Just testing the Democracy 2.0 poll system. Nothing exciting, just a simple question… What’s your favorite RGB color?
{democracy:2}
How Can They Ever Make Money?
Every time I see a YouTube video that’s circulating the ‘net, I always wonder… How do they ever plan to make money?
Advertising? I don’t see how that would ever effectively work… When was the last time you actually visited the YouTube site to watch a video? Everything I ever watch has been embedded in another webpage… I would never see any traditional form of advertising on their website, because I’m never there.
The only possible way I could see for them to ever integrate advertising would be to include it at the beginning (let’s face it, the end would just never work) of actual videos – or to force visitors to their website (by restricting off-site videos to crappy quality, or some type of ‘preview’ mode). Either way, I don’t think it would go over well with their target audience – an audience typically heavily anti-intrusive-advertising.
I don’t make it a habit of keeping up with these “Web 2.0″ companies on a regular basis these days, but can anyone tell me how any of these (similar) services are supposed to make a buck? Obviously they’ve been able to convince some big-money VCs that they can, I’m just still not seeing it…
If (Confusion.Equals(“Very”))…
I was looking through some source code for a class I was using, and found the following block of code:
if (provider.Equals("LOADEXTPROVIDER"))
{
OutputLine(" Assembly: " +
providerAssembly);
OutputLine(" Connection Class: " +
providerConnectionClass);
}
Now, the .Equals method has several overloads that take care of a variety of other potential tasks, but can anyone tell me why you would want to use this method for a textual comparison? Why not simply:
if(provider == "LOADEXTPROVIDER")
Are we just trying to accomodate varying coding styles, since we’re creating the method for other purposes as well? Is there actually a language out there that doesn’t support == (or simply = in farked up languages like Delphi)?
An Unpleasant Conversation
I had an unusually unpleasant conversation this afternoon that just entirely ruined my mood.
For just under 3 weeks now, I’ve been taking Ambien to help me sleep. Apparently you can take either a 5mg or a 10mg dose every day, so my doctor decided that it would be best to start with 5mg and see how we do (and by we I do, of course, mean me), rather than max out the dosage and have nowhere else to go. He also told me that if 5mg didn’t work out, not to worry about taking two a night if I really had to.
Well, I had to…
5mg was great, assuming I was already tired and half-way asleep when I took it. Now, you may be asking yourself why I would need medication if I were already half-way asleep at night. Well, you would be right, smart ass.
So, since I was taking 2 pills a night instead of one, I obviously went through my prescription much more quickly than anticipated. Since Ambien is a controlled substance, you can only get a prescription filled once every 30 days. Since I was still 12 days away from the 1-month mark, they wouldn’t let me get my refill Wednesday night when I tried.
Ok, now we have a problem. I’ve got a night and a half left (at 2 pills / night), and they won’t let me have anymore.
Well, fortunately the pharmacist is a really nice guy. Being quite familiar with Ambien, he knew that for someone of my body weight and age, 5mg wasn’t going to do crap (which was accurate). The regular (and recommended) prescription for those under 90 is 10mg. Being the nice guy he is, he offered to call my doctor and ask him to authorize me an increase to 10mg. It’d be a change in the medication level and a new prescription, so I’d be able to get my refill immediately.
Two days later, my physician finally calls the pharmacist back…. And says ‘no’.
So I call my doctor. His insanely hot secretary answers the phone and I ask as politely as I can if I could please speak to Dr. Stafford about one of my medications. She puts me on hold and a minute or so later, Dr. Stafford picks up. Here’s (give or take a word or phrase), the overall conversation:
Dr. Stafford: “This is Dr. Stafford.”
Me: “Yeah, this is Chris Meller. I just spoke with my pharmacist, who said he called to ask you about increasing my dosage of Ambien to 10mg, and apparently you said no…”
Dr. Stafford: “Yeah.”
Me: “Well… Why?”
Dr. Stafford: “You haven’t even gotten the prescription filled yet, and you’re wanting to increase it?”
Me: “Uhh, no, I got it filled over two weeks ago. I was just trying to get a refill, because I’d been taking two a night, and they said that because it’s a controlled substance, it was too soon. The pharmacist said that for my body weight, 5mg wasn’t enough, and offered to call you to get it approved before I ran out.”
Dr. Stafford: “You don’t go to the pharmacist about increasing the dosage, you come to me for that.”
Me: “Uhh, I was just trying to get a refill of the 5mg prescription. They wouldn’t let me, and he said 10mg was the proper dosage for me. Since you said that I could take two a night if I needed to anyway, I didn’t think it would be a problem and there was no reason to waste everybody’s time making another appointment with you.”
Dr. Stafford: [Long 30 second pause] “What pharmacy do you go to?”
Me: [I explain which one]
Dr. Stafford: [Another long 45-ish second pause] “See, the problem is, if we go up to 10mg, there’s nowhere else to go… That’s the most you can take.”
Me: “Well, what’s the difference? If 5mg isn’t working, how does it matter if I max it out, as long as it does what it’s supposed to do?”
Dr. Stafford: [Another 20-ish second pause] “Alright, you’ve got 10mg.” [Immediate hang-up]
Now tell me… Given what I’ve told you, was there any reason for him to be a prick about this? He told me that we could go up to 10mg if we needed to, and not to worry about taking a second pill each night if I needed it and one didn’t work. Then the pharmacist is nice and offers to call him directly to get the dosage increased when I need a refill, rather than me having to call the doctor and the doctor then having to call the pharmacist… Somewhere in all that, we decide to switch on jackass mode.
By the end of the conversation, I was one shot away from telling him to shove his 5mg somewhere and that I’d go find another regular physician who wasn’t an asshole when someone had a problem with their medication. But I was nice and simply let it play out… It did, however, have the side effect of ruining my wonderful mood and giving me an upset stomach. It’s amazing how one little conversation can cause your entire day to turn completely around, isn’t it?
Searching for a Firewall
Last night I upgraded our BellSouth DSL to their finally-available 6.0 Mbps service. The sales rep told me it would be speedier by the 14th, and much to my surprise, I woke up this morning to find a newly improved 6 meg connection.
Tonight I get home to spend a few hours enjoying twice my former bandwidth, only to reallize that my little DD-WRT-running Linksys router can’t keep up with demand. When my download kept “randomly” dropping by 200k/s, I started poking around to see what was up.
Turns out it was related to all the logging I had going (built-in logging, syslog, rflow, etc.) that was eating the processor of the wee little machine (load averages up in the 3’s on a router aren’t generally a good thing for your packet latency).
So, for now I’ve disabled all those “unnecessary” (but highly necessary) services on it to get things working. I’m now looking for a small fanless Linux box that will appropriately run one of the common firewall distros. At the moment, I’m looking towards m0n0wall, but if there are other opinions out there, I’d be open to hearing them (I’ve used IPCop in the past, but it looks like they may have died, since it’s been a year since a patch was released).
LinITX looks great, particularly their m0n0wall box and their beefier generic firewall box. Unfortunately, they’re based out of the UK, which means shipping is expensive and it could take forever to get it. My AmEx and constant desire for instant gratification don’t particularly care for either…
So here are my requirements:
Somebody out there has to have a good suggestion. I don’t have enough time to build this thing myself, so I want a pre-assembled (and preferrably m0n0wall-installed) appliance. Suggestions, please…
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