everyday

Netflix has acquiesced to the pleadings and demands of their customers and sent out a notice that they will NOT be doing away with multiple queues. Yay! I was seriously concerned about this. I was worried that I may need to cancel my account, even though I truly enjoy the service. Good job Netflix, how about next time, you just don’t decide to cancel aspects of your service on a whim.

It is really hot in Southern California. The “record breaking heat” kind of hot.

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!

http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/statuses/839088619

You may have noticed some new graphics on the site, specifically the following in the upper left corner:

Up until this point, I have remained fairly silent regarding my thoughts about who should be our next President. I was very interested in the campaign of Ron Paul, unfortunately he has not received the Republican Party’s nomination.

I won’t spend a great deal of time here talking about why I think Barack Obama is the best choice, but I will say that I do think he is the best choice.

I received a notice from Netflix that, effective September 1st, they will no longer be allowing users to have more than one queue. LAME!

I currently have the “2 at a time” plan with 2 different queues. This allows my wife and I to each get one movie at a time from our respective queues. This is such a convenient feature that I am not sure I will want to continue using the service should they discontinue the multiple queues. I would like to know what bean counter came up with this brilliant way to increase profits. Perhaps I can provide some advice, reducing the costs to operate your service will be meaningless to your bottom line when your customers leave.

Here is a link to some very, very lame corporate marketing / used car salesman language Netflix is using to “sell” this feature removal as a “improvement” to their service. Ha!

Having just watched the Boston Celtics defeat the Los Angeles Lakers in the fourth game of the NBA Finals, I can confidently say that 34 is greater than 24. 34 being the jersey number of Paul Pierce of the Celtics and 24 being Kobe Bryant of the Lakers. While Kobe is most certainly one of the best, if not the best player to ever play the game of basketball, he was literally shut down by the very impressive defense of Paul Pierce.

The Celtics came back from a 24 point deficit to defeat the Lakers on their home court at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. This was a phenomenal come back spurred on by the Celtics coaches decision to have Paul Pierce guard Kobe Bryant, which allowed the Celtics to avoid having to double team and provide help to aid in the defense against Kobe’s amazing scoring ability. The combination of Paul Pierce gaurding Kobe and Kevin Garnett shutting down any open lanes to the basket really kept the Los Angeles Lakers off balance and allowed the Celtics to manage one of the biggest come backs in NBA Finals history.

In my work as a Network Administrator for a school district, I run into problems with email click-through marketing techniques rather frequently. The specific problem is with click-through tracking of email advertising campaigns. Since we are a school district that provides internet access to minors, we tend to filter our internet traffic rather heavily. This filtering wreaks havoc with most click-through advertising emails.

For instance, an email is received inside of our network with a link to:

<a href="http://www.rs6.net/?kna76dv978y34qtib33t897jk1bt4hq3fr897&site=www.theactuallink.com">www.theactuallink.com</a>

The user thinks that when they click on theactuallink.com that they will be taken to theactuallink.com, they are instead taken to rs6.net and then bounced through to theactuallink.com. This causes a great deal of frustration with our users. We constantly receive phone calls that our internet filter is blocking theactuallink.com, when it is in fact blocking rs6.net, and rightfully so.

I imagine that this problem will only increase as more and more companies increase the amount of internet filtering they do to comply with various laws and regulations. So, what is the solution?

I would highly recommend never, ever rely on a 3rd party to bounce your links through. If you need to track the effectiveness of an email advertising campaign, then invest the time and resources to roll your own tracking. That or use a tool like Google Analytics that will not break the link even if the tracking itself gets blocked. I know that a large number of the emails are generated by non-profit organizations or businesses with limited budgets that are running their email advertising campaigns through a 3rd party, but I think the time has come to abandon the 3rd party and either hire the talent or develop it from within to avoid losing your audience entirely. There are a large number of free, open source applications that will allow you to run email advertising campaigns so the cost for software would be negligible. Hardware costs and requirements are ever decreasing as well, so the excuses not to are few.

Photos can be found on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/celerity/sets/72157605209737298/

I know that the title probably makes no sense to any one of the 2 people who read my weblog on a semi-annual basis, but I have decided to try to post more stuff related to my work as a Network Engineer. That being said…

Today I ran into a problem with our Microsoft WSUS server. Recently I upgraded the WSUS from 3.0 to 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This is the second time our WSUS has been broken by an update. Usually Microsoft’s updates are pretty solid, but WSUS updates seem to be a tad iffy. The upgrade from WSUS 2.0 to WSUS 3.0 broke completely and I had to completely rebuild the server, luckily I run the WSUS on a virtual server using VMWare’s ESX server, so rebuilding it was very simple.

The particulars of the problem are that the client machines would not download updates! Normally I don’t check on the update status of machines very often, but I was creating a new image for a laptop and the thing just would not download updates. I check the WSUS log on the client machine and noticed that there was a 0×80190194 error. A quick search on Google pointed me to a number of forum posts that state this is an HTTP 404 (Page not found) error. Unfortunately, none of these posts had any information about a solution. A bit more searching led me to a post on Microsoft’s TechNet Discussion Groups that had the solution, Re: WSUS 3 sp1 do not distribute patches to clients in Windows Server Update Services (URL is rather deep and may be broken, no warranty). The noteworthy part of the post:

1. Create a new virtual directory called ’selfupdate’
2. Set the pathname to
   %programfiles%\Update Services\selfupdate

Hopefully Microsoft will put some more resources into testing the updates for WSUS, it is a really nice product, but the updates always seem to break it!

via: Inhabit

There is a really interesting article on Inhabit about Frasers Broadway. It is a highly sustainable development planned to be built in the middle of Sydney. Hopefully other major cities will follow suite, especially in the south-western US where urban sprawl has obliterated the natural environment.