Jared’s Blog

As I made mention to in my last post, I’ve joined Jaiku. Since then, I’ve contracted the Jaiku bug. I’m on it every day several times a day. Though I have a feeling no one is paying attention to my feed. Maybe this will help that.

I’m divided. While I like writing these longer posts at times, often I find that it’s the very reason I don’t post to my blog more. I don’t feel like sitting down and writing a full blog post all the time. Not to mention that I tend to edit constantly and what starts as a 10 minute project easily turns into 20 or 30 minutes. Jaiku’s 140 character per post limit is useful at times because it forces you to say exactly what you want without any fluff.

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been debating on whether or not I want to continue hosting my blog. I bought hosting and a domain from GoDaddy back in February, but I haven’t bothered to transfer anything over yet. The main reason was because I planned to rewrite my own blog software in Ruby on Rails. The problem with that, however, is that I have to migrate all of my blog posts over to the new system. Also, Go Daddy’s Rails performance is poor. Not to mention that they don’t offer ssh access on my account (no Rails migrations).

The 3rd option is to move the blog over to a hosted blogging service. It’d probably be easy to import my posts, but I’m also sacrificing what I can do in terms of control. When I host it, I can customize things much more and I like that.

So I’m still undecided. One of these nights I just need to sit down and figure it all out or at least move my hosting over to Go Daddy.

Just a quick note to let everyone know I jumped on the Jaiku bandwagon.

On Monday, Rick’s Xbox360 came back from getting repaired. It had the 3 Red Lights of Death. For Xbox owners, that’s the equivalent of flatlining. But now things are better than ever. The first thing we did was go out and get Guitar Hero 2. Can I just say those Harmonix people are geniuses!?

I remember a couple of years ago being in Best Buy and they had the original Guitar Hero on the Playstation 2 demo console there. I watched someone play and thought it was just some cheap game with a silly expensive guitar-looking controller. Shortly after I began hearing how cool it was. Bands playing it constantly while on tour. Then there was the MLB pitcher who missed a game because he injured himself playing GH. And then there was the guy who started the site “Guitar Hero broke my knee” after an especially raucous session.

Anyway, Guitar Hero 2 is awesome and I can’t put it down.

I also set up Vista as a media extender for the Xbox. So now I can watch videos and listen to music from my computer on the home theater downstairs. Pretty cool! Now if I could only get it to play Xvid and Quicktime files…

Weekends are usually something I look forward to. I can spend my time however I wish without any planning involved. Well, this weekend just decided it was going to be that nice.

On Friday night, I was to head over to my parent’s house after work so that we could celebrate my sister, Hannah’s, birthday. After getting off work, I called them to make sure things were still going on as planned. I was told that they had to go pick up a cake, but that they’d be back shortly. I figured with the time it’d take me to drive, they’d beat me there without a problem.

Driving there in rush hour traffic took about twice as long as I expected (around an hour). In that time, I managed to get a stomach ache that wouldn’t go away. Finally, when I did show up, no one was home. I let myself in and hopped on my laptop to kill some time. Fifteen minutes went by, then 20, then half an hour. If not for WoW, I probably would’ve left. Mom and I chatted for a bit, I wished my sister a happy birthday, and then headed home for the night.

Why? I had (stupidly?) agreed to drive Hank and Laura to the airport. At 5AM! Maybe I’m just a nice guy. Maybe it was because I was thinking I’d only be up for a short while and then I could go back to bed. Whatever it was, I wasn’t thinking the same thing at 4:30 on Saturday morning when my alarm went off. By the time I was on my way home, I had convinced myself that the only way I was going to cure my bad mood was to get some McDonalds breakfast. I’m never up early enough to get it, so might as well enjoy the grease-bomb stuck between two English muffins they call a Sausage Egg McMuffin.

Really, the rest of the day was uneventful. Painfully uneventful. My roommates were both gone for the day (which means their girlfriends were also gone). So, the computer kept me company for the afternoon, evening, and night. Though, I seem to remember it doing a much better job in days past.

And then I get the call. It’s my boss, Scott. He, the other boss, Neal, and their families have had a cruise planned for a few months now so I figured he was down at the office and wanted to get in touch one last time before they left on Monday. Boy was I wrong. As it turns out, the company we process credit cards through made some changes which they neglected to notify us of. As a result, we weren’t processing any cards, which for us, is like Defcon level 5.

For about 2 hours on Saturday night, I was pouring over code, log files, and email trying to figure out what went wrong. Everything I was seeing told me we weren’t able to connect to the credit card processing server, so I merely was able to wait until they brought the server back up. I figured we wouldn’t do much after 10 on a Saturday and figured the server would probably be back up by morning. What we later discovered was that they had changed their server’s URL and didn’t tell us. Thanks to Jeff’s keen sense, things were running before I even woke up on Sunday.

Sunday really wasn’t that bad of a day. If anything, it was just as boring as Saturday. However, it was quite windy. That dashed any hopes of getting a frisbee golf game in. As I later heard, it was much more serious for others. Mankato saw gusts over 60 mph. A forest fire started and spread rapidly in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. And an oak tree fell through 3 rooms of my boss, Scott’s, house (The picture above is something I found online, it’s not my boss’ real house)! How do you like that 2 days before you go on vacation? Your online business stops processing all transactions for a day and then a tree busts through half your house. I can’t imagine how Scott and his family must be feeling. I do know they left for their cruise, so something must’ve worked out.
Murphy and his law were definitely in full effect this weekend and hopefully he got his fill so he can leave me alone now.

As I write this, I’m not sure if this is just a little “dork thing” or if this is going to make national headlines. What has happened is a key has leaked on to the Internet that effectively allows for the duplication of some HD DVD’s. It is kin to the DeCSS code that unlocked the content of DVD’s when the first encrypted versions started hitting the market.

Of course the response of the MPAA and content holders was to go DMCA-ballistic and start issuing cease and desist orders to each offender. Digg was one such site that received one of those letters. Well, as I speak, all hell has broken loose on Digg. Most every story on the homepage is a reference to the key or is talking about this “phenomenon.” Facebook appears to be lighting up as well and I can only imagine it’ll hit Myspace if it hasn’t already.

I can’t help thinking that this day will mean the end of DRM. May 1st, 2007: The day the Internet revolted against DRM. It has a nice ring to it.

Update: Looks like the rest of the world noticed.
Unhappy Digg users bury site in protest
Digg’s DRM Revolt
DVD DRM row sparks user rebellion