Getting Added to Google’s Lexicon as a Valid Word

What a long strange trip it’s been.   Back before I started a blog, I was just a person on the swg forum with the name Creeva in his signature.  I did a random Google search and I had less then 100 entries, about 3 years ago I was still stuck at 419 entries.   These days my number fluctuates for 20k-60K entries in Google depending on the day.   I’m still proud of having the number one entry in Google for “the greatest accomplishment of mankind” and not so happy about being number one for “afk entertainer” (UPDATE ON THE SECOND ONE – I’ve been bumped to number 2 – yay me).   One thing  always bothered me when I started this trip of seeding Google, the fact that originally when I searched for “Creeva” that Google sent me back the suggestion “Did you mean Creeval?” – this continued on when I had more hits for Creeva in the database then existed for Creeval.

Every few months I did a variation search on Creeva and normally I would either get no suggestion for some spellings, or I would get something spelled different.   Today however when I did a search for “Creeeva” it came back with the suggestion “did you mean Creeva?”.  Finally I’ve broken through the glass ceiling of valid search terms and “Creeva” will start being a valid suggestion.

I really don’t care if this changes tomorrow and it goes back to some other suggestion, today I have my moment in the sun.

See the full size picture of Google’s suggestion here.

Granted as a side note, my real name has only 4900 hits for it, and when I search on it, it suggest a different spelling of the last name (different person).     The suggestion also has 1500 less hits for his name then I have for mine, but that’s a battle for another day.

(My Original Blog Post: -*http://creeva.com/2009/02/12/getting-added-to-googles-lexicon-as-a-valid-word//2009/02/12/getting-added-to-googles-lexicon-as-a-valid-word/)

Watching A Yahoo Group Die

A long long time ago I ran a Yahoo Group entitled Marcon Drinkers it was started in 2001.   Before this group was started my circle of friends had another message board we were using.   One of the administrators went off the deep end started banning people and deleting posts.  He eventually found it funny just to delete the message board all together.  This is where I came into the picture.

Since I enjoyed the camaraderie of the group, and I had the technical know-how, I started a new Yahoo Group, the previously mentioned Marcon Drinkers.   The concept of the group and where the people came in, was that once a year our circle would descend upon a fantasy and science fiction convention in Columbus, OH called Marcon.  While we we there, there was mass amounts of alcohol consumed, except for just a small handful of occasions outside of there I don’t normally drink at all.  I’m not opposed to it, I just normally do not have a taste for it.    Moving on.

I managed to contact and grab people moving them to the message board.   For a time (2001-2004) it was quite active, I think I started dropping out more when I hung out on the SWG message boards most of the time.   I would say around (2006-2007) it really died, which is disheartening but people move on, friendships change, and people grow apart.   Our community wasn’t large enough to be self sustaining since there wasn’t any new blood.   People from the board attempted to start other groups, but none were as successful for the amount of time this one was.

Last year I was at a crossroads, I didn’t want to just delete the forum – since some people may actually still read it, so for them I continued and left it up.   Since nothing new was being posted I decided I was going to just crosspost my blog posts.  I originally hoped to stimulate conversation, but it seems the posts are standing alone in an echo chamber.  I did close membership to start spammers from popping up (since I always hated cleaning those out anyways).   So our peak was over 100 members, now it’s down to 46.   I slowly watch people drop off.   When I am the last one still standing I’ll take the group offline for good.

I do have backups of the groups since I don’t want the digital history to be gone, but it will last solely in my hands.  In a way it’s sad to watch a community die off.  First I did it with this group, then I relived it with Star Wars Galaxies.  Anytime a community is lost for any reasons there should be a sadness; a moment of reflection.   I think the main reason it is completely dead these days beyond dynamics changing is the advent of social networking.  I’m friends with many of these same people on different social networks like Myspace and Facebook.   This has given them more tools to empower themselves in the delivery of information to their friends.   A static mailing list scenario like Yahoo Groups  doesn’t fit into their world anymore.  Times, technology, and friendships change – but looking at the past will show us the journey on how we got to where we are today.

