Tom’s Garage

Posted By tom on April 28, 2007

I’m not talking about web hosting (though maybe one day I’ll discuss that too), I’m talking about a “host” as in having folks over to your house.

Parenting can be a really good start. Let’s face it, you get lots of practice asking kids if they’d like something to eat or drink. You even ask them if they need to go potty. Okay, that may be more than you want to inquire with an adult guest. But the point is, kids can help keep your hosting skills sharp. Let me go further with this…

Even though you might feel the urge to yell when your child spills milk at the table (for the 57th time!), it rarely is a good idea. I think the practice of resisting the urge to yell at the table (or at any time) is good for having guests over too — You’ll never find yourself screaming at a guest who spills a bit of wine. Nice bonus, ‘eh? Now let’s go a bit further shall we?

My pals TQ and Les have three kids with their two youngest being twins and just a few months older than my daughter. The girl’s name is a homonym to my daughter’s nickname: Abbey. And her brother is Jake. Jake weighs a bit more because he’s got an extra chromosome in each and every cell; It’s called Down Syndrome, knucklehead. Unless I explained it wrong in which case I’m the knucklehead. I’ll assume you’re the knucklehead for now, just to keep things simple.

While I have to remember three meals per day for the kids, I don’t have to remember to offer snacks between meals, because they will ask me. But Jake rarely does so when he’s at my place I have to *remember* to ask him if he’d like something to eat. Otherwise he’d cruise along and never ask while his tummy plays the terrible tune of hunger. Abby and Abbey might ask me for some yogurt and Ben may ask for crackers (usually candy as his first request which is denied quickly most of the time) but Jake will be busy playing with a Dora game or some such. So I’ve got to put it in my head to ask him. See how the training comes into play? And it’s free! The only cost is finding a cool person who is willing to share their Down-Syndrome-enabled child; It’s not hard to find them and most of them would love a bit of time to themselves while you get your training. Go find someone today and be a better host tomorrow!

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Posted By tom on April 24, 2007

I found this article on CodingHorror and while the guts were interesting I felt it was missing an extremely important piece so I figured I’d remove some pie from the hole in my face to spew a few additional words.

The question itself assumes something that I hope is quite incorrect, that open source folks *desire* to be billionaires, or are overly motivated by money. My hope is the vast majority of people are in fact NOT motivated by huge sums of money but rather, by softening the screams in their head when faced with using crappy software and hopefully lowering that tone in the heads of others by contributing their work.

We all need to make a living and I make a living developing software. That’s not really true because it’s the smart guys I work with who actually develop the software… I just take the credit. But I get much more satisfaction out of developing a great solution to a problem than I do cashing the check which allowed us to do the work in the first place. I get enormous satisfaction out of delivering something that I know married code excellence with time and money constraints and seeing it perform its job as expected or better.

So where are all of the open source billionaires? They’re hacking code, they’re getting rid of inefficiencies or vulnerabilities, they’re taking feedback and working til the wee hours to push up a new build because the task itself is important and provides the satisfaction. And while money is needed, it is not the focus of all (or most?) who work in open source land. And since we’ve built our business on open source software; On the backs of those non-billionaires, I’d like to say, “Thanks folks!”.

Side Note: If you’re Warren Buffett and are thinking of ripping up a billion dollar check with my name on it, I retract all of the above and will step on anybody’s head to prove it! Otherwise, I really really meant all of that stuff.

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Posted By tom on April 22, 2007

[re; Music Labels, Search Engines, software vendors, etc.]

Sure, that sounds like a radical statement or suggestion, especially coming from a jellyfish like me who would rather let the currents take me where they will. But as the straw mounts, things appear to have reached and unsustainable level; I’m sure they’ve been this way for quite some time but I’m still shaking the sand out of my ears so please forgive me.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of topics that I speak of here but one acted as the catalyst for this post and that is the craziness associated with pricing for net-based radio. I won’t pretend to be an expert in this area but the hints are stained with the same blood type as Patents, Trademarks and many other special interest areas.

I’m all for patents and trademarks, copyright and other earned assurances for creators; I don’t want you to go all crazy on me. But we (the general public) have been betrayed in the worst ways over recent years by our legislators and the judges who “interpret” the laws by patronizing the very groups who would bind our wrists, filling their war chests for battle against our own selves. Where laws ought to be written and interpreted in a narrow manner, in the interest of the general public, they are often provided quite a wide berth in the interest of those who would protect their “right” to force us all to carry a horse whip in our automobiles.

