TheGarage Tech Blog

Some time ago, InstaPundit
had a link
up about the current state
of the space program vis-a-vis its past failed initiatives. The price tag
of sending a pound of payload into space is so great, and building a  new
space vehicle an even more daunting task, that our space program has been
stuck in a rut for two decades. When was the last time anyone was excited
about the space program? The space station was cool at first but is largely
a political experiment doomed for failure because our partners are not
ready for such a commitment. I think most of us would agree that Americans
are still up to the task to meet almost any objective, if the will is there.

These broad sectors are safe for the near term, but as this
whimsical discussion of health care illustrates, the ever increasing advancements
in technology will allow more and more services to be provided over the
internet. Everyone will have access to the internet via high-speed wireless
on their wristphone/PC. More and more utilization of service providers
from around the world, from accountants to doctors, is going to leave a
lot of skilled, middle-aged people looking for something to do. In the
not-so-longer term, as virtual face-to-face meetings become ubiquitous,
the vast amount of consultative, diagnostic-type primary health care will
move over-seas. I think personal diagnostic medical equipment interfaced
with your PC combined with secure personal web portals will be as common
as, well, the internet is today. No more trips to the doctor unless you
need surgery. No more trips to the pharmacy unless they are having a sale
on film processing… oops, did I say film processing. Not!…  regular
pharmacies have regular film processing, I’d imagine overnight pharmacies
will have overnight film delivery as well. If the pharmacies dont, someone
will.

This morning at about 10:30 I got about $85 worth of rain. That’s total coverage mind you. Then around noon, about another $30 s’worth fell from the sky. I was prepared to let the grass go for the year. Almost made it through the summer. But another week without rain, and the yard is a big brown spot.

It was hit and miss. Thousands of dollars worth of rain was falling all around but we were just on the edges once again. Not that I was complaining. The $115 worth I got in the few minutes it rained was enough to probably get me well into Sept without total devastation. Then, of a sudden, several hundreds of dollars worth of water fell on my lawn right out of the air.

I could still use a couple of hundred dollars more water to make the lawn lush, but I’ll just have to wait until God gives it away for free again. Once we get out of the extreme August heat, it’ll be smooth sailing through the mild winter and into next spring. See, the deal is, if you don’t lose your grass in the late summer, you got a good head start on your crop of turf next spring. You lose it, and you got a lot more work next spring to get your lawn in to shape for the summer season of sun and fun. Either way, next spring there’s gonna be more grass.

After switching my site to a slightly better performing server, I was having some trouble with my outgoing mail. It became pretty frustrating trying to narrow down the problems from all the possibilities. This is a screen shot of my mail file there towards the end of the troubleshooting process.

I think I will switch the mail back to the old server just to be sure I know what fixed the problem. It’s still running as backup. Maybe I’ll cluster them for shitz and giggles.

I put site meter on all the pages that I currently have the Rhizomatic counter on. I am running them concurrently because I have been suspecting the Rhizo counter was not totalling my hits correctly. Suspicions arose a month or two ago because my total referrals and search engine hits (which don’t include those hits from bookmarks and email links) were always greater than my counter showed. A significant drift if you will.

So I added sitemeter late the night before last to test the accuracy of Rhizomatics counter, or the veracity of sitemeter, whichever the case may be. After one full day plus a few hours this morning there is already a 15 hit count differential–my way.

15 hits a day! I hope this is an anomaly for the one day, because that is 30% or more of what I have been counting. I’ll keep the monitor running and see if the discrepancy evens out over a few days.

There is this dude named Mike Golding who from every indication seems to be a monumental prick. He claims to be a Domino, err, Notes–tipster I guess you’d call it– who writes Notes/Domino tips then cry’s like a baby when, or prolly more like if, people come download them. I mean heck, he does have google adds on his site. He should thank every person who comes to his site and downloads his worthless tips.

Last time I checked the whole internet was based on a concept that factors down to one simple formula: content=hits. I guess he generates his content for some higher principle other than hits on his site. Yeah, right. Busy assholes like me generate content for hits. No higher purpose.

So anyway, he likes to write these controversial articles designed to generate maximum traffic to his site. I know, like, what a novel idea. He recently posted an article entitled “We are all morons…?” having to do with whether or not a programmer complies with specs or not. The only other option was to be an asshole. Well I am definitely in the latter category.

I made one response then I noticed that the link he provided next to the commenter’s name was a permalink back to that comment. No email link or website link back to the contributor was provided. I may be alone in this thinking, but I think that is pretty conceited. So I made another response. I’ll paraphrase since it took prick a whole ten seconds to remove the original:

Is it a moron or an asshole that provides permalinks back to his own site for each comment but doesn’t provide an email or website link back to the contributor? I always get that confused. Ah, I know, you feel you already contribute enough with your notestips to have to bother with providing a link back to those who contribute to your site. Gotcha!

