I moved my domain registration from eNom, where I originally signed up with my Google Apps account, to Hover back in November, and my website has been broken ever since.
Still not quite working
After the initial two straight days of beating my head against the (internet) wall [The walls here are concrete - only have to try that one time to learn not to do it again!], trying to get mnthomp.com to actually point to my Blogger blog, I gave up and went on vacation to Southern China. I've tried a couple more times since to bend the MX, CNAME, and TXT records to my will and point my domain to my blog instead of some random placeholder page that I didn't even want, but I only have the patience for that about once a month, and there was really no progress, so I was on the brink of giving up hope.
Maybe this is a quick fix?
Today I went to check my Apps email, and realized that I could no longer go to "mail.(domain).com" to get my mail, instead I got the same stupid placeholder, and I was inspired / angered into action again.
After about three hours of mucking about, I think I've got everything back to how it should be. Kinda. I ended up doing a forward/redirect instead of actually pointing the domain to Google's hosting service, which should work.
Until I go and check it and get the above pictured nice feature of being in China: "This webpage is not available. The connection to sh.114so.cn was interrupted." I didn't even want to connect to "sh.114so.cn"!!!
Theoretically this is caused by whatever crappy DNS servers China Telecom uses refusing to redirect certain pages. How this happens even when you're connected through a VPN ths is supposed to be shuttling all of your data through California, I don't know, but supposedly manually switching the DNS servers can fix this.
I'll try that later and maybe report back, but not right now. It's noon, I've been at this for over three hours, and I haven't eaten yet today [maybe that's part of the problem...], so I'm going to go eat, not stare at the computer for a bit, and maybe try again later.
Oh, but the reason I switched from eNom to Hover in the first place is that eNom is a pain in the but to use and Hover is much more user friendly when it comes to renewing, changing records, adding redirects, subdomains, etc. That being said, my website worked when it was a eNom, and now it doesn't. But I honestly think that's Google's fault.
UPDATE!! Feb 24 -- After taking some time to eat some lunch and not look at the computer screen, I realized that everything was setup correctly, I had just mistyped one line in the configuration. Now that the mistake is corrected, everything seems to be working correctly. I guess I could rescind my statements about the crappy China Telecom DNS servers... but they're still pretty slow, regardless.
I know that Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz's death on January 13th is already reaching the old news phase, but I remembered this video and had to post it. The fact that an event of the magnitude of Aaron Swartz's death is considered "old news" after only twelve days is a completely different topic.
This video is from Aaron Swartz's keynote "How we stopped SOPA" at the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington DC on May 21 2012. This was one of his last big, public appearances and he really articulates the struggle that those who want a free and open internet face in today's legislative environment.
I don't know what conclusions we can draw from Aaron's speech, and he may have had a history of being a little bit extreme, but it definitely doesn't mean that we can relax and not stay vigilant in the face of powerful people who don't know how the internet works.
I love Google's occasional doodles on their homepage, and I love the evolution from the early, simple ones to the latest HTML5 craziness. But I've never really understood how they have chosen which historical occasions and figures to represent.
For example, today, June 6, is the anniversary of D-Day, the day in 1944 that Allied troops stormed the Nazi held beaches of southern France and began the eventual push towards victory in World War II. 9,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded. It was kind of a big deal.
But on the Google homepage today there is an homage to the first drive-in movie theater, which opened on the same date in 1933. Really neat presentation and very well done, but the gravity of the events aren't the same.
That being said, while D-Day 1944 was a great victory for our side, a bunch of people lost their lives and I'm sure it wasn't a pretty picture. The opening of the first drive-in movie theater, on the other hand, is a shoe-in for awesome, lite-hearted remembering for those old enough and exploration for those too young to have ever been.
And I love drive-in movies and the culture that they represent, so I'm definitely not unhappy with their selection. But maybe Google will do something D-Day related to the 80th anniversary in 2014. I hope they do.
Even though Les Paul passed away in 2009, he will always be remembered as the father of the solid body electric guitar as well as multi-track recording. Plus, he was one heck of a guitar picker! For what would have been his 96th birthday, Google has unveiled probably their coolest interactive Doodle yet - the electric guitar doodle. After the fact you can probably see a picture of it at Google.com/logos, but you'd better hurry up and and try it out now!
