DNS issues with domains are, frankly, some of the nastiest, ugliest Web-based problems you can have. The reason why is that they involve computers that you can’t control directly (such as the 13 demi-god root servers). I won’t go into the ugly details about what happened with a family member’s personal domain today, but suffice it to say that it was one of this DNS situations where a DNS server wasn’t giving out the right information, and that had the chain reaction of breaking all sorts of things, including email. I spent 45+ minutes trying to convince their tech support people that something was wrong with one or more of their DNS machines (they couldn’t see it because they were connected to a different DNS), but I finally decided to try a long-shot and I added a new record (a CNAME) and voila, within an hour everything was working again. So, when faced with bizarre non-updating DNS records, create a new entry to force the update process to kick off again.
Author: Jason Dunn
Crystal’s Obituary
VIOLANTE – Crystal Alison (nee Hehr)
March 2, 1976 – December 12, 2007
“It is with profound sadness that Crystal’s family announces her passing after a courageous battle with cancer. Crystal passed away on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at the age of 31 and will be missed immensely by those whose lives she touched.
Crystal was born in Calgary and attended Mount Royal College, graduating in 2004 with a Bachelor of Applied Communications (Public Relations). She met the love of her life, Anthony in 1999 and they have been inseparable since. Crystal loved music, dancing and traveling but her biggest joy and passion was Anthony and Mattea, family and friends. People were drawn to Crystal because of her passion for life and her magnetic personality; her motto was “love always, live life and no regrets.”
Besides her loving husband Anthony, Crystal is survived by their daughter Mattea René; mother Mavis (Gary) Nugent of Creston, B.C.; her sister Holly Hehr of Calgary, AB; father-in-law Domenik (Patrizia) Violante of Kingston, ON; mother-in-law, Barbara Violante (Bryon) of Chestermere, AB; adoptive father Murray Colclough (Jo-Anne) of Calgary, AB; grandmother Mary Hehr of Caroline, AB; and numerous extended family and friends.
A Celebration of Crystal’s Life will be held at McINNIS & HOLLOWAY’S Chapel of the Bells (2720 Centre Street North) on Sunday, December 16, 2007 at 2:30 p.m. In lieu of flowers, tributes may be made directly to Rosedale Hospice c/o Hospice Calgary, Suite 900 833 – 4 Avenue S.W., Calgary, AB T2P 3T5, Telephone: (403) 263-4525, www.hospicecalgary.com. Forward condolences through www.mcinnisandholloway.com. or visit www.loveforcrystal.com.
In living memory of Crystal Violante, a tree will be planted at Fish Creek Provincial Park by McINNIS & HOLLOWAY FUNERAL HOMES, Chapel of the Bells, 2720 CENTRE STREET NORTH Telephone: (403) 276-2296.”
As If I Needed More Stress…
I’m in the midst of working on several things for Crystal’s funeral, and wouldn’t you know it, one of my servers got hacked. Not just hacked, reamed. I can’t receive email on any of my personal or Web site accounts (just my Thoughts Media account), and none of my team members can receive email either on their respective Thoughts Media accounts. It’s a complete friggin’ disaster. Thankfully Jorj and Janak are helping me with this, but the timing couldn’t be worse – we have to burn the box (abandon it and re-format it), so now my “I want to switch to a new server” has become “I need to switch to a new server right now.” What a day…
The World is a Darker Place Today
A few minutes ago Ashley called and told me that our friend Crystal passed away. She had been in a local hospice for the past couple of weeks, and her body finally succumbed to the cancer that was ravaging it. The world is a darker place today without Crystal in it – she had such a light, such a love of life, such vibrancy. Crystal loved butterflies, so the above photo is for her.
Cherish your loved ones today and always – you never know when life will turn your world upside down.
The 18 hours I Owned a Dell Vostro
A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a Dell Vostro 1000. Then I cancelled my order to buy an HP instead. Then I re-placed my order when the HP sold out before I could order it. When the Vostro arrived, right on schedule, it was pretty much what I expected when I unpacked it: big, black, bulky. It was a business machine after all, and I wasn’t buying it for looks. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was how bad the 15.4″ LCD screen was.