(My Original Blog Post: http://creeva.com/2009/02/12/watching-a-yahoo-group-die/)

Things You Should Be Able Before To Answer When Contacting A Consultant

[Blog] Things You Should Be Able Before To Answer When Contacting A Consultant:

-*http://s3nt.com/cpab

Someone I know came to me the other day about a consulting project that may or may not happen.   What essentially he wants done is an overhaul of IT infrastructure.   They want more automation to their operation and they deal with physical goods.  So from receiving to shipping, to everything in between they are looking to streamline.    They want to do more with less, less equipment if possible, less people if possible, less stress if possible.   In other words they want what every other company in the world wants.

Currently they have a software package that does some of this, but it doesn’t do everything they want it to be able to do.   I don’t have implicit knowledge of the package, other then I’ve created firewall rules when I was consulting with Symantec to pass the traffic.   So my first question is the scope of the project.   The person I was talking to didn’t exactly no what I meant by that.   They were more worried about the big picture ideal instead of what a consultant would need to work with.  A vision of the end goal is great, but without specific tasks to get there it definitely puts an implementer at a disadvantage.   He stated that we would have to do a sit down and discuss the issue and layout of the business process.   This is a good step, but part of why I’m writing this is to help others know the answer they should have when going into something of this magnitude.

Easy, Hard and Correct

The first question is why do you want to do this?  There are easy answers, there are hard answers, and there is correct answers to this question.    Some of the easy answers include – I want everything to work together better, we want to build to the future, and I have to spend my budget before the end of the fiscal cycle and want to try out this product.    Hard answers include we want something more manageable for our IT staff, we want it to run faster in our environment, we want something we can understand.

There are reasons that these are the easy answers and hard answers.  The first and foremost thought is to remember to sit down with a consultant or someone who understands the technology thoroughly enough before ever sitting down with a salesperson.   To sales people, these are all easy and correct answers.   They will tell you your toast can be used to transport computer network traffic with the right purchase, they are there to get your money.  It’s the one reason I can never be a salesperson.  I like people using the correct solution, not necessarily the solution that I am selling.   Even when I worked at Symantec, I knew Symantec products were not the best products for all customers.   Some customers only changed products because they had money to spend and ended up worse off for it.    Salespeople are tricky creatures that guard their bonuses like Disney guards it’s copyrights.

Easy answers are normally very vague,  they tell a salesperson of consultant that you haven’t really though to much about the problem.  You have a basic idea of what you want, but you don’t know any specifics.  The problem with the easy answers is that they are also the most expensive answers – this allows those that are implementing something to sell you what they think is best, regardless of how it will fit into your business six months down the road when they are gone.  You will have to make some decisions on your own, and this should not be listening to the best sales pitch from two competing vendors.  The best sales pitch does not necessarily equate into the best product.

Why are the hard answers difficult?  What that’s because everything is relative.   Going back to my examples can show you this.  We want something more manageable by our IT staff, well how trained is your IT staff?   Do your employees know alternative operating systems?  Does your staff only run Microsoft products?  Is this faster for your environment?  What about a year down the road and the nightmare efficient system breaks because of infrastructure changes you were forced to make?  Everything comes down to you knowing your environment and your plans for the future.   A consultant only gets a glimpse of time into your configuration and is not going to be the full time employee running this stuff.   They won’t know how your future plans could be effected if you don’t tell them your future plans.

