Ethan Burnside Gone Wild

I was pretty excited to find Green Hosting Reviews at greenhostingreviews.com.  Then, after reading a few reviews I realized it's all a scam.  The give-away is the link they use to send you to the host site.  For example, DreamHost's link looked like this:

http://www.greenhostingreviews.com/recommended/dream-host/

but but but... I thought you would be linking me to dreamhost.com?!?

Turns out that if you use the linux command-line tool 'curl', you can see what's going on.

Interesting factoid... The federal budget JUST for defense spending is the same size as the COMBINED budget of EVERY SINGLE state in the USA. 

Just got off the phone with Monitronics.

My wife and I have been paying for monitoring for the last 9 months on a house we don't even live in. We vacated a home here in Corvallis back in January, and have been trying to cancel the Monitronics account ever since.

Finally in mid Sept they recognized (on our third written attempt!) that we were sick of paying for it and wanted to cancel. Then here in Oct, I still get a new bill!

It's been my experience that nearly all politicians lie, but these are way too blatant to be ignored:

The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH0xzsogzAk

Lie, after lie, after lie, on national television, in ads he paid for.

I love the recent Palin bit too... "I told Congress: Thanks but no thanks!"... in reference to the funding on the "Bridge to Nowhere". Blatant lies. She just says it over and over again, like maybe the 10th time it will just magically be true, but you can't go back in time and take it back. You have to own up to your mistakes and grow from them.

I was forwarded this bit regarding taxes today. It is somewhat inflammatory (as many political bits are) but made me think a bit about where I stand:

> Subject: TAXES -- V E R Y I M P O R T A N T ! !
>
> INTERESTING DATA ON THE CANDIDATES' POSITION ON TAXES
>
> /This is something you should be aware of so you don't get
> blind-sided. This is really going to catch a lot of families off guard.
> It _should_ make you worry./ /If it doesn't, you're brain dead./
>
> Proposed changes in taxes after 2008 General election:
>
> *_CAPITAL GAINS TAX _*
>
> MCCAIN

Thought I might save someone some time, as I just wasted quite a bit of my own trying to figure this one out.

I had configured DNS load balancing into our ServerIron 800 and was having a heck of a time trying to get it to flip into an Active state. Turns out that by default, the DNS health check is a TCP check and despite the fact that most DNS traffic on the net is UDP, the ServerIron does not default to using UDP. The fix is not all that obvious, and I found it only after a few hours perusing the docs:

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I saw an ad today for Acheson Whitley Sweeney on the back of the Yellow Pages. It reminded me that I had been meaning to warn the general public for some time now...

I'm a big technology person. I upgrade my PC every year and often partway between. I live on the bleeding edge because in my business it's a necessity. If you're not on the bleeding edge, you're sliding off the tail of the technology wave.

We should leave Daylight Savings in effect year round.

Why should we have to:

- Drive home from work in the dark every night for the winter months?
- Adjust our bodies to shifting clocks? (Getting harder and harder as I get older)
- Deal with the increased chance for a Traffic Fatality?
- Pay the extra $$ in lighting/heating for the entire winter months.
- Put up with all these devices that are confused about what time it really is because Congress can't even settle on a reliable date to convert back and forth?

Here goes... first post...