Holy crap. I have no idea how I went on almost 2 full months with no updates. Weird. I know there's a couple of things I want to blog but haven't had the time to fully formulate entries for them. I'll get around to it. I am taking a quick mental break from refactoring a bunch of financial statement code at work to type this.

I love my job and what I do. I love how I make other peoples' jobs easier and things happen at the company because of what I do. It's a good feeling. Not many people can say that about their jobs. I am especially lucky to have my job in "tough economic times" such as these.

Anyway, sometime in October I joined a new band. It's good times. I like those guys. I also cut my hair a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to the Bahamas in January and Florida in March. Things are decent.

Back to a-codin' I go. Until next time.

Federal agents have uncovered what they say may have been be a plot to kidnap Barack Obama!



What can I say? Stereotypes always seem to play themselves out.

Just thought I'd share this spam email that I sent myself this afternoon (read: it's spoofed, duh). Note the URL pointed out in red.

I'm too lazy to make a thumbnail, so enjoy it at full size for what it's worth:


For reference, here's the WHOIS of whoever owns the domain they're attempting to send me to:

Domain name:

        ffffefdl.co.uk



    Registrant:

        Alessaned Moreto



    Registrant type:

        Non-UK Individual



    Registrant's address:

        Silvia Neto 78

        Sao paulo

        HY89 3GE

        United Kingdom



    Registrar:

        Webfusion Ltd t/a 123-Reg.co.uk [Tag = 123-REG]

        URL: http://www.123-reg.co.uk



    Relevant dates:

        Registered on: 19-Oct-2009

        Renewal date:  19-Oct-2011

        Last updated:  19-Oct-2009



    Registration status:

        Registration request being processed.



    Name servers:

        ns1.post-trek.com

        ns1.systrey-port.net



Disclaimer

WHOIS lookup made at 21:24:09 19-Oct-2009

This is an update to my previous post where I spoke about the ongoing Great Sidekick Outage.

T-Mobile has officially announced they lost all my data. Oops. I'm pretty pissed, and will be calling to discuss options tomorrow. What follows is the update from T-Mobile, retrieved a few minutes ago (10/10/09, 9PM EDT)

T-MOBILE AND MICROSOFT/DANGER STATUS UPDATE ON SIDEKICK DATA DISRUPTION

Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:

T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, are reaching out to express our apologies regarding the recent Sidekick data service disruption.

We appreciate your patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on maintaining platform stability, and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers.

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. As such, we wanted to share this news with you and offer some tips and suggestions to help you rebuild your personal content. You can find these tips in our Sidekick Contacts FAQ . We encourage you to visit the Forums on a regular basis to access the latest updates as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption.

In addition, we plan to communicate with you on Monday (Oct. 12) the status of the remaining issues caused by the service disruption, including the data recovery efforts and the Download Catalog restoration which we are continuing to resolve. We also will communicate any additional tips or suggestions that may help in restoring your content.

We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience. Our primary efforts have been focused on restoring our customers' personal content. We also are considering additional measures for those of you who have lost your content to help reinforce how valuable you are as a T-Mobile customer.

We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost.

Once again, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger regret any and all inconvenience this matter has caused.

Welcome to the Great Sidekick Outage.

This was to be the Great Sidekick Outage of 2009, except this is from what I can tell, the single, largest failure of T-Mobile/Danger in history and thus no need to specify a year.

For those who don't know, I'm a T-Mobile Sidekick user and have been since March of 2006. It's been good and bad, but mostly good, and I liked the fact that all my contacts, settings, messages, et al were saved on Danger's backend servers. This means that any time I got a new Sidekick, or lost/broke one, I wouldn't have to be one of those people with a throwaway "New Phone, Need Numbers" Facebook group we all know and love so well.

Well, last week (10/2), data service went out. It remained out for the weekend and returned sometime the beginning of this week. A lot of people reported losing their contacts and data by doing a hard reset or turning their phone off, which I was sure not to do. Then, yesterday, in the middle of web surfing, my phone reset itself and took my contacts, settings and data with it. The second-to-worst thing that could happen, happened: My local device was reset, and the backend servers are down.

Now if you've been following along, this means that I have no contacts, no emails, etc, until the Danger servers resync back to my phone. There is no way to force this to happen. All you can do is wait.

Worse is Danger (acquired by Microsoft of all companies, in 2008) and T-Mobile's communication or lack thereof, to the customers. Save 3 or 4 forum posts in the past seven days, we have no idea what's going on. All we know is that they're "working" on it. Suffice to say this is not nearly good enough. I've only been without my data less than 24 hours, but there are some who haven't had their information since last week. While T-Mobile has auto-issued a credit for a free month's worth of data to its Sidekick subscribers, we're way into the "unacceptable" realm.

I'm doing my best to remain calm about the situation and wait it out, but it's really quite irritating when the company won't even give us anything more than "just wait". I can't say I can reasonably justify the cost of a new phone and higher data plan due to this, but if my contacts and settings don't come back and I do have to rebuild from scratch... I'll consider it. That was one of the primary reasons I stayed with my Sidekick; 3 years of data were there, and I wasn't going to have to re-enter it by hand.

The clock is ticking MSDanger.

Relevant links:
T-Mobile Sidekick Forum
T-Mobile Forums: The Epic Data Disruption Thread
Powered By Danger: T-Mobile USA General Forum
Powered By Danger: Sidekick Service Issue Sticky
Sidekick Desktop Interface (Log In to My T-Mobile before clicking) (Currently down)
Official T-Mobile Twitter

Patrick Swayze has died after a lengthy battle with cancer.

Sources: 1. FOX St. Louis, 2. ABC News

I'm sure at least some of my nerdy friends have heard of Drupal, but I'm sure you didn't know the ridiculous lengths and conditions of their Trademark and Logo Policy. It's nuts. I probably need to acquire a license just for this blog post.

Sometimes things on the Internet get taken way too seriously, which leads to people saying things that make only a little bit of sense.

Disclaimer: For the purposes of this blog post, I'm going to blow something completely out of proportion simply because I can. Do I really care what this person thinks of me? No. Do I think they're completely ridiculous for saying it? Yes.

Tonight, I got called a "DREADFUL CREEPER" in a comment thread on Facebook by someone whom I've never met or spoken to before. The summation boils down to this image:



Those interested in reading the full thread can view it by clicking here.

Later!

I arrived home last night after a short (is 4.5 days short?) and not nearly long enough vacation in California. I had a blast out there with my good friend Seb. Met some other cool people and finally met a long-time Internet friend in real life.

I have pictures up on my Facebook profile and will be compiling some video to upload to YouTube.

Prior to the trip I purchased a new Canon HD video camera; their Vixia HF20 model. It's pretty nice and I'm happy with it so far.

Also, my Internet is crawling at a snail's speed and as my ISP can find no fault on their outside wiring, I am lead to believe my 5~ year old Motorola Surfboard has bit the dust. I ordered their new(ish?) SB6120 DOCSIS 3.0 compliant model and it should hopefully be here Wednesday.

Thanks to my ISP (Broadstripe) being a complete failure, I haven't had internet access at home since sometime on Wednesday.

What's worse is I have a cripped phone browser, so I can kind of do things, but not much.

Broadstripe will be out to "fix" the problem tomorrow, a full 4 days after we reported it. Believe me, I'm thrilled.

Also, I saw District 9 today. While the premise was far-fetched, it was good for what it was.