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musings of mark since 2001

This place at the top of the hill was only supposed to be for the summer, but now the property owner wants to make a deal until the end of April. Same price as now (too expensive for me anyways without a room mate) until November then it goes up another $150 for he increased electrical bills over winter.

Sounds okay at the outset, but come wintertime and walking up the four-wheel drive road in the mud will become rather onerous and it’s out of my price range. Anything over four or five hundred is actually too much for rent; this year is being on track to pull in about 10K, and that would put half my income towards rent, which is too much already.

It feels rather isolated up here too. One of the things I really like about Bowen Island is the sense of community and living so separate from it doesn’t feel right. If I could convince some one else to live up here though it might not be too bad, the rent would be affordable as well. The word of mouth thing hasn’t got any bites yet with August fast approaching so may take a chance and put an ad in the newspaper and see what comes out of the woodwork.

A pall of smoke hanging over the water all day from the forest fires up in the Interior, hanging out indoors getting the new Bowen Island forum up and running. Still go t acouple weird things happening on the old imported posts but the new ones are good to go as soon as the DNS changes are done.

It never ceases to amaze how gullible the American public are and how television has numbed them to the truth and the obvious. The video released yesterday of the 9-11 hijackers is a good case in point. Three years ago when they first showed airport cameras, they looked like every other security camera in existence and showed a time stamp on the bottom of the screen. This latest video, conveniently released just before the report highlighting at least 10 instances where the bad people could have been stopped does not have a time stamp – very odd unless they were taken with a regular video camera. The camera angle shown tries to mimic a security cam by shooting down from the top but they forgot to turn on the time stamp.

Update: 2004-07-23
Took a while to figure out what else is wrong with the airport video, probably because I haven’t been in a US airport in years, so looking through old airport security videos and news reports. Take a look at the large white boxes on either side of the video still. I thought they were the tunnels that do the x-ray on luggage but they are actually bomb detection units, which although common now were not used before 9-11.

They are running the pictures of the 19 Arab looking men again too. Conveniently forgetting that it was proven that at least six of the names and faces are for people still alive and well. The news of many of the passports conveniently found around the rubble of the WTC were forged is also forgotten; creating diversions and blaming them on Arabs is a well-known tactic of the Mossad.

Both President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair have each had to confront a damning report on the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war. Although both leaders still insist that the war was justified, Blair has since said “I accept full personal responsibility for the way the issue was presented and therefore for any errors made.” Bush has yet to make any such statement.

This past Monday, long time veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas took on White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan on the issue of responsibility.

White House Press Briefing, July 19, 2004.
TRANSCRIPT:

• Helen Thomas: Prime Minister Blair took full personal responsibility for taking his nation into war under falsehoods—under reasons that have been determined now to be false. Is President Bush also willing to take full, personal responsibility—
• Scott McClellan: I think Prime Minister Blair said that it was the right thing to do; that Saddam Hussein’s regime was a threat.
• Helen Thomas: Those were not the reasons he took his country into war. It turned out to be untrue, and the same is true for us. Does the President take full, personal responsibility for this war?
• Scott McClellan: The issue here is what do you to with a threat in a post-September 11th world? Either you live with a threat, or you confront the threat.
• Helen Thomas: There was no threat.
• Scott McClellan: The President made the decision to confront the threat.
• Helen Thomas: Saddam Hussein did not threaten this country.
• Scott McClellan: The world—the world, the Congress and the administration all disagree. They all recognized that there was a threat posed by Saddam Hussein. When it came to September 11th, that changed the equation. It taught us, as I said—
• Helen Thomas: The Intelligence Committee said there was no threat.
• Scott McClellan: As I said, it taught us that we must confront threats before it’s too late.
• Helen Thomas: So the President doesn’t take full responsibility?
• Scott McClellan: The President already talked about the responsibility for the decisions he’s made. He talked about that with Prime Minister Blair.
• Helen Thomas: Personal responsibility?
• Scott McClellan: Terry, go ahead.

Of course this exchange was not shown on TV

Yippee! Got the blog running on the new server and there was only a couple things to change so feeling pretty good about moving the Chamber of Commerce site over to the new server and not losing anything.

Got a phone call this morning from the president of Webnames.ca, the majority of their customers are corporate clients and now they want to break into the small business market and I’m especially suited for that myself so there’s deals in the making

Pretty happy with the C-Panel interface, a lot more control than the H-Sphere one that is being used over at datahive.ca and best of all I can now set up control panels for every client and they can do the mundane things that are hard to charge money for, like setting up new email accounts on their domain.

Time to get back to work…..

Another large earthquake in our area last night, the second in less than a week and close to the same area as well. Not quite close enough to Vancouver for major damage, but high-rise buildings were reported to have swayed for about 20 seconds.

Some kind of earthquake is happening at the datacentre that hosts our web sites as well. In the past couple weeks there have been two outages with no explanation or even a reply sent to their support desk, one of them was a DNS problem that lasted almost 24 hours which was totally avoidable and unacceptable. Now today there’s a third outage, at least this time they answered their phone and said it would be fixed in five minutes and they would call me back. And if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you….

Completely unacceptable for a web service that should have 99.9% uptime, especially when the problems are their own fault and not outside influences. In that light, I’ve decided to change the datacentre and am moving to The Planet in Dallas, Texas. The intermediary will be Hostgator.com out of Florida, they seem to be in the top four of all the forums and reviews I’ve seen out there and are running C-Panel instead of H-Sphere which will allow me to do some reselling myself.

Three hours later and they finally have the web server running. Mail server is still down though if you try to connect with a POP3 service which is what everyone uses. Looks like they lost a bunch of mail too as logging in to the server over http shows nothing in the Inbox, not even spam and that is definitely not a good thing. Will be glad to dump who ever the bums are that Travis Bell and Scott King sold their company to as soon as my money gets to Florida.