If you’ve never played an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), you won’t find this video as funny as I do, but if you have any background in online gaming, you’ll appreciate the clever lyrics. And if you’ve never checked out The Guild, you should – it’s absolutely hilarious!
Category: Internet & Technology
Wired’s Artifacts From The Future: DNAMatch.com
This is just sheer brilliance. Check out the above image broken down into smaller pieces at Wired – every bit of text adds to the concept. So clever and well-executed!
.mx Domains = Highway Robbery
I was on Go Daddy today and saw that they were accepting registrations for .mx (Mexico) domains. A cool domain name popped into my head: tex.mx (Tex-Mex), a style of food that I think is absolutely fantastic. I thought I’d register it for fun, in case somewhere down the road a Tex-Mex restaurant chain wanted it and I could retire with my family to a small island somewhere. A regular .com domain is $11.99 CAD for me to register. A .mx domain? “Just” $661.80 per year. What a bargain! I don’t get this – I thought everything was supposed to be cheaper in Mexico. 😉
I Was Trying to Reason With Software (or “How JustHost Does Bait and Switch”)
The past month, I’ve been on the hunt for a new Web host for a few personal domains. I have an account with 1&1, but they have a limitation on how long CNAME entries can be, so I need to look elsewhere. I signed up with BlueHost, only to discover their horribly limited control panel software didn’t do what I needed, so after three days I cancelled my account. Next I tried WestHost, quizzing their pre-sales people on exactly what I needed before signing up. They said they could do what I needed, so I signed up. Again, they had horrible control panel software that didn’t do what I needed it to do – the pre-sales people either didn’t understand my questions, or they weren’t being honest with me. So I cancelled my account with WestHost. It’s frustrating to waste time with this, but I’m thankful that both BlueHost and WestHost have simple cancellation policies and I got a full refund.
So I went on the hunt for other Web hosts, this time for ones that had better control panels. I’m not looking for “cheap” – I’d happily pay $10 to $15 a month for the account – but what I need is something powerful and flexible and based around the concept of multiple domains. I was looking at JustHost.com, and decided to sign up with them because they use Cpanel, which I’ve used on my own server before. I was going through the sign-up process, and on the second phase it asked me about adding upgrades to the account. One of them for for SPAM Assassin. I was a bit confused, because SPAM Assassin is free software that virtually every Web host out there uses. And JustHost wanted to charge me $19.95 for it:
In another browser tab I looked at the list of features, and sure enough, SPAM Assassin was listed:
So which was it? When I was clicking around the JustHost site a chat window popped up, so I thought I might as well ask them about this. Here’s the transcript of that chat:
* * * * * * * *
Connecting to Agent…
You have been connected to Amber
Amber Says:Hey Wait! We would hate to see you go without seeing what’s made us Award Winning Web Hosts. So just this once I can give you a 20% discount on our unlimited hosting. That’s a $24 saving! To take advantage of this one-time offer just CLICK HERE
Amber Says:When you are ready just say “Hi” and we can get started….
You:Hi there, I have a question
Amber Says:Hi my name is Amber thanks for visiting Just Host today!
Amber Says:Is there anything I can help you with? Or if you would like to check out our last minute 20% discount, please CLICK HERE!
You:I’m in the midst of signing up now, and I’m confused about something….
Amber Says:Signing up for hosting with Justhost couldn’t be easier! If you want to sign up now just CLICK HERE and complete our simple 1 page order form!
You:on the Features page, it lists Spam Assassin and there’s a check mark next to it, seeming to indicate that it’s included in the package
Amber Says:Unfortunately we cannot accept checks or money orders. We only accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Paypal
You:Yet as part of my sign up package I’m being offered Spam Assassin for $19.95/year….
Amber Says:You get a free domain for life, free instant setup and you can host unlimited domains, plus, much much more.
Amber Says:Today only I can offer you this special 20% discount so you can sign up for just $3.95 month. Just CLICK HERE to get this today only offer!
You:are you reading what I’m writing? I’m asking you a question
Amber Says:Please repeat your question
You:You don’t have a scroll bar?
Amber Says:Would you like to sign up for our most popular hosting plan for just $3.95 / month?
You:No, I’m asking a question. Let me repeat it…
Amber Says:Ok Great!! To sign up for the $3.95 a month offer CLICK HERE
You:http://www.bestbuy.ca/catalog/subclass.asp?logon=&langid=EN&catid=24930
You:sorry, ignore that
You:on the Features page, it lists Spam Assasin and there’s a check mark next to it, seeming to indicate that it’s included in the package
Amber Says:Unfortunately we cannot accept checks or money orders. We only accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Paypal
You:Yet as part of my sign up package I’m being offered Spam Assassin for $19.95/year….
