Major Changes Coming…
Thursday, May 1st, 2008 88 ViewsStay tuned...
Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
On Vacation
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 167 ViewsI am going away on vacation until April 30th. If you contact me between now and that date, rest assured that your message was received but you will not get a reply until after that date. For emergencies, please call me at 410-696-4611. As a pre-caution, PublicDomainReprints.org processing of requests has ...
PubMatic is Bad, Really BAD
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 443 ViewsAbout four months ago, I decided to try out a new ad optimization service called PubMatic.com. What this service is supposed to do is automatically optimize ads coming from multiple ad networks and display the one that will make the most money. I set it up in the beginning of ...
Business Checks on the Cheap
Thursday, February 28th, 2008 540 ViewsUntil recently, I didn't need physical checks for my publishing business - instead I just used the free BillPay service provided by the bank and saved on postage. However, a few days ago I found out about the new business checking account from ING Direct that has even higher interest ...
Carbonite Just Paid for Itself
Sunday, May 6th, 2007 927 ViewsFor the past few months I have been using a new over-the-Internet backup solution called Carbonite (they also have a more business oriented competitor called Mozy). It is basically a program that runs in the background backing up your computer as needed. Tonight while working with some files I accidently erased ...
Good Customer Service at 7/11
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 747 ViewsTo give credit where credit is due, 7/11 Corporate has pretty good customer service. About two weeks ago, I filled up my car at a 7/11 gas station and the place was horrible. There was gas all over the floor, and the hose did not detect that the tank was ...
Three 1/2 Tales of Horrible Customer Service: Part I - Quicken
Friday, February 9th, 2007 939 ViewsI usually tend to buy very little software and try to use open source as much as possible. However, there are just some that I can't get away - Windows (which comes with my machine), a specific program for my Treo and Microsoft Money. Every few years when my version ...
Baking Powder and Bitter Taste
Saturday, January 20th, 2007 1,271 ViewsThis past Friday I ended up baking a small cherry cake for our family. The recipe was very simple - it only had 5 ingriedents: flour, baking powder, eggs, oil and pie filling. Unfortunatly, after the cake was baked, it turned out that it tasted very bitter to me. My ...
Webmin, Rackspace and Securing Servers
Sunday, January 14th, 2007 744 ViewsLast week my company was making some server changes (which hopefully I will blog about at some point) which necessitates a security check. Being a startup, we cannot afford a format ethical hack/penetration testing, so the next best thing is an automated security tool. I tried using Nessus from Windows, ...
“SunPlus” Opt-out Instructions
Thursday, November 30th, 2006 419 ViewsThis is primarily for people in the Baltimore area. One of the annoying pieces of snail-mail spam that comes to my house everyday, is a set of advertisements distributed by the Baltimore Sun called "Sun Plus". After searching long and hard for information on opt-out, I found that the number to ...
Asbestos Testing via the Internet
Monday, November 13th, 2006 542 ViewsOne of the pleasures of home ownership is finding hazardous or dangerous things in your house. I recently had that pleasure after a few contractors pointed to a specific place in my new house and told me that it is probably asbestos. After spending quite some time trying to find ...
My Blogging Hiatus and Housekeeping
Saturday, November 11th, 2006 457 ViewsSome of you may have noticed that I haven't been posting as often as usual. Well, the secret is out - we recently bought a house and just finished our move, so I have been kind of busy. I will be posting a bit more often from now on. Additionally, I ...
Generic Tylenol Recall
Saturday, November 11th, 2006 2,119 ViewsIn case you haven't heard yet, there is a major recall (11 million bottles!) of generic Tylenol (acemitophen) 500 mg bottles due to possible contamination with metal particles. Recall notice can be found here and the list of brands affected is here. Interesingly enough, the FDA thinks that this can cause ...
OperaWatch’s Founder Joins Opera Software
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 494 ViewsMy good friend, Daniel Goldman, the founder of Opera Watch (a blog covering the Opera browser), just announced that he joined Opera Software as their technical evangelist. Congratulations! P.S. I should say that I am partly to blame since I introduced him to the Opera browser several years back.
The WRONG Way to Sell a $600 Phone
Thursday, June 15th, 2006 538 ViewsYesterday my company ordered several of the newly released Treo 700p smart phones for myself and two other people in the company. The list price for these is $649 per phone (before any discounts). The Bottom Line is that if you are selling something that expensive, then you better make sure ...
News Story on My FOIA/PA Experience with the NSA
Thursday, June 8th, 2006 653 ViewsMetroPulse, an alternative weekly out of Knoxville, KY published a cover story today on NSA spying. Among other things, it has a small section detailing my experience with getting my own records (which I discussed in this blog), and some quotes. The article can be found here. There are some very ...
Verizon DSL Outages Across the Eastern States
Monday, May 15th, 2006 684 ViewsMy DSL went down about 8:45 PM this evening. Checking their status page from my cell phones shows nothing. So I called their technical support and was suprised to hear a recorded message saying that there is an outage across most North East states (NY, NJ, MD, DC, VA, MA, ...
