Archive for August, 2009
Back in Milwaukee
Posted by Alex in Alex's Thoughts on August 31, 2009
I’m home from California! Actually, I’ve been home for awhile now, but it took me quite a bit longer than expected to recombobulate myself upon getting back into Milwaukee. I don’t travel much and I usually work from home, so a whirlwind weekend of running around a convention center tackling whatever happens to come up took the wind out of my sails for awhile. In its own odd way, it was also very invigorating.
I won’t bore you all by going through the whole play by play of the trip, but I had a good time. It was naturally incredibly busy, I was on the clock almost the entire time, but it was enjoyable. It was that good sort of tiring. You know how you feel after a rough exercise, and you sit down and your entire body feels just great? It was a lot like that.
The best part was probably meeting my coworkers, honestly. I’ve met a handful of them before, but the sheer number of people we had out in the field this year was incredible. I talk to most of these people every single day, but there was something very uplifting about being in the same physical room as so many of them. I love working from home, but once in awhile sitting down with the team to plan out the day, jam out some ideas, and just talk shop can be a really great experience.
Actually, sitting around and brainstorming on something with a group of creative people is probably one of my favorite things in the world. Blogging, stories, comics… just creating things with other people. I have this distant dream of opening a little studio with a team of folk to do all sorts of goofy little projects, but none of my favorite people are local. I really doubt I’ll be able to convince anybody to move up here to Milwaukee to rent out some office space and open a studio with me. Also, that’s a massive tangent that I won’t even get into right now!
I met a lot of other people too, of course. I met a lot of my WoW guildmates, and that was awesome. I didn’t get to spend as much time with them as I would have liked, but there are so many hours in a day and I spent most of them working. I did get to meet the cast of The Guild over the weekend (including Felicia Day, yes) and some Blizzard developers. I interviewed Christie Golden, was grabbed by a bunch of fans and vendors that recognized my name, and that was really cool. Still, I didn’t get to meet everyone I wanted to while I was there. There were a few readers I really wanted to say hi to, but was so swamped that I didn’t have time to catch my breath and do it until it was too late. Oh well, maybe next year. Hi Orkchop!
No, that is not me with Felicia Day right there. That’s actually Zach Yonzon of WoW.com, he was manning my camera Thursday night and it just so happens his picture with her is the best of the lot. Curious!
I was really sad to leave at the end of the weekend, and strongly considered skipping out on my Sunday morning flight and picking up a new ticket later to spend an extra day or two in Cali. It was very tempting, but the $150 United charges no-shows/cancellations pushed it out of “I can scrape by!” territory. It just wasn’t doable, so I went home as intended and have slept approximately one billion hours since I got home. It was a little depressing for awhile there, but I’m back on track now. It’s time to get back into the grind.
It’s a bit odd, really. Working from home, my idea of vacation isn’t laying out on a beach somewhere or anything like that. Running myself ragged on a convention floor was, to me, vacation. It was different! It was exciting, it was something outside of the norm. It was fun, and I can’t wait until next year to do it again.
California, here I come!
Posted by Alex in Alex's Thoughts on August 19, 2009
If you’ve followed me here from WoW.com, you probably know where I’ll be this weekend. If not, you probably don’t care! But I’ll be covering BlizzCon this weekend, which means a weekend of running all over the Anaheim Convention Center by day, getting drunk by night, and then wanting to die at the end of it all.
I don’t have a lot to say right now but I’m sure I will when it’s all through. For now, I just wanted to let you guys know that I’ll probably be twittering my journey to Cali, if you’re into that sort of thing. My shiny new iPhone will keep the information flowin’ the whole way. Hopefully, anyhow.
So… yeah. Twitter. Follow me. Woo.
WordPress ‘unable to create directory’ error with DreamhostPS
If you host a WordPress blog on Dreamhost and just switched to Dreamhost PS, you’re probably going to run into an issue where you suddenly can’t upload media to your blog. When you upload an image to embed in a post, you’ll probably get an error message that looks something like this:
Unable to create directory. Is its parent directory writable by the server?
The fix for this is very, very simple. When you switched over to DreamhostPS, your blog’s default upload directory changed. Go to Settings -> Miscellaneous, which will open the page you see in the image directly below.
If you have a typical WordPress install (and chances are good that you do), what you see written in my “Store uploads in this folder” field is what should be in yours. The default is ‘wp-content/uploads’ and if you see some other weird thing there, chances are you need to change it back to the default, unless you’ve personally decided to change it to something else in the past. In which case, change it to what you’ve decided to use as your default.
