Why Ninjas Don’t Wear Shoes

BOO!

We had our annual Halloween party a little early this year… since the 31st is a Tuesday, we decided to have our party on Saturday, April 22nd instead.

Sorry it took so long to get some pics up!

That’s me!

Notice I’m a ninja? You can barely see me wailing on my sweet electric guitar and then popping a huge boner.

Also, to make my disguise complete, I hid my shoes under some chairs in the corner of the party!

BIG MISTAKE

You see, as the company grows, these parties grow! With all the friends of friends of friends we probably had about 200 people this year. I believe 90% of them were with Javier.

And, as the people attending get further and further from actually knowing anybody throwing the party, the crime rate rises and rises!

You see, when it was time to leave, my shoes were gone!

It would have been no biggie, since those shoes were on their way out anyway.. but my car keys and cell phone were inside!

We looked all around and couldn’t find it.. could somebody really have stolen my shoes?! There it was, 3am 2am, and I was stuck standing in my black socks.

I ninjad my way back to the hotel (my condo was getting fumigated for termites.. how’s that for some rocking timing), broke into my room (my wallet was locked in my car), and dreamt sweet ninja dreams.

Long story short!

The next day, I came back with my spare keys (but no alarm fob!), set off my car alarm six times trying to get it to start, went to the T-mobile store to get a new phone, but decided to give my old phone one more, final call .. when somebody picked up!

Hello
Hi. Um, I think you have my phone?
Uh, yeah, I think so.
Uh, yeah.. who is this?
It’s Brad. (New tech support guy from Indiana!)
AH HA! YOU ARE SO FIRED!
Waaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!
Okay fine, please stop crying. How about just a 20% pay cut?
Sniff. Sniff. Okay. I’m sorry. My girlfriend was really drunk last night and we were sitting on those chairs in the corner and I took her home and picked up all her stuff and I thought those were HER shoes.
You thought those size 14 velcro converse were your girlfriend’s?

I was pretty drunk too.

And THAT is why ninjas don’t wear shoes.

One Small Step Back for Mankind

It’s that time of the year again!

The end of the world is coming! Armageddon is nigh! Armstrong is high! Ghosts and demons will rise from every nook and cranny, to consume the whole of our planet! Or at least the U.S.

Because this Sunday, it’s the end of Daylight Saving Time.

Oh, I’m sorry.. perhaps you thought I was referring to Y2K?

I remember back in the summer of 1997 when I was working at my uncle’s company and he was like “we should do Y2K consulting!”

And I remember thinking to myself

“Why would anybody do that? The Y2K bug isn’t going to cause any more problems than any other computer bug. Every single day millions of computer glitches, programming bugs, human errors, usability defects, battery explosions, hardware failures, etc, etc, etc, happen… and the world keeps humming along. Why would a widely KNOWN and EASILY fixed bug, having to do with something as non-critical as DATE processing, be anything to give a duck’s fart about?”

(I used a lot of fowl language in my head back then.)

Think about it.. how many times have YOU personally called the cable company, or a store, or a restaurant, or a movie theater, or even a bleeding HOSPITAL and been told they couldn’t help you right now because their computers were down?

And yet somehow the world keeps humming along.

But, probably because 2000 seemed like a likely time for the world to end anyway, the media really latched onto it! Business folks (usually not the most technical ones) got on the bandwagon, and the general public pretty much followed behind.. all caught up in a giant vortex of hype and fear about how the world as we knew it would end come January 1st, 19100.

(A little aside.. the unix time command returns years in the format “the number of years since 1900″. Which means in 1999 it returned “99″. So, what you should have done if you wanted to show the full year, was just

1900 + $time;

(Simply 1900 plus the number of years since 1900!)

What a lot of people did instead was just

'19' . $time;

because, in the entire history of unix so far, the time command had always happened to return a two-digit year. This resulted in a lot of websites having the date as January 1st, 19100 when it all of the sudden became 100 years since 1900! In fact, WE had this very bug hit us.. it made the serial numbers we generated for our DNS entries all screwed up… Y2K strikes again! When we saw the problem, we fixed it in about eight minutes. Unfortunately it was too little too late, the world had already ended.)

Ah yes, those were crazy times.

Now we can all sit back, have some fois gras, and laugh.

Or can we?

Not only is fois gras on the outs, maybe you’ve heard that Congress has recently legislated that starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time will be extended for another four (or sometimes five) weeks!

POW! Just like that!

