Junk

Yes, I know the spanky new website is down. New firmware on router refuses to port forward now. Can't get old firmware to fix.

I have nothing to say about The Bin Laden Trades.

Or this.

My leg feels better. Barney seems to have forgiven me.

What The Fuck Is Going On Around Here?

It's nice of you to ask. I know some of the links on my site are gaudy. I didn't mean to turn into Homer Simpson when he made the greatest website in the world.

Ohhhh look it's dancing Jesus.

I've been trying to stress test a very dubious connection out to teh internets.

Comcast whom I hate more then a certain Adorable Girlfriend hates... well pretty much every one she comes into contact with. I think I lost my train of thought.

Yeah dancing Jesus.

I am now the proud owner of a web domain in Spain.

deanrul.es resolves to me. Right now it's being hosted on my soon to be dead PowerBook Aluminum G4 12. It's connecting through a wireless router to Comcast where I can only have a dynamic IP address.

The router I use has been banned from automatically updating to places like no-ip and dyndns.org because they're spam tastic. Actually they're only spamtastic when connected to a windows machine. My Apache Server on a Macintosh is pretty much bullet proof. But still no automatic updates for my European TLD domain name server.

Frankly I admit I'm out of my league here and may have bitten off more then I can chew. There is a package called Updatedd that's supposed to work in the background to serve a dynamic ip address to your domain name registrar. Two things hinder me. The first is that the ip address that my macintosh sees is a bogus local area network address that my router uses to fool my Mac into thinking it's connected. The other hinderence, and it's probably the biggest problem I have is that I don't know dick about Linux.

I knew the Mac was a UNIX boxen but I never really gave it much thougth. Apple might not have written the underlying code for the daemon but they really prettied it up in the finder. Nice work. So I have the option of adding some of the builds for Linux into my /private/bin/etc/bash/log/httpd/wtf directory that are supposed to tell eurodns.com my ip should point to a new bunch of numbers. I just wish I knew where the little bastards were supposed to go.

And they say the Macintosh isn't a real computer because it's easy to use.

If anyone knows how to configure Apache on OSX to seamlessly and automatically update my dyndns info I would sure appreciate it if ya'll drop me a line.

Still in all, it beats the fuck out of having to screw around in the registry looking for cryptically named .dll files that share the same name but different creation dates and you don't know which one was over written by another program sharing the file. And Word needs the latest .dll but it lost functionality for running Excel so you have to leave the old one in but PowerPoint gets confused looking at both so I just say to hell with it.

So enjoy the cats for a little while longer. I pull the plug in a couple days. I'm already up to 4 gigs of traffic and I've only been online for 2 days. Biggest hit to my site has been me. Second biggest has been the Google robot. I added a tag to tell google to stay away. I know they're a bunch of fucktards. I think I'll block access from 66-249-66-227 at my router.

OK here's another test.

Try it.

It opens in a new window. It looks pretty much like it did this morning but now should work on the iPhone.

What's going on around here anyway? It looks like I might have some plans.

This Is Just A Test

OK. You can go ahead and click here now.

It opens in a new window. It's still really disappointing.

Let me know if you get the Apache page. If so then click here.

iCrap

Since getting an iPhone I find my ties.org email has gone straight into the trash. Sorry if I haven't replied. Looks like I've lost about a month worth of communication.

Pop Goes The American Dream

2 weeks ago I applied for a home mortgage with LendingTree. I did it mostly because I'm curious what a teacher is worth. I know roughly $46K is a dollar value but it's just a number this year, it goes up every year thanks to the union and DOE regulations. Now a teacher is considered one of the big three professions. You always hear Doctor Lawyer Teacher as the gold standard of professional status. Throw in the fact that this is going to be my first home, my FICA is over 700 and I have 10% down. I also own my car and have no student loans (I am carrying a large balance on my credit card but it is coming down now that I'm working.) One would think that I could get a loan for whatever I asked for. Not so. I asked for $300,000 which is the low end of the price for a single family detached within 10 miles of the school I teach at. There were fewer then 20 houses on MLS to choose from. I got two calls, not the 3 advertised. One offered me $94,000 and the other never called me back.

Now I know there are lots of complaints about LendingTree but I thought they'd be a good ballpark estimate. Perhaps if I went to the bank I'd have a better idea of my financial prospects. I'm going to leap to conclusions anyway.

A teacher, considered one of the pillar of the community jobs* can't get a loan on their salary to purchase a home in the community they work in. That's fucked up. It's not like there's no money in the system to loan, $400 billion dollars is a lot to inflate the currency supply with. That's pretty damn close to half a trillion. So I should be getting that loan right?

