Maddox on why CompUSA is a wretched store. (WARNING: it does contain some coarse and otherwise socially unpalatable language best saved for rock concerts and angsty teens) Overall, this does an excellent job of encapsulating the CompUSA experience.
Best line: “Hire untrained school kids to man your staff, because I like being told that the swap file on my computer is “pretend memory.” Being talked down to by crater-faced sales staff is a humbling experience, and the phrase “pretend memory” is awesome. It makes me want to pay you pretend money for the pretend advice I received from your staff with pretend technical knowledge.”
Well kids, it’s been a ridiculous 3 weeks. But, we’ve now sucessfully upgraded every port on campus to gigE. Although we’re only starting now with the formal redesign of the network …
Cheers.
Some of you may have noticed some instability here at VDOV.NET lately. This is due to some unfortunate dependencies of Wordpress 1.2 in Debian, along with serious issues in the Wordpress authentication system, which forced me to more or less rework the backend of the site from scratch. However, now we’ve got a nice 1.2.0-1.1 Wordpress install, along with MySQL 4.0.20-11.
If you notice any problems with the site, let me know.
For all of those that were there/are interested, I’ve posted pictures of Adam and Megan Beardsworth’s wedding on the VDOV.NET gallery. Just don’t ask me to dance …
If you thought we couldn’t possibly do ANY more … you were wrong. Here’s a list of new buildings upgraded in the past 2 days.
Ladd
Banister
Stowe Inn
Searles (all floors)
Quinby
Johnson
32 College
Riley
Memorial Hall
Thorne
McLellan
Coles Tower
Check out the new Bowdoin College NOC site (yes I know it’s just NO). If you’re a Bowdoin student, you can keep tabs on how the massive network overhaul is going on a day-by-day basis, as well as get e-mail notifications! Just log in with your Bowdoin username/password pair.
Oh yeah, it’s here.
Piracy online has gotten a lot of press recently. It seems that as far as the RIAA and MPAA are concerned you should almost feel guilty even hearing a few notes of a song wafting from someones car CD player across heavy traffic through the window of your car and into your ear. So what the hell is fair use? As a student I blatantly copy all sorts of copyrighted material into papers and presentations, with proper citation of course. So where is the line. Can I use copyrighted pictures? What if I use a copyrighted picture in a presentation at a fundraiser for charity? So I did a little searching and found a few good sites.
University of Texas fair use tutorial
CETUS (an organization affiliated with City University of New York, California State University System, and New Yorks State University System)
straight from the source at the US copyright office
also here there is a great article in Wired News about the efforts of the EFF (Electronic Fronteir Foundation) and the ALA (American Library Assoc.) to distribute balanced information about fair use, which allows in certain cases use of copyrighted material without the author’s permission, a topic conveniantly absent from MPAA and RIAA materials. Apparently the ALA plans on distributing this information to students through high shcool librarians…
somehow I think that I might trust my high school librarian more than a talking anti-piracy weasel.
as I have been saying since I got a radio show to say it on F— the RIAA,
Andy
Due to some unforseen difficulties with my video RAID, that section of Restricted Content will be down until at least tomorrow, when I can iron out the issues.
UPDATE: Everything is back to normal. Phew.
Bowdoin College is getting fast. To date, we have upgraded these buildings onto the new Cisco net, with gigabit on every port (and PoE in most cases).
All Brunswick Apartments
Hyde
Appleton
Burnett
Smith House
Hubbard
83 Federal
Gustafson
Hamm
Mayflower Apartments
Helmreich
Stowe
75 Federal
Howell
Baxter
Pine St. Apartments
10 Cleaveland
7 Boody
79 Federal
30 College
Copeland
Harpswell Apartments
Macmillan
Searles Basement
Searles 1st Floor
Howard
Maine
Coleman
Winthrop
Sills
Kanbar
Don’t forget the new border as well! Dual Cisco 7200 routers, dual 9500 Packeteer PacketShapers, dual 525 PIXs. Oh yeah, and dual Cisco 6509s and a 6513 at the core.
UPDATE: Keep adding new hosts …
Yay for SSL. VDOV.NET is now served exclusively via SSL. Wanna see how cool my now deprecated apache non-SSL config is?
root@smashy:/etc/apache> more httpd.conf
Include /etc/apache/modules.conf
Redirect / https://vdov.net/
root@smashy:/etc/apache> more modules.conf
ClearModuleList
AddModule mod_so.c
AddModule mod_macro.c
LoadModule alias_module \
/usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_alias.so
Have you ever seen a cleaner apache config? I think not!
Ok I ran across this story on slashdot and did a little research and hove come to the conclusion that Katie Tarbox is a tool. The long and short of the story is that Katie.com is owned by a lady by the name of Katie Jones… she has owned the domain since 1996, and as we all know that is getting back in internet prehistory (you know back when moving .gifs were the cool thing) . She seems nice enough from her posts (the site is mostly a personal blog).
Now there is some other Katie, Katie Tarbox (I know the name is pricelss and just look at her pic, seems downright angry about internet safety) who wrote a book about how she got involved with an internet sexual predator when she was 13 and now she is an “advocate for internet safety.” She wrote a book called “Katie.com” and now wants Katie Jones to just give her the domain… what a tool. Here is KatieJ’s response on her blog (which is great) to Tarbox and her lawyer. Now read some excerpts from Tarbox’s book which were definitely written by a middle schooler.
So the way I see it Tarbox was dumb, her parents were dumb… they got taken advantage of by a bad person. It great that she is “doing something about internet safety” but then whay hassle people you dont even know. This type of bullcrap pisses me off. Not only does Katie.com get flooded with traffic about this lame book, but then they have the gall to demand the domain from the 8 year owner (which in internet time is for freakin ever). Yeah that is really promoting internet civility and personal protection. And now they are claiming that Katie J made the whole thing up as an internet publicity stunt (for what I am not sure).
So the lesson here (and Costa go ahead and agree with me on this one) is that I HATE stupid people… a lot.
much love
-af
PS: How long before Paulette Vdov writes a book about how her credit card info was stolen online and used to buy porn.