With less than two years warning, Congress decided to completely re-break what must again be millions of lines of time-related code across pretty much every computer in the world.

Have we learned NOTHING in this new millenium?!

Did anybody even CONSIDER the implications of this? The billions upon billions of dollars of our economy that will be wasted re-tooling every elevator in Manhattan and every sprinkler system in LA to be Y27DST-compliant? The myriad tragic side effects of millions of computers have their clocks an hour off for three weeks in March and one week in November? The CHILDREN?

Even us, your beloved web host, has a few Y27DST bugs creeping up the pipeline. For one, we’re going to have to patch all our servers so they know about the new time zone rules. That will probably take somebody a few hours AT LEAST.

Secondly, call us insane, but we keep all our domain registration info in Pacific Time, even though Verisign has everything in UTC (the one true time). So, whenever we have to do any interfacing with them, we need to convert UTC to Pacific time, and/or convert Pacific time to UTC. Which would be one piece of cake if not for that cluckin’ Daylight Saving Time.

Thanks to DST, and the fact we don’t even keep time zone information with our date/time stamps (call us even insaner), there is not a one-to-one mapping of Pacific times to UTC times! Which causes problems for the two or three domains registered every year between the second 2am and 3am on the last Sunday of October. We just don’t know if those domains were actually registered at 9:30am UTC or 10:30am UTC!

Think about it.

Spooky stuff.

Which is one of the reasons I’m for abolishing Standard time! Who needs it?! It just causes programming headaches, not to mention just when the days are getting really short.. the sun starts setting even earlier! Heck, I’m for DOUBLE DST and make it permanent. Nobody’s children walk to school anymore anyway.

And apparently it wouldn’t be a big deal to change it.. Congress clearly thinks 20 months is more than enough warning to get ready!

Speaking of which.. I just patched our domain registration code!

my $thisyearsdsbegins = &ParseDate("first sunday in april $year 2am");
my $thisyearsdsends = &ParseDate("last sunday in october $year 2am");
if ($year >= 2007) { # crazy congress!
  $thisyearsdsbegins = &ParseDate(”second sunday in march $year 2am”);
  $thisyearsdsends = &ParseDate(”first sunday in november $year 2am”);
}

Now, nobody register any domains between (the second) 2 and 3am Pacific time this Sunday, please.

(We’ll all be at our Halloween party.)

Sales Are Slow

I’m Frustrated.

You know why? I’ll tell you why. It’s because sales are slow.

And I don’t know why.

Now, you may think it has something to do with this, this or maybe this.

But I don’t really think that has anything to do with it.

Because I’m not talking about DreamHost’s sales at all!

Nope, I’m talking about the fact that ALL SALESMEN I EVER DEAL WITH ARE SLOW!

GOTCHA!

You may remember when I asked for recommendations on storage.

Well, I wasn’t kidding.. we need that storage! FAST!

But apparently, these storage vendors thought I was kidding. Because this has been how every single discussion has gone:

Hi DreamHost! We are X and we heard you were interested in spending like a GAZILLION bucks on storage?

Yep, that’s us! Yep, we do! What do you cost and how do we sign up to try it out?

No problem! I’ll get you a quote right away, but first, when can we come out and talk with you in person about our product?

Well, really, the only way we’re going to really trust your stuff is if we can test it ourselves.. but okay, we’ll meet with you..

Nice to meet you, blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah, blah…

Okay, that’s great, so.. how much?

Well, I’ll have to get a quote together.

You didn’t bring one?

No. I’ll have to get one together, I’ll email it to you tomorrow!

Sigh, okay..

So, what did you think of our quote?

Uh.. I never heard anything from you since the meeting… TWO WEEKS AGO.

Oh, whoops, silly me! I forgot to get one together or send it to you!

Ah. Well. Do you have a price?

When would be a good time for me to come back out with some more tech guys for a meeting? I’ll be in town tomorrow around 2..

Huh? We already MET! Didn’t we? For the love of mom, HOW MUCH FOR THE DISKS?!?

And they invariably turn out to be no cheaper than what we’re already paying, even after we told them in the first meeting how much we’re paying and how much they need to be for us to even get a test unit!

So yeah. It’s a teensy bit INFURIATING.

Literally, every time I talk with a sales guy they always end the conversation with “I’ll get that info for you by this afternoon/tomorrow!”

And invariably come this afternoon/tomorrow when I don’t hear from them and decide to give them a call back because I really do want to BUY LOTS SOON it’s “Oh, um, actually, let me call you back tomorrow/early next week.”