There was more that I can’t recall, but you get the gist of it. Hey Mike, I think you forgot the idiot category. The reason why you seem so bitter is prolly cause you never work from specs.

I don’t know why I find it so hard to make new friends. I am such a nice guy I gave him two links and he wont even give me a link back when I comment on his site. Prick!

What’s up with this marketing blurb?

We get your web site submitted for listing on the top 400 search engines!

i wonder who the target is there. Which would you rather have, submission to the top 400 search engines (or top 40,000,000 search engines, for that matter) or precise expert technical advice on how to get your site a solid, consistent ranking in the top five search engines? Or even only the top three?

Here is a news flash– the top however-many search providers use the same few search engines provided by a handful of search engine providers. So the things you do to maximize your page rankings for each of the top five search providers will also work similarly for all the other “top 400″ search providers using the same search engine.

This is just another cheap marketing technique used to lure in those who have been drawn to the web with aspirations of cashing in on the internet. I have personally been involved recently with a so-called web developer who is of the cut-and-paste variety. Her skills are limited to what code she finds on the internet. Primarily she runs the web-hosting/website development/PHP-Nuke scam on small mom-and-pops who don’t know any better. On this one deal I was lending some advice on, the chick had the meta tags on every page spammed to draw hits from people who would use her hosting/web design service instead of her client’s services. The client didn’t know what meta tags were for or even that they existed. The web site developer didn’t have the integrity not to cheat the client. She didnt even have the courtesy to put her spam in alongside with her client’s keywords, she only put in here own keywords.

She also pulled another common stunt found amongst the incompetent and insecure: she would not give the client access to most of the cPanel/PHPAdmin in an effort to maintain complete control over the account and minimize efforts to get rid of her sorry ass.

And finally, she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing. She left unpatched all the KNOWN security glitches in PHP-Nuke and subsequently used those back doors to attack her former client’s website. After being told her services would no longer be required and all the security patches were applied, she called the hosting service and scammed her client’s user name and password from some idiot working there and went into the site she had been paid to create and destroyed it. Of course she didn’t have enough integrity to have provided her client with any kind of backup strategy.

The kicker is that her whole portfolio of sites got hacked by another like-minded piece of shit using the same back doors she left open. The vast majority of her significant portfolio was concentrated in the repossession industry. Go ahead, have a chuckle. You know what happened. I love it when the wheel comes full circle. Don’t you.

If you ran one of the industry’s top trade associations how well would you like it getting out that you had been maintaining an insecure site and that some ditzy flake was running around with the keys to the kingdom? Not very well, I think. Especially when you consider the degree to which the trade associations preach about how their members are experienced, well-trained, and in many cases credentialed as the reasons clients should use their members over the other, fly-bynight operations. How do they expect the clients to buy into this idea when it appears they dont even practice what they preach when they purchase professional services.

I wonder what percent of the hosting re-sellers/web developers fall into this criminal category? I wonder what percent of the crap we put up with in our in-boxes, referrer lists, comments, and such are the direct result of idiot, fly-by-night internet service providers who dont have a freaking clue as to what they are doing– like the one involved in the true story above. I bet it is a fairly high number.

I recommended to the lady who got scammed that she file FBI complaints for each separate stunt this chick pulled hacking her site.

This theme of lets get into a business– any business– and scam everyone and everything for all its worth is getting tired. I see it everywhere. These marketing scams make it very difficult for honest people of modest means to make a decent living as a small business owner. Maybe its always been this way and I am just getting more more cumulative evidence of it cause I am getting older.

Oh yeah, the scammer’s name is Debbie Corbin and her company was called Ultimate Designs. I hear she had to relocate her shingle. Heh heh.

If you have any web-scam horror stories, I’d like to hear of them. Post them in the comments of email them to me.

…working on the railroad dont seem so bad.

A friend I have never actually met helps run an antique railroad line, Roosevelt Railroad Museum, Inc., whose claim to fame is FDR rode on the line way back when. I told him I would give him a plug and then never did it. So here it is.

From the looks of some of his pics, it looks like my kind of job… as long as there isn’t too much work. Heh?

Lots of rain, sure is green around the trestles!

I may just have to make it out to Georgia next spring to ride Elton’s train (he dont like me calling it his train) and see if he knows anybody who can cook. It looks as if he does.

More pics in extended entry.

Its a highly sophisticated piece of technology: