[ music | 4 Non Blondes - What's Going On ]

So, I got an email from Dreamhost on thursday.

"Dear DreamHost customer, We have found evidence indicating that your 'XXX' web server account may have been subject to intrusion by a malicious 3rd party. As a precautionary measure, we have reset your password and ask that you change it..."

Ok, WHAT? My first thought was "who could possibly have gotten my password?" I don't use IE, I don't use the same PW everywhere, I use secure PWs, I don't enter my information into forms from random email links, etc. I'm a security conscious user. My last computer virus was in 1993. Well, I asked what this was about, why they felt my account was at risk, and it seems it's probably just a consequence of this incident from last year.

"We received a tip linking to a file of usernames and passwords including a small handful of DreamHost FTP accounts; your username was on this list. This does not necessarily mean that any illegal activity has occurred under your account (as we've not observed such) but it does mean that someone cracked, phished, snooped, or otherwise obtained the password for this user."

It's probably the old password from last year's breach, but I took no chances. I've asked them what password was leaked, we'll see.

UPDATE: No, it wasn't my password from last year, it was my latest DH password. I am distressed...

[ music | Sheryl Crow - My Favorite Mistake ]

I had a call a few weeks ago. So far my absolute favorite call. A customer calls, and I'm walking them through various things, and I have to tell them to type in a specific string of letters and numbers. One of the characters was a zero, so as not to confuse it with the letter O I said "zero". The customer then replied, "Is that the number zero or the letter zero?" I kid you not.

[ music | Morningwood - Easy ]

Want an old manual typewriter that you can hook up to a PC and be both retro-mod and cyberpunk at the same time? Let me know. I happen to have access to an old Underwood manual and a Smith Corona manual, both in excellent shape with their cases too. And my hardware hacker roots would love to convert one to a keyboard for you (for a fee, of course). Hit me up if you're interested.

[ music | Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have It So Much Better ]

It's spring, and time to cause panic! But rather than postulate about igniting the atmosphere with those new fangled atomic weapons, I'm just going to make my Dreamhost promocode doubly sweet. The discount is now twice what it was, $50 off any yearly plan, or $25, $30, or $40 off levels 1, 2, or 3 (respectively) for monthly plans. So if your current web host sucks (and if it's not Dreamhost, it sucks) then this is the time to change over. I need to update the Webhost Shootout but it's still valid. For the record, I'm currently paid up through November of 2007 and really have no plans on switching, if that is any kind of endoresement for you.

Previously, and more.

[ music | Dire Straits - Money For Nothing ]

I actually know a couple folks who have successfully gotten stuff through these folks, so it's legit. Now, here's the deal. You sign up through my link here, and complete one "offer". Most are signups for credit cards, but the good ones are a free 30 day trial of eFax (just cancel online within 30 days if you don't like it and there's no charge), a free/$0.99 trial of Real Rhapsody for 30 days (they say it's 99 cents, but I was never charged, and cancelled after about 3 weeks), Columbia House DVD club where you get 5 DVDs for 49 cents each, etc. I've done the eFax one, and it was easy to cancel, and the Real Rhapsody one, which was also easy to cancel. The Real Rhapsody service is actually pretty good. Lots of great music is available for listening, and you can download full albums and burn then to CDs, etc., all under the subscription. I was very impressed with that.

Now, with that said, to get a free Nano, you need to complete one offer, and get 5 other people to do the same. I have signed up, and have had two people complete offers through me, and a third is due to complete one this week. This means I need only 2 more people to sign up and complete one of the free offers, and I get a free iPod Nano. So, I'm appealing to my readership to see if anyone wants to complete one offer and help me get the Nano. When you sign up, they ask for an emal address, a mailing address, and a phone number. The email address actually doesn't get spammed, amazingly, but email addresses are still easy to get, so that's not an issue anyway. The mailing address has to be in the US, because if you get 5 people to complete an offer, they need a US address to ship to. And the phone number, well, just lie about that. I did. Use your area code and exchange, and just make up the last 4 digits.

Bedtime for Bonzo, I guess.

[ music | Queen - We Will Rock You ]

I was hosting some files for a friend in a semi-hidden directory. Well, the URL got leaked, and I got slammed for 300GB of transfer in less than a day. This means I'm looking at about $260+ for bandwidth overages. This is not a good month for that. So I emailed Dreamhost about it. They replied mere hours after I sent my mail, and I sent it at around 4am Eastern time on a Saturday. That means someone was reading it and replying in the wee hours of Saturday morning Pacific time. How can you expect more than that on a billing issue? I'd have been happy with a response Monday morning. And the issue I mailed about was so easily handled I was flabbergasted.

Unlike other hosts, DH doesn't shut down your site the instant you hit your limit. They do offer a throttling option that once a day checks your use, and if you go over, it'll change to a backup site YOU create to help limit your overages. This doesn't totally prevent you from having overages if you get nailed in a single day like me, but it helps limit the bloodflow a lot, automatically. And it turns out I have a significantly generous period in which to pay that bill down, more than I'll need thanks to the rewards I've earned from people who have signed up for DH with me as their referer.

