I finally bit the bullet and got an Audible.com account. This may have been a very bad thing for me to do. The first audiobook that I got was “Turn Coat” by Jim Butcher. Now I want to get all of “The Dresden Files” books in audio format. James Marsters reading was excellent.

Being able to “read” a book while working on things around the house, while running cat5 at work, on the drive to and from work…

There are quite a few books that I am looking forward to reading, including the Shannarra books by Terry Brooks. The real question is going to be if I can get by on 2 credits a month, or if I will end up buying more books than that.

I normally think of myself as pretty savvy and able to spot a scam from a long way off.

Yesterday, I let my guard down.

A kid showed up at the door, typical just out of high school type, drinking a NoS energy drink and talking at 100 miles per hour. He was going door to door selling magazine subscriptions for US soldiers over seas. It’s tax deductible. He gets points towards a trip to Cancun and paying for part of his tuition next year.

He seemed so sincere. I said, “Sure, we can do two of those.” He continued on with his spiel, including things like “Checks are held for 2 weeks before depositing” and “You’ll receive a letter in the mail thanking you.”

We handed him the check, he handed us a receipt, he left.

Then I started to think about it a bit more. I read the fine print on the receipt. I started to get that, “Oh crap” feeling.

I looked up the name of the company on google.

“Face to Face Technologies, Inc” aka “FTFT, Inc.” aka “Dynasty Technologies, Inc”.

First hits are for scam and fraud reports. Oh crap indeed.

I emailed some friends and family who have worked with the VA before and asked if they had heard of this program. I went to the VA website and used their web form to ask if FTFT, Inc was associated with them.

Then I went to bed for some very troubled sleep, waking a few hours later. In my email were two responses, one from the VA saying that they were not affiliated with FTFT, the other telling me to cancel it as soon as possible since it was a scam.

So I called the bank, put in a stop payment on the check. Then I filled out the cancellation form on the receipt, just in case they honor that. It will be mailed later this morning, with delivery confirmation. According the the terms on the cancellation, it must be postmarked no more than 3 days after the original purchase, including Saturdays. Not much time to try and get out of this.

After doing that I thought about this scam. It’s really quite clever. Since you are buying the subscription for someone else, you don’t expect to get anything from it. It hits the heart strings of many due to it being “for the troops”. That it was a kid trying to “work his way through school” didn’t hurt either.

I think I will be adopting my friend Adam’s response to someone asking for donations, especially going door to door. “Send me some literature through the USPS mail, and I will consider it.” or “Sorry, but our budget for charitable contributions has already been met for the year.”. Which in all honesty, it had been. We have a finite amount of money that we give to several charities, but I thought this would be an ok one to splurge on… it’s not like we were signing up to pay for this every year, it was a one time charge.

We’ll see if it actually gets cancelled or if I get to play games with these people later on.

I’m lazy. I don’t want to do the things on my todo list. I find myself thinking “if I could just get things into $gtd_software everything would be better”.
Down this road lies madness! But there is a part of me that keeps asking, “But would it be less crazy than my current, obviously not working system”.
Even if the “not working system” is my will power to just do the things on my todo list.

I wish I could sleep when I really wanted to. Instead, my brain decides to take a tour of any random event or past thought. And I do mean any.

Some of the things my brain has decided to rehash today (yes, instead of sleeping)….

• The Acting Company of Hibriten High School 1994 performance of “Romeo & Juliet”
• Do I have a fiber to go from patch panel A to patch panel B at the office?
• Why don’t I write a blog post about the music I have been listening to lately and why I have been listening to it?
• Why can’t I sleep?
• I should clean my office.
• I should clean my office at home, too.
• Why didn’t that port work this morning during the overnight maintenance?
• I need to order “Small Favor” by Jim Butcher.

Yes, some of these things are “todo” list items that I should probably have on a todo list so that I stop thinking about them. The problem with that is, once I start making a list, I obsess about it. Which means I don’t sleep anyway. So what do I do? I fire up the laptop, look at my rss reader, facebook, twitter, email and then fire up a blog post.

Oh yeah, reaaaalll productive.

Anyone have a location of the Insomnia Fairy? I have something I would like to discuss with that individual.

This past Friday, I went to a going away gathering for a friend that is moving to upstate New York. A few years ago this would have been a much bigger deal to me than it is now. Even though we both lived in Southern Wisconsin it seems that for the past year or two we have seen each other only a handful of times, and those were usually at a LOPSA-Madison meeting.

We didn’t get together and just have dinner like we used to. We would “talk” to each other over IRC a couple of times a week, so there was still a connection. And it didn’t feel like we weren’t spending time together, because, well, “I just talked to Jesse on IRC”.

Over dinner for his going away gathering, we even made the comment that we would still “talk” to each other just as much, and probably end up seeing each other just as much as well. The days of someone moving a couple of hundred miles away making them “gone” are, well, gone. Email, instant messaging, IRC and video conferencing have made the world a little smaller. There are people that I have never met “in real life” or “meatspace” that I nonetheless feel a real connection to. I talk to them on a mostly daily basis. They live all over the world. One is a System Administrator for an all girls school in the United Kingdom, someone else is in Qatar. Others live in less exotic places like Pittsburgh, Los Angels, North Carolina, et cetera.

I don’t feel like I need to actually be in the same physical room with someone anymore to feel like we have had a meaningful exchange of ideas. Or even to just “hang out”. I spend time each week with people on the World of Warcraft realm Misha that I have never shared a physical location with. We communicate in text and using VoIP software. We laugh and tell jokes and strive together to accomplish goals.

