dominic eidson: Category Meta-internet

Meme

Dominic — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:15:00 -0600

Every so often a meme comes along that I can jump aboard with. So here goes:

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My Result:

Mack felt like he was moving in slow motion inside the eye of a hurricane of activity happening around him.

– William P. Young, The Shack

Gas strikes, or why they don't work.

Dominic — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:52:00 -0500

You read the subject correct - gas strikes generally don’t work, and here’s a short rant on why:

Every year when gas prices spike for some yet-unknown reason (other than profit), I get emails, SMS messages, IM messages and whatnot talking about how the world/nation/state/city is attempting to hold a “Fuel Strike” on a specific day.

The instructions generally are simple:

“Don’t buy gas on <day>”

The problem with this kind of strike, is that they never work. The short timespan is simply to short to have any impact, since people will storm gas stations the day before (and, potentially, the day after) in order to get their fill of gasoline.

One way in which a fuel strike might work (emphasis on might), is by prolonging the duration of the strike. I imagine if we all refused to fill fuel for a month or so, it might have some sort of impact (negative or positive, who knows).

However, we Americans are too in love with our gas-guzzling vehicles to last a long enough amount of time to have any impact.

I have attempted to solve the fuel consumption (and thus expense) issue for me by riding both my bicycle and my motorcycle to the extent that I can. Bicycle is near-free (food costs increase with the metabolism increase), and my motorcycle gets about 4 times the gas mileage that my truck does. (It has other drawbacks, though.)

So please, don’t bother holding a one-day strike (of any kind, actually) - it won’t accomplish anything, and you’ll be out time and energy best spent some other way.

LiveJournal and boycotts

Dominic — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:48:00 -0500

I don’t normally engage in spreading more effluvia about internet fads than neccesary, but I’ll make an exception.

LiveJournal, one of the oldest blog hosting sites, recently was bought out by some Russian company. This is really irrelevant, except for the fact that this new company has enacted a new subscriber policy in which they have done away with the gratis[0] ad-free signup option.

Previously there were several levels of subscribership:

Basic: Free w/no ads
Plus: Free w/ads
Paid: Paid w/no ads (recurring cost)
Permanent: Paid w/no ads (one time, $$)
Early Adopters (founders, people who’ve been around for a while, etc)

SUP (the Russian company)’s new policy did away with the basic-level accounts, still leaving a “free” option, however it is (somewhat) hampered with advertisements).

Most of the people who are jumping on the boycott bandwagon (including, to a large degree the instigator) seem to confuse the difference between the “basic” account type being disabled and all free account types being disabled.

Unfortunately, they are in the wrong on this matter. You can still create a free account, you just have to deal with a few advertisements (or install an ad blocker - works well for me).

Having said all that, I don’t expect the basic accounts to return.

However, I envision a black market on basic (free, ad-free) LiveJournal accounts emerging, and my account will gladly be sold to the highest bidder.

Using Asterisk to screen political phone calls

Dominic — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:31:00 -0600

This entry might find a lot of you swimming in the deep end of the geek pool - it’ll use terms you haven’t heard before, and concepts that may be foreign to a lot of you.

But here we go anyway:

Yesterday, while listening to my home phone ring for the Nth time that day with yet another judge advocating I vote for someone else, I came up with a simple, yet very functional method of filtering out machine-generated phone calls.

It’s rather simple, actually. As soon as the phone rings, answer, and play back a message prompting the caller to do something (generally, press a button.) In response to this “something” the caller is then connected through to let my actual phone ring.

Failing a response, the caller is hung up on after a predetermined number of seconds.

This is all rather simple if you have already played with the opensource PBX system Asterisk.

Edit the incoming context for your VoIP provider’s SIP/IAX connection, and drop in the following snippet of magic:

[incoming]
exten => _X.,1,NoOp(Incoming Call from ${CALLERID} for ${EXTEN}@${SIPDOMAIN})
exten => _X.,2,Answer()
exten => _X.,3,Wait(1)
exten => _X.,4,Playback(continue-english-press)
exten => _X.,5,Playback(digits/1)
exten => _X.,6,WaitExten(10)

exten => 1,1,Goto(default|inbound|1) //or do whatever you want to "continue"

exten => t,1,Playback(i-grow-bored)
exten => t,2,Hangup()

exten => i,1,Playback(invalid)
exten => i,2,Wait(1)
exten => i,3,Hangup()

I see some of your eyes have glazed over - I understand, and apologise for the level of uber-geekery. On the other hand, I did want to get this information out there for others to enjoy the next 8 months. :)

Reorganization

Dominic — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:27:00 -0600

A few administrative notices:

I am currently housecleaning my website - I’ve picked up a new domain in some effort to re-brand part of what I do (or am hoping to do) for a living, and figured it would be good/better to re-organize some things.

And we start:

I’m likely to start moving things to a new domain - dominiceidson.com in the near future.

I’ve already started - my blog now lives here (Heh, it took two tries to type it right - seems muscle-memory prevails). Don’t worry, though - it can still be reached by the old URL, through wonders of geekery.

I will hopefully soon be putting up a photo gallery of some sorts, to start showcasing some of my photography. More on this later, as I re-learn the drudgery of “web programming.”

How to be Creative

Dominic — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:07:00 -0600

Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid, wrote a good piece on how to be creative a while ago.

I love #1: “Ignore everybody.”

The internet is down, please wait....

Dominic — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:42:00 -0600

This posting is mostly for my friends who may or many not be internet-savvy enough to know how to look past all the fear mongering and hyperbole that’s been put out there by media regarding the recent network cable breaks overseas.

I will try to summarize the information that was presented here, here, here and here - if you want more in-depth, please to go those links. :)

In a nutshell: Last week two undersea cables were cut in the Mediterranean north of Egypt. Whether this was an accident or not is still to be determined. The affected cables were SEA-ME-WE-4 and FLAG Europe-Asia.

The countries hardest affected by these cable cuts were Egypt, Pakistan, India and Kuwait.

Iran, contrary to common belief, was not even in the 10 top affected countries, despite having lost approx. 20% of it’s connectivity.

Don’t get me wrong, losing 20% of a countries internet connectivity is bad - real bad - but nothing compared to the 90+ percent for Egypt and Pakistan.

An interesting point of note, is that many of the countries have managed to recover some of their lost connectivity - but they’re far from being out of the woods. And even if in the next week or so more of the connectivity is re-established, it won’t be until cable repairs are completed that the internet for those affected, will be back at full speed. (Currently, some of Europe is getting across the Mediterranean via the US and Asia….)

Meat Cake, photography and randomness

Dominic — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:38:00 -0500

I came across this gem today while surfing the internet.

It’s a cake. A manly cake. Made from MEAT. (Click the link if you don’t believe me :)

In other news, I shot some pictures this week. I caught a real live train on 4th Street by the Convention Center.

I also went photowalking with some flickr folks on Sunday.

In other news, I’ve gotten semi-sucked into Twitter, which is one of those high-energy social network things. I’m not sure I quite have the high energy for it, thus the semi- prefix.

Internet Memes

Dominic — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:08:00 -0500

This is one of those “How do others view you” things..

http://kevan.org/johari?name=uthrom

Computers per Sqare Foot

Dominic — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:41:00 -0500

Take the number of computers in your house/apartment/fridge-cardboard-box
Take the number of 100-square-foot chunks in your house/apartment/fridge-cardboard-box
Divide one above by two above.

Like this:

10
7 (700 sq ft)
10 / 7 = 1.42857

Now you have your CpSF score.

Update:

After cleaning house, the new score is:

5 / 7 = 0.7142857