Things seem to be improving on the comments front. Here's what was going on, what I did to fix and what's going to happen moving forward:

Basically, MT was tagging all comments as "Junk" and throwing them into a bulk folder. This is because MT 3.2 (nicknamed Movable Tripe, by my buddy John, will only authenticate commenters who are registered with TypeKey. this is Movable Type's free authentication and spam blocking service. If you're going to be a regular poster on this site, and, fuck, why shouldn't you be? you should think about registering with TypeKey. It's quick. it's Easy. And like I said, it's free.

In order to get around this problem I installed an MT plugin called ". This plugin allows you to maintain a database of emails for trusted posted above and beyond the limitations of TypeKey. It's a pain in the ass. It shouldn't work this way, but this cloogey work around works. I've tried to include the emails of everyone I can think who would post, but I can't foresee the random visitor who comes to the site and posts on something. Their comments will most likely end in the junk pile and if I feel like wading into the cesspool that is the junk comments folder, I may or may not be able to find the comment and resuscitate it, but most likely it will be lost in oblivion.

I hope that MT fixes this problem. It's really insane that even with all this protection some spam comments still get through to be moderated yet comments from almost all real people get tossed in the junk pile.

Posted by andrew at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

When I first started this site, I was in the Peace Corps, had little money and needed to find a cheap web host and I found the cheapest, in more ways than one. I found 1dollarhosting.com owned by some company called Webcountry. At first it was alright. It was a little slow, but everything online in Samoa was slow. They did hoodwink me into paying a membership fee, but that was nominal compared to what I would pay if I had hosted my site at a real company. The problem for me started when I wanted to run Movable Type. I couldn't get it work on my site. The problem was that I didn't have a mySQL database. I could purchase one through Webcountry, but for a few bucks a month and that didn't make financial sense. So another volunteer (thank you, Paleni) allowed me to host my blog on his site. I just uploaded pictures and other media to mine. It was laborious. It was sluggish. But it worked.

When I got back to the States, I moved my site to a real full service host, Total Choice Hosting and cancelled my account at Webcountry, or so I thought. The other day, I look at my credit card bill online, and there's this charge for 12 bucks. 12 bucks isn't much. But I don't want to be charged for services I'm not using. Who would? It's a matter of principle.

I called them up.

They told me that I needed to cancel the service through a specific webpage on their site (which I have subsequently done) but didn't know about at the time, which I think is part of their shady customer service practices.

I explained the situation to the "customer service" rep. I asked for a refund. She said they couldn't do that. I told her that I was going to contest the charge with my credit card company. Then she threatened me. She said if I did that they, Webcountry, would tack a $150 charge on my account and send it to collections, at which point I asked to speak to her supervisor. When I got nowhere with him, I asked to speak with his supervisor, a man named William.

I explained the situation again. He threatened with charging me for storage overages, which I wasn't even aware of. I told him that was completely dishonest, all I wanted was a refund for the $12 for an account that I was clearly not using and for which there had been a misunderstanding about the nature of the cancellation process. He called me dishonest for storing more than 20 megabytes on their server, which was absurd. It was obvious I wasn't going to get anywhere with him, so I hung up.

When I came home, I looked online and it didn't take me long to find a message board with complaints about Web Country. They have an "F" rating with the Better Business Bureau. What a joke.

Here's what the BBB has to say about this piece of shit company:

Some complainants allege false advertising regarding the advertised price of $1 a year for web hosting services, claiming the actual cost is $62. Other customers complain they experience problems with downtime, rude or argumentive technical support representatives, and failure to honor their money back guarantee. Some customers complain that the money back guarantee is useless as fees for services are comprised of several individually non-refundable amounts. Reportedly, only about $12 of the money paid for services is actually refundable. Many customers complain their sites are never activated, and they opt to cancel for lack of response. In these cases, customers disputed credit card charges or put stop payments on checks. Sometimes months later, they receive collection notices billing them for services which were never activated or used.

