Al Lewis of Market Watch discussing the alleged stupidity of holiday presents:
But there are some economic inefficiencies to gift cards too. Among them: About 10% of gift-card value is never claimed, Waldfogel wrote, and retailers can’t book the unclaimed cards as revenues for years.
Yeah, people buying slivers of plastic for $50 and not redeeming them must be a real financial burden.
We swapped gifts, had a turkey roast and freshly made fruit cake, played Wii games, flew a RC helicopter to scare the dogs courtesy of the illustrious @omegatron, built Lego, then took a long family walk in the park. The first real home Yule we've had since my mum moved on, and it was absolutely wonderful :).
My old man and I decided to call it Yule given our German heritage, because the holiday was originally a winter festival before it was adapted, and because "solstice" isn't entirely accurate. We're precise scientific folk, you see!
@dHeinemann: My Christmas present from my sister. Now I can join @rubenerd with Haruhi figurines on my desk. :D pic.twitter.com/U4Zl6djs
I am honoured to be in this exclusive club with you good sir! And thank you for the Christmas donation too, Merry Christmas :).
Christmas has come early! Less than a week after reviewing my transition from Thunderbird and Firefox back to SeaMonkey, we've had a 2.6 and 2.6.1 update! :)
According to the release notes:
And under the "Mozilla platform changes" heading:
As MCBastos, Paul Bergsagel and I noted in the newsgroups, the a significant change has been an overall improvement in performance, not just in JavaScript, and especially on my venerable 2006 MacBook Pro.
Thanks to the SeaMonkey team for the present! I know a few of the developers are German, perhaps they're keeping with the tradition of giving and unwrapping presents on Christmas Eve instead ^_^.
As for the fact I'm unabashedly using a gigantic K-On picture with the SeaMonkey icon superimposed… um… Merry Christmas!
I wanted to avoid commenting on an aggravating subject like this on Christmas Eve, but the story is developing so rapidly I feel I have little say in the matter. In short, goodbye GoDaddy.
GoDaddy, perhaps best known as "that site with Danica Patrick and Ella Koon on it" has been a mainstay of the domain registration business for years. I got on board in the early days of podcasting in 2004, back when The Gillmor Gang had those offer code things you could use. GANG1, GANG2 and GANG3 gave you 10% off each order, freebies and other stuff. Many other shows ran similar promotions at the time.
Anyway, for someone at the time with limited funds and tens of domains, it was a pretty sweet deal. So much so, that I put up with their overly complex site designed to up-sell me as much as they could. My only regret was they didn't support the .sg TLD (hey, I made a rhyme! :D), which meant I had to have an account with someone else as well.
I have to admit, that horrid tranquilised elephant shooting news made me sick to my stomach, but it was the way they treated a friend of mine over SSL certificates that first led me to question their technical and customer service merits. Despite certificates being listed at a certain price, renewing them is substantially more, and as far as he could tell they made no reasonable effort to make this clear to him. Steve Gibson of Security Now had a similar issue with them a few months back.
Of course, there was the recent DNS blocking controversy, and their terms of service that allow them to suspend or revoke domains at their will — which they've done. Their initial support for SOPA, and subsequent PR backflip has done nothing to help their cause.
From Talking Points Memo:
Polis pointed out that SOPA and Smith’s amendment already excluded certain operators of sub-domains, such as GoDaddy.com, from being subject to shutdowns under SOPA.
“If companies like GoDaddy.com are exempt, why aren’t non-commercial domain servers exempt?” Polis asked.
And from that now infamous Pastebin upload from Anomymous:
[..] Bob Parsons and GoDaddy have made news, this time for announcing their support for the Internet Censorship bill SOPA, which experts have said would destroy the Internet as we know it, adopting a system of government censorship similar to that of Iran and China. GoDaddy had stated previously that it believed SOPA was “a welcome step in the right direction”, and have since continued to voice support for the controversial bill. Link
Bob Parsons, you disgust us. From your documented cruelty to animals, to your outright support of the oppressive Internet censorship bill SOPA, you have attracted the attention of Anonymous.
It's even attracted the attention of Jimmy Wales:
I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy. Their position on #sopa is unacceptable to us.
And even this weird guy called Ruben Schade:
So GoDaddy flipped on their #SOPA support? I’m still not renewing my domains with them.
I'd already disabled automatic renewal on most of my GoDaddy domains back in January this year, so next week I'll be finally moving off them entirely. I'm so angry I'm almost willing to do it now just to join the exodus.
Not sure whether I'll put the rest of my domains onto Hover or my private .sg registrar, I've had positive experience with both. I'll have to run the numbers after New Years.
As for those that have endorsed them in the past, me thinks a revision is called for.
To my beautiful, friendly, cheeky, brilliantly talented, witty, trolling, free spirited best friend and mum who suddenly lost the battle four years ago today. I still feel your glamourously fabulous cane with Christmas lights wound around it hitting me on the head when I say something particularly nerdy or stupid, or when I sing Dean Martin off key, or when I start to doubt myself.
I miss you so much it hurts, but you're still my rock and in all my thoughts. I love you <3
In a move that has shocked those in the industry, Internode has been purchased by iinet for AU$180 million. Those overseas may know iinet as the Australian ISP being sued for the "alleged" copyright infringement of its customers.
Perhaps because it's the hardest night of the year for the remainder of my family, or that I feel Australian internet is terrible anyway, but I find it hard to be as upset and outraged by this news as much of my online Australian IT cohort. I suppose rearranging the deckchairs may well prove to be an entertaining and distracting sideshow in the coming days though.
When I commented on the alleged death of Kim Jong Il, I lamented that Christopher Hitchens wouldn't be around to comment on it. Fortunately, we have video of him discussing North Korea at Politics and Prose in 2007, with his trademark wit and humility.
I can't begin to imagine what being a North Korean would be like. To have been born on the wrong side of the wall, even worse than my German relatives almost were. It depresses me no end.
Having moved from the Mozilla Application Suite to Phoenix 0.2 in the mean old days, I’m giving SeaMonkey a try and am really liking it.
Aside from those on Twitter who asked me why would you do that lol!111!!eleventy!, many didn’t seem to know what SeaMonkey was. As well as an adorable aquatic critter, SeaMonkey is a web browser, email client, html editor, address book, IRC client, newsgroup client, RSS aggregator, positron accelerator, coffee machine and working implementation of the Haber Process. Believe it.
SeaMonkey is the community driven continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite which Mozilla originally spun off Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Thunderbird from. The Mozilla Application Suite in turn was based off the original Netscape Communicator, the dominant WWW client software for much of the late 1990s.
I’ve been a heavy Thunderbird user for years, predominantly because it allowed me to easily import my existing Mozilla data at the time. Unfortunately, I’ve haven’t liked some of the changes in the 3.x series. The new tab UI feels inconsistent and confusing. I preferred the old way of searching which quickly returned results in the same view, and without expensive indexes being constantly built. And so on.
SeaMonkey Mail reminds me of the Thunderbird 2.x series, which in my opinion was the best graphical email client since that one that was bundled with Cooee (whatever that was called) and the older versions of Eudora. It detected my Thunderbird user data, and had all my accounts and gigs of messages imported in a few short minutes. Understandable given they largely share a common codebase, but still impressive.
I’ve added all my email accounts from Thunderbird and [[re-]al]pine, subscribed to all my newsgroups from Pan, and have even replaced the now unusable (in my opinion) Google Reader with it for web feeds and whatnot. Four applications in one! ^^
Given I’m using SeaMonkey for my mail, I figured I’d try using it as my browser in place of Firefox as well. The current 2.5 release is based off Firefox 8.0, and as such supports the same HTML5 and CSS3 goodies.
I was impressed at how many of my critical Firefox extensions like NoScript, Ghostery and Simple Clocks work flawlessly in SeaMonkey. Unfortunately, Tree Style Tab doesn’t, and currently I haven’t been able to find an available replacement extension that puts my tabs on the side, ala Opera. For someone who has dozens of online docs open at a time, this is really important! I have a newsgroup thread and a post on mozillaZine about it, we’ll see if anyone can help out.
Functionally, I’ve noticed no difference using SeaMonkey Navigator over Firefox other than perhaps in memory usage. SeaMonkey uses less memory than Firefox and Thunderbird combines, which again I suppose makes sense.
What are we up to now? Five applications in one! ^^
Over all (is what people wear on farms) I'm surprised by how quick I've taken to this software.
The minimalist in me likes that I've replaced two icons with one in my dock. I like that with a CMD-1 I can get to a browser, and CMD-2 I can read practically all my internet communications in one window. It even comes with the "Modern" theme from the old days, which contains so much retro win I have it set as my default theme for now.
I'll be keeping Firefox for now just in case, but I haven't launched it since last Thursday.
Heartfelt thanks to Philip Chee, Karsten Düsterloh, Jens Hatlak, Robert Kaiser, Ian Neal, Neil Rashbrook, Andrew Schultz, Justin Wood, and all the others in the SeaMonkey community for your tireless efforts :).
An advertisement for Park Inn Hotels on a cute Germanwings A319. I reckon when the promotion is over, they should paint over the white letters but keep the livery as is!
Photo by Nikiforov Konstantin on Airliners.net.