You can just aimlessly pluck strings with your mouse pointer, or you can use your keyboard for a bit more precision Here's a link to me slowly tapping out "Happy Birthday" - http://goo.gl/doodle/hfQh. Not sure how long the link will last, but it's pretty nifty while it does! (My version of Happy Birthday is played "5565 887 5565 998 5508 8876 440898")
I'm not even going to mention how long it's been since I've blogged. Whoops, I just did. Oh well, moving on...
I'm totally obsessed with electronica remixes of vaguely folkish music. And apparently YouTube is the only place to discover them. Take this one for instance:
It's The Twelves remixing Fleet Foxes "White Winter Hymnal," and they're both kinda mainstream (as well as completely awesome). This track was featured on The Twelves' BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix from Dec 18 of 2009, so it's likely available elsewhere.
However, I would have never found this gem if it weren't for the 'Tubes, and it is a beautiful work, worthy of radio time:
Some producer called Maffiss totally reworking the haunting, auto-tuned, vocal-only, four-line Bon Iver track "Woods" into some danceable awesomeness. Looks like you can legally obtain all of his remixes for free at http://maffiss.bandcamp.com/.
Speaking of Bandcamp (the website, not the horrible joke from American Pie), there's some pretty good stuff on there. Like Apple Juice Kid. Look him up.
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I've realized that I do need to actually work out a little bit, because as much as I love dancing, and as much as I do it (couple times a week, not as much as I'd like, usually), it doesn't really do much for your anaerobic fitness level. I also realize that I'm probably never going to go to a gym again and I don't plan on buying a bunch of free weights, so I need something to do that doesn't take much (any) equipment and is a little broader than my usual crunches / push-ups action.
A few weeks ago I came across an article on Lifehacker about J.P. Müller's My System. First published in 1904, it was apparently the Victorian version of South Beach - effective, but controversial. Also, it's not a diet. It's a 15-minute, zero equipment, core-strengthening routine that, even though it's 107 years old, seems pretty effective. I found several scanned copies on the interwebs and decided to skip the intro, etcetera ("Why Be Weak?") and go straight to the workout, which is broken down into a five-week build-up to the ultimate 18 exercise routine on week six. I'm on week two, and I can totally feel it in my "flanks." I think I need to supplement it with extra push-ups to really get what I want out of it, but it's going pretty well. [Also, apparently someone else was similarly inspired, but they decided to put it online. www.mullersmysystem.com]
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Along similar lines, I also have realized that my diet is in serious need of some help. I think my daily caloric intake is somewhere around 1800, including a couple hundred worth of booze, usually, when it really should be closer to 2600, with less alcohol. [Not that I am worried about my drinking, or even that I drink that much, average of a drink or two a day isn't bad, is it?] Today I had some hot chocolate, some cereal, some ridiculously tasty oatmeal**, one slice of salami, and some "apple nachos." Now it's 8pm and I would rather head out the door to go dancing than fix anything to eat. I suppose I'll have a cookie and see if there's any free pizza available at Avo's when the kitchen closes. And a beer. Beer counts as food; it's basically bread.
But yeah, like I was saying my diet needs some improvement.
**Ridiculously Tasty Oatmeal: So, a very nice girl, who has the shift after mine at Everyday Joe's, has gone through a lot in the realm of eating and being healthy. She was anorexic and addicted to exercise, and therefore really unhealthy. I don't know if she even weighs 100 pounds now, seeing as she's a pretty small girl and still extremely active, but she's apparently significantly healthier than she was. Anyway, we were working together last week and somehow oatmeal came up in conversation. I mentioned that I liked bacon in my oatmeal [you'll laugh until you try it], and she mentioned that she puts peanut butter in hers and loves it. I had never thought of putting peanut butter in my oatmeal, but I love peanut butter, and I love oatmeal, so I figured I'd give it a go. Oatmeal, brown sugar, peanut butter, a little jelly, enough milk to float it all, and five minutes in the microwave at half-power, and damn if that wasn't the yummiest thing to come out of that box in a long time.