The company responds to some complaints by disputing allegations, refusing refunds, issuing partial refunds, or offering explanations for their actions. Several complaints are closed as unresolved, meaning the customers are not satisfied with the company's response.

That's a report to be proud of.

Sure enough, this policy of threatening the $150 "Administrative fee" and collections is written into their Terms and Conditions:

18. Refund and Disputes:

All payments to 1DollarHosting.com are non refundable (except those covered by our 30 Money back guarantee- see item 19). This includes setup fee's, membership fees and subsequent charges regardless of usage. All overcharges or billing disputes must be reported within 45 days of the time the dispute occurred. If you dispute a charge to your credit card issuer that, in 1DollarHosting.com's sole discretion is a valid charge you agree to pay 1DollarHosting.com an "Administrative Fee" of $150. 1DollarHosting.com will use Collection agencies and report to the major credit bureaus if required.

I'm no lawyer, but that doesn't seem legal to me. Lawyers? Any idea?

Anyway, the question is, what to do? I could contest the charge with Visa and deal with the consequences of fighting Webcountry or I can just pay the 12 bucks and walk away. In the past, it wouldn't have been a question. I'd have fought them tooth and nail and if they wanted to me to collections and fuck up my credit, I'd sue them, but now, it just doesn't seem like it's worth the trouble. I should just suck it up and file it away under lessons learned, which is exactly what they want me to and how disreputable companies like Webcountry make money. It's really disgusting.

Posted by andrew at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I hate fucking spam, but you have to love some of the "names" of the commenters. Here's a choice sampling:

cum on her face
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ejaculate on the vagina hot tub
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rate my tits
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skimpy thongs galleries
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Scooby Doo Porn? What the fuck is that? And who couldn resist "hard core porn girls drinking horse cum"?

Posted by andrew at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

And, yes, for this and , I love her to death and would have gladly gone all the way to Samoa just to pick her up. (as it turns out, I was already there).

Posted by andrew at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sorry to anyone who has posted or tired to post a comment since I upgraded to 3.2. The comments are not working and I'm trying to find out what's going. Somehow spammers are still able to bombard me me with junk comments. It doesn't make any sense. I have a post on the MT message boards and I should figure out what's going on soon. I will let you know as soon as I know.

In the meantime, if you want to comment about something, check out my photos at where comments are working perfectly.

UPDATE: I've been tweaking the site a little and while it's not working perfectly, it's getting better incrementally. I found out that Movable Type was placing comments by actual people like yourself in the Junk comments folder with all the other spam crap. I found the few that were in there and published them. Now if I can figure out how to make my regular commenters "trusted" we'll be in business. Until then, stay tuned and thanks for being patient.

Posted by andrew at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is it me, or does Owen Wilson pretty play the exact same character in every movie he's ever been in?

Posted by andrew at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What should you do when you get a gift from someone that is totally innapropriate from someone who should know better? Do you thank them and hope that you never get a gift like that again? Do you thank them with a caveat? Do you say nothing?

Posted by andrew at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I finally caved in and had Comcast come in and install cable and high speed internet at my new place. I've been feeling cut off from the world not watching Jon Stewart and few other things. And I had been using my landlord's wireless internet signal, with her permission, but the connection was weak, it would go down all the time and it was starting to drive me insane.

So when I got a flier from Comcast with a deal for 85 bucks that included HBO and a DVR, I called to get it. They surprised me by not only giving me an appointment the next day, but also giving me a 2 hour time period instead of their normal half day. The guy came (he actually arrived early when I was in the shower) but wouldn't install the cable jack because I didn't have written permission from my landlord, who conveniently was in Phoenix. I called her and rescheduled the appointment for Monday.

We had talked about it before and she had given me permission to have the jack installed, but I didn't realize that I needed a written notice. I thought she could fax something to me, but wasn't in a place with a fax machine until Monday. On Monday morning, I got a call from the technician saying he was in the area and could come right now instead of the 4-6pm appointment time. I thought about it for a second, and said ok, but give me 15 minutes.

