This does not sit well with me. Giving government the capability to control a public, open and free network is where I draw the line. I do like the idea of having a federally-recognized cybersecurity certification program, as this will establish one standard for knowledge on the subject and clear a lot of hurdles for aspiring network security analysts. Everything else is bull. This is the first time I’ve seen the EFF call out something introduced by a non-Bushie. I took issue with the NSA in the Bush years because the same thing happened: government took too much liberty with the public internet, and spied on its own citizens in the process. If a threat emerges, let the government deal with their own networks. Any sysadmin who has completed the proposed federally-sponsored cybersecurity certification program would predictably be able to take care of those under their control.

If you haven’t noticed already, I’ll go ahead and say that my problems with this are solely practical rather than political, as the internet is a big part of my life and work, so naturally these are the issues I care most about. (I’m working on an essay-type thing detailing my positions, in which I proclaim that Republicans are evil and Democrats just don’t care anymore.) I’ve seen a lot of people online throwing harsh words at the president for this, which is stupid because he has nothing to do with it. These people are crossing the line. They’re probably overzealous Glenn Beck fans. Anyway, case in point:

This has nothing to do with “protecting” the internet.

It has everything to do with the power drunk, dicatorial 0bama engaging in an unprecedendted, unconstitutional power grab, orchestrated by his psychotic. lunatic fringe “czars” like Van Jones.

After siezing the auto companies, siezing the banks, setting up a snitch line at flag@whitewhite.gov for Americans to report anyone who doesn’t agree with 0bama’s evil health care bill, , ahile ammasing a fedrel deficits of a staggering $1.6 trillion, and sending “stimulus” money to murderers in US jails, this communist wants to grab control of the internet too does he?

Really? Really? I suppose the fact that Jay Rockefeller is coming up with this thing rather than the White House does nothing for you. You probably think President Obama has exercised some sort of mind control on this poor fellow to perpetrate this communist, Kenyan, Bill Ayers-esque, Orwellian, Illuminati, unconsitutional, and overall, evil, evil, evil power grab that will turn everyone gay, make the divorce rate skyrocket, take away all your guns and direct the government to demolish all churches.

To this I say: Really? What are you smoking?

So much has happened this week and I am surprised I made it out alive. Check it out.

Monday
I was working on billing stuff with Boss #2 in Henderson when his wife left to take one of the kids to grandma’s and grab food at Arby’s, if I remember correctly. She backs out of the driveway and B2 and I hear a horrible grinding noise. “That didn’t sound good,” I said. We emerge from the back yard and she’s back in the driveway. My car also has a nice little bit of damage done to it. My driver side door will open only once more after this happens, more on that later. We notify the police and get an accident report, and I drive home with a disabled vehicle, entering through the passenger door. On my way home from Henderson, a Subway bag in my car decided to empty itself of its contents and begin flying around the car. This startles and distracts me enough that I run off the road and have one hell of a ride trying to get back on the road (successful) while staying in my own lane (not successful) traveling at 60mph. I left the highway and had to sit off on a side road for about 20 minutes to gather myself, then decided to make the rest of the way home.

Wednesday
Wednesday was my 21st birthday. I know I promised last year on this blog that I’d have a party but needless to say that never happened. I actually had to work that day, for the second year in a row. B2′s insurance company gave me a check that day for the damage to my car from his wife backing into it. I still have not visited the other former customer I planned on visiting that day. How exciting, huh?

Friday
Friday, I planned on renewing my license to get the cool sideways version that all the people 21 and over get. I was still climbing in and out of my car through the passenger door, so I mapped out what the routine would be before leaving. I would go to the bank to deposit my paycheck, then walk over to the judicial center to get my license renewed, then head home. Apparently, I was concentrating too much on this planned routine because on my way to the bank, I zoned out, went through a red light and struck the side of a Ford F-250 going through that same intersection. My car did little damage to the truck but was pretty banged up itself, as seen in the picture at the top of this entry. The car was a complete loss and my insurance will not pay for it. Thankfully, the check I received from B2′s insurance company will just about pay off the car so I can sell it for parts or something to make up the difference. Not to be brought completely down by the day’s events, I went out with friends to celebrate my birthday. I had a few drinks; I figured that the way this week was going, I would be lucky if I didn’t die at Holiday World on…

Saturday
Yes, I went to Holiday World on Saturday with the OSMA/Twitterites. We planned this event at Texas Roadhouse during the big ice storm back in January, and I think that was the key to its overwhelming success. We had 21 attendees. I finally got to meet some really cool people (and catch up with others!), all the while being burned to a crisp by the sun. I did not die at Holiday World, so I can consider this week a partial success.

Can I sleep for about a week now?

To see a globe in your dream, suggests that you need to step back and look at the wider perspective. It also indicates that you are in complete control of your life.

To see a spinning globe in your dream, signifies that your life is going out of control.

Okay, I saw several globes, none of which were spinning. This must be a good thing because my life is not spinning out of control, and I must REALLY be in absolutely complete control of every aspect of my life. That’s good right?

This dream also featured a journalist  like the last one I blogged about, but I will not disclose this plot because from what I hear he really is a nice guy, and he wasn’t a very nice person in my dream.