Let’s look briefly at recent events in “online radio” as it relates to licensing and royalties. A very small group of entities who *claim* to represent artists have [seemingly] persuaded the department in charge of approving such things to dramatically increase fees. That specific topic is for a different time, and hopefully from a person who knows what the heck s/he is talking about. For now I’m discussing the last bastion we have in front of us, our dollars. They (the dollars) are very powerful but the lazy amongst us (myself dreadfully included) far outnumber those who would help keep us on the right bearing.

It’s all so simple. If the RIAA/MPAA abuses their position in the world, stop buying music and visiting movie theaters. Do it in earnest; I know it’s difficult but we need to show them that our ‘finger’ is much bigger than theirs.

I know what you’re thinking: “If I protested every little thing that I found to be unfair I would have to go back to growing every bit of food I eat and creating every comfort I crave by my own two hands”. I’m not suggesting such a thing because I don’t think it is entirely necessary. I think if the big, overt offenders are addressed first you’ll find that there are less areas to protest because others will fall inline.

An important piece is, we musn’t focus on the things that “only affect us directly, right now”, because a principle itself can be an extremely important thing. For example, letting the music industry get away with its atrocities may not affect you but the groundwork they’re laying now may impact the television you watch some day. I know you Jerry Springer fans (you know, the ones who go to work on Wall St.) would be up in arms if the same sort of fees caused your station to go off the air. We need to combine our strengths and tell those fuckers that they’ll not get a dime of ours if they make an egregious move. More…

If Microsoft would hijack our fat fingers in the browser for their own financial gain rather than give us what we’re looking for, move to Firefox. And if the Mozilla Foundation colludes with Google for the same, send them the same message; Someone will fill in the gap. Keep ‘em straight on a regular basis and we’ll find that most will play straight in the future.

Sure, it might take a decade or two for fruit to peek out but in as much time we *will* find ourselves in tighter chains if we do not start the process now.

I’ll leave my similar rant on our government “Representatives” for a later date, when I’m well informed. That means: Never.

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Posted By tom on April 22, 2007

** I only got the Title of this note written before I had to handle other things; Partially to keep myself busy and partially to do my part at work. I still want to memorialize the pre-knife stuff but I’ll add the post-op info too. The point is, my emotions are all different now so much of the meat will be lost. Imagine the difference when interviewing a man who just escaped a burning building versus waiting a couple of days and trying to capture the real emotion… fugetaboutit.

I took Sunny in just around 8am and as per usual, he was terrified. As a matter of fact, he was terrified when we were a mile away from the clinic because he knows the route.

SIDE NOTE: Sunshine loves the car and going for a cruise but lately he’s only ended up in the Vet’s office so I’m not sure how many more times he’ll willfully jump in.

He’s a good boy but he gets so darn nervous, because nothing fun EVER happens for him there. It may be good for him but try telling that to a 2 year old when you’re trying to put medicine in their eyes for Pink Eye; It may be good for them but if they don’t know it, it might as well be purposeful torture.

Where was I? Okay… So we’re hanging out in the little doggy room, waiting for the Doc to come in. It was kinda nice because this was more of a doggy *suite* than a room (Note to self: If I go to a doctor for a follow-up and I get the huge, nicely decorated room, get the “F” outta there!). His regular doc was not going to do the surgery so we both sat with baited breath (is that right?) as the door knob twisted. In walked a very nice, older man with a great disposition. Dr. Connelly. He inspired confidence immediately. He is the only doctor that has not asked to muzzle Sunshine (Sunny is not mean but he is 100 pounds and scared so… whatever). He let Sunshine “rush” him and we all settled down and he gave me the poop on what to expect. Sunny had been nervous and made a mess on the floor so I handed Dr. Connelly the poop too.

Sunshine got a little injection to calm him down before they took him away from me. I got to sit and read with him for 15 minutes or so while he calmed down and then he was gone. I was kinda sad but handling it well until I pulled up to my driveway. I still had his ball in my pocket and his leash on my lap and I just welled up in tears. There was no pooch to greet me at the gate and my brain began flipping through memories of what we’ve done together and the realization that we may never do any of those things again began to set in.

It’s here I should note that I am NOT a psycho animal owner who let’s his life revolve around his pet. But I’m also not one with ice running through the veins. He’s my pal and has been for a long time and that means quite a lot to me. Remove the label please. Thank you.

The doctor called right before he made the cut so I could guesstimate how long it would be before I could expect that he’d be done. If all went well it should be ~1.5 hours but it could go to 3 hours if he ran into unexpected problems. After two hours I began to get nervous and at 2.5 hours I couldn’t take it anymore so I called to get the skinny on things. It turned out that Sunshine had been out of surgery for 40 minutes but the doc wanted to wait until he came further out of the anesthesia effects before letting me know how things went. Things had gone good! There’s got to be a word that means something between relief and elation and that’s the word I would use right now (if only I had a broader vocabulary).

I needed to wait a couple more hours while he recovered and they observed him. I picked him up just about 6pm and the doctor filled me in on what had transpired and what to expect over the next weeks.

I had to take him to the Emergency Vet for overnight observation and while they were all very nice, Sunshine had just about reached his limit for me taking him to places other than HOME, only to have him irritated by temperature taking, blood draws, etc. “Sorry bud, this really for your own good”. When I picked him up in the morning he was kinda glad to see me but I’m sure he had reservations about getting into the car with me again; Would I take him to some other sadistic, no tennis ball having group of people? I swear I heard the canine version of, “Cirkey!, him again?!?”.

He’s been home now for a couple of days and looks unbelievably good. It’s a struggle to keep him settled down because he’s all ready to play ball but I’m not allowed to even contemplate it for two weeks.

So that’s it, my brief (hah!) story of where we are so far with Sunshine. When we finish his meds and get to toss the first ball, I’ll pop back in with an update.

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Posted By tom on April 19, 2007

Okay, I admit this may be a bit of a stretch but perhaps there’s a seed of an idea buried in my fantasy notion.

Buying a domain name in the retail market might cost you $10 – $20 with discriminating shoppers able to snatch them up at $7 or so. These are yearly fees so we’ll need to keep that in mind.

There are plenty of people making a fair living buying and selling domain names and even more people (making more money!) buying and developing domains, monetizing through advertising networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network (among others).

What if you bought a domain name for a homeless person? It could be something that simply increases in value as virtual real estate or it could be something that is ultimately developed into an ad-supported revenue stream. This assumes the homeless person has some means of retrieving postal mail (seems weird but I believe there are places to accommodate mailboxes for those without a home).

It would be helpful to have a centralized system to automatically get a domain name started with content, ads, etc. (I like Frank’s experiment with wiki technology). Of course, unless the guy buying the domain is also going to get things started off, the homeless person would need some sort of free access to the internet. Does such a thing exist in urban areas?

The point is, buying a domain name could be like starting someone off with a bank account which delivers extremely high returns, perhaps allowing for basic existence (a daily meal?) fueled solely by the interest.

This might seem too difficult given some of the barriers. But think of the TV commercials we see where donating “just pennies a day” can sponsor a child. What if some of those organizations had a method in place for folks to sponsor by purchasing a domain on someone’s behalf? Could that not provide the money needed to assist properly? At least in the aggregate?

Perhaps it’s a pipe dream but maybe, just maybe, there’s something valuable to extract from the basic principle.

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Posted By tom on April 18, 2007

My pal Sunshine has been looking a little odd recently. His tummy has been swelling out a little bit and while I thought he was just turning into a fat old pooch, Kerri felt that there might be something wrong. I burned several days waffling over the issue but today I took him in to see the Vet. Glad I did because he’s quite sick.

Poor old Sunny has got the big “C”, the worst fucking word ever devised by mankind… he’s got cancer. Hopefully it is something that can be removed by surgery but I won’t know for sure until they open him up next Friday.

For animals things seem a bit less fair. The doctor is “pretty sure” that it is in his spleen and that he can remove it (the tumorous spleen). But this is all based on x-rays. There’s a small chance that it is actually one of the lobes of his liver and a smaller chance that it is part of his intestinal tract. Can’t tell just yet. I’m sure there are high-end facilities to make a more definitive diagnosis but give the size of the tumor and time, it seems to make more sense to get in and go to work. Funnily, that’s how we do problem diagnosis sometimes at VPOP.

