Why am I here?

WordPress shuts down controversial anti-Islamic site.

Did I just hear the toaster pop?

Apparently Righthaven is burnt toast; not only has their business and legal model failed spectacularly, but MediaNews Group isn’t reupping their contract. Spread some Schadenfreud marmelade on it, pour some tea, and wait for the funeral.

Will the last one at HuffPo please unplug the server?

Lee Stranahan, who is developing a reputation as the last honest liberal, just quit the Huffington Post over their dumping of Andrew Breitbart for things he said somewhere else.. So there’s two.  Then there’s the strike. Apparently AOL has once again demonstrated their exquisite sense of market timing. Pretty soon Arianna is going to be playing with herself.

I’m unimpressed

MerchantCircle, who took Bloglines over, has finally migrated the server. Unfortunately.

First they’ve given us a clunky clone of the Google newsreader, instead of the superior Bloglines system, which let you set preferences for each blog as you subscribed. You have to mark blogs as read or unread, rather than there being a default. And about half my blogs didn’t come over. Most were trapped and allowed to be added manually, but a few went missing entirely (Fr. Zuhlsdorf, where are you?) I lost all my pervious saved blog entries, except that we got the number of “new” entries you’ expect from a new subscription. In short, what I got was exactly what I got when I opened a Google Reader account (in preparation for Bloglines dying entirely)… so why should I use Bloglines rather than Google, except that Google is Evil and it’s bad enough that they know my work mail, let alone which blogs I read?

UPDATE 12/17: And this morning their server seems to be totally down. Heck of a job, MC!

Vichy Versace

WRSA brings you a stylish collection of what they call “collaborator wear”, for the folks who can’t quite make themselves don the Sainted Face of Che. I note that in the first example, the heart is almost in the right place, and should be visible from afar.

Apfelnazionalsocialismus

Let’s see… iSnitch (sold under the Orwellian name of “PatriotApp”) is AOK by Apple, but the Manhattan Declaration app is not? Why is Linux looking better every day?

Maybe I ought to call 408-996-1010 and tell them how offended I am at this app.

SuddenLink, my hero

For most of the past year, we’ve used Sprint 3G wireless. We’ve not been entirely happy with it. It’s not much faster than dialup, for 3x more. We were told that the fact that cell phone service sucks at our house had no relationship to 3G. That’s not true. And we were limited to 5G of download, with overages charged at a fairly stiff rate. One month we went over by about 3 G, and instead of being charged 60% more, we were charged over 3x as much. Why did we get it? Because nobody would sell us DSL or cable Internet. It was that or satellite, which had some of the same problems. We had all kinds of companies who claimed that they serviced our area, but when you got to the address, it was, “No, we can’t do you.” When pressed, they would give some technical answer about distances from boxes, which begged the question: why not our street? We could see cable stakes on the side roads of our block. And as the township goes, this is a fairly urban little patch, with minimal frontage.

Well, I’ve been the one to do the harassment, but since Rusty is unemployed, a Farmville addict, and thus has time and motivation, she decided to contact more people in the neighborhood. And she got to Jeff Wells, 2 doors down, who said, “I have Internet”. “Duh, with who?” Suddenlink, our cable TV provider. So she called them, and asked about service, and got the same runaround. “Uh, but you’ve got a customer 150 feet away from us.”  ”Er, um, we’ll send a tech out tomorrow.”

Which is how we find ourselves with 6 mps unlimited Internet. It’s faster than work… tested at 6.43 mps this morning as opposed to 4.74 on the work machine (same kind of imac). I haven’t had the time to test it much…I did system updating last night and played with Internet radio this AM, both things I could never do before. And I had to go out and buy a wireless router so Rusty could play (the cable modem comes in at my desk), and we wanted fast, so it wasn’t cheap…even though Micro Center was having a sale. And I’ll probably have to pay through the nose to get out of my Sprint contract.

Here are the villians:

Sprint: for selling a lousy product

Verizon, and their successor Frontier, our local phone co., for not selling anything at all.

ATT, ditto

CenturyTel I can’t really diss, because they never pretended to sell to us. But they serve a guy a mile down our road, across the county line, so they could have served us.

And last but not least: SuddenLink. Yes, they just gave us this beautiful connection, which I am duly grateful for. But they wouldn’t until I had spent big money on a Sprint wireless modem. They haven’t given us any paperwork about our account…all we know is what it will cost us. No instructions, features, etc. I suppose that’s all online.  But what kind of an industry is it where you have to beg and grovel to be their customer? We’ve been trying to get broadband for 4 years. Where were they?

Inflation hits emusic.com

I’m an emusic subscriber; for my $12 a month I’ve gotten 30 tracks (or 2 1/2 albums). 40¢ a track is a pretty good deal, and they’ve generally had the sort of things that I want. But now they have the Universal catalog, and Universal, as one of the great bullies of the music industry, has probably set some terms. And since they can’t sell Universal for 40¢ a track, they are now moving to a price-per-track model. Most tracks will be $.49 each (Universal much more), and doubtless prices will go up. To take some of the sting out, they’re giving old subscribers $2 in free money. But even with that, I’m getting fractionally fewer than 29 tracks per month. And they still have the no-rollover policy. When there was a per-track basis, that wasn’t such a big deal; you could put an odd track or two on an album you wanted, and pick up the rest the next month. But what happens when you get stuck with $.48 at the end of a month, and the cheapest item is $.49? You get ripped off.

Whip!

“Should we call it LockerBP now? ”

Blogetery

There’s been quite a bit of conjecture about this affair being “a test of the Internet kill switch“. Apparently, it wasn’t quite that, yet. The Fibbies found some Al Quada material on a Blogotery blog, and went to Blogotery’s server BurstNET, who cancelled the account as a TOS violation.

The Blogetery guy doesn’t sound as if English is his first language, and he doesn’t sound like a whiz on server law either. Should he realistically be expected to police 69K blogs? Is it reasonable for BurstNET to terminate 69K bloggers over the actions of one? What this tells me is that a “kill switch” isn’t needed: the government can pretty much shut down what it wants, under the guise of “fighting terrorism”.

A representative for Burst.net said the company had offered Blogetery’s operator his money back, but that “should be the least of his concerns.”

Personally, I think Burst has just as much to worry about as Blogetery. If I were a customer, I’d be looking for a new server.