...because the Internet is already my primary source of information and is rapidly becoming the only source of information that counts. Read this to see why your reliance on Mainstream Media is soooo five minutes ago.

These people are also crazy:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/12/21/national1342EST0572.DTL

Here's the story of a family who is suing Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart sold their daughter the shotgun she used to kill herself. Tragic, yes. Worth of litigation? Hardly. The family's claim is that Wal-Mart “should have known” that the girl was going to do something bad with that shotgun because (a) she assaulted a Wal-Mart employee (come on, who hasn't?) and (b) the Wal-Mart pharmacy had information on file about her prescription meds for (wait for it!) being crazy.

Here's the deal: some people are nuts and some of those people are nutty enough to do bad things with shotguns. Improve gun control laws. Be better parents. Or even (gasp!) allow for the possibility that this poor soul actually wanted to and decided to end her own life. At least she didn't take anyone else out along the way.

Respect her decision, and stop trying to blame those cheap bastards at Wal-Mart.

These people are crazy:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/16/national1426EST0601.DTL

They want us to stop eating fish. They liken it to eating cats and dogs. Frankly, I'd eat member of PETA if it came right down to it. Perhaps a little PETA on pita. With a nice Chianti.

I say: Wear fur. Go hunting for sport. Eat anything below you on the food chain, including people of limited intelligence who have little better to do with their sad, tofo-eating lives than to push a dubious moral agenda on the good folks at Neiman Marcus and various sushi houses around this great meat-eating country of ours.

Seriously, people. Fish are fish. And, as it turns out, fish are both yummy and good for you. Deee-lish, Noo-trish, as my grandmother used to say.

Trina's blog is now available in XML. Check it out:

http://www.trinachow.com/blog/rss/trina.xml

Be happy, Omar.

-dick

...by the way, if you vote “Yes” on all the propositions, you'll be a democrat. Voting “No” on everything makes you a republican. Ain't that funny? Or sad, maybe.

Freakin' two-party system.

Well. I've spent some time now reading through the various voter's guides that the good men of the Office of the Post have left at my doorstep, and I daresay, I am well read and ready to exercise my civic obligation on or possibly before November 2nd.

I've put together a nifty little spreadsheet, which you can find here, which has information from various political parties and other organizations about how these parties and organizations would have you cast your vote on each of the approximately 5000 propositions and referendums on this year's ballot.

There is a column for you to indicate your intent on each proposition, and the spreadsheet will automatically re-color itself to tell you whether you are a tax-and-spend bastard democrat or a bible-thumping republican gay-basher. Sweet!

These days, I'm riding Caltrain to work everyday. It's awesome. I am invulnerable to traffic on 101.

So, I spend the train rides playing around with .Net. I'm learning a lot. Right now, I'm writing an app that creates a web page for me to control my Media Center. You can view all the music files and make them play (on the media center, not on the computer where you're running the browser). It's cool. It uses .Net remoting and DataSets and lots of other wicked stuff.

I think up new features at night and write them, 40 minutes at a time, on the train. No feature can take longer than 40 minutes.

This morning, I wrote search. Tonight, maybe I'll hook up Play/Pause. Or maybe Shuffle. Who knows?

(c) 2004 Forty Minute Software, Inc.

My new Dell 4600 is the cat's pajamas. That is, if the cat in question is actually a giant robotic tiger-lizard and the pajamas are flaming high-tech ninja pajamas forged in the fires of Mount Doom by mutant pajama-elves from the future.

Seriously. I love this computer. Visit http://www.dell.com immediately and order something nice for yourself.

Buying experience: Excellent

Computer: Ass kicking

Shipping: Free and unbelievably fast. I actually received the computer the morning before I ordered it.

Set up: Trivial.

Wiping the disk and doing a clean install of Windows XP: Mostly Easy.

Re-installing critical drivers: Superbly easy, and possibly the best thing about buying Dell. Also an excellent reason to avoid buying Toshiba.

You are crazy not to be running WindowsXP Service Pack 2 (XP SP2) right now. Crazy, I tell you. The pop up blocker in IE 6 alone is worth the price of admission. Which is free, by the way.

Go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com right now. Do it. Right now. I'll wait.

I spent all weekend playing around with ASP.NET and CSS. Fun, fun, fun. Plus, FreeTextBox is pretty much the bomb. But you knew that.

Trina just installed the latest version of Entourage on her Mac, and the sound it plays for “no new mail” is the first note from the Boz Scaggs' tune “What's Number One“ from his little known “Other Roads“ album.

