Rather disturbing

February 16, 2005

The New York Times has an article that retells how blogs played a role in forcing Eason Jordan resignation from CNN. The most disturbing part is buried at the bottom of the story. The comments Jordan made were at a session that was officially "off the record". Honestly, I haven't followed much of what was going on with this because it seems a non-story.

It is, however, disconcerting that a journalist, be it citizen journalist/blogger or professional journalist, does not respect the idea of being off the record. Stop for a minute and consider if Deep Throat had any reason to believe that Bob Woodward would not keep his word and protect the source would he have talked?

So which is it?

February 15, 2005

This article in the Las Vegas Sun discusses the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by District Judge Don Mosley claiming that he was improperly penalized by a disciplinary committee.

The third paragraph reads "Mosley, asked today whether he would appeal the ruling, said he is considering his options and "a decision should be made fairly soon."" And the seventh paragraph reads "Mosley was out of town and could not be reached for comment."

Wait a minute here, which is it? Is he saying that he'll make a decision soon or that he's out of town?

Concerned about online identity theft?

February 13, 2005

The Better Business Bureau recently released a report that indicates identity theft is more frequently committed offline than online. The report found that in spite of rising fears about identity theft and online fraud that old-fashioned physical loss or theft of wallet, checkbooks or credit cards accounts for nearly a third of all identity theft. Thefts stemming from online sources including computer spyware, online transactions, computer viruses & hackers, and phishing scams combined accounted for less than fifteen percent of all identity crimes.

Another important finding of the study is that people who use online methods to keep track of their accounts are likely to find out about identity crimes much sooner than those who rely on paper statements. The average loss for those monitoring online was $551 compared to $4,543 for those who rely on paper statements.

Dialup - or how Ground Control managed to make my connection not work

February 13, 2005

WIth thanks to the folks at Ground Control and Direcway I'm once again using a dialup connection for the next week or two. Having had plenty of problems with the "Web Acceleration" of Direcway causing problems I decided to place a call to the satellite provider's 24x7 tech support.

First off it took several hours and in excess of twenty calls to have a single conversation. Every time I'd talk the satellite voice over IP connection on the other end would die and that was it. Once we got through that it turns out that the unnecessary "reset your DirecWay 4020" request was not only unnecessary, but also prevented my connection from working. So I was promised a call back in half an hour (the customer service manager and DirecWay's help desk were both not responding according to the customer service representative). Two hours later still no call. Being one to give the benefit of the doubt I thought maybe it was taking longer and waited until this morning.

A very rude customer service rep did everything but claim I'd been out moving the dish all night and instead of offering any sort of apology for the inconvenience and damages caused by Ground Control's errant attempts to solve a problem related to the cache on DirecWay's server, I'm now without connections. Once the problem is resolved I can share my customer service experience with Satellite World in Henderson, Nevada.

He could not seem to grasp that a user might expect a company which claims: Ground Control maintains an internal staff of highly trained satellite technicians. We know business satellite Internet. should be expected to not cause more problems. If, as the person this morning claimed, the problem is because of a "moved" dish then prior to starting the procedure, which again had nothing to do with the problem, that this procedure could fail if your dish has moved in the slightest.

DirecWay and XML-RPC

February 11, 2005

Last month I posted about DirecWay problems with MarsEdit. It occurred to me today that the problem may instead lie with the way DirecWay does "Web Acceleration" and that it could be interfering with the XML-RPC calls.

A quick search reveals that this indeed seems to be Direcway XML-RPC problem. The author of the WordPress article suggests it is related to latency. I'm not certain as it was working for me at one point over the satellite connection. I noticed, however, a problem with DirecWay's cache last night. At one point it attempted to load this site and munged the .css files associated with it. From then the only way I could load the site was to power-cycle the DirecWay box and load it before the Web Acceleration kicked in.

So I called Ground Control tech support and they say there is nothing that can be done. They recommend contacting the author of the software to have the problem with their system fixed.

Half-time controversy

February 11, 2005

This year's Super Bowl half-time show is causing complaints for the FCC. By Monday the FCC had received four complaints about the half-time show amongst 33 comments overall. Last year's Janet Jackson half-time show generated only three complaints compared to the four about this year's show. According to MediaWeek people complained about the reference to California grass in McCartneys' song, suggesting it is a reference to marijuana and two others felt the show was boring or unimpressive.

Nevada political happenings

February 10, 2005

The Committee to regulate and control marijuana is unhappy with Nevada Assembly Speaker Richard Perkins' comments at the opening of the 2005 session of the Nevada Legislature.

Meanwhile on the National scene The Red State Rebel takes issue with the GOP's anti-Harry Reid memo from earlier this week. Among other things the memo labels Reid's efforts to block conservative judicial appointments as blocking a Republican "talkathon," on delaying tactics.

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