Amber Says:You may not have noticed but I am actually just a virtual agent, so I dont fully understand your question.
Amber Says:You can try asking me again and re-phrase your question, or why not contact our freindly phone support team toll-free at: 1-(888)-755-7585 they should be able to assist you further
You:A virtual agent. I’m talking to software. I assumed I was talking to someone who might as well have been software.
Amber Says:A virtual agent, basically means i’m not real,,, BUT that doesnt have to be a bad thing
You:Trust me, it’s a bad thing.
Amber Says:Sorry I can’t understand your question. Please can you repeat it for me?
[chat disconnected]
* * * * * * * *
And that’s how I started off my day today: trying to have a discussion with software. 🙂
Asus P6T Deluxe V2 4 GB RAM Mystery
Just a quick note for anyone that might run into the same problem as I did today: if you have an Asus P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard with the latest BIOS, and you’ve installed 6 GB (or more) of RAM in the system, and you’re only seeing 4 GB at the BIOS level, here’s what you need to do. First, take out half the sticks of RAM, leaving three sticks of RAM in, one in each of the orange RAM slots. Then power up the computer and go int the BIOS – it should see 3096 MB of RAM in the System Information section of the BIOS (it’s at the bottom of the first BIOS screen).
Now, power down the computer, unplug the power cable, and install the next three sticks of RAM, this time in the three black slots. Power up the computer, and go into the System Information section to verify that you have 6136 MB of RAM. That’s it, you’re done! I don’t know what idiot at Asus thought this was acceptable to ship a product where you can’t install all the RAM at once, but there you have it.
Remember too that you’ll see to be running 64-bit Vista or Windows 7 in order to access more than 3.5 GB of RAM.
The Greatest Baby Shirt Ever Made: Level 1 Human
I used think that the “I’m a Boob Man” baby shirts were the height of baby-apparel humour, but the coolest “onesie” I’ve ever seen is pictured above, made by my brother Aaron. It’s perhaps the ultimate shirt for the son of an old-school pencil and paper RPG guy like myself. That’s the Neverwinter Nights font to boot, so extra geek cred for that. So cool! You’ll have to wait a year to level up Logan! My brother made some other great shirts that I’ll take pictures of soon.
The Desk of a Geek, The Life of a Geek
All Your Browser Crashes Are Belong to Flash!
Over the past year or so, I’ve been plagued with browser crashes of a specific type: Flash banners. There’s a certain type of Flash animation that gives IE8, Chrome, and Firefox absolute fits. Complete lock-up and eventual crash. Check out the screen shots:
Above: This is a Windows Live Flash-based banner locking up and crashing Google Chrome. Google seems to resist crashing the best of all the browsers, though when it tanks it takes the whole thing down – not just a single tab like they’d have you believe. I guess nothing works as well as the marketing tells us it does.
Above: Here’s Firefox crashing on a Microsoft Bing Flash-based banner locking up and crashing Firefox. The behaviour is always the same: Firefox will peg one CPU core, and the memory usage will climb and climb – once it reaches around 1.5 GB, it will finally crash hard. I’ve lost count of the number of crash reports I’ve submitted to Mozilla.
Above: Another Firefox Flash banner crash, this time from Bud Light. Maybe Firefox doesn’t like lime beer.
Above: Yet another Firefox crash, this time on another computer, and from Budweiser.
Curious about what the actual crash report looks like when Firefox takes a dump? Dig this:
Description:
A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows.
