Category: Rants & Raves

How long has Amazon been running sponsored links? I was looking at The Wreckers live album, and saw this in the listing:

Clicking on the ‘What is this?” link gives the following text:

SPONSORED LINKS
Sponsored Links are advertisements that Amazon.ca provides for you. We receive Sponsored Links from Google’s AdWords service. When you click on a Sponsored Link, we get revenue. The selection of Sponsored Links that are displayed is based on keywords. For example, if you search for “Bruce Springsteen” or view pages about Bruce Springsteen, the Sponsored Links may point to sites that sell tickets to his concerts or provide information about him. Sponsored Links are always clearly labelled.

Generating additional revenue from Sponsored Links allows us to offer you lower prices–something we are dedicated to doing in every way we can.

Really Amazon? You’re going to drop your prices because you’re making money from Google? You’re not just going to roll the profits into your quarterly earnings to make your shareholders happy? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

[I really do like Amazon though, I order a lot of stuff from them – pretty much every new book, DVD, and CD I buy comes from Amazon.ca…and I’d buy a lot more from them if Amazon Canada offered MP3s, electronics, etc.]

It’s an ugly way to start my week: opening up my personal email account and seeing 300+ messages…290 of which are spam bounce-backs from some jackass spammer using my personal domain as a reply-to address. And it just happened a couple of weeks ago! Hopefully it will be as short-lived this time as it was then. And I really hope all the alpha-geeks in the world would get together and solve the problem of email domain-hijacking once and for all (and spam for that matter).

Ok, we’re back up and ready to rock – although things are a bit slow at the moment because we’re copying over large chunks of data. I’ll be posting the Dragon contest later today as planned – but it won’t be until the late afternoon/early evening. Watch Digital Home Thoughtsmebeli for it!

I’m not bad when it comes to editing video, but I truly admire people that have the sense of timing and intuition to make truly superb movie trailers – you know that ones where you end up finding out that the movie trailer was better than the movie itself? These are three movie trailers that take the movies in a completely different direction…much to the delight of anyone watching them. This is funny stuff! [Language Warning]

(That last one would have been even funnier if the announcer’s voice was more appropriate for a movie trailer…)

Like most men that were kids in the ’80s (yeah, I’m over 30 now), I have fond memories Transformers, GI Joe, and other franchises that are now flooding the modern movie market. For the most part, that’s a good thing – I really enjoyed the Transformers movie, even if I think Michael Bay should have been punched in the head for a few of the decisions he made. At any rate, as you might have guessed from the photo above, GI Joe is coming to the big screen…and I’m not sure I should be scared or excited. Will they slaughter my childhood memories with a campy, cheesy movie that will suck? Or will they retain some of the coolness and make it an enjoyable romp? Well see – but one things for sure, GI Joe: The Movie in cartoon form still kicks ass! I just watched it a couple of months ago… 😀

Oh yeah, and in case you didn’t figure it out, that’s Ray Park playing Snake Eyes – the same guy who played Darth Maul. I think Ray Park is great, but someone needs to teach him a new stance – that’s a total Darth Maul rip-off. 😉

I don’t think I can thank the people at Akismet enough for their amazing comment-spam-blocking technology that they give out to most people for free (sites without ads). Every couple of days I get around 500 spam comments that are completely blocked by Akismet – I’d say no more than three spam comments a week slip through to my moderation queue, meaning that for the most part, Akismet’s system is completely administration-free. That’s truly amazing stuff – thank you Akismet!

There are a lot of silly groups on Facebook, and I tend to ignore most of the ones that I get invited to, but this one caught my attention because it seemed so insane I thought it was a hoax:

“In 2007, the ‘artist’ Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, took a dog from the street, tied him to a rope in an art gallery and began starving him to death. For several days, the ‘artist’ and the visitors of the exhibition watched, emotionless, the shameful ‘masterpiece’ based on the dog’s agony, until eventually he died. Does THIS sound like art to you? But this is not all… the prestigious Visual Arts Biennial of Central America decided that the ‘installation’ WAS actually art, so Guillermo Vargas Habacuc has been invited to repeat his cruel action for the Biennial of 2008.”

I fully admit to not being a “modern art” guy, and not understanding or “appreciating” much of what I see in the realm of modern art. So long as my tax dollars aren’t being used to fund it, and the art doesn’t abuse the rights of others, artists can do pretty much whatever they want in my book. But this is so completely over the line it’s ridiculous. I wanted it to be a hoax, but it seems that it’s not. I’m not one of those hyper-PETA types that thinks animals are more important than people, but I am one of those dog-owner types that gets very, very angry when he sees people being cruel to dogs. If this “artist” Habacuc wants to explore the themes of starvation and suffering, he should chain himself up and tell people not to feed him. Doing this to any living being against its will is cruelty, nothing less.

How can we stop this from happening again? There are two online petitions: one in English, one in Spanish (I think), and if you take a minute to check out this Facebook group, there’s a well-written email that you can put your name to and send to the Centro Nacional de la Cultura, the gallery that has invited him to repeat this process again – although according to Snopes it seems he might not do any “art” involving a dog.

One of the most irritating thing that can happen to you as a domain owner is when a spammer decides to use your domain as the reply-to email address. When this happens, if you have your domain email configured as I do to capture email at every address @ the domain.com, you get hundreds of bounce-backs flying at you. The worst part about this? There’s absolutely no way to stop them – the design of email is fundamentally flawed in that it allows anyone to put an email server online and send email without having to authenticate who they are and if they have permission to send email. Worse still, if people flag the spam they received as spam, it hurts my chances of being able to send legitimate email from jasondunn.com. Someone really needs to fix email – it can’t continue like this for another 10 years.

So if you happened to have received a piece of spam from the jasondunn.com domain, I can assure you it wasn’t I that sent it.

Decoder ring: I’m “Customer” and the technicians are from The Planet, the company that hosts my Web sites.

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you…
You have been connected to David G.
David G: Thank you for contacting The Planet Customer ServiceTeam! How may I assist you today? Would you be interested in seeing the weekly promotions that we are having?
Customer: Hi there…
Customer: My site, www.zunethoughts.com, isn’t loading – it seems like a DNS issue
Customer: The other sites on my server are loading fine
David G: Can you verify your username and last 4 of your password please?
Customer: I was wondering if you might have any ideas?
Customer: sure….
Customer: username: **************
Customer: password: ****
David G: Let me transfer you to our Support Team. They will be able to point you in the right direction for a solution. One moment please Thank you for choosing The Planet!
David G has left the session.
Please wait while we find an agent from the Technical Support department to assist you.
You have been connected to Michael W.
Michael W: Hello, how may I assist you?
Customer: Are you able to see what I said earlier in this chat?
Michael W: Yes, one moment please.
Michael W: There was a problem with many of the DNS zones in our name servers. This caused some domain records not to resolve. I ahve republished your zone which should be ready some time after 6AM CST. I do apologize for any issues this may have caused. Continue reading Why You Can’t Trust Your DNS Records To The Planet