Or, more often… voicemail.

I just don’t get it.

I mean, I know sometimes our support takes a little while to get back to people. Sometimes over the 24 hours we strive for. Sometimes even over a few days when it’s something especially tricky.

But my requests are not tricky at all. In fact, it’s usually stuff that seems like it might be okay to just, say, put on their web site?

And it’s even more annoying because THEY CONTACTED ME FIRST!

But still, I don’t know, I’ve never really been a sales dude. Maybe I should cut them some more slack.

Maybe they’ve got a lot more on their plate then it seems.

I’m sure it’s a ton of scheduling, a ton of quoting, a ton of traveling, and a ton of contacts to keep straight.

I’m sure it’s physically and emotionally the pits.

And not very rewarding.

Unless you count COMISSIONS!

So please, sales guys.. do your job!

Sell to me!

Dote on me!

Make me feel loved.

Try and be at least as responsive for a million dollar storage sale as my freaking cable company is when I call to add ESPN HD for $5/month.

Or I’m just going to have to sign up for ESPN HD 20,000 times instead.

(For ten months.)

iTunes Music Sore

I love my iPod shuffle.

I never had a USB stick before, and it makes a pretty sick one.

I love iTunes.

If you ask me, it’s the real reason iPods are as popular as they are. I’ve tried a bunch of jukebox software in my lives, and they universally blow elephants. Except iTunes. iTunes is really pretty good. It’s easy to browse, easy to search, easy to rip, easy to burn, easy to use, stable, and free. It’s perfect. Oh, but wait..

Just one more thing.

The iTunes Music Store SUCKS!

Can I get a “heck yeah?”

HECK YEAH!

I know Defective By Design agree with me! And you know why they think it sucks? Three little words:

I Love You.

Ha. Gotcha. No, the words are really:
D. R. M.

That’s Digital Rights Management, sucka.. and it’s what keeps you from playing songs you BUY at iTMS from playing on your Xbox, Sonos, Zune, Windows Media Center PC, and if you get confused, maybe even YOUR OWN COMPUTER!

It’s what stops you from sharing your purchases with your friends, but it’s also what allowed Apple to convince the record labels to even allow them to give this whole “Internet” thing a go.

Because we’re all pirates at heart.

I mean, why pay for something if you can get it for free right? And why pay for something if you can get something better for free?

Well, the music industry is hoping you’ll pay for something worse than what you can get for free because they’re going to make it hard to get it for free. They’re competing by decreasing the value of their competition’s (file sharing services) product, rather than by increasing the value of theirs.

Like, why can’t you re-download songs you buy from iTMS? I don’t want to ever be forced to re-purchase a song (or a thousand) just because a hard drive died and I wasn’t keeping good backups. And trust me, the bandwidth costs of allowing this would be infinitesimal.

I really don’t know why they don’t allow this. I can only think because it’s something that would actually be valuable? And a way to compete with the free file-sharing networks on merit rather than by litigation?

It’s so frustrating.

Which is why, today, October 3rd, 2006, The Day Against DRM, we’re announcing a new (beta!) product:

Files Forever!

What is it?

It’s a new service (during the beta only open to DreamHost Customers) that allows you to sell your own digital files, a la iTMS.. but with a few key differences:

No DRM is allowed.. period!

Once you upload your file to sell, you pay a tiny one-time storage fee, and we serve it FOREVER at a nice, permanent, URL.

Anybody who buys a file somebody offers via Files Forever get an online backup of it included.. that is, they may re-download the file as many times as they want, FOREVER!

Any file you buy from Files Forever you can also “loan” to your friends via the service! They are then allowed to download the file as much as they want until you ask for it “back.” (This is awesome, trust me.)

We handle all the payment processing / shopping cart stuff, and take just 5% + 50c for credit card fees. (We combine purchases to minimize these costs too.)

You can even offer an “affiliate cut” for people who re-sell your files!

That’s it pretty much!

You can also keep the files you upload private.. so Files Forever also doubles as a very cost-effective permanent online archive solution, as well as an easy way to email big files to your friends.

So, Happy DreamHost Customers, please try it out today.. and when this thing takes off, maybe the big content owners will start to catch on and DRM will some day be sent back to the hell-hole from which it spawned. (Hell’s hell-hole I assume?)

And if you find any bugs or have any suggestions, of course I don’t want to hear about it.

Kidding.