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name:Â Â Â AppHangB1
Application Name:Â Â Â firefox.exe
Application Version:Â Â Â 1.9.0.3399
Application Timestamp:Â Â Â 49f1091d
Hang Signature:Â Â Â cc8e
Hang Type:Â Â Â 0
OS Version:Â Â Â 6.0.6002.2.2.0.256.1
Locale ID:Â Â Â 1033
Additional Hang Signature 1:Â Â Â 2de4e2a1ef83764b153393c7ddb0c147
Additional Hang Signature 2:Â Â Â 75d7
Additional Hang Signature 3:Â Â Â fdf5d60b2d0319bb6c73afe447f9eeff
Additional Hang Signature 4:Â Â Â cc8e
Additional Hang Signature 5:Â Â Â 2de4e2a1ef83764b153393c7ddb0c147
Additional Hang Signature 6:Â Â Â 75d7
Additional Hang Signature 7:Â Â Â fdf5d60b2d0319bb6c73afe447f9eeff
This has happened to me on multiple computers, multiple browsers, and no, it’s not related to extensions on Firefox. The only extensions I’ve had installed for quite a while now is the Canadian dictionary, and Xmarks. But since it crashes both Chrome and IE8, neither of which have add-on extensions, I’m more suspicious of Flash itself – meaning that this problem is related to the Flash plug-in that each of these browsers use. I’ve updated, un-installed, and re-installed Flash more times than I can count and it never helped. I’ve watched as a banner goes through certain animations, and the CPU is pegged, then it transitions to another part of the banner and the CPU calms down. This is all related to the animation that Flash banner designers are using, I’m sure of it.
Because IE8 doesn’t re-open tabs when you close and re-open it – didn’t IE7 do that? – using it for my serious browsing isn’t much of an option. I fire it up when I need to check a site that I know I won’t keep open for more than a few minutes. Chrome is more crash-proof than Firefox 3.1, so I’ve been using that for the past month or so. It’s a nice, fast browser – but doesn’t render everything properly and sometimes acts funky, so I fire up Firefox on a regular basis. It’s weird using three different browsers! I haven’t tried Firefox 3.5 much since it was released recently, so I might switch back and hope that it’s less prone to “Flash Crashes”…
The New Floor, and New Floor Covering
A few people have asked what I ended up using on my floor, so here you go: they’re rubber/plastic tiles designed for a garage floor. I bought them at RONA, our Home Depot-type store here in Calgary. I didn’t cover quite as much space as I’d originally planned, but it’s enough for me to roll where I need to in my office. There are small bumps on the tiles, so it’s not like rolling over hardwood, but it’s not too bad. I ordered some rubber wheels for my Aeron chair, which will hopefully help further. I’m still getting things set up, so the wiring isn’t quite up to snuff. 😉
The Moment I’ve Been Dreading Has Arrived: Office Teardown
I’ve been putting this off for at least two years now, but I finally had to bite the bullet and get it done: I had to tear-down my home office and move it in order to get my floor fixed. We moved into this house in 2001, and finished the basement later that year. We put down berber carpet, which at the time seemed like a good idea because basements tend to be cold. Then we got a little puppy named Keiko – and after a few months that berber carpet was covered in stains (house-training a puppy is a messy business). It was also problematic for me to not be able to roll my office chair from computer to computer – for a while I had a custom-cut piece of Plexiglas on the floor, but over time that cracked and broke.
Not wanting to pay another $500 to replace it, and realizing it was a bit demoralizing to be working surrounded by urine stains, it was time for a renovation to my home office. In 2006 I hired a carpenter, and he sub-contracted a flooring company (Underfoot Floors in Calgary), to re-do several key parts of my office. He built a custom set of shelves for me, and the flooring company ripped up the berber carpet and installed a hardwood laminate floor. For a while, everything was great – but then I started to notice that as I rolled my chair across the floor, it would seem to catch on the floor. Over the next year, I’d find little chips of broken hardwood laminate – bit by bit, I was destroying the floor. The entire point of going with the hardwood laminate was to get something tough enough to stand up to a rolling office chair. I brought in the carpenter and the flooring company, and there was a lot of shoulder shrugging and finger-pointing.
This is what the floor looked like after a couple of years worth of my chair rolling over it.
The problem was two-fold: the underlay that Underfoot Flooring used was quite thick. I had asked for a thick underlay in an attempt to plug up some of the awful insulation problems that Bay West Homes inflicted upon us when they built the house – on a cold day, my basement would be a good 15 degrees Celsius colder than the main floor. You could hold your hand along the baseboards and feel freezing cold air blowing in. Knowing nothing about flooring, I didn’t realize that by having the thicker underlay would cause the floor to move up and down more. You’d think that the flooring professionals would have pointed this out to me, right? No such luck. The particular flooring that I selected – completely based on colour and design, because hey, what do I know about flooring – turned out to have a bevelled edge, meaning that the pieces didn’t lock as tightly together as the indestructible Pergo flooring I had back in my condo. Again, I had no clue – Underfoot Flooring knew this was going in a home office, so I trusted their advice about the flooring options I had. Continue reading The Moment I’ve Been Dreading Has Arrived: Office Teardown