wonko.com

Loren spent $500 on a pair of 80 year-old lederhosen while he was in Europe. WTF?

Flickr is, for the most part, a pretty usable web app with a decent UI, but one thing that's always bugged the crap out of me is the "click here to add a description" area under the image on a photo page. It doesn't appear until you mouse over it, so it's completely non-intuitive unless you already expect it to be there, and even though I've been using Flickr for over a year I still almost always start typing my image description into the "Add your comment" textarea, which is always visible. I hate that.

I'm quickly approaching burnout at work. The long hours and weekends are piling up as our release date approaches.

I need a vacation. I have a fast car that'll take me anywhere in the continental United States. Where should I go?

I've been giving serious thought to using Amazon S3 as a remote backup solution for both my personal data and Jetpants customer data (which is currently backed up to multiple servers of my own). The price is pretty much unbeatable. Unfortunately, when I tried to sign up tonight, I kept getting dumped to the error page pictured here.

If Amazon can't even keep their servers operating well enough to take my money, how can I trust them to keep my data safe?

The new Google Reader rocks my socks. I wasn't at all impressed with the old UI, but this one's brilliant.

Jetpants will be a year old this Sunday. A whole year. I'd say it's been a wild ride, but it hasn't really. It's actually been very, very tame. Running a (very) small web host is super easy. That's why I've done my best to keep it small; as soon as it becomes a medium-sized web host, it'll start being work.

Would you believe we had our first cancellation today? I hadn't really thought about it until now, but a year is a pretty long time to go without losing a single customer. I mean, it's not like there's a lot of churn when you have fewer than 20 customers and most of them are people you know, but still. Wow.

The weird thing is that I'm actually kinda happy about it. Not because he was a bad customer or anything, but because he switched to DreamHost. I'd be sad if I didn't think DreamHost was the best web host in the galaxy (possibly the universe). Hell, I've even thought of switching to DreamHost once or twice.

If I'd lost a customer to some doofus with a reseller account, I'd be pretty miffed, but losing a web hosting customer to DreamHost is sort of like losing a zooplankton-eating contest to a freaking blue whale. How awesome would that be?

The downside of all of this is that I didn't have any scripts in place to automate the account deletion process, since it never needed to be done before. I had to do all that crap manually. That sucked.

WordPress.com has announced a new VIP Hosting plan. You pay them a $500 setup fee and $250 a month and they host your WordPress blog. They say the service is aimed at people who get more than 100,000 pageviews a month, and they justify the jaw-dropping price by spouting lots of gibberish about load-balanced servers and backups and your very own domain name (ZOMG!).

I'm sure their load-balanced, geographically diverse servers are nice and all, but $250 a month? Plus a $500 setup fee? And all you get is a damn blog? And it's a damn WordPress blog on top of that? They're clearly targeting people who are:

1. Not at all technically-inclined (i.e., incapable of setting up a Blogger account)
2. Rich (or so popular that they can generate enough ad revenue to cover the ridiculous fees)
3. Gullible enough to believe they need a dozen load-balanced servers to handle 100,000 pageviews a month

Okay, maybe that last one is a stretch. Given WordPress's horrible performance, maybe it actually does need a dozen load-balanced servers to handle that kind of traffic. Whatever. If people actually fall for this thing, good on WordPress. There's a sucker born every minute, and who am I to say they shouldn't be parted from their money?

For the record, wonko.com averages over 200,000 pageviews a month and my server (for which I pay $99 a month in hosting fees) barely even notices. Could I withstand a Slashdotting or a Digging? Probably. All it takes is bandwidth and a smart static page cache. Unfortunately, it hasn't happened yet, so I can't say that with complete certainty.

But I can say with complete certainty that WordPress's VIP Hosting is a ripoff.

Last night I installed Mac OS X on my laptop (which is a PC). It involved a bit of tweaking and I had to short circuit two pins on the VGA port with a paperclip to get it to boot, but it worked. In fact, it worked almost perfectly except for the built in wi-fi card. I played around with it for 15 minutes and then the novelty wore off, so I blew OS X away and replaced it with the latest build of Windows Vista.

In two words: I'm impressed. Vista is long overdue and has been getting tons of bad press lately, so I expected to hate it, but I don't. Not at all. I really, really like it. The installer is fast, pretty, and simple compared to previous Windows installers and even compared to the OS X installer. I didn't have to configure any of my hardware; Vista detected everything and booted up looking and sounding perfect. The Aero visual theme is slick and clean looking, albeit just a tad sluggish due to my laptop's unimpressive video card.

There are little annoyances here and there (the useless "security" dialogs come to mind), but they're outweighed by the vast improvements that have been made in the UI. I'm still getting used to the idea of replacing menus with ribbon bars, but in most places it really does seem to simplify things. I'm not sure I like them better than menus, but I think they've got potential. I'm a lot more enthusiastic about other changes, such as the new Start Menu. I also really like the new Explorer UI; it's quite possibly the best file manager I've ever used.

In short, Mac OS X was nice and all, but Vista won me over. I may even like it enough to buy it when it's released. That would be a first.

I've perfected a new form of griefing in Day of Defeat: Source. When I'm not messing with the poor God-fearing boy scouts on the Christian DoD:S servers, I like to find new and interesting ways of teamkilling without getting punished. My new favorite method is the reverse teamkill.

It works like this: Join a server and choose a player with a reasonably high score to pick on. Hit ~ to bring up the console and type name Player , where "Player" is the player's name. The trick here is to add a non-breaking space at the end by holding Alt and typing "0160" on your number pad. Nobody will notice the extra space.

Play it straight for a few minutes. Rack up five kills or so and try to capture an objective or two. Then start punching your teammates. Be careful, though: you only want to hurt them, not kill them. Don't be too obvious about it, but don't worry if they catch you at it. Your goal is to get them angry enough that they start hitting back.

Before long, team chat will be rife with messages like "Player is team-hurting!" and "No I'm not! That's not me!" and "Ban Player!" Resist the urge to chime in. You want to be completely silent. Let the tension build.

Most servers have a revenge menu that you can use to punish people when they teamkill you. Use it! Once you've pissed people off so much that they start shooting you, the revenge menu is like a get out of jail free card. You can use it to kill your teammates, and the best part is that they get double negative points! Meanwhile, keep killing enemies to keep your own score up.

If there are admins around, you'll probably get kicked eventually. No worries, just move on to another server. If there aren't any admins, then someone will eventually call a vote to ban you. This is where things get really fun. The voteban menu on most servers lists players by name, and there's absolutely no way of distinguishing between "Player" and "Player ". Half the people who vote will probably vote for the other guy, leaving you in the clear. This will cause all sorts of exciting chatter as the original Player realizes he's being framed.

If you're really, really good at this, you can finish the round as the only player on your team with a positive score. And if that's not a worthwhile way of spending a Saturday afternoon, I don't know what is.