Archive for the “What's Up” Category

High Tech Monorails is a documentary I edited for my friend Rob Kelly.  It’s airing on Travel Channel and Travel HD several times this month starting Sunday at 7pm PST.  Set your TiVo and be sure watch it!

The show covers several of the world’s best monorails including the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal Germany, which was built over 100 years ago.  It also takes you to China aboard the 1.2 billion dollar mag lev that reaches 270 mph, and to Las Vegas where a monorail was built to connect the back side of the strip’s casinos.  And the film talks about how Los Angeles was offered a free monorail in the 60’s but turned it down due to pressure from the oil companies.  And it asks the question “why aren’t we using these technologies more today.”  All egos aside, it’s a delightful way to spend an hour.  I hope everyone gets a chance to check it out.

Hit the link to see a clip from the show… Read… »

Just an update on the wordpress virus.  After several hours of research followed by 3 or 4 hours of fixing, I’ve wiped out the virus and cleaned up the database.  I also implemented guvnr’s 10 tips to make wordpress hackproof.  (Ok if that’s not offering a challenge to all the hackers out there…)

The main advice everyone gives is obviously to update to the latest version of wordpress and all your plugins, but once infected it’s too late for that plan to help.  Other tips are to of course use a strong password and to disable the default admin user account.  But first I had to remove the ‘back door’ admin user – which was giving the virus access to my site. Then I went through the 10 tips closing up vulnerabilities where possible.

One place where I almost hosed myself was that somewhere in the process I accidentally reduced my admin account’s privileges to that of a normal author, without first creating a new admin user.  After that blunder, logging back in as admin was impossible – so there was no way to create a new admin user.  Ultimately I had to hack back in to my own site (via the mysql database) and create a new user with admin capabilities.  Ahhhh, technology!

Yes!  I just determined that tomorrowland.com has been infected. You can read about the attack here.  So the site might be up and down for a few days until I clean it up.  And then I’ll be on vacation for a week after that.

It’s a cleaver hack that somehow installed a hidden administrator account.  I noticed it when I wrote that last entry and when I clicked to set the author, an unknown author appeared.  Then further investigation showed that I have 2 administrators although the 2nd one shows for a split second and then disappears.

This is probably the reason dreamhost saw some odd activity on my site, however a simple google search could have told them what was going on.  I’m still glad I’m off their servers and moved on to my own.

Let’s just say that I won’t be doing any more business with dreamhost.  And I can’t recommend that anyone else do business with them either.  Without getting into the details they are responsible for tomorrowland.com being down for almost two weeks, and never showed any concern about it, or a real reason why it was shut down, which has lead me to finally move away from them and shared hosting to a dedicated server at another company.  Of course this brings new technical challenges, like maintaining a whole server, but it should be fun and educational and I expect that now we’ll be good for a while.

October 20, 2008 – now

Five days shy of a year ago I reinvented my blog, decided to extend myself some grace, just try to have fun with it, and focused the site on all the technology that’s in my life and makes our lives more fun.  Back then I made a commitment to myself to update my blog every day.  Except for weekends, holidays, and the occasional day here and there I did a good job keeping it up for quite a long while.

But for the most part blog posts were written very late at night.  And daily blogging wears on a person, especially when you see various levels of success (and failure) in terms of traffic, and basically no revenue from ads.  So over time my updates slowed and eventually came to a stop.

And let’s talk about ad revenue for a moment.  Because in my opinion Google AdSense is a scam for honest site owners.  (By honest I mean following the contract and not clicking on your own ads and not trading daily clicks with fellow bloggers.)  In the past year, from October 22, 2008 through October 15, 2009, Google AdSense shows that I gave them 103,994 page impressions.  Not too shabby.  In that year I had 225 clicks and earned $83.28.  However, because Google won’t cut a check unless you reach $100, I’ve not seen any of that green.