The correct answer?  That include being as specific as possible.  Let’s say this is to implement an Exchange Server migrating from a Lotus Notes architecture.   Why would I want to do this?   Lotus Notes has been long in the process of being a headache for us.   The administrator that runs it is retiring in six months and we have other employees that could scale up quicker to learn  Exchange then Lotus Notes.   The collaborative features in exchange work in Outlook, which our company already loads on all the desktop since we have a full Microsoft Office License on all of the desktops.  About 30% of our users already use outlook to retrieve their e-mail, even though they all have the Notes client installed on their desktops also.   Being able to consolidate this would save us thousands a year since we would no longer need a support contract or license fees paid to IBM to support the old Lotus infrastructure.    The more complete and specific the answer, the better the consultant can answer your questions.

Do You Listen To Alternatives?

Even in the Exchange scenario seems complete.  How rigid are you to suggestions?  What if the consultant offers up other alternatives such as a web based e-mail solution that would still allow Exchange to connect and retrieve e-mail? While a Linux/Apache approach may be cheaper, you could also implement it on top of IIS.   Building with some other technologies you could gain all the collaborative powers of Exchange for thousands of dollars less.   Those who didn’t want to use Outlook could use a browser.  If you combine this with a secure remote access solution this would allow for a possible quicker and less bandwidth connection for telecommuters if that is where your company is going.

Knowing what your plans and how rigid they need to be help a consultant decide what avenues may be the best approach for you.  While I offered up a free solution, another consultant may offer ways to augment your current Notes infrastructure to fit your needs.  The best consultants will offer alternatives to your current line of thinking.   You do not have to listen to them, you can stay focused, but hearing how open you are is important.

Timeline

A timeline is something you should have in mind sitting down with the consultant.  He needs to know deadlines and what your expectations are.   Does this need to be done in a week or a year?  How are your current employees going to ramp up on the new solution?  While a consultant may reset your timelines to something more realistic, knowing what type of time frame you are trying to achieve is important to the success of the project.   It also tells the consultant if they are going ot need to bring in more outside help.

Breakdown of Tasks

Have you compartmentalized your tasks?  The person that contacted me was looking for a complete end to end solution, is this what best?   In a solution like that how are you going to handle the transition time?   You don’t want to migrate the whole solution at the touch of a button, since any big architecture change can effect your business continuity.  For some businesses any downtime at all is lost revenue.   A consultant wants to make this impact as minimal as possible.   Even when you do the best planning and compartmentalizing sometimes you will get stuck on a twenty-three hour conference call working through the issues of down time.   When this happens I can tell you it’s not fun.  That was also with a staged migration.

What segments of your business can be down for hours at a time?   When you can answer that you can start staging your tasks.  The tasks that can be down the longest generally should be the first ones migrated, since they should give you expectations for later tasks, and allow you to plan accordingly.   Do not re-architect the design so the whole system (no matter how small) to be done in one night if there are multiple groups effected in the transition.   Design the impact to be as small as possible.   Yes, this may increase time – which in turn increases expense, but without proper planning it may cost you more in the long run.

Cost

The question that no likes asking or giving, what is your budget for this task.  You can wait for the consultant to make a cost estimate pitch first if you like – but at some point in the conversation cost is going to come up.   Do your homework ahead of time to see how much you expect it to cost and budget accordingly.   What are you going to do if things go over budget?  If your three quarters way through a project and haev no more money to finish it, how is that going to impact you?

In Closing

This may seem like a list of things that I want as a consultant.   These are however fairly common truths on what a consultant needs to start a project properly instead of spinning their wheels.   In the next week or so I’m going to follow this up with how to spot a good consultant versus a bad one.

-*http://s3nt.com/cpab

Is A Cash Based Society More Anonymous Then A Cashless One?

[Blog] Is A Cash Based Society More Anonymous Then A Cashless One?:

http://s3nt.com/cn4y

Image from here

A little over ten years ago, before debit cards became ubiquitous and people cared more about having actual bits of paper for the monetary worth, I had a discussion with a friend about how the world would  eventually move to a cashless society.   I argued over the cost and extent of such a venture going forward.   He did have one good point in his argument – anonymity.

