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Jeremy Clarkson is stupid!

Jeremy ClarksonI hate British TV personality Jeremy Clarkson. He’s just so damn… smug. He’s a jerk in the same way that Simon Cowell is, only he’s somewhat quieter and he lacks Cowell’s wit. He’s an America-basher that finds fault with anything my country does, yet he (apparently) feels that Britain is heaven on earth. He comes across as one of those Britons that still longs for the British Empire, and deep down he probably thinks the Union Jack is still flying over Bombay.

Anyway, as you might of heard, there have been several incidents lately where the British government has lost sensitive data. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) lost a CD containing the names and addresses of 160,000 children. The week before that, the British government admitted that a government contractor had lost a CD containing the names and addresses of 3 million people with learner’s permits. And shortly before that incident, the government admitted that it had lost a packet of CDs that contained the names and banking information of over 25 million people – almost half the population of the UK!

As you might imagine, privacy activists in the UK were (and are still) livid over all this. In response to the activists, Clarkson recently published a newspaper article about how the activists’ fears are overblown. He called their cries “a bunch of palaver” (idle talk) and called the whole thing “a storm in a teacup”. And to prove that all this privacy paranoia was a bunch of nonsense, Clarkson put his real, actual bank account number in the article.

Almost as soon as the article hit the newsstands, someone hacked into Clarkson’s account and transferred £500 to the British Diabetic Association. This article from The Guardian notes that Clarkson, “in a rare moment of humility”, admitted that the stunt had backfired:

“The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again. I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake.”

He also added: “Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer jerk!

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This Odd House

My girl watches a lot of HGTV. Since I kind of “own” the HDTV in the living room, Lisa and I have an unspoken pact where she “owns” the TV in the bedroom. So I don’t complain when she flips it on HGTV, even though it’s not really my bag. I mean, House Hunters is OK, I guess – even though it’s all kind of the same after a while – and I actually kind of dig House Hunters International just to see how crazy home prices are in London or how it is that Italians pay cash for their houses. But really, the only shows I really enjoy on HGTV are those “weird house” shows. You know what I’m talking about… the type of show that visits a house made entirely of Lego blocks or maybe an old theatre or elementary school that’s been converted over to a house. That sort of thing.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me offer my own contribution to the “weird house” phenomenon:

St. Albans

This is all that’s left of St. Alban’s church, on Wood Street in London. Some believe that this site was the location of the palace of King Offa, an Anglo Saxon ruler of Mercia (what is today the English Midlands), who ruled from from AD 757 to 796. Parish records date back to the year 930, and it is known for an absolute fact that a church has been on this exact site since 1077. In any case, by 1633 the church had fallen into serious disrepair, and a committee fronted by Exchequer Sir Henry Spiller and Inigo Jones (who is widely regarded as “England’s first architect”) recommended that the church be demolished. And it was, in 1634. The church built to replace it was short lived, having been destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The church was rebuilt yet again, this time by Sir Christopher Wren in 1685. And this is what you see today… sort of. Most of the church was destroyed during The Blitz in 1940. The tower was the only part of the church to survive the bombing, and the remainder of the ruined building was demolished in 1965.

The tower is now a private residence. Interestingly, it stands in the middle of a busy London street, in a “traffic island”. Here’s another picture:

St. Albans (second pic)

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What’s with Popular?

Popular was one of my favorite TV shows in the late 90s. The main arc of the show involved two characters: Brooke McQueen, the popular, All-American blonde cheerleader and Samantha (Sam) McPherson, the brunette champion of the downtrodden and all things alternative. The girls are, in fact, complete opposites… and Jacqueline Kennedy High School became a war zone when Brooke and Sam’s parents started dating. Popular was similar to Beverly Hills 90120 and Dawson’s Creek in that it was a “teen drama”. However Popular was smart enough to realize that people made fun of shows like 90210. Much of the drama in Popular is therefore completely over the top and winkedly tongue-in-cheek. It was a great show, and I still miss it.

One interesting thing about the cast of the show is how much weight they’ve lost.