I haven’t seen a screen that bad in years! It had a matte finish, which I was expecting, but the back-lighting was uneven and it was the most dull, lifeless screen I’d ever seen. Everything was also vaguely out of focus. I wasn’t expecting it to be that bad, and even though this machine was only going to be used for Web access and basic word processing, I wasn’t willing to grimace every time I used it. I figured I’d give it a few days of use to see if my initial gut reaction faded, so I began the long process of patching the Windows XP OS it shipped with (why Dell doesn’t ship the machine with the latest patches is beyond me). After getting it patched up, I uninstalled the Google junk it came with – I consider Google Desktop Search to be no different than the trial versions of the other applications that Dell’s consumer laptops ship with, and I thought the Vostro machines were supposed to be junkware free?
I used the included Dell Support software to check for newer drivers and whatnot. It’s bizarre that Dell’s support software tool isn’t useful enough to actually report to the user what version of a certain driver they have and then report if there’s an updated version or not. Instead, you have to go the driver page, look at the date on each driver, and guess if you think your Dell computer has that version or not. Ridiculous, no? I saw a few drivers and a BIOS release that looked quite new, and seeing as how Dell shipped me the Vostro lacking the past half-year or so of Windows XP updates, I figured the drivers might be equally out of date. I installed the drivers, then got to the BIOS update and let it run as well. At the end of the BIOS update, the laptop rebooted, and I sat staring at a black screen. Nothing came up after the reboot. I held the power button down, which forced the power off, and booted it up again – nothing. I then pulled the battery, left it for a few minutes, and tried again – nothing.
I was baffled as to how Dell could offer me a BIOS update that fried the machine, but I called tech support and they arranged for a courier to come and pick the unit up – this is after the tech told me that I had damaged the machine myself by updating the BIOS, but they’d repair it anyway. The courier was supposed to come on Friday, but didn’t arrive until today – the laptop is now out of my hands and off to be repaired.
Technically I still own the Dell Vostro, but as soon as it gets back from tech support, I’ll be calling customer service and sending it back for a refund. The poor-quality screen is the biggest reason, but the way the machine tanked after the BIOS update is the rotten cherry on top of this whole situation.
YouTube: The Shallow End of the Internet Gene Pool
I think the above questions say it all. I’ve been answering an endless stream of questions on YouTube after posting a bunch of Zune videos, and with some of them, I feel like I’m an AOL forum moderator in 2001 fielding questions from people who are looking for the “Any” key. I don’t know how some of these people even manage to work a Web browser, let alone post a comment on YouTube…
UFC Finally Landing Some Big Name Brands?
No, that’s not just two sweaty men rolling around on a mat: it’s a screen capture (thanks SnagIt!) of the most recent episode of The Ultimate Fighter. Yup, I’m a fan. What’s notable is the fact that Rhapsody is a sponsor on the mat, and off-camera to the right is an Old Spice sponsorship spot. Rhapsody and Old Spice? Brands I actually recognize! The UFC is growing up. The era of Toyo Tires and Mickey’s Malt Liquor is coming to an end: the UFC has come into the next stage of its evolution, and as those multi-year sponsorship contracts expire, I expect to see the big brands start to capitalize on the audience that the UFC has so ably captured. I’ve read that among the highly-coveted 18 to 25 male demographic, the UFC is pulling in higher numbers than the NBA (I couldn’t find the source on that though). Where there are big numbers, the big sponsors aren’t far behind. Zune needs to get on board and ride that train…
Hotmail: Stuck in the ’90s?
