3:00 AM this morning was the last time I’ll ever use DSL.

Around 3:00 AM today, I noticed my connection dropped. I tried everything I could, but to no avail. I spent almost three hours trying to figure it out. I gave up and went to bed.

I called Verizon in the early afternoon about the problem. Long story short, it seems my line had two IPs, and that was the cause of the problem. OK.. so what do do about it? While I was on hold, I thought about all the cool ways they could handle this, from clearing my line, to doing some fantastic line “sweep” and clear all the shit off the line. Their solution– unplug your computer for eight hours, then tray again.

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U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller on Friday urged telecommunications officials to record their customers’ Internet activities, CNET News.com has learned.

Well, George Bush and his baddies are at it again, expressing a great desire to completely destroy any privacy you thought you had left.

In a private meeting with industry representatives, Gonzales, Mueller and other senior members of the Justice Department said Internet service providers should retain subscriber information and network data for two years, according to two sources familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The closed-door meeting at the Justice Department, which Gonzales had requested, according to the sources, comes as the idea of legally mandated data retention has become popular on Capitol Hill and inside the Bush administration. Supporters of the idea say it will help prosecutions of child pornography because in many cases, logs are deleted during the routine course of business.

News.com

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As of today, scriptedlizard.com is hosted by another company, BelaHost. They’ve done some work for me on another one of my sites, and I really thought their service was second to none.

One Down, Three To Go

I will move all of my sites to BelaHost in the coming weeks. Because two of them use SSL, and I must have little to no downtime, I have to be smart when moving them. I don’t want to piss of customers.

Moving over the MySQL database and all associated SL files was a piece of cake. I had no real problems, except some characters got screwed up when importing my MySQL tables– about 30 apostrophes. Other than that, smooth sailing.

After four days, it’s actually quite nice to be able to see my site up and running. I won’t tell who my old host was until after the move is complete.

PS - And if you can’t tell, my new host uses FreeBSD. Sorry Linux.

I’ve heard of digg.com before, but never actually visited the site until a couple days ago. I knew it was a great place to go to find interesting stories for tech-related topics, but since I had my news sites bookmarked, I figured I had enough of an information base to work with.

Start The Presses

With digg though, users become the editors and choose what stories appear on the home page. They simply choose to “digg” the stories they feel should be read by others. Over time, you get a great selection of stories from all genres, from technology to software to science.

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eBay could as easily have been named eBuy, cause that’s just what I did for six years– buying over 1,000 items. Sadly, I don’t buy on eBay as much as I did, so in essence this is like a farewell letter.

How I Got Started

Back in February 1998, eBay was new to me. I don’t quite remember how I stumbled upon it, but once I was there I quickly became quite the fan. I mean, I saw toys that I remember destroying when I was a kid. Hundreds, thousands of dollars worth of toys I destroyed went flashing across my mind. Could this be true? Could I get a second chance at childhood and savor all those childhood memories again? The short answer was yes.

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Up again late at night, I wandered onto Yahoo! to see the latest news, and I thought I was at AT&T’s web site.

I guess there is no shame in an advertising blitz on AT&T’s part, and I guess equally there is no shame on Yahoo! for being AT&T’s bitch! Nice one Yahoo!. I wonder if you altered the search results as well, on say keyword searches for “phone service.” You whores!

Few things bring out the hidden hatred in a person like SPAM does. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term SPAM, you are most likely familiar with its spawn– hundreds of useless e-mail messages that can bog down web servers and generally make your life miserable.

SPAM is the insult that keeps on giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and giving and did I forget– giving.

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