I appreciated the Vet’s sensitivity to the financial commitment but it was hard to not also feel irritated because he was talking about mine and Kerri’s “first child”. He was warning me about the cost associated with saving my best pal, the one who virtually never leaves my side; The one who has chased and returned more than 250,000 tennis ball throws. Given my emotional state at the time, I’m sure I would have been just as irritated if he had not given me a ballpark figure. I don’t suppose the doc could have provided an acceptable remark at all.

As an aside, I really like this doctor and couldn’t think of a bad thing to say about him for the last 6 years we’ve been taking Sunny to see him.

I’ll know more tomorrow when some blood tests come back. Sunshine is tentatively scheduled for surgery on Friday, unless more bad news comes back from the tests.

Kerri added some welcome levity to the situation tonight when she suggested that we rename Sunshine to something like, “Remodel” or “Bathroom” or “Redo”… referencing our bathroom remodel fund we’ve been stashing away which will be tapped to pay for all of this. It’s not with any level of regret that I say this… it’s just a funny thing to hear at a crappy time. Actually, no pun was intended but that makes it even funnier, huh?

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Posted By tom on April 17, 2007

I’m sure most of you know this already… I’ve known it for a long time myself; But for some reason tonight I feel like dumping a few comments on the brutally poor quality of the “news” we get from the typical outlets.

Although I believe that often we are fed reports with deliberate skewing meant to manipulate the masses, I also believe that we have eager [pseudo professional] writers who just don’t know what they’re doing. It’s kinda like me on virtually every topic, but I don’t publish things in the New York Times.

I was reading a story from the NYT which covered the potential purchase of DoubleClick by Google. There were some ironic anti-trust comments from Microsoft and AT&T but I suppose those are expected. The part that really went over the edge was the following snippet:

“Ad-serving networks like DoubleClick place tiny programs on computers, called cookies, that monitor what sites users visit.”

“[C]ookies” are real and used by ad networks but last time I checked, they were not “programs” and they could not monitor what web sites users visit. It’s a little deeper than that because if you have enough reach on web sites, you can build a profile of a user by having info sent across the wire for web sites that have your ‘code’ included on their page(s). But that does not equate to monitoring which sites users visit and a text file (the cookie) is not known as a “program” in any circle I’ve run in. I could be wrong, I might need new circles, or a brain transplant with a field mouse to improve my cranial capacity.

So was it a malicious attempt to thwart Google’s purchase? Was it purely lack of understanding or poor wording in an attempt simplify things for readers? Not sure.

Again, I make mistakes all the time so I’m not trying to throw stones. I’m really writing this for myself to remind that the “mainstream” media is at least corrupt, probably inept and mostly likely a deadly combination of the two. So while it’s a good idea to monitor them, it is an even better idea to be skeptical of each and every word they print. It’s not just semantics, despite what they might say in defense of this example.

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Posted By tom on April 15, 2007

I have two in my home. I (me personally) am the first one. The conversations are frequent and usually start out by someone asking Kerri how an intelligent, great looking, hard working woman like herself could find her same self married to a goofy, loudmouth jerk like “him” (Me!). That kind of chatter could go on for days if I didn’t start dragging people out of my house.

The second piece is a life size cardboard cut-out of our current President, Gee Dubya. As goofy, loudmouth-ish and jerky as I might be, I fall far behind the misunderestimated one in terms of feeding fires — I don’t agree with all of his policies or decisions and I can in fact think for myself — So I love the ensuing conversations. I should note that while I *can* think for myself, I often don’t. Surprise!

Sure, I’m fairly conservative (from a fiscal perspective) and I voted with pleasure for the man both times; But I’m not a capital “C” ‘Conservative’, towing the party line and all that jazz. It’s fascinating to experience the reactions I get from both sides when folks walk in to The Garage and see him (G.W.B.) hanging on the wall. I get high-five attempts from Republicans and sneers from Democrats. The nice thing is, it gets us talking and in a minute or two folks realize that while I do have strong convictions, I’m not a card-carrying Elephant. So we get to actually “talk” without me having to bring up any specific subject.