It turns out that I have the odd ability to recognize certain tones. Sounds. Notes, as it were. I would have given 'em hell on Name That Tune. I can't do it all the time, but sometimes my ear is just dead on, like with this Entourage thing. It's weird. Almost spooky.

Anyway, now I have Boz Scaggs stuck in my head everytime Trina's machine checks for mail (which is about once every seven seconds, for cryin' out loud).

CradWorld is now being hosted by FluidHosting and things are working well.

One thing bugs me, though: Propagating DNS changes through the Internet is completely braindamaged. It's like the final frontier of the Internet. On the Internet, you can:

• Order a Russian bride, and have her drop-shipped the next day
• Get a perfectly reasonably replica of “Sunshine Golden Fruit Raisin Biscuits,” (which were bought and promptly discontinued by those bastards at Keebler some years ago), and have them over-nighted by the crateload to those of us who miss them a lot... (check here)
• Invent a company, bring up a web presence, get VC funding, go public, tell lies, cash out, and get indicted by the SEC, all in about 30 seconds
• Look up someone's name and address, given only their phone number, or find out who's stalking you, all from the comfort of your armchair

But if you just want to change web hosts, it's a freakin' ordeal. It takes 48-72 hours to propagate a DNS change through the web. What are these folks doing? Writing it down and mailing it out? Calling folks up one by one? Walking the change around on a 5.25“ floppy? For cryin' out loud!!!??!

Actually, so far as I can tell, domain name resolution is performed by a group of druids in the UK. Making changes to one's domain host requires a re-alignment of certain mystical stones and crystals which, as you might imagine, can take some time.

So, there you have it. CradWorld.com is once again available to the general populace, for better or for worse.

Over the past few days I've tried to pick out a good company to host my web site. I had a bunch of criteria and did quite a bit of searching around the net, reading forums, reviews, etc. Here's what I found:

First, my criteria:

• ASP.NET support
• Perl, CGI support
• Multiple domain support, with email for each domain
• FTP support, preferably multiple FTP accounts
• Frontpage support (not mandatory, but nice to have)
• Static IP
• decent storage (400 MB+)
• decent b/w (10-20 GB/mo or more)
• good email support: POP3 and webmail, IMAP a plus
• reputable company, good support

The first criteria, ASP.NET support, actually narrows the field quite a bit. Also, I found that ASP.NET (Windows 2003) servers generally run about $5/month more than their Unix counterparts. Many companies support both.

The Basics

Web hosting comes in three basic flavors, with prices increasing as you go up:

• Shared server, in which your site is hosted on a machine that is hosting several other sites. You access your site through a web-based configuration app. There are generally limitations on what you can install/run, and some configuration changes may require the hosting company to help.
• Virtual Private Server, in which your site is hosted on a 'machine within a machine.' Perf may not be as good as a dedicated machine, but you have a lot more flexibility on what you can run -- you generally have root level access to the virtual server. Many of these are UNIX-only (no Windows).
• Co-located (dedicated) server, in which you are paying the web host to maintain a machine for you with a high-speed network connection. You are completely responsible for what runs on the machine.

I was only interested in a Shared server. In checking around, I narrowed the field down to four companies based on my criteria:

FluidHosting

These guys get very good reviews on the forums, and they offer multiple-domain hosting, which means that you can host several sites without having to pay extra $$. That was a deal-maker for me.

 

Their price/perf is not as good as some of the others, esp. for disk space & bandwidth, although they certainly are not bad. They have a 'single FTP account' limitation, although they do support anon FTP. I don't think this is a deal-breaker.

Crystaltech also gets very good reviews, but apparently does NOT have very good support for multiple domains (dealbreaker for me). If you only need to host a single domain, they appear to be quite competitive.

This is Omar's host company of choice. These guys look great, but they had two drawbacks for me: Their prices were not as good for multiple hosting, and they ONLY support Windows technologies -- NO perl or CGI. Since I want to play around with a bunch of stuff, I don't want that limitation. (They claim they get better performance out of their IIS servers since they don't have to support non-MS technologies...)

GearHost

Gearhost has the best price/perf, and fantastic features. I know two people who use them and seem mostly happy, however Omar dumped them for EAServe after some bad experiences. I saw several negative reviews citing their downtime and support.

In the end, I went with FluidHosting. They are hosting dasBlog for me and a few other things. So far, so good. Next time: A deeper review of FluidHosting.