He believed due to corruption (or anything else you wish to argue for) that there would always be cash money to allow for citizens to have an anonymous usage of money in society.   I had several more arguments going against this back then, but I couldn’t truly get around the anonymity factor, especially with small unmarked bills.  I don’t believe the anonymity factor is going to last too much longer though.

Enter in RFID dust, this effectively will destroy anonymity in a cash based society.   The technology was developed as an anti-counterfeiting method.   With this knowledge in hand we can make some assumptions.  The first is that the dust can be used to verify the authenticity of the bills.   The second, when it is truly embedded in the bills and not sprinkled into batches of money – that the RFID will contain a serial that will match the serial number on the bill itself.

If the dollar can “beacon” the serial number, then how does it become anonymous.   In theory before you use any paper money you could microwave it, but eventually that will no longer work either.  The next argument would be that only the government has the readers – this would be a “for how long argument”.   Think of the theft and tracking of the flow of money analysis that could be gained solely on a research perspective.  I can see in 20-30 years as the technology becomes cheaper and centralized databases are more available – that this type of tracking could be the norm.

I’ve written about software currently that can track the flow of money, there is no reason we wouldn’t be able to see real time tracking of every single penny in circulation by utilizing this technology.   The only thing stopping it right now is cost, which will drop.

http://s3nt.com/cn4y

I Like Sharing Almost Everything About Me – But Wakoopa Is Too Much

[Blog] I Like Sharing Almost Everything About Me – But Wakoopa Is Too Much:

http://s3nt.com/cmw0

I share tons of personal infromation about myself online.   You can believe its for whatever you like best to explain my behavior.  I do however, believe it or not, hold some degree of privacy.  I have never once been interested in taking Wakoopa for a test spin.  Part of it I think is using softwarethat I would interact with for hours is more personal then what music I’m listening to for a brief moment in time.   I know I’m just insane, it’s something very minor compared to everything else I share.  Ninety-nine percent of the time you would just see Firefox running.

So what aspects of your life are you unwilling share online?

http://s3nt.com/cmw0

Watched Knocked Up

[Blog] Watched Knocked Up:

http://s3nt.com/cmc9

Knocked up is real, fake, immature, and mature all at the same time.  Granted this story may have been more appropriate a couple years ago when I first saw the movie in the theater.  However I guess things are different now, our child is due in a week so that may give me a different perspective.   I can say that I see parallels in what we have gone through and what I saw in the movie.   Part of it has freaked Xie out, she asked if I was bothered – I’m not.   Part of her thinks that I’m not, ready or I don’t think it is real.   I do.  I am like Seth Rogen’s character in the movie and believe that this has been gone on for thousands of years and I think we mostly have it down by now.   Being the oldest of eight, I’m used to have kids and babies around – and the fact that they are around and need care do not scare me.

So here is to the coming weeks when the baby actually arrives…

http://s3nt.com/cmc9

My Normal Information Consumption

[Blog] My Normal Information Consumption:

http://s3nt.com/ckut

I consume a ton of information a day.  Some people think that they receive and process mass amounts of information, and some like Scoble definetley out pace by any measure of the word.  Other people just seem to flip out if they have more then five emails that arenot spam.    We are going to just look at the last 30 days.

Since I do most of web floundering in Google Reader – let’s look at the trends:

From your 76 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 14,054 items, starred 177 items, shared 41 items, and emailed 39 items.

That is 14,054 articles that I skimmed in the last 30 days,   The starred items are things that I want to get back and read later.   So if we take the averages:

Each day I read (or at least skim)  469 articles

Each day I star 6 articles (which is a misnomer since an hour later I unstar them, so it only counts currently starred items I think)

Each day I share 1-2 articles

Each day I email 1-2 articles

That is literally just what I get from RSS – let’s be fair and say I go to 50-100 websites a day reading an untold number of articles.   I have no true way of tracking that since I do not capture that data at all.

