Giving Turntable a spin

Friday gave me my first look at a new music service called Turntable. It’s a service where you and up to five of your friends can take turns DJ-ing a music channel (or “room”). Participants in the room can vote whether a song is “lame” or “awesome” and the vote determines whether the song stays in rotation. They can also share real-time comments in a chat window.

It’s an intriguing idea, but how does it work in practice? It works well if you like hiring schizophrenics to DJ your parties! There were some cool tunes I heard that I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to, but the music flow soon became a jumbled mess.
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Paul Jones’s #noemail experience

Paul Jones, now available email-free!


My friend and local Internet guru Paul Jones (the real one – accept no substitutes) has just completed three weeks of ignoring his email. No, he’s not stranded on some desert island and, no, he’s not ignoring people – he’s simply convinced that there are better ways to communicate than email. Paul is harnessing the power of social networking tools (Twitter, blogs, RSS, IRC, instant messenger), smartphones, and the old-fashioned telephone to fill the gap left by email.

I’ve been following Paul’s progress on this off and on but I don’t recall hearing of any “finish line” in this particular endeavor. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Paul leaves email behind for good. Maybe he has a point, and email is a wheezing relic from the past?

You can follow all of Paul’s “noemail” trials and tribulations (including some insightful commentary) on Paul’s blog.

Rats fed HFCS got fatter than rats fed sugar

Here’s an interesting Princeton study. That Big Gulp will kill ya, I tell ya.

In results published online Feb. 26 by the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, the researchers from the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute reported on two experiments investigating the link between the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and obesity.

The first study showed that male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

via Princeton University – A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain.

Weather radio not alerting

Since the April 16th tornado, I’ve been paying close attention to my weather radio when storms are approaching. The problem is that it hasn’t sounded for anything in weeks. I tried connecting my radio to my attic antenna (aimed directly at the WXL58 tower in Chapel Hill) but it didn’t seem to help.

I decided to pay close attention to my radio during today’s scheduled weekly test broadcast. When noon came and went without my radio sounding, I emailed the National Weather Service with a report that the alert system may be in the fritz. My friend Greg has also noted a lack of alarms lately, too, so I’m thinking it may not be just my radio.

Should I hear back from the folks at the NWS, I’ll let you know.

Keep people from linking to your images

The IRS scam email below links to the IRS logo, on the IRS website itself! The government could avoid having its own bandwidth used for scams by adding some rewrite rules in Apache.

When I saw some of my photos being linked from other websites (usually forum-type sites that don’t provide their users the ability to upload their own files), I decided I didn’t want to foot the bill to host images shown on other websites. I followed this great tutorial and implemented my own RewriteRules, which have worked like a charm:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !no-direct-links\.png [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?markturner\.net/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?planettrilug\.org/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.markturner.net/wp-content/no-direct-links.png [R,NC,L]

These rules allow images to appear on my website, the PlanetTrilug website, and Google’s image searches, but any other sites linking directly to my images get a “No Direct Links” image instead.

I am pretty easygoing with the use of my images (many of them donated to the public domain), but hosting them for other sites costs me money. If you would like to post one of my images on your website, if it’s a public domain (or Creative Commons) one feel free! If it is not, shoot me an email and let me know your plans. Whatever you do, though, please use your own server. Don’t link directly to my images. Thanks!

Scam email: Federal Tax payment canceled

Got another scam email, this time purporting to be from the IRS. There’s a handy executable file which will not provide you the details but instead infect your computer with a virus. Beware!

Received: from 66.141.broadband10.iol.cz (66.141.broadband10.iol.cz [90.177.141.66])
by eddy.neusemedia.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 319388AE824
for ; Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:05:45 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from [130.104.251.35] (account practisingfu@travidia.com HELO lhisllbqq.epevnviqxbl.va)
by 66.141.broadband10.iol.cz (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.2.3)
with ESMTPA id 072829134 for me; Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:05:47 +1100
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:05:47 +1100
From: Eloy_Todd@irs.gov
X-Mailer: The Bat! (v2.10.01) Educational
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Message-ID: 9846395078.17E5RC9W861799@mvnus.ertqklybgfajqyk.info
To: Mark Turner
Subject: Federal Tax payment canceled

Internal Revenue Service United States Department of the Treasury

Your Tax payment (ID: 40459362352125), recently initiated from your bank account was returned by the The Electronic Federal Tax Payment System.

Rejected Tax transfer
Tax Transaction ID: 40459362352125
Return Reason See details in the report below
FederalTax Transaction Report tax_report_40459362352125.pdf.exe (self-extracting archive, Adobe PDF)

Internal Revenue Service, Metro Plex 1, 8401 Corporate Drive, Suite 300, Landover, MD 20785

Google hunts government business


There was a full-page ad in today’s newspaper from Google, trumpeting how “the State of Wyoming has gone Google.” Apparently, the state government there has transitioned from hosting their own mail servers and commercial office applications in favor of Google Apps.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. UNC Chapel-Hill’s Ibiblio transitioned its email accounts from in-house servers to Google’s GMail and has been happy with the results. So has UNC Asheville. I know some local governments in North Carolina which are considering the move, too. But I’m still smarting from Google’s no-show during this year’s losing municipal broadband legislative battle. Google could have become a high-profile proponent of open networks in this state but instead its efforts were limited to lending its name to a form letter. Google’s lobbyists (Capstrat, apparently) have been all but invisible.

I wonder how Google hopes to persuade governments to turn over a major portion of their IT work based on a newspaper ad (and a spectacularly uncreative one at that). We’ll see how effective this approach turns out to be.

Chicago O’Hare versus Chicago Midway

During last week’s trip to St. Charles, a colleague quizzed me on my choice of flying into Chicago Midway as opposed to O’Hare. Most of my coworkers prefer to fly O’Hare. My answer was that I’ve found it quicker to get a rental car at Midway Airport than O’Hare, where a bus trip is inevitable.

But there’s a bigger reason that I was reminded of when my colleague was late arriving to St. Charles this morning: taxiing time. It takes forever to taxi around O’Hare airport. My colleague’s plane got delayed because of other planes stacked up on the ground. During last year’s flight to Chicago from Milwaukee, my plane spent as much time on the ground at O’Hare as it did in the air getting there!

Chicago Midway is a much smaller airport. That translates into less time wasted on the ground, which in turn makes traveling so much more efficient.

Happy Father’s Day

It was a happy Father’s Day for me. Ate a nice pancake breakfast made by Kelly, talked to my own dad on the phone this morning, and went on a 10 mile bike ride with the family to Lassiter Falls and back. We stopped by Qdoba for lunch and then cooled off at the house for the rest of the day. Fun, fun!

I’m pretty tired now, but comfortable. Looking forward to a nice, quiet evening reading and then sleeping.

Hope your Father’s Day was fun, too.

Carter: Call Off the Global Drug War

Former President Jimmy Carter rightfully calls for the end of the failed “War on Drugs.”

IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade.

The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.

via Call Off the Global Drug War – NYTimes.com.