I decided to move away from TextAmerica with all the recent events going on over there. If you want some background on what I am speaking of, go to the following site: extamerica. I have the overwhelming feeling they won’t be around for long. An old contact (Shawn Honnick) who used to work at TextAmerica told me to look at Flickr and their API. I have been a Flickr user ever since their service started. The reason I uses TextAmerica primarily is because I could customize my template to mimic my own site so when users jumped off it flowed like my own site. So after doing some research and seeing that it will be a bear to code the site with the Flickr API so the photos show up on my site. I decide to take the easy road to start. What’s the easy road you may ask? Setting up a sub-domain and installing WordPress. WordPress has a plug-in call FAlbum that does everything I need it to do to flow as part of my site and give me complete design control. But as luck would have it Flickr had a major storage crash which took their site down as I was getting ready to apply for the API module. They kind of lost 20 Terabytes of photos but are actively recovering that data from another Data Center. They are bringing the site back up shortly with a lot of images showing as unavailable. The images will come back on their own as the files are recovered. So as soon as they are back up I will start experimenting with FAlbum and Flickr integration into my site.
Time Out
I took a ride out to Jersey today to meet up with some people from the clan I belong too. The clan is Evil Smurfs and Gad is one of the founders and he threw the shindig. It was a good time had by all. I posted pictures on my Gallery section, you can find the link is below, enjoy.
Summer 2006 ]ES[ Gathering Pictures
A New Home
I just moved all of my domains from my old hosting company Vizaweb to 1&1 and so far I am very happy with what they are offering me compared to what I got from Vizaweb. The biggest bonus thus far is that I am not timing out every 10 minutes or so. When I first went to Vizaweb everything was great, however over time their service just got worse and worse and support was non-existent. If you’re looking for a hosting company give 1&1 a try.
Clueless
I often wonder how our elected officials can write laws to protect us concerning technological matters, when they seem so out of touch with technology. Two recent events amplify my feelings in the matter. Recently Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” poked at little fun at Congress during hearings concerning videogame violence. Several congressmen considered themselves gamers for playing pong and solitaire, that’s a joke right? Congressman Joe Pitts made remarks that poorer kids would be more influenced by these video games than their well to do suburban counterparts. My jaw dropped when I heard those remarks. The video below is an excerpt from the show in question and is quite humorous to watch.
Now on to the Net Neutrality issue. The net neutrality legislation which is trying to make its way through is in essence trying to protect the consumers and business alike from being charged a tiered level to have content delivered to them. AT&T started the matter off by saying that Google and other companies like them were getting a free ride off the ISPs backs to deliver their content to the consumers requesting it. This is far from the truth since companies like Google pay for their Internet access and bandwidth which I would have to assume is quite sizeable. Telcos are getting worried since they see their customers moving away from conventional telephone service to cheaper VOIP solutions. In essence they want any content not coming from their own services charged extra to get to their customers. This is just short of extortion. Ted Stevens recently gave a speech concerning the matter in front of his peers and is one of the most hilarious things I have ever heard. Below is a clip of his speech. When you hear comments and speeches like this, you fully realize that probably most of our elected officials have no clue about technology and the Internet. If you are going to talk about or even vote on legislation you obliviously know nothing about, shouldn’t you learn about it first so you can make a sensible logical decision or statement?
It's Friday Night, The Party's…
Well keeping true to my word, it’s Friday night and out come the bottles. Going to sit down and play some Counterstrike Source with my clan mates tonight. I should be in a good singing mood this evening. After I took this picture I realized what was playing on my Sirius Radio. Pretty fitting for what’s about to go down on the server tonight, don’t you think so my ]ES[ brethren?
BTW, if you’re a CSS player, come join us. You can find out more information about our clan and game servers at the Evil Smurf’s website.
Happy but fried!
I decided to take some time this week and update my site design. It was long overdue and very much needed. I am quite pleased with the finished product and also set up a photo gallery within my CMS (Content Management Software). As usual the coding fried me, especially tweaking my Text America account to mimic my site design when I link out to it. I am going to take it easy this weekend and have a couple of drinks and relax. At least that is what I am telling myself. I know I am going to have to log into some clients network remotely and fix some problem that arises. That is usually what happens when you plan some time off.