Last night my better half (Kerri) put on a “going away” party for one of her co-workers and a bunch of her team showed up, including her old boss, Carol. I happen to really like Carol (likely the only boss my wife will ever have that I won’t think is an idiot) but being an administrator in the health care field provides lots of opportunities to dash towards the Liberal side when fiscal matters arise. Carol saw that 2-D statue and made a real quick remark; I’m sure that she’s known about my conservative tendencies from Kerri but aside from that, this was a fairly pure assumption route that I was all for whatever Georgie-boy recommends. Funny.

We got to talk for a few minutes and she was closer to many of my views than she could have imagined… vice versa for me. We got to talk without having the baggage of assumptions because from the get-go we both realized that we had made quick judgments about the other and when faced with that kind realization (that our first, for-sure thought was wrong), we were willing to listen, at least to save ourselves from being woefully wrong yet again. I didn’t put that picture up for this purpose but the more I run into these situations, the more I’m thankful that my Mom bought and gave it to me.

I sincerely wish that every conversation I’ll have with folks can be as PRODUCTIVE as those I’ve had when faced with folks who walk in and see my cut-out, whether they love or hate the man. It gets the dialog going and that’s what we really need in this world. Or at least in The Garage.

Oh, and check this shit out: I have a chess board/table right next to the “conversation piece”… what better way to set your brain to work than to talk politics while playing chess? That picture and game board may be the path to solving the world’s problems. Perhaps they should place that setup in the U.N.? That’s a royalty-free observation. Go to work!

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Posted By tom on April 11, 2007

When you impose rules which limit users’ ability to do what they need for their business, you open the door for someone else to come in and service your customer instead, removing that customer from your income stream. That’s my opinion anyways.

Let’s say I was a Registrar and I indicated that no domains could be registered through my service if they were “vulgar” in nature. As soon as one of my clients wanted to register such a name and found that they could not through my service, they’re off to another service and will likely register all future domains with the new service. That may be a bad example because some folks don’t care to have certain names in their database and the lost money means nothing to them. Fine, let’s try another example:

Shell access used to be a staple in the hosting environment but many companies have turned off that feature for security purposes or some misunderstanding of how things can work. So if you don’t offer shell access and someone needs to SSH into their machine, they’ll simply leave and find a service which provides what they need. If other companies did not provide the service you can bet that someone would jump in and fill that gap pretty quickly.

Now let’s look at the large ad networks out there; Google and Yahoo!. They’ve become fairly hostile towards individuals with a plain ‘ol parked page. Sure, it can be done if you’re large enough or if you go through an aggregator but for the folks with just a handful of domains, they’re making it tough. I wonder what is going to happen? I wonder what monster of an advertising facilitator is going to fill the gap? What do GOOG and Y! have to lose? Well, the little guy may very well turn into a big guy, but he’s already been chased away. And, this new monster company may woo other huge advertisers away form the two staples. It’s opening the door and I think the two biggies are going to be left with tremendous feelings of regret for having pissed on the [for now] little guys. I could be wrong but my guess is that AdBrite or some other soon to be monster stands to gain quite a bit from the policies imposed by the biggies.

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Posted By tom on April 5, 2007

This may be old news to many of you but the official date is news to me… I received the following email a short while ago from Verisign:

VeriSign, Inc. and it’s wholly owned subsidiaries (“VNDS”) is hereby

notifying all registrars of a fee change for .com and/or .net domain names

effective October 15, 2007. In accordance with our contract, ICANN has

already been notified. Details as follows:

1. VNDS’ fee for each annual increment of a new and renewal .com domain name

registration and for each transfer of a .com domain name registration from

one ICANN-accredited registrar to another will be US $6.42, exclusive of any

ICANN Variable Registry-Level Fee (as defined in the .com Registry

Agreement) or any other ICANN fee; and

2. VNDS’ fee for each annual increment of a new and renewal .net domain name

registration and for each transfer of a .net domain name registration from

one ICANN-accredited registrar to another will be US $3.85, exclusive of any

ICANN Variable Registry-Level Fee (as defined in the .net Registry

Agreement) or any other ICANN fee.

Except for the above-described fee changes, all other terms of the relevant

agreements (.com and .net Registry Agreements and Registry-Registrar

Agreements) remain unchanged.

Time to renew your domains now, possibly for a couple of years as I would expect they’ll use every ounce of their ICANN-allotted power to increase their fees 7% every year.

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