Here are before and after pictures of Sara Rue – who played Carmen Ferrara, Popular’s “sensitive fat girl”:

Sara Rue (Before)

Sara Rue (After)

Of course, I knew that Sara had lost weight because of her role on the much-hyped ABC show Less Than Perfect. But I had no idea that castmate Ron Lester (who played Michael ‘Sugar Daddy’ Bernardino) had lost so much weight too:

Ron Lester (Before)

Ron Lester (After)

Wow – my hat’s off to you guys! I always thought that Sara Rue was pretty, even when she was heavy. And I suppose that it’s not that surprising that she lost all that weight – after all, there’s so much pressure for women to be thin in Hollywood. But I only found out about my fellow Georgian Ron Lester a few days ago… and “Wow” was all I could say when I saw him!

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Awesome Sex Pistols video!

Check out this awesome news clip about the Sex Pistols from NBC’s Today Show. It was filmed on or around January 5, 1978 in Atlanta… the date of the Pistols first show on their American tour. The sarcasm of the reporters is absolutely stunning; you’d never see reporting this slanted in the news today. The clip is pretty long (7:28), but it’s worth it, I swear!

A couple of other points:

1) This show happened just over 30 years ago. In fact, had I posted this just three days ago, I would have hit the anniversary exactly.

2) Access Atlanta has a cool write up about the show here.

3) The linked article quotes Atlanta music legend Jeff Calder. Jeff owns Wax N Facts Records in Little 5 Points and is also in the legendary Atlanta band Swimming Pool Qs. I gave Jeff lots of money when I was a young hipster.

4) Jeff is also working with my MySpace buddy Lisa King on her new music CD. You can visit Lisa’s band’s site by clicking here.

5) I got the link for the video (which spawned everything you’ve read in this post) from this site… which is written by a guy that hosts a show on WREK and lives in… Duluth, Georgia. The world really is a small place.

6) James Bolton was right… Jane Pauley was hot back in the day.

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2 More File Sharing Apps

The Internet is not hurting for ways to share files with friends. Sites like RapidShare, YouSendIt and MailBigFile were the first on the scene, and for a while they were pretty cool. For various reasons, however, those sites decided to put caps on the way people used them. Most of them adopted rules that limited the maximum file size (100 MB, usually), and many of them put limits on how much “non-premium” users could download at once. With RapidShare, for example, “free” users can only download 60MB or so per hour. So if you have a mess of pictures that you want to email someone, you’d probably have to break it up into pieces (which makes it unnecessarily confusing for the end user) and that end user might have to wait several hours before they can download the entire lot of pictures.

Other programs and services came along. Tubes, for example, is a free service. To use it, you (and all your friends) sign up on the site and download a program that looks something like an instant messaging program. You can then create shared folders (called “tubes”) that are copied back and forth between your friends. So you can create a “public” tube and drag and drop files there,  and the files will automatically be downloaded to any of your friends that have “subscribed” to your “public tube”. It actually sounds simpler than it is in practice. In reality, you need to send “invites” to your friends to join your “tube”; these don’t always go through, and sometimes the “tubes” will mysteriously disappear from your friend’s computers. And then there’s permission issues: Tubes tries to allow granular control of your files, so that Friend A can download a file from your public tube but not edit it, while Friend B can open and edit the file, while Friend C can’t download or edit it or anything. It’s all too complicated for the average user, and to make matters worse, it just doesn’t work that well. I tried Tubes for a couple of months, and I’d often find really outdated files on my friend’s computer. As in, files I’d deleted from my Tube weeks ago. Tubes said they were in perfect sync. Yeah right. And Tubes also seems to choke on large files, which is most of what people want to trade these days in the first place.

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Geek Basics: Dynamic DNS

As I’m sure you know, every computer connected to the Internet has an IP address, such as 69.73.181.157 (this site’s IP address). As I’m sure you also know, every computer on the Internet communicates with every other computer via IP address. Most web sites have static (unchanging) IP addresses, while most home users have dynamic addresses (addresses that change every day, week or month, depending on how often your ISP decides to change them). If you still use dial-up, for example, you’ll generally get a different IP address every time you connect to the Internet. Some DSL providers change their customer’s IP address several times a day. Many cable providers don’t change their customer’s IP addresses for months at a time.