If that doesn’t take care of the problem for you… uh, find someone else to troubleshoot it with you. ;) I’m not an expert or anything. This is just the fix that worked for me and many others.
The Departed, why didn’t I see this sooner?
Posted by Alex in Reviews and Recommendations on August 12, 2009
I could have gone my entire life without seeing Jack Nicholson’s boner, but if that’s the price I had to pay to see The Departed, it was worth it. Yeah I know, about three years late to the party, right? The thing came out in 2006. Well, I put off seeing this movie for a really long time because my attention span sucks, and the thing is 2 1/2 hours. Plus, I was still working for Hollywood Video and on the brink of quitting the job, and I didn’t want to watch another freaking movie for all the money in the world at the time. Watching movies was the last thing I wanted to do. So I finally got around to watching it now, three years later.
Anyway, the movie itself. I’d been nervous about the length and my short attention span conflicting, and I really didn’t need to worry about that at all. The movie was 2 1/2 hours long, which is pretty freaking long by current standards, but I was never bored. It never lost my attention. I assume most people know what it’s about, but if not: It’s a cop/mob movie. Martin Scorsese suspense flick with tons of betrayal, deceit, and… people getting bullets through the skull. It was incredible the whole way through, and the cast really couldn’t have been any better.
I’m not going to do a rundown of the whole cast, but I wanted to touch on one person: Leo. Leonardo DiCaprio is one of those names that a lot of people roll their eyes at ever since Titanic, but I’ve come to realize it’s pretty unfair. The guy is great, and I think he’s at his best in movies where his character is a little more dark. See: Blood Diamond, Gangs of New York. This movie really played that up, and it was fantastic. His character reminded me a lot of Donnie Brasco, which is another good movie in the genre. The characters match up with the whole “losing yourself” aspect of what he had to do. You’re around terrible people doing terrible things so long that you start doing it yourself, whether you think it’s right or not. It just becomes a part of you, it’s something you need to do to get by regardless of your morality. It’s always a fascinating transformation to watch.
The ending was a bit depressing, but satisfyingly so, if that makes any sense. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but it didn’t leave you feeling empty either. Everything was simply… done.
If you haven’t seen this movie yet, please go do it. If you have seen it and think I’m an idiot for not watching it sooner, feel free to mock me ruthlessly in the comments section.
On net neutrality
Posted by Alex in Alex's Thoughts on August 5, 2009
You may have heard me mention a few times that I’m a huge supporter of net neutrality. The term ‘net neutrality’ sort of suffers from the fact that it’s become a buzzword, so most people hear it every single day and accept that the term exists and means something, but it is repeated so often that what it actually means is entirely irrelevant. That is unfortunate, to say the least.
Net neutrality is a stance that basically says the Internet should be free. Not free of cost, but rather free of restriction. The sort of content a residential Internet user accesses on the internet should be determined by the user, not determined by the network provider, such as your ISP. If you pay $50/month for broadband internet and want to access Google, you should be able to do so at your whim. If you want to access your favorite music blog, you should be able to do that. If you want to visit DeviantArt, your service provider should not be able to stop you. If you want to troll 4chan, there should be no ISP-placed barriers.
This is what Google has to say on the topic:
Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days… Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online.
A lot of people on the internet tend to underestimate it. How much information have you gleaned from the internet, just by random surfing? How much have you learned? How often do you bring up Wikipedia every week to look up something, either for some important purpose or simply to sate your curiosity? A lot, probably. What about all of the other things that people use the internet for these days? Employment, communication, all of that.
Right now, if your ISP decided there was information on Wikipedia that they didn’t want you to see, they have the option to prevent all of their users from accessing Wikipedia. You will be severed from a website that’s been called “the collected knowledge of all of humanity.” That’s probably overexaggeration there, but think about that. Naysayers will very quickly jump up to say, “But you can just go to the library.” They’re sort of missing the point, though. That’s exactly the problem. Your ability to go to the library and research something depends on a private company allowing you to do so. If that company says that you can’t go in there, that’s all there is to it. You can’t do it. You’ve been cut off from the information you want.
It sounds unlikely, right? But there’s absolutely nothing stopping it from happening short of it not being a wise business decision at this time. The moment that it does become one, or someone thinks that they can get away with it without repercussion, we lose a part of the internet, which means we lose freedom of information, and that’s one thing that we should never willingly give up.