E-Mail -2479 – so I’m receiving an average of 83 e-mails a day that is not marked as spam – otherwise the totals would be much much higher.

In the end is this entertaining or useful to you?  Probably not, but it should give you a bit more insight on me.

http://s3nt.com/ckut

How Will We Explain To Our Children What Newspapers Were?

[Blog] How Will We Explain To Our Children What Newspapers Were?:

http://s3nt.com/cjru

Picture from here

We hear time and time again about all the newspapers and magazines going out of business.   How much longer will they survive in the same sense that we have seen during our lifetime?  More importantly how are we going to explain them.  In one sense we can it would be easy to explain them since we’ll still have them in libraries aging the perfect yellow gracefully, surviving on microfiche since the companies and libraries don’t seem too interested in digitally converting them, and being used as padding in boxes in the dark reaches of the attic.   So there will be some visual styling and physical copies that they can examine.   What was there purpose though?

We will explain to them it was to deliver news to the general public so they could be informed about the world around them.  It was in the pre digital era (which may as well be prehistoric to them) so these papers were printed out by the millions on a daily basis so there was a communal knowledge shared amongst the populace.   That on Sunday’s we got full colored comics to entertain the kids and full color coupons to entertain the families.   That we got our daily stock quotes from it.   If we wanted to sell something in the town next to ours we used the classified system.   If someone died we would be alerted.

Let’s look at this though – I’m thirty-two years old, so we are going to speak of this in the context of my lifetime.   Why did we have newspapers, except because we didn’t want to read a chapter of a book.   News was piped into our lives via the nightly news on TV and all day via radio.   It would have been simple for towns to start a local (by local I mean town level) radio station for news, classifieds, and obituaries.   Most municipalities already do that though through the local cable company. I remember people buying “classified” ads on it.   Obituaries were missing from that system.   So what have we left, stock quotes and obituaries?  This transition could have been done literally decades ago.   How about an all stock quote radio station?

Let’s look as some other aspects of this picture – in theory most of us are evil human beings since we don’t utilize public transportation  and drive our oil guzzling vehicles around the country daily.   What about all the trees and wilderness decimated by using wood pulp to supply the newspapers (millions a day) for the little bit of news that we couldn’t get somewhere else?  This was rampant going well into the age of recycling, if it wasn’t for the ubiquity of the Internet we would still be doing it today.  What example does this set.   We could have used hemp as paper, since hemp is infinitely more renewable then wood pulp paper, but we didn’t.   Some people didn’t like that idea and wanted to increase their own wealth.  This is also not to forget all the oil trucks used for transporting, the coal and oil used to power these places that printed them.

The other thing I can see my child asking when he becomes aware, doesn’t it give too much power to one entity?  Some towns managed to have two newspapers that provided coverage for their area, but what we are stuck with is just two viewpoints.   What if there was a story that neither wanted to print, in that era it may has well never have happened if it didn’t make TV, radio, or newsprint.   History and stories have been lost for decades since the story wouldn’t get more readers, so these companies could not sell more advertising.  Then I would also have to explain the theory of Yellow Journalism.

Now I’m sure in the age of digital living that these children and grand-children will understand advertising sponsorship to the news.  What they will have a harder time is news that was set typographically so that it couldn’t be manipulated.  A system where you had to buy the paper just to know the news (a news tax as such).   A system where if you wanted to sell something you were lucky if you had the audience of a fifty-mile radius.  That we gave the control of so much to so few and enjoyed it….  That we were so wasteful in our resources, when looking back it was just pure gluttony.   I’m not sure how they will ever understand.

I can say I used wrestle the comics from my grandfather as he read the paper so I could enjoy them, and that is a fond family memory.  I can’t say looking back that even I understood their purpose.      This story is coming from someone who was a newspaper boy, yet has never had a newspaper subscription in my life.

http://s3nt.com/cjru

Problems Getting SSL Working

[Blog] Problems Getting SSL Working:

http://s3nt.com/cjpr

So I’ve talked about my hosting provider before, their tech support isn’t the brightest crayons in the box.  It seems whatever issue I have with them, they don’t read what exactly I want.  Key word analysis is great guys, I did it when I worked phone support at Symantec.   What I didn’t do is misinterpret everything the customer said on every single issue.    If something isn’t working you have to fix it.

Warning for the non-geeks that read my site, this is about to get technical.

Let’s go back to the beginning and flash forward to present day.    In September I really wanted to implement SSL for the administration section of my blog – simple, easy, and secure.   The biggest reason for this was the WordPress 2.7 series offered better support for SSL, so now why the time to implement instead of hacking around with plugins for support.  This turned out to be not so simple.

Online I found my hosting provider is supposed to offer a server self signed certificate, so I sent the following message to tech support:

Is there a shared server certificate for SSL that I can use for my wordpress installation?

Now I’m fast and willing to pick through things on my own, so before technical support could reply I added this second message to my brand new ticket.

I found the SSL manager in cpanel -

1.  Do you have instructions on properly generating your SSL key for use with
this (wording might be wrong – but how to configure this so I can use it with
my creeva.com domain?

2.  Do you instructions on using this with wordpress?

Simple and straight forward I thought.    Here is what I got back:

Hello,

If you install the  shared SSL for the domain, you will be getting warning when
you take the site.

It is better to purchase SSL from third party godday.

Please check the link given below for installing SSL.
http://ping.fm/Rv9Mx

In case you have any more queries, please don’t hesitate to contact us with
all the required details. We’ll be happy to assist you further.

Let’s throw the little bit of broken english aside for a moment and break this down.  I am aware (of course they don’t know this) that I will be getting a certificate mismatch error when I login to the SSL site.  Problem one I see is that they are sending me a third party, yet they sell an SSL service – I find this odd, but Godaddy (I’m assuming that was what he meant) is cheaper.  Good customer service?  Maybe.  The other problem is that he sent me the instructions to doing this in Cpanel 11, all fine and good, but they have all of their customer on Cpanel 10.  The instructions were similar and I followed them.   After implementing the changes I attempted to go to my website on HTTPS.   Firefox through out the following message:

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to creeva.com.
SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)

The page you are trying to view can not be shown because the authenticity of
the received data could not be verified.

* Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

I spent a day researching this message, BTW Firefox’s documentation of error message is terrible, hence why it took me a day instead of minutes.   Also Firefox’s documentation is wrong as I would find out later.  After a few days of trying to get this to work I gave up and wrote this off as a lost cause for the moment and focused on other things.

Flash forward to yesterday, I decided to reopen this ticket since again I wanted SSL.  I knew from experience that the shared cerrtificate would not work properly, so I went and generated a free (valid) one from Instant SSL.  I wanted to do this before purchasing my own SSL certificate from Godaddy, just to make sure everything was working properly.   I went through all of the steps and I go thte same error message.  Well I saved the thirteen dollars a valid certificate would have cost, but wasn’t any closer to my end goal of an encrypted WordPress administration section.  I still wanted this so I opened the original ticket back up (tech support hates that BTW) and added the following note:

I’m back to this again – I was considering buying SSL instead of using the
shared cert – but having applied a cert from Comodo – I’m getting the same
error in firefox:

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to creeva.com.
SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)

The page you are trying to view can not be shown because the authenticity of
the received data could not be verified.

* Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

If I try Internet Explorer it doesn’t even connect

If I use digicerts SSL checker – http://ping.fm/nWoU0 I get this:

DNS resolves ‘creeva.com’ to 69.4.229.212
No certificates were found.
Output from ‘openssl s_client’ command:
13127:error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown
protocol:s23_clnt.c:585: CONNECTED(00000003

Now following godaddy’s instructions it seems I need access to cpanel WHM -
which is somethig from a shared hosting perspective I need you to implement.
Can I get this done – also I’m perfectly fine using a self signed server
generated cert (which is what it currently is right now)

Since I’m not using a shopping cart and I’m only going to use SSL for
maintenance of wordpress, it’s perfectly fine for me to receive the security
exception warning in firefox since it will not be a customer facing error, I
only want the encryption side, not the non-repudiation side of SSL.

Also the instructions you sent me are for Cpanel 11 – currently my account uses
cpanel 10 when I login

For those technical people that understand what I’m trying to accomplish, am I unclear on this?  Please excuse my muddled use of non-repudiation.  Also that stupid Firefox message I stated was vague, well it seems the server wasn’t even completing the connection properly – stupid Firefox error messages.  This is the response I got back:

For installing a dedicated SSL certificate on your domain, you will have to
purchase a static IP(dedicated IP) for your domain. For that you need to
contact our billing department.
After obtaining a static IP, we will assign that IP to your domain. You can
upload  your cert , key and CA bundle  for the site to the server so that we
can install the cert for you.
Also please note that there will be some downtime for the site until the IP
change propagates globally.

Please confirm if you need a static IP for the domain, so that we can forward
this to the concerned department.

Now what part my message did they not understand I did state that I was perfectly fine with an error message, that I wanted to use the shared certificate.   I think I implied fairly well that I would prefer to use the shared certificate, that way I wouldn’t have to actually buy my own.    This is the problem you get into when you do keyword scanning, at least the first guy with broken english understood my question better.  My response:

Like I said in my previous e-mail – I do not need a static IP, nor do I need
a dedicated SSL certificate – I’m fine using the standard shared SSL
certificate – as was/is advertised online that all plans came with a shared
server SSL cert – that is what I would like to use and that is what is not
working.

Maybe they’ve finally understood my issue?

We are checking your query  regarding shared SSL in detail. We will get back to
you with the updates soon.

Soon came about thirty minutes later:

After careful review of this ticket, we have decided that you could be better
assisted in another department within our company.

For this reason, we are transferring your ticket. Please expect a short period
of time where this ticket is not updated, as it is queued up at its
destination.

We make every effort possible to take care of every ticket as quickly as we
can. We will contact you shortly.

Thank you for understanding,

Was was nice enough to leave off the names of their technical support staff.   What I don’t understand is why I have to go to another department – maybe I’m going to the server admins who actually make the changes?  Any time I have an issue it seems that I have to go through a lot of back and forth in the technical support team.   If you techies read my inquiries as unclear, please let me know.   As I get more information I’ll be updating the comments.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

UPDATE – not often I get to update – it seems HTTPS is now working on my domains – well kind of.   I still have more configuration to complete on my side, but it is at least answering now.  Only took thirteen hours.

http://s3nt.com/cjpr

Uploading Photos To Flickr From a Nokia N810

[Blog] Uploading Photos To Flickr From a Nokia N810:

http://s3nt.com/cij2

One thing I’ve wanted to do is upload images from my Nokia N810 to my Flickr Account.   I’ve mucked with mailing photos, but that’s never fun with bulk amount of images.  You might think that because the N810 doesn’t have a normal sd slot, going for the micro-sd instead that I wouldn’t have a lot of photos on here.   Ironically whenever I take photos on my RAZR cell phone the only way I can get them off is via my N810, in which it works right away.

Before you state that I can purchase or pirate Motorola Phone Tools – why should I when I have my N810

I played with a progam called Maemo Publishr, but that was slow and clunky, and in the end I still was not able to get any pictures actually uploaded.   Doing a bit more research it seems a program I was already using, Maemo Wordpy, could already do this.  I authorized it Flickr to accept photos from Maemo Wordpy and I was off to the races.   In under a minute I had all forty-three images off of my cell phone and in my Flickr account.

If you want to upload to Flickr from your N810 – Maemo Wordpy is the key.

http://s3nt.com/cij2