So why do web sites have static IP addresses, and why do home users have dynamic ones? Well, web sites need static IP addresses so that people can connect to them. If a website’s IP address changed every day, the Internet’s DNS servers – the computers that convert “yahoo.com” into 216.109.112.135 when you type that address into your address bar – simply couldn’t keep up. The web would be in a constant state of flux, and you wouldn’t be able to connect to your favorite web sites on a regular basis. For an ISP, though, keeping track of which home user has which IP address is a monumental pain. It’s much easier for them to run DHCP servers – computers whose sole job is to assign IP addresses when the home user’s cable\DSL modem asks for one. So rather than have a huge database of account numbers and IP addresses, your ISP simply sets up a server that says “here are our available IP addresses. Whenever a customer requests an IP address, give him one of these”.

It might be helpful to think of IP addresses like phone numbers. A Chinese take-out restaurant needs a static phone number so that people can call in and order food. After all, if their phone number changed every week it’d be hard to order from them, no? But in this example, the restaurant’s customers don’t need static phone numbers to call in an order. They can phone their orders in from their home phone, their work phone, their cell phones, or even a pay phone.

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All About: Digital TV

You might have heard some of the hoopla about the “Digital TV switchover” or the “analog cut-off”. A lot of people have heard about it, but haven’t heard any of the details. A lot of misinformation is floating around out there – hopefully, this post will help clear the air on many issues:

What’s going on? The United States Congress has passed a law that requires all television broadcasters to stop broadcasting analog signals on February 17, 2009. After that date, all television broadcasts must be in digital format.

Why did they do this? Because digital broadcasts are much more efficient than analog broadcasts. By converting over to digital broadcasting, television stations will be able to broadcast clearer images with much less bandwidth than is currently being used. And once the cut-off is complete, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will take some of the bandwidth currently used for analog broadcast channels and use it for the “public good” (e.g. radios and communications devices for police departments, fire departments, ambulance services, etc.). They will then auction the rest of the bandwidth to the highest bidder; this may result in more cellular services, city-wide wireless Internet, and other new high-tech services.

Who is affected by the cut-off? People that get their TV via over-the-air (OTA) antenna are the only people affected by the switchover. People that get their TV via cable or satellite are not affected by this in any way.

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5 Annoying “Programs”

As an IT guy, there are software programs out there that are a pain to install and maintain. As someone who uses computers, there are certain programs that make me want to pull my hair out. Programs that deserve a special place in hell… programs written by Satan himself. And here’s a quick list of them:

1) Windows Vista – Several years ago, several stunning “proof of concept” videos began leaking out of Microsoft’s headquarters. They were breathtaking. They made geeks like me salivate. They were the first glimpses of Windows Vista, and they were awesome. Sadly, Microsoft began cutting features from Vista – so much so that Vista went from “an operating system from the future” to “just a little upgrade from Windows XP”. And sadly, Vista fails in this aspect. It fails badly. Windows 2000 was a huge upgrade from Windows NT. Windows XP was a huge upgrade from Windows 2000. Upgrading to Vista seems like a huge step backwards for a lot of people… and in a sense it is. In my experience, Vista requires an 8-way quad-core system with 36GB of RAM just to work as well as a 1.5GHz P4 with 512MB of RAM running Windows XP.

What makes it all so sad is that there’s a lot to like about Vista. Explorer has had a much-needed face lift, and Vista’s icons are much more pleasing to the eye than XPs’. The built-in search feature is nice, as is the inclusion of Shadow Copies. Microsoft did a lot of worthwhile work under the hood – specifically, with DirectX and Desktop Window Manager – but the implementation of that work – Windows Vista – just sucks.