Who's going to give a loan now? It seems that there are no mortgage houses left standing. All that money with no one willing to hand it out.

A couple years ago Lisa tried to get in with some bankers to handle their forclosure listings. Nothing came of it. Now you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a house in preforclosure and Lisa is still only representing buyers. Looks like the banks have to come to her now. There are some folks who will survive the market and end up with a lovely home. They'll never get back what they paid for it but people pay 3 times in mortgage interest anyway. What they sell it for will just be a number to boast about. Only Baby Boomers who bought a house for $15,000 in 1970 will actually make money on top of what they paid in mortgage interest. It's too bad the dollar they sell their house for isn't worth what it was in 1970. The rest of us are screwed. In the mean time, there is no middle class left when a married, college educated, pillar of the community professional can't get a loan to purchase a 2 bedroom house on 10,000 square feet of land.

American dream? I'm dreaming about moving to Croatia. By the way, that house would have cost $60,000 a year ago, it works out to $120K today.

What kind of job prospects can I expect in Eastern Europe? It turns out that Croatia is desperate for teachers that speak english. I'll bet the banks there would be happy to give me a loan especially since I'll have a 35% down payment. And for those Americans who don't know where Croatia is it's two countries north of Greece on the coast of that splash of water just behind Italy's knee. And for those Americans who think it's dangerous there. The civil war is over. Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia are all joining the EU. They've got no place to go but up.



*(not my words, one of the mortgage brokers called it that.)

Everybody, Everybody!

WTF

Sometimes I see something that makes no sense to me at all. Netflix is telling me that my love for 1940's filmnoir will carry over to cartoons about armless goofballs. OK, so they got it right but still... That's a big leap.

Binary Solo 10001000011100101010001010001

Weekend of computer issues. Largely self inflicted. Been trying to sync a Sony camera to my Macintosh. No firewire, just USB and it's a Sony so no Macintosh support. VirtualPC works and I can drag the mpeg-2 files to my Mac desktop but I want a more elegant solution. I tried installing WinXP on Lisa's Mac but had issues with BootCamp recognizing the windows install disk. No it wasn't an OEM disk. I know better then that. It was an XP disk that I thought was a full install of the home edition but it wasn't having it.

AT&T amuses the shit out of me. Only carrier to work with the iPhone, which as far as i know is an Apple product, will not sell me DSL service because i use a Macintosh. Looks like i'm stuck with Comcast a while longer.

My 12 inch powerbook is fading on me. It makes me sad. The fluorescent tube grows dimmer every day. I'm just hoping that it survives until the start of the next school year (two weeks.) Then I'm elligable for another MacBook on my teachers discount. What I really want is another submicro notebook like my little aluminum PB G4. The 15in is more than I want to carry around.

Although, the good news is that the new MB will come with iLife which rumor has it has a version of iMovie that now supports DVD cameras through USB. According to this cryptic message from the Apple site my camera will work with the software.

It might just be worth the $300 premium over what I would spend trying to fix my screen, install Leopard and get iLife'08 for Lisa's computer because it still won't work on my G4.

By the way Darren, what I meant to say is 3mm jack not 3/4 inch. It's the little 8th inch jack like on a Walkman. The line out on the iPhone dock will work with a standard mini headphone plug and doesn't need to be connected to the power cable to feed music to regular headphones or in my case a Walkman to RCA addapter into my TV. I'd still like to know if you tried docking it in your iPod speakers.

I know, I'm using my TV to listen to music. I don't have a bitchen stereo with tube preamp and powerline smoother. iSuck.

Does anyone remember the phrase "Don't touch my Dads NADs!"

Got to get ready for school!

iRule Because iBlow

When gas prices go up, blame Dean
Tropical Storm Dean May Become Hurricane Tonight
Models Show Dean Moving Toward Yucatan As Category 4 Hurricane
Dean Is Headed For Land
Dean Strengthens, Erin Headed Toward Texas
Tropical Storm Dean near Lesser Antilles
Dean Has Potential to Grow Into Hurricane
Dean likely to arrive as hurricane, but where?
Dean Still Moving West
Wondering About Dean?