You will quickly see where I’m going with the post title. My site (as well as a couple of others) are now at DreamHost. I have a feeling this will be the last move for a long, long time. If you decide to sign up, enter me as a referral and show these people how awesome I am at recruiting. (If you click the link in this paragraph and sign up in the same session, you don’t have to do a thing. Trust me. They know where you came from.)

And now for what I came here to say. Yes, I have had another totally messed up dream. Recently, Dariush took a vacation for a week to Hawaii. I had this dream last night where I and some faceless Twitterites went with him. (Really, the others didn’t have faces.) Anyway, I was being stalked through a high school in Hawaii on their graduation night by a student I didn’t know. It was a she, she looked like a freshman, it creeped me out. I found my way to the hotel room we were all sharing and strangely there was a large tree growing from the floor. We had the TV on and I remember wondering out loud how we were getting the channels. Another interesting event was when Dariush was sitting on the bed (the room only had one for some reason) listening to a song on his phone. While this was going on a couple of Secret Service-looking guys walk through the hotel room, give him a weird look and conferred for a few seconds in the bathroom. They come out, tell us all they’re agents with the RIAA and arrest Dariush on suspicion that he downloaded the song he was listening to illegally. As they were taking him away, I woke up.

Ta-da!

A lot of things around me are falling apart. Common Technologies is all but gone and I’m the one tasked with making sure the hosting customers get somewhere they’re taken care of. This somewhere will probably be DreamHost for most of them. Others currently on a Windows server will be moved to a web host that provides Windows servers with Plesk 8.3, identical to our current setup. A couple of them will probably benefit from moving to a hosted Exchange solution for their insane volume of email. In all, I have around 28 accounts to put somewhere. I have a list written on the back of an envelope of all the clients. I’ll cross them off as I get them taken care of.

I think I know why I’m miserable lately. I have no free time. Back in the day I had plenty of time to sit around and write code all day/night. And the difference was the stuff that made me happy was my own stuff, as opposed to stuff that others wanted me to do for them. I sort of want to do this again, if only for a month or so. I think that’s all I can afford to do.

Anyway, I’ve moved both my rackmount servers to my house and I’m preparing to set up the network extraordinaire in my own home. I can’t do much in my own home network other than back up my files and have a place to offset video transcoding, but one thing I also want to do is get an Asterisk phone server set up. If you saw the horrid tangle of phone wires in the basement you would understand why. I’d like to slim it down to one line in the house plus another for emergency use only. I may use my 1U PowerEdge 350 for this. I just took a break from writing to start downloading the trixbox ISO image.

Since it’s inhumanely late I will now go to bed. And by ‘go to bed’ I mean go to the grocery store to get something to eat first.

1. Use this stimulus money to buy all stock in an insolvent bank/automaker/whatever. All of it. Everything. Leave none untouched.
2. Fire every single board member and executive. All of them, everyone, you know the rest.
3. Put in people who KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
4. Turn the bank/automaker/whatever around.
5. Sell the shares for a profit.

This would be a better plan than just handing money to executives. That or as my grandfather tells me they could give every person who lives in the U.S. $2.4 million. I could definitely pay off my debt with that and then put the money somewhere I deem worthy to receive it. Who’s with one of these suggestions?

1. I don’t know what kind of fantasy world these people have been living in, but I’m pretty sure abortion has been legal for at least 30 years with the Roe v. Wade decision. At least, there’s been a legal standard for it. That pretty much renders this thing useless.
2. The methodology is just stupid. I may be an atheist and a card-carrying Dem and all but that doesn’t mean I like, support abortion or anything. I disagree with at-will abortion yet will not question a Supreme Court decision… but the way to eliminate the problem is NOT to force your religion/morals/what have you on others without regard to situations where an abortion may be needed, like those standard cases of rape or incest or when the pregnancy presents a danger to the mother’s health or life. The way to eliminate abortion is to advocate policies that make the environment better so that mothers will not consider abortion once they are pregnant. Of course I have left out that “have more sensible sex education to reduce unwanted pregnancies in the first place” thing, because I don’t want to be sitting here all night writing. If a woman would rather not or later find they can’t raise a child, do the right thing and let a family who can raise the child adopt him or her. This is related to the whole “pro-life” (the buzzword) vs. “pro-life” (pro-ALL LIFE) argument.

Anyway, that’s my take on this whole … thing. I do apologize if it was a bit incoherent. Also all my best wishes to our new president and may he have a successful four (but hopefully eight) years serving our great nation.

• You could login with your domain user name and know how many new emails you had.
• It would tell you the weather.
• It would tell you what color day it was for the next week.
• It actually had an RSS feed.

I applied for a job at OHS to become a computer lab technician and hopefully reverse all these shortcomings. Apparently it was one of those jobs that was already filled but they had to post it because of the law or something. Some coach who was already working there got the job, from what I can gather. That kinda gets to me, it’s like they’re not hiring qualified people. Not even an interview for me? 

All this is fine with me; I mean if they don’t want to advance themselves it’s their loss.

Owensboro recently was blessed by the Google-gods with Street View. Exciting, exciting, exciting. What does one do upon their first visit to Street View? They look for their house. However, I was unable to do this because my neighborhood is apparently not covered.

Of course, the streets outlined in blue are the ones that have Street View. It appears that there is an L-shaped black hole of GSV coverage here in town. I could understand if I lived on the edge of town, but as this larger image shows, I do not. 

What gives, Google?

Shortest. Blog post. EVAR.