April 2009

There were 60 posts published in April 2009 (this is page 5 of 6).

Cheviot Hills

I saw today that the old Cheviot Hills golf course has now been plowed under. All the trees on the middle of the property have been cleared out, leaving little trace of the fairways that were once there.

I haven’t heard much about how the property will be used. Last word I can find in the media is that car lots are going there. Since its owned by car dealers I am curious about the timing of the construction, as folks have all but stopped buying cars due to the economy. I suppose we’ll see in the next few weeks. Even so, I’m sad to see the old golf course go.

AP chases its own Internet tail

associated_press_logoKnow how I mentioned the Associated Press’s cluelessness when it comes to the Internet? Word comes that the AP threatened a Tennessee radio station when the station posted on its website videos from the AP’s very own YouTube channel. Not only that, the radio station is an AP affiliate!

Going after its own members: there’s a bright business decision. When I said the AP was going to “police itself out of existence,” I didn’t think it would actually police itself!

Something’s afoot in the City of Raleigh

mystery-invitation-smallI got a mysterious email invitation this afternoon from the City of Raleigh. It reads:

The City of Raleigh invites you to enjoy your coffee break Tuesday, April 14, celebrating a local partnership that is producing a significant “FIRST IN THE U.S.A.”

10 A.M., Tuesday, April 14
Raleigh Convention Center
Salisbury Street and Lenoir Street

I understand a different invite went to the city councilors that read:

The City of Raleigh and the Transit Authority invite you to enjoy your coffee break Tuesday, April 14 celebrating a local partnership that is producing a technological “FIRST IN THE USA!”

Please join us at 10 a.m., Tuesday, April 14 at the Raleigh Convention Center’s Salisbury Street and Lenoir Street plaza.

As you can see, the second one mentions the “Transit Authority” and “technological first.” I wonder what this means.

  • A GPS bus locator? No, that’s old hat. Been done already.
  • WiFi on city buses? Certainly possible, but what’s the local partnership angle?.
  • Mobile digital TV on city buses? This one makes more sense.

Capitol Broadcasting (home of WRAL) has been tinkering with mobile digital TV and has some devices built.

Capitol’s new mobile technology spinoff company is called News Over Wireless and is certainly local. But would transit passengers be forced to watch all-WRAL, all the time, or would other stations also be available?

On the other hand, it could have nothing to do with TV and could be some sort of other transit innovation. A Prius-branded bus? Electric vehicle recharging stations? Again, what would be the local partnership angle, and what about this would be worthy of such subterfuge?

This is all speculation at this point, as I haven’t gleaned any more insights. I do hope to be around for Tuesday’s unveiling of Whatever It Is.

Robtex

When I noticed a store’s webserver was unreachable, I decided to find out why. With a little sleuthing I found that its nameservers were not resolving.

Normally when this happens there’s no trace of the company left on the Internet, but The Google took me to the robtex DNS tool. Thanks to this site, I was able to find the missing nameservers’ IP addresses and verify that these servers were indeed offline.

I consider it poor system administration to host your domain nameservers entirely in your own namespace for just this reason. If you make a mistake in a zone with your own nameserver, your whole foo.com site becomes invisible to the Internet.

I hope this major store gets itself back on the web soon!

Patrick Chan, I presume?

Isn’t this exciting? I’m going to get $12.5M !

Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 07:06:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: PATRICK CHAN innocent.emailaddress@someuniversity.fake
Subject: Contact email: pat.ch01@8u8.com
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

I’m Mr Patrick Chan, i have a proposal of $12.5M,please contact me by email: pat.ch01@8u8.com

Come Back Home

What an amazing, rocking, pop song! Pete Yorn is a great vocalist.

Come Back Home (YouTube)
Pete Yorn

Come back home for another year
And find yourself in the thick of it
Come back home for another year
I always thought that you could handle this

And you know you’re hard enough
And you find you’re strong enough
And you feel you’re strong enough
Continue reading →

Dogs and people

A dog likes to pretend to control his people, herding them to the places the dog wants to go. Then again, people only pretend to control their dogs, as sometimes getting a dog to do something can be an exercise in frustration!

AP to police itself into nonexistence

While I don’t condone stealing copyrighted works, I’ve long recognized the Associated Press’s outright hostility to the Internet. While it could’ve raked in plenty of online advertising dollars, the AP has never played well with the Internet. Never.

Now word comes down that the AP will be going after bloggers who post AP stories.

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under some very misguided, unfounded legal theories,” said Dean Singleton, the AP’s chairman and the chief executive of newspaper publisher MediaNews Group at AP’s annual meeting.

(gosh, I hope I can use that quote safely!)

The AP has never provided proper links to its stories, thus anyone discussing an AP story has to cut-and-paste the desired excerpts because AP stories disappear into the ether so quickly.

Again, I don’t have a problem with the AP trying to make money on its product – some of my closest friends have been quoted in AP stories, after all. When the company shows such evident disdain for its online audience, however, perhaps that audience should rightfully go elsewhere.

Time Warner becomes more evil

Just when you thought you couldn’t possibly hate the cable company any more than you do, they raise the bar on suckiness. Time Warner Cable will soon be implementing bandwidth caps on their high-speed internet users in what looks to be an effort to kill streaming media companies like Netflix. Watching a handful of Netflix-streamed movies each month like my friend Greg Brown does would be enough to push you over the bandwidth cap.

I found out tonight that I’m not immune for being an Earthlink customer and not a Time Warner customer. According to the advocacy website StopTheCap.Com, Time Warner plans to cap Earthlink customers as well. So much for the illusion of competition!

All of this makes me wish we had municipal Internet like down the road in Wilson.