A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of Y.B. Finchless and Daughter, located on Vashon Island, in Puget Sound, Washington State, and still the only true home of Abs-of-Steel for Squirrels©®

"The demise of distance as the key cost of communications may well prove to be the most significant force shaping the next half-century."

dshield.org

The Internet Storm Center at SANS

Old incident logs reported by the FinchHaven datacenter firewall

Micro$oft and Sun Microsystems kiss and make up

Once again, the Register's Andrew Orlowski presents a very important analysis of the recent (04/02/2004) settlement between Micro$oft and Sun Microsystems

Once again, Micro$oft has bought its way out of serious trouble. Of course, with roughly $60,000,000,000.00 in cash reserves in the bank, that's not a problem for billg...

An analysis of the 2002 Micro$oft-DOJ "settlement"..

Andrew Orlowski of the Register® presents an excellent analysis of the November, 2002 "settlement" between the United States Department of Justice and Micro$oft, an analysis that should be read by anyone with any involvement with computers, whether they be a home user or an IT professional.

My thoughts about Trent Lott; the core beliefs of the American right wing; and the rhetorical evolution of the right wing over fifty years.

W. Ralph Eubanks in the Washington Post (12/14/02): "I knew exactly what he meant when he mentioned "all these problems" this month and talked about "the mess we are today" in 1980. It's not hard when you know where the seeds of Lott's words are planted..."

George Bush, Al Gore, and the Supremes!

Here's an analysis that should be read by anyone
who was confused by the presidential "election" of 2000.

What, you say: "Get over it" ?

Never -- that election set the foundation for any manner of mischief that we'll see for the "Next Four Years"...

Web hosting

• We've had our domain name "FinchHaven.com" registered through register.com since December 1998 -- and we were up and running for three years at SiteAmerica, and then one year at Feature Price, and then for a year at Eskimo.com up in Shoreline, WA.
  
  Now we're at pair.com, recommend by Kevin Rose of the Screen Savers on TechTV...

Well, at 04/2004, the problem with Eskimo.com is that they simply want 'way too much money for disk space, and with my growing photography business I need tons of disk space.

At Eskimo I was getting 100mb of disk space for about $270.00 a year.

At pair.com I'm getting 500mb of disk space for $180.00 a year, and I'm back to having PHP and some other good stuff..

So, off we go... be interesting to see how long the DNS change takes to propagate :-/

...and, the answer to that is it took about 12 hours for pair.com's nameservers to start to pick up traffic, and at about that time I started to pull down email from pair.com's POP server (after I had edited my .fetchmailrc...)

At 02/2003: It's taking a little while to get set up, particularily getting virtual domain hosting and getting nameservice from Eskimo North, but I think it will be worth it.

Major indication that Eskimo North is my kinda place: I emailed support@eskimo.com at about 10:50pm one evening, and five minutes later I get a phone call back to help me resolve my question!

When have you had a Helpdesk call you at 11:00pm at night?

When have you ever had a Helpdesk call you at all, for that matter?

And since I wrote that, I've exchanged three or four emails with the actual *owner* of Eskimo North, while he helped me get settled in..

When have you ever had the owner of your web hosting company email you to help you out?!

I tell ya, these are my kinda people...

• Given recent (January 2003) events, I have to edit my opinion of Feature Price:

Feature Price has been astounding! Within 12 hours of placing my order online, I had a static IP assigned and was able to ftp up an index.html and get started moving in.

Update at 06/02: Feature Price is still doing pretty good. Despite my having to yell at them several times about my mail feed suddenly going dark (I subscribe to so many mail lists that it's immediately obvious when I'm not getting any email..) they've always responded quickly and got things back running pretty fast...

Update at 01/30/03: Well, my relationship with Feature Price just suddenly went all to hell. What happened was, I lost track of when I needed to renew my annual web hosting, and Feature Price made no attempt of any kind to get in touch with me.

About Monday, January 28, I noticed I hadn't received any email since the previous evening. That's not surprising, since the biggest problem I'd had with Feature Price was email: either my email would stop completely and I'd have to send in a trouble ticket, or I'd receive a bounce notice from one of the many lists I subscribe to that list emails for me were being bounced by Feature Price.

I surfed to my home page and found this:

This web hosting account has been suspended until
action will be taken from the website owner.

This website is hosted by Feature Price Web Hosting.

If you are the owner of this website, please
contact the Feature Price billing department
at accounts@featureprice.com.

So my renewal date had passed, and they just shut me down...

...and since they had shut me down, I had no access to my email.

So, off to yahoo.com and my emergency email account, the one I had used when I first got set up with Feature Price..

But wait! Feature Price won't accept email from Yahoo!:

"Message from  yahoo.com.
Unable to deliver message to the following
address(es).

<accounts@featureprice.com>

Remote host said: 553 sorry, your envelope sender is
in my badmailfrom list (#5.7.1)
Giving up on 64.38.96.30."

