willing to part with for a song. (A thousand thanks, Warren!) It’s a high-end model, somewhere in the $4,500 range, and it’s one of those pieces of equipment that’s so powerful and has so many features that it’s dizzying just looking at it. I took the plunge nonetheless, dropping it on the new network and poking around the management interface until I figured out how to route the right network traffic. Voila, I’m in business.

Amazingly, things went right on the first try– instead of the tenth, as is my usual wont. Now I’ve got a week or so to comfortably configure all of the right settings, and then move the rest of my servers.

Movin’ up in the world!

If anyone from T-Mobile is reading this, you guys blow.

When I set up my cell phone with them almost a year ago, I specifically said I needed text messaging because I’ve set up my web servers to automatically call my phone with a message if they’re in trouble. It’s a great arrangement, and lets me respond immediately to any problems. Of course, this doesn’t happen often (and when it does it’s almost always a false alarm), so I only need a half-dozen or so text messages per month.

The woman I spoke with last May said she’d set me up with 30 free messages per month. Great, that’s more than I need… I’m set. Today when I was reviewing my bill I noticed I’d been charged twenty cents for four messages last month. Apparently those 30 free ones weren’t per month; they were in total. Now, every time my server cries out for help, I’m billed a nickel for the e-mail to my phone.

I called T-Mobile and asked about this, seeing if they could either give me a handful of free messages each month, or perhaps slap another 30 on my account (which will last a while). The guy said that was just not possible. Yeah, right. Even though the woman last year did it, now he’s powerless. He pointed out that it’s only five cents per message, or I could sign up for 300 messages for three bucks a month. I insisted I only needed five or so messages, he continued to tell me he “wasn’t supposed to” throw me a handful of freebies.

So now I’m quite literally being nickeled-and-dimed by T-Mobile, because of a misunderstanding last year. Losers.

Man, spam sucks.

I have an elaborate set of mail filters that automatically categorize incoming messages into folders based on who they’re from, the content, and so on. One of the filters checks my address book and shovels anything from someone I don’t know into a “suspected spam” folder, which I can then check for anything legitimate.

The problem is that I get a hundred or so a day in this folder, and I have to scan them to look for anything real. Take the example here. One of these messages is legitimate; the others aren’t. Argh.

I wonder sometimes how many opportunities I’ve missed because someone writes to me and I simply discard their message with all the other trash.

My friend Derek sent me an article comparing the civil rights struggle of last century– and its fight against the Ku Klux Klan– with the present-day insurgency in Iraq.

The civil rights movement, described in the article, finally emerged victorious over the KKK “insurgents” because the population finally got tired of what was happening. To quote:

“The Sixteenth Street Church bombing was a wake-up call for northern whites. The deaths of four little girls in white dresses was too much even for whites who hadn’t cared about civil rights.”

So the “solution to the problem”, in this case, was for the general population to get fed up with the crap going on around them, and stand up for something.

Similarly, in Iraq, the solution will occur when (if?) the population decides the insurgency’s day is over, and fight back. Right now I suspect most people are living quietly in their homes, doing whatever they can to avoid the next car bomb or kidnapping incident.

The important thing I want to stress here is that the presence (or absence) of U.S. troops does precious little for this situation. One might argue that the insurgents aren’t quite as brash as they might otherwise be, knowing that some Marine sniper might be around the next corner. But overall, I don’t think the insurgency much cares about the U.S. forces. They run pell-mell through the streets, yanking people out of their cars or driving through the front door of a police precinct.

A billion dollars a week from us isn’t making the elections any safer.

Now, I’m fully aware that I’m sitting in my comfortable home writing this message– I’m not hiding out in a shack in the Baghdad suburbs wondering if my wife is going to make it back from the store today. It’s easy to assess a situation as an armchair quarterback, and I know the reality is far tougher. But my grandpa, who was a bomber pilot in World War II, said of the Jews who were buried in mass graves, “The Germans lined them up and made them dig their own graves, then shot them all. If I’d been one of those poor Jews, I’d be damned if I’d dig my own grave. Let them shoot me and dig it themselves.” He had spunk, to be sure, but the reason I bring this up is that it demonstrates a shift in attitude that will be necessary if the insurgency is ever going to be put down.

Who knew I’d ever agree with something Senator Kennedy says? Today I do:

“We now have no choice but to make the best we can of the disaster we have created in Iraq. The current course is only making the crisis worse.”

Kennedy is calling for the immediate withdrawal of 12,000 American troops, and a complete reduction in force by the end of the year. Good for him.