Ya know, I think I may have some more of that before I go out dancing after all. I can get there at nine instead. Still not a balanced diet, but I'll worry about that another time.
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There's more news, like the job I got, my constant truck tribulations, the super awesome balboa weekend, etc, but that may have to wait or be skipped. Watch my twitter if you're really interested in what's going on day to day.
Apparently I went about getting my previously mentioned Wordle word cloud of my Twitter stream in a extremely roundabout way and didn't realize that it isn't as simple as I thought.
From what I can tell, Wordle will create a word cloud from any url that supports an RSS feed. To find the RSS feed of your (or anyone's) Twitter updates, go to http://twitter.com/username (replace username with the one you want) and click on the "RSS feed of ___'s tweets" button on the lower right-hand side. This will give you the RSS page address that Wordle needs to create a word cloud. Copy the url from the location bar and paste it into the appropriate box at www.wordle.net/create and hit Submit.
Unfortunately, there are only 20 updates included in Twitter's RSS feed at a time, and I'm not sure exactly how many of those Wordle decides to use. It's not very many, so you end up with a really crappy looking word cloud with a lot of @s, usernames, and tinyurl links. Not very entertaining.
The way I stumbled upon my really cool looking word cloud was pretty convoluted. I started out at the TweetStats site graphing my tweet timeline, tweet density, and some other cool aggregated statistics about my tweets. (Which, incidentally, you can check out here.) There is some really nifty info there, and if you click on the little "Tweet Cloud" button near the top, you get their version of a word cloud made from you tweets. Kinda near the middle-right of that page there's a little blurb that says "Don't like the TweetCloud? Well then, go make a Wordle! (no @'s)" Click on the link (I like the no @'s version) and it takes you to a Wordle page with all the hard work done already. Then you just mess around with the colors, layout, etc, and take a screen shot of what you like. Bam!
There's also a "save to gallery" button, but I wouldn't waste your time there, since the gallery is chronological and cannot be searched, therefore rendering it basically useless to find your creation in the future.
I have to assume that there is some RSS-foo going on in the background of TweetStat to get a better sampling of data than I was able to find using the RSS button on Twitter. I also assume that if I spent long enough messing around with the public API, I might be able to figure it out, but since someone has already done it, I'm not gonna waste my time.
Also, I'm pretty sure that your updates cannot be protected for all of this to work, but since mine are public, I can't tell you for sure. Happy graphing / clouding!
Just announced (via comic book) yesterday and released to the masses today, Google's new open-source jaunt into the browser world, "Chrome," aims to help us get more done on the Internet with less junk in the way.
Read about Chrome's nifty features here, and download it here.
I downloaded in about 15 minutes ago and am immediately impressed. It has a very Safari look to it, which is alright, but the first neat thing I noticed was the lack of a normal Windows title bar at the top of the window - talk about getting things out of your way! I also promptly missed my Firfox extent ions, specifically mouse gestures and Focus Last Selected Tab, but Chrome imported all of my bookmarks without any problems (other than having to close Firefox to do it), and everything seems to work. Since the "awesome-bar" name was already taken by FF3's spiffy new multipurpose address bar, Google called theirs the "omni-bar" since it's the one place to type anything at the top of the screen. It seems to work very smoothly though, ever smoother than the 'Fox's.
The other big thing is where the tabs are in relation to the address bar. They're above it. Each tab has it's own address bar, bookmark buttons, etc. This may seem a little bit weird, but it really matches the way Chrome works - each tab is its own process in memory, so it doesn't have to share and when you close it, it's actually gone. This lets Chrome handle memory much better than Firefox 2 or 3. With four tabs open it appears to be consuming about 42 MB of RAM for the program itself and then 4 to 16 MB for each tab, depending on what each is doing, each in their own process. While not exactly light weight, this is certainly not bad. I will have to keep an eye on it to see how it goes after a couple hours worth of surfing.
Of course, being Google, this new browser was released in beta form, but it definitely will be taken as a shot across the bow and a direct challenge by Microsoft. Since Google's Chrome browser is written from scratch and with the open-source community in mind, I'm not sure how the other open-source browser, Firefox, will react to this development, but I think this is just what we needed to kick the browser wars up a notch.