Only communicating with someone with the aid of a personal computer doesn’t seem as fantastic as it did 15 years ago. In the late 1980’s when my family moved to Southern Africa, it really was “going away”. I still have not reconnected with some people that I knew before we made that move. Others I have reconnected with thanks to email and websites like Facebook. Has anyone else thought about this? Or do we just accept it? There are people that are using these forms of communication now that have always had them available. The idea of writing a letter to someone and then sticking it in the mail box seems anachronistic to them. Yet for hundreds of years that was the only way to communicate long distance. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the telegraph came into wide use, and that was largely killed off in the 20th century by the telephone. In February of 2006 Western Union sent the last telegram.

When will the last email be sent? What will replace it?

I have been reading Wil Wheatons blog off and on for several years. His stories and things that interest him seemed to always be not quite what I expected. I was kind of thrilled to follow some of his tweets and see that he is a a Led Zepplin fan.

Then I saw a tweet a few minutes ago that he was putting a PDF version of his latest book up for sale for $5. I told myself, “Self, you should go buy that!”. Then I did a dumb thing. I went to his blog instead of following the link in his tweet.

There, was a post about an artist named Zoë Keating. There was a youtube video embedded, so I hit play. I totally forgot about the tea that I had just started steeping upstairs. Like 20 minutes later I finally went upstairs and got it. I spent those 20 minutes listening to the youtube video, then reading her website and blog, then going to iTunes and ordering both of her albums.

So now, I am going to sip my tea, listen to Zoe Keating, and hopefully make it back to Sunken Treasure.

In a tweet from LeoLaporte, he linked a blog post from Mark Zuckerberg where Mark explained that they were pulling the previous version of the ToS out of revision control and putting it back into place until they can come up with a better one. Way to go for public pressure and outcry!

I’ll be honest, until the recent discussion about the changes that facebook.com had made to the terms of service, I haven’t thought about it since I started using it. I won’t say since I signed up, because I did that initially with no plans to ever use it except to look at some pictures that a friend had posted there of his house.

Later on, a few other friends found me on facebook and so I started to slowly use it. Adding friends from High School that I had long ago lost touch with, even connecting up with someone that I went to gradeschool with! It was all kind of fun and exciting, creating links back to people that I just didn’t have the time or inclination or resources to track down before.

But now, with the changes to fb regarding content, I am unsure if I want to continue using it. As I look back at things I have done on fb, I discover that the main thing that I have been doing is just updating my status, and reading what friends are updating for their status messages. I don’t need fb for that. I have a blog. I also have a twitter account. With those two thoughts in my head, I have been kicking the idea around of either killing off fb entirely, not that they will delete the small amounts of content that I have put up or of just piping my twitter updates to it along with my blog posts and not going to facebook.com at all anymore. But would that be enough?

I know that it is too late to get the genie back into the lamp, I have far too much information on the intarwebs from mailing lists, old websites, et cetera. But I am trying to think more about what I put out there, even if I can’t un-ring the bell.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I do want to feel connected to people, even if it is in a superficial, in passing kind of way. I am on multiple IM networks, I am on IRC almost any time that I am awake. I check my email with the kind of compulsive habit that I wish I could apply to other parts of my life. And of course I also play World of Warcraft, which has a whole list of other people, blogs and forums that I “connect” with in some way.

After much thinking about it (I started this blog post several hours ago, then went to bed), trying not to be hypocritical or to jump on a somewhat popular bandwagon, I am going to keep my facebook account. I will just be little more careful about what I put on there, and most likely will try to integrate twitter and my blog into my life a little more.

After reading a blog post again that a … well, I can’t say we are friends anymore, it’s been a long long time since we had a meaningful conversation, lets call him a possible new-old friend. Anyway, he posted about using Blog RSS Feed Reader fb application, so I am going to follow his lead and see if it works for me.

I just watched “Bill Gates Unplugged” and I liked some of what I saw.
Having lived in Swaziland when I was a kid, malaria is more than just something I have read about. My father is a teacher right now in Public schools, so the issues that we have with our education programs in the USA is again, more than just something I have read about.

One of the things that Mr. Gates suggested was to use cameras in every classroom. On the one hand this sounds like a great idea, and I realize that there is little to no expectation of privacy in a classroom. However my fear is that once people get used to the idea of being “spied” upon, they will accept and even welcome, more and more scrutiny into their daily lives. That said, I am hard pressed to think of a more scalable way to accomplish what he suggests of having classroom content recorded and available for anyone to review.

I know several people, many of them teachers, will feel threatened by some of the ideas that Mr. Gates brings forth. Including that after three years of teaching there is little, to no improvement in a teachers ability. Or that having a Masters degree does not mean you are a better teacher.

I think I may have to have a chat with my dad about some of these ideas, since he is a teacher who has been doing this for more than three years and has a Masters degree.

The Setup:
“Gruber mentioned today that he contributed to The Setup on waferbaby. Cool idea—I love seeing how experts in the field do what they do…”
(Via The Weekly Review.)

So do I.

Since I have heard about Mr. Gruber from multiple sources, including Merlin Mann of 43folders.com fame, I decided to go check “The Setup” out.
Oh dear.
I found toys!

Caffiene keeps the display from going to sleep. Yay! I had been using a custom power profile and shoving the mouse all the way up in the top right hand corner to keep the screensaver from kicking in while watching Netflix “Watch Instantly”.

And because I was looking into mac software again, I decided to see if GnuPG for Apple Mail was updated yet… low and behold, it is!

Which lead to my next must have feature in a mail client, the ability to have multiple “identities” or at least From: addresses. A little more searching on the net and voila! Just have to add email addresses separated with a comma to the Accounts -> Email address field.
I can’t believe it is that simple.
Now if only this setup will be stable, I guess only time will tell.