And my personal favorite headline:

The Battle of the Super Models

Dear Netflix

Thanks for nothing cocksuckers. I hear that you won't let me use the 17 hours of streaming video because the Macintosh doesn't have a DRM scheme to your liking. So instead of giving me a few bucks off for my hassle I get shafted while you give access to Windows PC users. I am glad to see that your protection scheme is so strong it's hacker proof. It's great to know that you're relying on bloated featureless crap to show your best face to the public. It might interest you to know that I can run WinXP on my Mac and tried out your service. I think the reason you don't want the Mac fouling up your downloads is that Mac users expect elegance while the movies you delivered to me looked like shit. It's better to ignore us then insult us with crap. Maybe that is a good strategy on your part.

As for my 17 hours each month. If you're not going to give me an extra movie or lift my throttle could I donate my time to an orphanage for blind children?

Yours Sincerely,

Dean

How Much Is That Gonna Cost Me?

Van Halen, Devo, Big Audio Dynamite (because it's too late to see The Clash) and The Replacements. Those are the bands I haven't seen live that I'm willing to go anywhere for any price to see.

Van Halen just announced a tour with Dave and Eddy and some other guys. Actually it's with Eddy's son Wolfgang in place of Michael Anthony. I'm sure Wolfgang is technically competant but I've seen Michael Anthony live (I did see Van Hagar Live Without A Net.) I doubt Wolfie is going to drink a fith of Jack Daniels during a 10 minute Bass solo.

I just took The Police off the above list and the show was great. A little slice of disappointment though, The English Beat/General Public are one slot out of that list and they played in Boston the night of The Police show. And I missed 'Every Little Thing' because my leg was killing me and I had to walk around under the grandstand to avoid blood clots from standing.

I've probably upset Tom by suggesting Big Audio Dynamite is in some way a suitable substitution for Joe Strummer.

I haven't seen REM live but for some reason, as much as I love them, I'm not interested. I missed my chance to see them play at the Salem Theater in 1983 for $5. I had just moved to Marblehead and didn't really know anyone. I tried to talk the two kids I did know into going but they didn't want to pay $5 for someone they never heard of. I knew who they were because my Dad had MTV at his house (Marblehead didn't have cable tv yet.) I saw the video for 'Radio Free Europe' and knew that REOSTYXTOTOFOREIGNEREAGLESLEDZEPPLENBOSTON were done for and what we would eventually call "College Radio" was The Cutting Edge.

Passing All Consumer Tests

More Videos

Balls And Shaft

I just got home from a much too short weekend in Manhattan. The Kurz and I met up in NYC for a late lunch and some very abreviated sight seeing. Much of our conversation orbited my recent raising to the sublime degree of Master Mason and further light from the appendant bodies. Mike is hooked. He's so totally asking to be one that I find myself invested with renewed curiosity and enthusiam for the craft. Trying to look up the lodge in New York to see if there's anyting going on in the city that never sleeps I find all sorts of other websites. They lead me to other sites.

I come down with a wicked case of ADHD and just start wandering through the interwebs. I find this picture on a site that's claiming to be exposing all sorts of satanic Masonic secrets.



That's not the handshake.

None of the handshakes on that page are correct. If it was a disinformation site meant to trick e-masons who haven't truly recieved light I wouldn't be so concerned. But much of what Kurczy and I talked about was on some of the scandals and controversey surrounding my brotherhood. I feel the need to call out cowans.

Anyway, come home Mike. I want to be there on the 5 points when you're raised.

Brave New World

According to this the mainstream media is still under the impression that we're under no threat from deadly small pox because there are only two sources in the world that are closely guarded.

Which is more dangerous? Conspiracy theories on the internet or staggering ignorance within the so called credible journalism found in the mainstream media?

One doctor has shown that it is a trivial matter to synthesize nearly extinct viral particles from nucleotides sitting in a jar on the benchtop. Another has shown us how easy it is to increase the lethality of such a pathogen.

It's a good thing we don't sell do it yourself DNA fabrication kits to any asshole with a credit card.

The Best Part Of The Movie

Lisa and I just watched 'The Black Dahlia'. Dissapointment with Cinemax showing it fullscreen aside the movie sucked except for one thing. It had a who-the-hell-is-that moment, which I live for. One bit actor fired off a moment of recognition just long enough for me to sit wondering for the rest of the movie where I just saw him recently. So I looked him up when the movie ended. I liked 'Doom' but it was the brain cell which just last week watched 'Batman Begins' that was trying to get my attention.

Welcome to Hollywood Mr Brake. You see the same people on the way down that you passed on the way up. Good luck!

They Love Each Other

Last night Barney refused to come to bed because Little Princess Sheba still gets locked in the downstairs bathroom every night. He want's her to come up to bed with us. They're that inseparable now.