…may he rest in peace.

So I’m taking a break from this inordinantly long lab report on every aspect you could imagine regarding DNS to bring you this message:

I’m bored with my iTunes library.

Now, normally, one might go out and grab a .torrent or pop open a peer to peer file sharing application (tsk tsk, shame on you), but seeing as I don’t want to become one of the RIAA’s latest targets, I’ve turned to a new solution. Continue Reading »

Every so often in life you have moments that define who you are and who you will become. I just had one of those moments and all I could do was wave at it as it passed.

You see I just received a telephone call and because I am at work I chose not to answer it. This decision may prove to be a deciding factor in my life or death for when I looked at the caller ID it said quite simply “Tom.” To immediately dispel any notions you may have, the fact is that I do have my name and my phone number listed in my address book, therefore when the name Tom came up it meant there was only one conclusion - I was calling myself.

So there I sat, phone in hand, paralyzed. If I answer it who will be on the other line? Will it be me, my future self perhaps? Am I in peril, or am I just warning myself about something huge? Perhaps I have found out what 42 equals for example. If I do answer it though I may break the continuity of the space time continuum and then what will happen? Will the earth explode? Will I be forever changed so much so that in the future I don’t make the same phone call which means I can’t have received it in the past which means it couldn’t happen!? My final thoughts were much more on the practical side of things as I reflected as to whether or not I would leave myself a voice mail.

The ringing stopped.

I waited but there was no voice mail. I checked my caller ID to be sure and it was in fact not only my name, but my phone number that was used to make the call. Realistically it makes sense that I wouldn’t have left myself a voice mail since I hate talking to machines…but my guess is that I didn’t have time because I was in grave danger and had but one shot to reach myself in the past and when I chose to not answer the phone all hope was lost.

Someday when some great tragedy befalls me you will know that it could have been avoided simply by answering my phone. I can only suggest that if ever you receive a call from yourself - answer it because you very probably are calling for a really good reason.

Things have been changing a lot around Zomgee (like we’re some non-abstract entity or something). Starting the beginning of May, HT, OhYo and I will each begin our lives being the largest combined distance from each other. I suppose you could say that the three amigos have become the one amigo, one pard’ner, and one dude… Continue Reading »

There have been three men in and around Hollywood the last century (1900s of course) that have defined masculinity. These three were manly men- not the wife-beating, lyric-spitting, gun-toting (for less-than-good purposes) facade the term “man” usually gets nowadays. These three were law-following, law-making, and law-enforcing men. The majority of the time, not only were they on the right side of the law, they were the law. It just so happens that all these men were very Republican, loved guns, championed the causes of the United States forefathers, sought to end discrimination and segregation, and just plain-old kicked butt. Continue Reading »

Enter the Peeps.

Peep #1: My name is Gladiator.
Peep #2: How dare you show your back to me! Slave, you will remove your helmet and tell me your name.
P#1: [removes helmet and turns around to face P#2] My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.

Fin.

It’s time to annouce the winner of the contest a mere two posts ago. ZePuKa best defined the word “in” without using a word that contained “in” and was, in fact, the only person to do so.

In recognition of her superb rule-following and adequate defining skills, she’s won a $15 gift certificate towards anything from woot.com, shirt.woot.com, sellout.woot.com, or jinx.com.

Remember the good old days? When you got AOL 4.0 cds? When you were psyched about finally getting a 56k connection? When this exciting new technology called V.92 seemed to be cutting edge?

One of my first exposures to the Internet as we know it today was actually from a commercial- NASCAR to be exact. NASCAR and thousands of other entities, it seemed, touted entering in their respective name as an “AOL Keyword”.

AOL never had a nice browser feature. It was just a reskinned IE, but there was a bar at the top of the window where you could type in keywords and in I’m-Feeling-Lucky fashion, be transported to a whole new world, which in my case was a sad looking (yet simplistically attractive) recap of (then) last week’s race.

Don’t worry though, this isn’t a trip down memory lane using the Wayback Machine as our vehicle (there’s plenty of blog posts about that). This is merely just a look back out how epic “AOL Keyword” was hyped to be.

You see… back then, people didn’t understand what the “.com” at the end of the nascar meant. They also didn’t know that sometimes you could only get to that site by typing “www.” in front of it. Nowadays, the browsers are smarter. Want to go to GMail? Simply type “g” into Firefox’s address bar and hit enter.

Sadly (perhaps not) “AOL Keyword” is used by only the older generation… the dot commers back before the dot com era. Nobody in their right mind uses this anymore, right?

So what brought on this journey into the recent past? Well, I ended up watching both Hackers and Antitrust over the past two days. In between thoughts of “hacking the Gibson”, insecure passwords, and Synapse, old, archiac memories slowly filtered into my mind. Multiplayer paintball via dialup, spending 12 minutes at a time downloading 1mb Need for Speed 3 cars, and a myriad of other things (EZNet anyone?)

Without looking at a dictionary or other definition-giving source, define the word “in” without using the word “in” or any other word that contains “in” (inside, within, etc).

So I just added some new categories to the site- Owned and Fail. I’m sure I’ll remove/combine those two later, but for the time being, they’re really the only thing to describe what happened today.

Recently, Pakistan announced that it would henceforth ban YouTube due to it harboring blasphemous videos, ideals, etc. Can you guess what PieNet, Pakistan’s quick-to-act ISP did? Instead of blocking traffic to and from YouTube within Pakistan, it instead rerouted the IP addresses to other sites.

Now in their limited intellect (apparently) they thought that making large scale DNS changes wouldn’t really do much. What they didn’t (or did they?) realize, was that the beauty (shortcoming) of DNS is that it propogates up, down, left, and right.

YouTube ceased to exist for an hour today.

The response? Well PCCW, an upper tier telecom provider, cut the cords to Pakistan.

So thankfully, I was able to see what the hubbub on Google Trends was about with Gary Busey kissing Jennifer Garner on the red carpet at the Oscars.