Give it a try, lemme know what you think!
Also, check out Lifehacker's screenshot tour here.
Four short years after Firefox 1.0 started to "reclaim the web," Firefox 3.0 has arrived! So help set a Guinness World Record (for most software downloads in a 24-hour period) and get Firefox 3 today here. (Or, the direct download link here.)
I've been using the release candidates for over a month now, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone to use.
Google always has to be on the bleeding edge of innovation. Today they introduced a new feature that is sure to be the envy of all of the other geeky email services: Gmail Custom Time.
Now you can send email from the past, (not before 01 April 2004, though) and have it show up in the correct order in the recipient's inbox!
They must be rolling it out slowly though, like they have done with other new features, because I still don't have the "custom time" option in my compose window. Oh well, I can wait - because when I get it, I can always send an email from the past as if it were already there! April Fools! That's totally not possible.
Yay, that was a good one, Google.
**Update: More Google April Foolery - Project Virgle! A colony on Mars.
Welp, it's 2008. I'd better try to remember to write that on checks and stuff now! I hope your 2007 was great and your 2008 will be even better.
In other news today, TCP/IP turns 25 years old today. It's good to know that I am older than the protocol that makes the entire internet work. I guess you could say I'm 'Pre TCP/IP'. As with most things that really took root and changed the technological / industrial world, TCP/IP was adopted and backed by the United States government with the ancestor of the modern Internet, its ARPANET network.
Basically TCP/IP is the set of numbers that make allow the internet to find itself. Every connection to the internet has its own, specific IP address (like 216.136.227.255 which is one of Yahoo's) which is organized by the TCP system so that your browser, search engines, etc, can find the stuff that you are looking for. The DNS servers convert those numbers into names, but that's a totally different story.
Also, I was reminded to eat my black eyed peas today for fortune in the new year, so you'd better do that too. Here's the recipe I think I'm going to try.
When I left my house at 5:45 a.m. there was about 3" of new snow, on top of whatever was already there, and it was still coming down pretty hard. Needless to say, road conditions were terrible, so I decided to stay in the "north office" instead of going the extra 55 miles down to the "field office," since the first 15 miles alone took me 45 minutes.
At least it looks / feels / seems like winter now!
Click on the title to read a great post by former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson from a couple of weeks ago. He believes, as I do, that the U.S. should not allow the United Nations to assume control of the Internet.
The United States invented the Internet and we, through ICANN, have been doing a pretty good job of administering it as well. The U.N. would just screw it up like they do with pretty much everything else they touch.
Off topic, but related... I like that Fred Thompson blogs. I don't know if he personally does the typing or if he employs someone to do it for him (more likely), but it's still cool. Especially for an old dude.
A live-ish map of Robert Earl Keen's current road tour brought to the Internet by as mush-up between Google Maps and the concert schedules found on MySpace by Grüvr.
As of today, the map shows REK appearing in Fort Collins, CO on Wednesday the 26th, a show which I hope I can make it to!
"Nigeria was the first nation to announce a full economic collapse from the internet crash. Ninety-four percent of its gross domestic product came from internet ventures."
LOL... But in all seriousness, I'd better figure out a way to back-up my Blogger. I'd be a little sad if I wasted all this time with nothing to show for it.
Ever wonder why Firefox makes you wait three seconds before you can install an extension or other add-on? I have, and apparently Jesse Rudermanfigured it out.
Apparently, there's a tendency for people to click "okay" or "install" or "yes" as fast as possible without reading any warning or notice dialogs when they think they know what they are doing. This can be dangerous if a site is trying to trick you into doing something that you wouldn't have otherwise done. There are also sites that will take advantage of the "y = yes" keyboard shortcuts that are common in a lot of applications and trick you with a 'captcha' like the one in his post.
I'm a geek, but it answers one of those nagging questions that I probably wouldn't have figured out on my own.
Whilst fulfilling my addiction to Lifehacker's offerings to the web, in this case a discussion about Apple's Cinema Display monitors versus those offered by Dell, I came across the best comment exchange ever. And by best, I mean non-flaming, name-calling, immature ranting. Just a nice, clever "Oh Snap!" moment.