So I surf to Feature Price's online renewal page, but wait! It doesn't recognize the account name/password combination I'd been assigned, so No Joy(tm)...

So I call their Sales number in Florida (long distance..), and after being admonished that I will not receive technical support at that number, I'm placed in the waiting queue because "they are busy helping other customers"...

So I wait, getting the "Please hold" message again and again, and after about three minutes (I'm not making this up!) the voice who at the first told me I would not be getting any tech support comes back on and tells me that, due to the very large numbers of customers they are helping, would I please call back at a later time  -- CLICK! --  and they actually hang up on me!

And I call back, and the same thing happens: they hang up on me!

And I call back, and the same thing happens: they hang up on me!

And I call back, and the same thing happens: they hang up on me!

I must have called twenty times, and exactly the same thing happens every time, and I never got through to anyone!

So I can't email 'em, I can't renew online, I can't reach 'em by phone...

What to do, what to do?

So, foolish me sends an email off to the administrative contact for the domain name "featureprice.com", and to billing@, and to accounts@, and to support@, telling them everything that's happened to me so far, including getting hung up on by their Sales phone number, and that I think they're doing "...a really shitty job of running their business..."

(Which is putting it mildly :-/ )

...and suddenly I get an email back, at Yahoo!:

From: "Travis Johnson - Hosting-Network, Inc."
<Travis@Hosting-Network.com>
To: f1nchh4v3n@yah00.com, laura@featureprice.com,
    sam@featureprice.com, ryans@featureprice.com
Subject: RE: suspended: **webhosting** for finchhaven.com
====FP CANCELLATION OF SERVICE FOR VIOLATION OF AUP=========
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 03:25:01 -0500

<snip>

You may not renew your account with Featureprice.
Please find a new provider.
You have now violated our TOS and AUP with 
abusive language found at http://www.featureprice.com/?c=14&p=8
and is what you agreed to upon getting an account with FP.

<snip>

So they've blown me away, completely.

And I think to myself: "Huh.. no great loss."

And I went off to Eskimo North, which I'd been thinking about doing for years, anyway...

• SiteAmerica's customer service was *so* poor (For example: they changed my POP3 mail server twice within two months without telling me, or anyone, apparently; their system status page was last updated in December of 1999(!); their Help Desk phone number just directs you to a web page and from that I've never received any response...) that, despite all the nuisance and work that it is, in January, 2002, we moved our web hosting to Feature Price, which came highly recommended by a friend of mine.
• Whoa! The real joke about SiteAmerica appeared on 06/11/02:
  
  "Register.com has made a business decision to discontinue its SiteAmerica web hosting services. As a result, Register.com will no longer be providing Web hosting services effective June 30, 2002."

Apparently they didn't notice that I've been gone since January...

They never sent me a bill.

ISP's

So, mid-winter 2003-2004 I signed up for Comcast High Speed Internet, and WOW!

Then about 4 weeks after I got signed up with Comcast they doubled the speed, so now it's supposed to be something on the order of 3meg down, 512k up, and again, all I can say is WOW!

You get to the point where you never think about downloading big pictures (I'm really into the Mars photos..) or downloading software.

I bought my own D-Link DCM-201 cable modem and just signed up for Comcast's basic installation, where the cable guy just heats up the cable and goes away, and it's your problem to get your computer(s) to talk to Comcast and vice versa.

For a while I kept thinking about adding another ISP, maybe going back to Northwest Nexus, or maybe getting dialup throught Eskimo North, but fortunately I waited long enough for Comcast to bring cable up to where I live, and I'm glad I waited..

DSL will never be an option where we're located (we're .8 of a mile up a dead-end road, and from *there* it's about 2 miles out to the Island Highway, and then we're about halfway between two access points at that...

Our original home page for FinchHaven was hosted at http://www.halcyon.com/~jsage/, starting in the fall of 1995, but in January of 1999 I redirected everything to www.FinchHaven.com at SiteAmerica 'cause I got really tired of trying to keep three web sites synchronized!

• We used to get 56K dialup Internet access from worldnet.att.net and we did have Daughter of FinchHaven hosted at home.att.net -- although everything now redirects to www.FinchHaven.com.

• And once a long long long time ago, starting about 1994, we got dialup access from halcyon.com/Northwest Nexus -- but Northwest Nexus' customer service deteriorated so much after their buyout by Winstar that I blew them off and switched 100% to AT&T.

As it turns out, at 06/02, I think Northwest Nexus has dropped/been dropped by (who dumped who?) Winstar:

"Northwest Nexus is a privately held company with 50 employees and more than $7 million in sales. We are happy to provide reference account information on request.

Headquartered in Bellevue, WA, the company maintains Points of Presence (POPs) throughout Western Washington and in the Spokane, WA and Portland, OR areas."

So maybe RalphS or Ed Morin are back in business...

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