2) Adobe Acrobat – If I had to choose between living in a world without Osama Bin Laden or Adobe Acrobat, I’d choose the world without Acrobat… hands down! When people call Acrobat an “800 pound gorilla” it’s not a compliment to Adobe’s coding or marketing teams. The program really is an 800 pound gorilla – with all the grace of a brontosaurus thrown in for good measure. Acrobat takes forever to load of most people’s systems, when it’s not busy crashing Internet Explorer or Firefox. Previous Acrobat updates have taken 4 reboots to complete. Sadly, although there are alternatives to Acrobat, most of them suck for various reasons. FoxIt, for example, looks and acts like a Windows 95 program, and (most importantly) doesn’t render all PDFs correctly. If I could rid the world of Abobe Acrobat, I would.

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So – What’d ya get?

Well, Christmas has come and gone. While I would have liked to have written this post a few days earlier, I’ve been busy with cleaning out my closet, going to parties, and several other things. However, as I type this post up, I’m doing so while looking at my new baby:

Christmas 2007 001

Yep, that’s a 22″ widescreen LCD monitor. It’s AWESOME! I feel like I’m sitting down as a space commander or something! EVen though my previous monitor was a 19″ SGI CRT, this one feels so much bigger than the old one! It’s HUGE in comparison! So I finally entered the 21st century with this new monitor, and for that I say “Thank you, Grandma!!!”

My folks also got me an authentic Hines Ward throwback jersey:

Christmas 2007 003

That’s pretty awesome! I have “replica” jerseys from Jack Lambert and Jerome Bettis, as well as an authentic Terry Bradshaw throwback jersey (that’s a bit too snug these days), so I’m excited to have a jersey from an active Steelers player… and one who is a Super Bowl MVP at that!

My folks also got me this t-shirt from founditemclothing.com. It’s a painstakingly accurate replica of the “I Love Toxic Waste” t-shirt Val Kilmer wore in Real Genius:

Real Genius

It’s friggin’ awesome! If you’re a fan of 80s movies, you’ll really want to check out founditemclothing.com’s site. They’ve done a lot of work in replicating some of the shirts from your favorite 80s films – like Caddyshack, Repo Man and Beverly Hills Cop – as well as shirts from newer films like Shawn of the Dead and The Big Lebowski.

I got several other presents too. Maybe they lack the “fun” of the previous presents… but that doesn’t mean they won’t be used or appreciated. My sister and brother-in-law got me a new belt, which was much needed and will be worn every day. They also got me Like An Icon, the new book about Madonna. I’ll be getting into that in the next few days.

But then there’s my “favorite present”. It’s hard to pick a “favorite present”. Sometimes you get things like a new belt or some new boots; these things lack a “Wow factor”, but you end up using them all the time. Then there’s things like a new vegetable peeler or flashlight. They’re inexpensive gifts, but often last for years. So when you pick them up five years later, you’re like “Man, my sister got me this for Christmas back in 2002!”, so there’s an endearing charm to them.

But then there are the things that people get for you that caused them a fair amount of grief. For the past couple of years I’ve put “British candy and cheeses” on my Christmas list. And my folks have come through with a handful of British candy bars and a hunk of Stilton and Cheshire, or whatever British cheeses were readily available at the grocery store. But this year, my Dad saw the “British candy and cheeses” on my list and decided to do something about it. I opened up this huge box and found it jammed full of delicious British treats:

 

Christmas 2007 002

I think that this is my favorite gift, mainly because my Dad read my list and took the time to track down a British food store in Atlanta. My Pop loaded me up! In addition to the huge box of candy pictured above, he also got me a galaxy of British cheeses, from Double Gloucester and Cheshire, to two types of Cheddar, Stilton and Wensleydale. Even though I always put “British candy and cheese” on my Christmas list (because I always eat it all!), he felt that I had been slighted in this regard, and it was so sweet that he tracked down a British food store just to hook me up! I don’t feel guilty, though: my Dad owned a wholesale food store in Atlanta for years, and I know that he can spend hours in exotic food stores. So he probably had fun just browsing the aisles!

Thanks to everyone for making this Christmas so special!