I threw on some clothes, went into my office (I don't have a printer at home) and typed a permission letter from my landlord, printed it out and returned home. Illegal, maybe. Expedient, definitely.

Ironically, the technician, not the same guy who came to my house last Friday, never even asked about it. He just went about his business, drilled a hole from the garage into my living room, hooked up the cable from the pole to the house and brought the box into my place to install it.

Here's where the problem started. The first problem is that I have an old TV. It's a 27" RCA that I bought in, I think, 1998, right before I moved back from Los Angeles to the Bay Area. It's a great TV. It's worked well all these years, but it doesn't have video input jacks, just a cable jack. So I have to use an RF modulator just to get my DVD player to work and it will not work with the digital DVR box which I paid for. Fuck. So the decision now is whether to get a new TV, if so which one to get and where to get it.

The second problem, and the real problem, is that the box that the DVR came in, which the tech put on the floor in front of the TV, had these enormous staples in it which nicely gouged up my hardwood floor. When I saw it, I put a call into Comcast immediately. They said that someone from customer service would call me back within 24 hours. I just got off the phone with them, slightly more than 24 hours after I registered my complaint, but not by much. The woman wanted to confirm what happened and said someone would call me with 3 business days to resolve the issue which probably involves a claims adjuster from their insurance company. Oh, what fun.

Meantime, I hooked into the digital world again. I have HBO so I can now watch Rome, amongst other things. Probably going to be a huge time suck. I'm going to have to fight it.

Posted by andrew at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

With more revelations that's Bush secret spying program conducted by the NSA has ensnared domestic calls and emails and Tom Daschle coming out and saying that, contrary to administration claims, Congress never authorized the program of warrantless surveillance of Americans, it's interesting to read the following:

Americans expect NSA to conduct its missions within the law. But given the inherently secret nature of those missions, how can Americans be sure that the Agency does not invade their privacy?

The 4th Amendment of the Constitution demands it... oversight committees within all three branches of the U.S. government ensure it... and NSA employees, as U.S. citizens, have a vested interest in upholding it. Respecting the law is only a part of gaining Americans' trust.

The American people need to know, within the bounds of operational security, what NSA does and why they do it, and how they work within the Intelligence community and the Department of Defense to protect the Nation's freedom.

With each new day, NSA is writing new and unexpected chapters. The missions have never been clearer. The challenges have never been greater. The stakes have never been higher.

That pretty much settles the issue, right? And where did this statement come from? It's from the NSA's own website.

The big question now is what is the country, and by country I mean our elected representative who have the power to investigate this, going to do now that George Bush has admitted to violated the 4th Amendments rights of U.S. citizens guaranteed in the Constitution which he took an oath to protect.

What I, along with everyone else who's been following this story, really want to know, is what the fuck is going on here. If the President, under FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Survellience Act, can authorize warrantless surveillance of Americans as along as he gets retroactive approval from the FISA court within 72 hours, (mind you this court is a to surveillance target as a grand jury is to a ham sandwich) why not get the retroactive warrants?

Why not get the warrants unless the subjects of the spying were not terror subjects as they would have us believe, but something else entirely. Something like politicians, policitical activists, journalists or anything one else that the courst might look at speciously and question the legality of such activity. Unless it's just pure hubris of this executive not believing that any entity has the right to oversee their activities, which could be true, what else could it be?

Posted by andrew at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Crooks & Liars has a great video retrospective on one of the seemlier and still unexplained Bush Administration scandals, the Jeff Gannon/Jeff Guckert gay prostitute somehow being granted a White House press pass and using it to lob softballs questions at the president and Scott McClellan. It's disgusting. So the obvious questions: What the fuck was this guy doing there in the White House room? Who did he know in the White House? How did he use a fake name and still earn a press pass despite the Secret Service screening that all journalists who cover the White House must undergo? What damage has this done to reputation and efficacy of the national press which, I believe, the White House is doing everything in its power to undermine?