A married couple, friends of mine, are having relationship troubles. You know the old story: she’s on Hotmail, he’s on Gmail, and they can’t see or share their respective calendars. A problem as old as time. 😉
I figured the solution was simple: move her away from Hotmail, to Gmail, and they’d live happily ever after sharing their Gmail calendars. Why Gmail? I think Google’s Web-based email and calendar system is superior to Hotmail, though I confess I’m not as familiar with Microsoft’s offerings as I used to be (I don’t do Web-based email). I created a Gmail account for her, logged into her Hotmail account, and tried to set up a simple forward that would shunt all her Hotmail email into her new Gmail account until everyone started to use her new Gmail address. I didn’t count on huge road-block that seems right out of 1998:
WHAT? Hotmail’s email forwarding will only forward to other Microsoft email accounts? What’s the point then? That’s something I’d expect from the 1998 “We want to rule the world” Microsoft, not the newer “We want to work with the world, as long as we can make money doing it” Microsoft. Having a limitation like this is just a slap in the face to a Hotmail customer – sure, she’s trying to leave Hotmail, but there’s no reason to make the exit an ugly one. If Microsoft offered a real forwarding option, it would leave the door open to coming back. I haven’t thought very highly of Hotmail over the years (mostly because people using the service never seem to get my email), but this really drops the service down a few notches in my eyes.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I find it incredibly hard to believe that what I want to do is really this hard. I’ve done a bit of research and found a few desktop-PC programs that act as email re-directors, but that’s not a good solution. Possibly something Web-based? I thought Hotmail would have an option to function as a POP3 account, so I could use Gmail to pull her email in, but they don’t offer that either. It’s no wonder Gmail is so popular, Hotmail is really unimpressive.
Worst Kung-Fu Auditions Ever
This made me laugh so hard…probably because I’ve always been interested in martial arts and have been known to throw high kicks nearly as bad as these. 😉 I think it’s a spoof inspired by the clip at the 58 second mark (which make me laugh the hardest) because the background changes. On the other end of the spectrum, you have these incredible jumping guys and of course the jaw-dropping talents of Tony Jaa (warning, the clip is violent).
It’s Good to be Home
It’s great to be back from Amsterdam, even if I came home to this:
It’s cold, but being surrounded by my LCD monitors is keeping me warm. 😉 Amsterdam was an interesting place, but it’s not someplace I’d want to go back to. It’s never fair to judge a whole country by your experience in one city, so if I were to return to the Netherlands (I hear it’s beautiful in the spring), I’d skip Amsterdam. Why? Weather comes and goes, but the people stay the same. In the case of Amsterdam, it was the attitude of the people in the service industry, and the incredible number of people who smoke – and I have a story that combines both! Ashley and I are non-smokers, and coming from a city where smoking is all but outlawed, it was a shock to be surrounded by smoke constantly – it was like time-travelling back to the ’70s.
Back to my story: we had read about a Mexican food restaurant called Los Pilones that was supposedly the best in the city – which might not be saying much for someplace so far from Mexico, but we figured we’d try it. That night at 7 PM there was the first Mobius event, the meet and greet, so were going to be eating early. We arrived at the restaurant earlier than we thought, 4:20 PM, but when I saw that they opened at 4 PM I thought we were set. The door was locked. A guy came to the door and said the kitchen wasn’t open yet, that we should come back in 20 minutes. What kind of a restaurant doesn’t open when their sign says they’re supposed to open? A restaurant in Amsterdam!
We came back at 4:50 PM and were granted admittance, and quite enjoyed the ambiance (pictured above). The menu was simple but everything sounded good, so we ordered and munched on some corn chips and some delicious salsa. When our food arrived a while later, we were still the only customers in the place – so as we started to eat I was surprised to smell smoke. Yes, you guessed it, the bartender (or bus boy, I wasn’t sure which) was smoking. Only two customers in the place, and right as they get their food, this jerk decides to start smoking. Unbelievable. Either the residents of Amsterdam are the rudest people in the world, or they’re so used to the smell of cigarette smoke it doesn’t occur to them that non-smokers might not want their food to taste like smoke. Or maybe it’s both.
And that, in a nutshell, is Amsterdam. We saw some interesting things (I’m still pounding through my pictures from the zoo), but it was really tainted by all the smoke and the rudeness of the people there. I’m all for experiencing the local culture when I visit a new place, and trying to resist the urge to view everything through the eyes of a North American, but some things are universal: non-smokers really don’t like the taste/smell of cigarette smoke. Back to processing my pictures…I’ll post a few when I’m done, perhaps with a few more stories about what I saw and experienced in Amsterdam.