New Congress, Save the Internet ramps up again!

As I’m sure my American readers know, there’s a new Congress on the way in, and they’re going to need to be trained like the baby animals they are. Please help spread the word on Net Neutrality by watching and then forwarding this video from savetheinternet.com on to all your friends. Your children with thank you one day, and you’ll thank you one day soon.

WordPress opinions

Well, I’ve been using WordPress for, like, 6 hours now and I think I have a pretty good idea about it.  I like it.  Last night I helped set my friend Jason up with WordPress and liked it so much, I switched.  Now that I’ve customized like a madman, I feel pretty happy about it.  I’m going to start digging through plugins tomorrow, should be fun.  I think the theme is good for now, I might do some more later on it.  Alright, I’m out.

Change of pace?

I’m seriously considering converting my whole blog over to wordpress and I’ve set up a sandbox in the mean time.  Unfortunately there exists no import wizard, so I’ll have to do all the transfers of posts by hand.  I don’t think I’ll transfer the comments if I do.  What do you guys think?

EDIT:
I did it!

Politics

I got a bit hammered last night at the bar when the election results started rolling in, and when I learned that Thelma Drake, Republican, had won the House race here in my district of Virginia, I crafted a rather nasty drunken letter and sent it to her campaign mailbox.  I shall share said letter with you now.  Looking back on it, I may have gone a bit overboard, but the general theme is about right.

I feel that you won this election because of the abundance of uneducated elderly in this state.  It is because of you that I will be moving from this state as soon as possible.  Alas, there is no state in this union free from political insanity, so my only choice may be a foreign nation.  At the moment, I’m considering the Netherlands, but for the most part, any nation not linked so completely to Christian fundamentalism is sounding really good right now.  One should not get me wrong when I say this…  In no way do I feel that Christians are less worthy of my respect than Jewish, Muslim, or Atheist.  I do not however, feel that any one of these sects should be as influential in our national government as Christianity currently is.  The few are speaking for the many when we have psychotic overprotective parents dictating that we cannot have two homosexuals in a monogamous relationship on television.  I don’t know a SINGLE person who thinks that people should be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.  Our children should be taught tolerance, not ignorance.  If I had a choice between letting my kids watch two human beings in a loving relationship enjoy the most basic of human pleasures and someone kill another innocent human being, I would choose the "pornographic material" every time.  You’re a sick individual, and every person I’ve spoken to who wanted me to vote for you was as twisted as you are.  Resign.

Virginia is more religiously orthodox than the middle east now.

Brandon Whaley
Virginia Resident
Atheist, and no longer proud to be an American

How’s about them apples?

Road rage

I write this while sitting in traffic. Bad traffic.  I can only assume someone is dead and the corpse is in the road and noone gives a shit enough to drag it to the gutter where it belongs, so everyone is just stopping to look.  Every motherfucker in the city is trying to take this alternate route I’m on because the normal route has an accident too.  I really think there should be bulldozers at every damned intersection to push the damaged vehicles and injured people to a more reasonable location than in the middle of the fucking road!  I’m thinking toxic waste dumps full of caustic chemicals.  If I am physically capable, my fucking car is gonna be out of traffic.  Wait, nevermind, I just exited the traffic… Guess what it was?  NOTHING!  Fuck it, I’m out.

The state of compiz

Since my Ubuntu Tips post, Compiz has really come a long way.  If you’re reading this because you checked out my ubuntu tips tutorial, you’re going to want to go here: http://wiki.compiz.net/index.php/Ubuntu#Installation for the most up-to-date methods of getting compiz on your box.  I especially like the new compiz-manager program that will load compiz, load your theme engine, and if it craps out, automagically revert to your default window manager.

If you need help with getting compiz working, you can usually find me trolling around #ubuntu-xgl on irc.freenode.net.

Spam Exasperation

I’ve finally gotten enough spam to get fed up with it.  I’ll be disabling comments on each post that spammers hit, as they hit them.  I think this gives a nice compromize between giving people a chance to weigh in and preventing undue stress for me.  It usually takes the spammers a week or two to pick up on my new posts, so this should work out well enough.  If you want to comment on an older post, let me know and I’ll turn on comments just for you.

OpenDNS part 2

I e-mailed the OpenDNS people (see last post) and got a really fast reply.  They provided some interesting (and vastly useful) info which I felt I should share:

> Hey guys, I love the service…  I’m going to switch my office network over on Monday and see if anyone notices ;D
>
> One thing though…  I think it would be good to have some sort of "view this page anyway" for the suspected phishing sites.  You never know when a site might change hands without your knowledge and if you make the link small enough, I’m sure the people that REALLY need your protection won’t notice it.

Brandon, glad to hear you like it, and thrilled to hear about your office.

About going to the phishing site… we’ve heard this a few times. It’s not, unfortunately, slam-dunk easy to do, given the way we block phishes, and our initial call is that it’s more important to block phishes. We’ll keep providing more meta-data about -why- it was blocked, for the curious. Also, our designation of a site as a phishing site will expire over time. We’re quite sensitive to false positives.

If you personally are curious, since you’re unlikely to be phished, you can turn off the phishing protection at http://www.opendns.com/prefs/ (prob better at home than at work).

Also, we hope that our reliability shines through at http://system.opendns.com/ — we want to give you more reasons to choose OpenDNS… and even be able to tell people about the switch. 😉

Cheers,

John Roberts
VP of Product
OpenDNS  http://www.opendns.com/

OpenDNS

Wow, just found out about OpenDNS and decided to try switching my home network over.  They resolve simple typos to TLD’s (like .cm and .co now resolve to .com), they’re faster than my ISP’s DNS servers (no shock there, I hate my ISP, but they’re the fastest around), and they block phishing domains at the DNS level.  How’s about them apples?  The one thing I’d like to see is the option to view the page anyway on the phishing domain thing, but I can live.