Posted by andrew at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I picked up a Motorola Razr last week when my previously trusty Nokia 3360 suddenly died. I've been playing around with it and I've finally got some of the features figured out. The phone has a camera. Not great quality. 1.2 megapixels, but I always have with it and it's connected. So now I can take mediocre quality pics and post them immediately online. I don't want to clog up this blog with these shots, but you can find them on a Blogger blog I set up, Idle Images, and they will simulataneously be posted on my site. If I can figure out how to give them subjects as I post them remotely then I'll really have something. In the meantime, it's pretty cool to be able to share this stuff almost instantaneouly. What I really need is a killer 5 mexapixel ultracompact camera that's also a phone instead of a fully featured uberconnected phone that also takes little pictures, and that will come in time, no doubt.


Not a bad shot for the camera phone. The light really needs to be perfect to get anything close to reasonable, but it's not about makiing museum quality prints, it's about documenting.

Posted by andrew at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After some fits and starts, I've finally got Movable Type 3.2 up and running, which means more stories and good spam filtering (or so I hear). There's just one minor issues. MT is making me login again after everything I do. It likes that guy from Memento, it can't make new memories and it forgets who I am within seconds. Kinda of annoying, but I have a post on one of the MT forums and hopefully someone can send me the solution.

Update: three days later and lots of posts on the MT forums and fretting, jiggering around,I finally actually do have MT 3.2 up and running and can start to post. Fuck that was awful. Alright time to get caught up on a few things here.

Posted by andrew at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The are up on Flickr. Hopefully some stories will come soon if I'm not too lazy (god, damn, I'm feeling fucking lazy)

Posted by andrew at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, Bilmon nails the story with the perfect analogy over at the Whiskey Bar:

Bush declined to discuss the domestic eavesdropping program in a television interview, but he joined his aides in saying that the government acted lawfully and did not intrude on citizens' rights.

"Decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people," Bush said on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."

Washington Post
December 2005

Citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed inviolability of the person. No person may be placed under arrest except by decision of a court or with the sanction of a procurator.

The inviolability of the homes of citizens and privacy of correspondence are protected by law.

Constitution of the USSR
December 1936

Posted by andrew at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our flight home is at 12:45pm local time today, which means we have to grab a taxi to the airport around 10:15 or so. It sucks ass, but we have to head in the reverse direction to Miami first, go through customs and immigration in their nightmare labyrinthine airport, and then on to SFO. If all goes well, we should land in the Bay Area around 9:00pm. When I get back I will post some more stories that hopefully will be interesting to someone.

Posted by andrew at 05:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry I haven't had time to write anything. Lots has happened, of course. Some good, some bad. I will try to fill in the blanks when I have more time back in San Jose early next week. We're in Montezuma on the beach. It's nice, not spectacular, but nice. We're about to go eat dinner at a dinner across the road from our place run by a couple of women from Rome. Should be excellent (which is more than I can for the comida tipico or whatever passes for normal food here in Costa Rica). Adios for now.

Posted by andrew at 05:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I landed in Costa Rica and everything is fine. flight from Miami was quick, 3 hours. We spent one night in a town, alajela near the airport and then took a taxi with a nutjob driver from belgium named Oliver who zipped us up here in 2 hours for 10 bucks : normally on the bus it is 6 bucks for a 5 plus hour trip : this morning up into the highlands to a town called La Fortuna right at the base of a large active volcano,
Arenal. it is really beautiful. the weather is realtively cool. it rained a bit last night, but today is spectaclur and the volcano which normally is sheathed in clouds is totally visable. if we are lucky, it will stay like that tonight and we can see some of the lava flows.

so far, so good.

[ this damn keyboard is not working right and i cant get caps or most punctuation, for that matter

Posted by andrew at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry about this, but I've had to put TypkeKey back in action because I;m still getting swamped by spam despite my MT-Blacklist filter and I don't want to come back from Costa Rica and have to deal with hundreds if not thousands of spam comments. It's really not that big of deal. If you haven't already, just sign up for a TypeKey Account. Then you can comment. Soon after I get back, I'm going to try to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 and from what I'm told, that should take care of the spam problem once and for all.

Posted by andrew at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)