For another example of what could happen: Say you’re looking for a job online, and AT&T is your ISP. You heard from a friend that the company he works for is hiring, and they’re accepting resumes online. Your friend’s company happens to be a rival company of AT&T. You try to submit your resume, but you can’t access the company’s website. AT&T blocked it at the ISP level, and you didn’t know. You can’t submit your resume, you don’t get the job, and you remain unemployed.
A theoretical situation, yes, but one that could become a reality if net neutrality isn’t a stance that succeeds.
Another model that various ISPs have put forth is a ‘tiered internet’ in which your internet is not one steady speed. There are differing priority levels depending on the website that you visit. Some websites will be flagged as high priority, and you’ll be given full high speed access to those websites. Others will be considered low priority, slashing your download/upload speeds.
A tiered internet is another thing we absolutely do not want, because the power to set the priority system would not be in the hands of the users, it would be in the hands of the private companies. Time for another sample scenario.
Let’s say that you use Comcast. In this sample scenario, Comcast has partnered up with Microsoft (who is actually a supporter of net neutrality, but bear with me here). If a tiered internet were allowed, Comcast could set MSN Video as a high priority website, giving you full blazing download speeds like you’ve always had, maybe even a bit faster. However, your beloved Youtube? It’s a competitor, so Comcast could diminish its presence by putting it on a lower tier, giving you significantly lower download speeds there. Yeah, a tiered internet lets you surf MSN Video faster than ever, but if you go to Youtube you’re barely breaking dial up speeds. Tiered internet models could also open up even worse abuse: Making you pay extra to access certain websites. $10/month for Wikipedia, $5/month for Youtube, $20/month for Google… that sort of thing.
Net neutrality is a stance that ensures private interests do not have a significant impact on a residential user’s ability to access the internet. No ISP should be able to say, “We don’t want our users looking at this.”
Net neutrality is a real issue, and it’s one you should care about and get involved in. It’s something discussed federally. It’s something that’s gone before congress. Those that speak out against net neutrality often say things like, “Net neutrality regulations are unnecessary because we have no plans to block content or limit broadband performance.” That’s absolutely not true. It’s a line used to try and convince politicians that net neutrality is not an issue worth their time. It’s moot, because there’s no problem that needs regulating. Completely false. There are already companies that have intentionally stalled P2P downloads. ISPs that have tried to stop their users from using torrents by artificially throttling the downloads. Have you had problems torrenting something recently? There’s a chance it had nothing to do with how many seeds there were, but rather it was your ISP trying to discourage you from using torrents, whether you were torrenting something legit or not.
Yes, that sounds a lot like a crazy conspiracy theory, but it’s really not. It’s something that happens right now. The internet, right now, is in the hands of private companies, and those private companies want to control how you get your information, where you get your information, and what information you actually get. Net neutrality wants to disallow them from doing that, and give everyone equal access to whatever they want. The company I used in my sample above, Comcast? They’ve actually tried to stop all of their users from using BitTorrent. Luckily for us, the FCC told them they couldn’t do it.
Note that this also applies to things like instant messaging. Do you use AIM? What if Comcast told you that you couldn’t anymore? Did you find my blog through WoW.com? If so, I’m assuming you play WoW! Do you raid? Do you use Ventrillo? If AT&T decided they didn’t want you using Ventrillo anymore, they could stop you. Hell, they could prevent you from logging onto WoW. Net neutrality wants to make sure that they can’t do that. If you want to log onto AIM or Ventrillo or your favorite MMO, your ISP should not be telling you that you can’t.
If you want to know more about the topic besides what I have to say here, such as who’s for it, who’s against it, what the pros and cons are, by all means: Look it up. That’s what we’re trying to preserve. The ability to find the information you want. The ability to see both sides of a story, rather than just the story the people controlling the information wants you to see.
I strongly recommend you read this article on seven reasons why you should fight for net neutrality. I also suggest keeping an eye on FreePress.net, maybe even signing up for their newsletter. In fact, FreePress.net even currently has information on how you can contact your congressman to tell them that net neutrality is important to you. The best thing you can do if you support net neutrality is to speak up. Let congress know that it’s important that they get behind it. The internet is one of the driving forces behind modern living right now, and if we let it be taken away from us, we’ll be doing ourselves a great disservice. Do not underestimate what the internet does, and can do. Letting private companies mold it to their whims could have an impact on humanity as a whole, and that’s definitely not an exaggeration.
Fight for it.