I can't recommend DH highly enough now. And I'm not even talking about their superb communication, professionalism, and hard work I witnessed on Monday when they were fighting with a catastrophic power failure in Los Angeles. They kept us informed in a series of status updates that continued throughout the week. Very honest communication with their customers and public. They didn't have to, they chose to. I've known web hosts that give little to no explanation about anything. These folks weren't afraid to admit mistakes, because they learn from those mistakes.

At this point, I'm sold on DreamHost for life. I have no qualms about recommending DreamHost to anyone. If you're interested in their hosting, use promo-code BE25 to get $25 off your first year.

[ music | Monty Python - Accountancy Shanty ]

Well, New Orleans was spared 20 feet of standing water in the downtown area - this time. They really need to get some better preparations, and hopefully this close call will spur some movement on that front. There was a bar on Bourbon street open quite late into the night last night, and this morning, Jackson Square saw folks welcoming the calm with a drink. You have to love that town. :)

So, about Dreamhost. Use promo code BE25 and you get a one-time $25 off your hosting bill. It's valid for all plans and all term lengths one year or longer. If you sign up for monthly billing, you save $12 off a Level 1 plan, $16 off Level 2, $20 off Level 3, and $25 off Level 4. You can check here for plan details, and enter promo code BE25 on the payment page.

In my never ending quest for misery and self-torture, I went over to eHarmony.com after seeing one of their ads on TV for the fifteen-billionth time. I went through their 29 dimentions of compatibility matching profiler, and it came back with "Unable to Match You at This Time". Yep, their extensive psychological profiling was unable to figure out what kind of girl I might like.

"Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched."

I could have given them some clues if they allowed a little more input besides religion, smoking, and drinking (like, say, HEIGHT! I like TALL women, damnit!). But no, they instead tell me I'm an enigma that science is unable to understand. Thanks! Anyone want to point me to the nearest bridge?

Click the thumbnail for a screenshot...

<jX> Have you ever been out ghost hunting and suddenly needed a USB flash drive, or been transferring files to your USB flash drive and suddenly needed to check for ghosts?
<jX> PROBLEM SOLVED! (magic token)
<jX> Intricate diagrams in crazy moon man language here: (I can't read this)
<MightyMu> jX: make sure jwz knows about that...

Another six gigabytes up in smoke again yesterday. Recently Slashdot ran a story that perfectly phrased a thought I've had for years. The Social Contract. I don't block most ads because I feel viewing a few ads and occasionally clicking an interesting one is the least I can do in exchange for free content. I also don't really mind TV ads, except when the SCREAM AT ME and such. I block ads from DoubleClick due to their heinous data tracking efforts, and popup ads. Those break the advertisers' and content providers' end of the Social Contract. But normal ads, I leave them alone, because I'm not going to break my end. The key to it is equity and fairness. Don't make your ads evil or obnoxious, and I'll view them.

But then there's Fusker, a web tool to blatantly break the social contract. It's used primarily for image and porn galleries. It allows the users to scrape all the images on a page or gallery at one time in the browser, bypassing a site's framing and support content. In the forums they suggest disabling Referrer Logging, to bypass referrer blocks. Referrer identification is useful to servers to help prevent file and image hotlinking, a big drain on bandwidth. I moved from TCH to DreamHost specifically to get more bandwidth. I now have 6 times more than I did. But I got Fuskered again, and at this rate I'll burn up 180 GB of my 120 GB by the end of the month. That'd leave me with -60GB, which would cost me an extra $60 this month alone. This is not good.

I'm trying to keep the Shared Media directory as open as possible, but I'm having to lock it down a touch. Most people will never notice what going on. That's good, it means we're abiding by the social contract. I thank you for that, and that's why I have some stuff up for folks to enjoy.

But A few of you may be reading this when you were expecting something else. If that's the case, you were redirected for hotlinking. You're making it hard for other people to enjoy the stuff I'm trying to share on my nickel. I don't ask much; don't be a jerk.

Wow. Ok, while my DSL was out, I decided to play with Knoppix. Well, the short of it all is I completely hosed my partition table, and nearly lost all my data. That sucked. I asked for help as I was getting errors from Partition Magic and PARTINFO that I couldn't decipher. I found a whole new range of computer problems I'd never experienced, and was dying to figure it out. I was 10 again for a while, learning something so basic, yet new to me. Looking back, it's been a blast fixing it, and I'm glad it happened and I didn't lose too much data (nothing important). For those technically inclined, below is a more detailed account of what happened and how I fixed it. I posted this to the newsgroup too, to let the few folks who chimed in how things went. I post it here for a different and wider audience. Please feel free to comment. :) [Read More]

At these prices, we have to be crazy!

Anyway. For Sale:

• (2) New, Unopened copy of The Grudge with cardboard foil-printed DVD case cover sleeve. $7 via PayPal, includes postage. Amazon's marketplace has them starting just under $12, not including shipping. These are new, unopened, 100% legit.(they're both gone. Sorry folks. It is a good film, though, I finally watched my copy)
• (1) AMD Athlon processor Socket A, 1GHz (overclockable with proper cooling). Guaranteed to work. Includes heatsink, but no fan. $30, includes shipping. Pricewatch shows them starting at $53.
• (1) 200MHz and (1) 233MHz Pentium MMX CPUs. Guaranteed to work. $6, includes shipping.

If interested, comment here. I'd like to unload at least the Athlon and DVDs quickly, while they're still fashionable. :) Thanks.