I also have other ads on my site.  I have an amazon ad that I made myself which links to Amazon using my associates code.  That ad has probably been there fore about 6 months, was clicked on about 5 times, and never resulted in a purchase, meaning no revenue.  I also had an ad for dreamhost, which also never resulted in any revenue.

This has led me to the idea that I might as well remove all the ads and just do it for the love.  The fact is that I’ve only ever had the goal of using the ads to cover the cost of the site.  And of course the cost just shot up 5 fold because of the server change.

Traffic

I won’t be shy with the rest of the numbers… On an average day (before the takedown of ‘09) I got about 400 unique visitors (as reported by Google Analytics), which I feel is a decent following.  In terms of web traffic and server usage this is a very small site.  To put it in bandwidth terms, last moth I used about 75 GB of bandwidth.  Again, a very modest number.  I now have a whole server mostly dedicated to serving this site.

Grace, Success and Failure

Grace came from the fact that I had been getting hung up on the possibility of making mistakes and it was causing a serious block.  So I decided to give myself the freedom to make mistakes, misspell words, have bad grammar, etc.  And luckily when I started no one was reading anyway, so who cared if I made mistakes.  The freedom is why I can write this entry off the cuff.  Because if I had to plan it out and write it properly it would never get done.  Grace to move forward and not care what people think.

Success and Failure is often self-judged by page views.  And once a random post gets a ton of hits overnight, that becomes the new standard by which all other posts are judged. What is weird is that the posts that I expected to get picked up by engadget or gizmodo and do well usually didn’t.  It wasn’t something that I could control.  And some of the posts that I put the most effort and love into also didn’t get a lot of hits.

The biggest hit is my review of the Sony Webbie HD camera, which as of today has been hit over 42,000 times.  And of course my dell mini 9 leopard install was also a hit at over 12,000 views (plus about 20,000 on youtube).  Oh and my favorite is a post where all I did was ASK if anyone has opinions on Plex vs Boxee vs XBMC.  That post has hit over 4,000 times and has high results in google.  And actually that one has made me want to focus more on the discussion of home media players, which I still plan to do.

Some of my ‘failures’ (ok, let’s call them disappointments) would be the Cat Genie review, which I worked hard on, and the paint on screen stuff – wow I worked REALLY hard on those posts.  But another disappointment was the first Podcast.  Without the 42,000 hits on the webbie camera post, these other numbers would have seemed respectable to me. But in comparison they’re poor and disappointing.  Perspective?  This post will get read about 10 or 20 times, and most people wont read this far.  So blogging has to be done for yourself and if people read it fine, and if they don’t fine.

The Podcast

The most recent change came in June when I posted what was supposed to be the first of many video podcasts.  I worked extremely hard on the video, had to put myself out there by being on screen, and then worked on customizing my own video player module.  I still have many plans for video and hope that they’ll be the future of this site.  But it will take me accepting the mentality that I had a year ago with writing and apply it to the videos.  I can be a perfectionist when it comes to video because it’s my field.  So we’ll see where that leads me over the next year.

I know… the site has been quiet.  Click to read why…  Read… »

My blog updates have been few and far between these days.  Fortunately this has presented me with several new ideas for posts, all which are “in queue” waiting to be written.  In the mean time NAB happened.  HOPEFULLY there are a couple of good posts that will come out of that.  For example, I think I’ve found the perfect solution to my storage quandary and if rumors are to be trusted I’ll be getting an advanced model to review.  It fits in the NAS category and I’m super excited about trying it out.

Read on to see what’s been going on plus twitter and some ideas I have for future posts…

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Less than an hour ago At 9:35 AM on Friday the 20th, I walked out my front door and saw this: Three contrails being left behind 3 very fast moving objects.  Is this what the apocalypse looks like right before the flash of bright light?

I live in a suburb of Las Vegas, which is near Nellis Air Force Base, some old nuclear test sites, and Area 51.  I’ve heard stories that casino hosts used to take their high rollers up on the roofs of the casinos to watch the nuclear testing. That sounds like a good idea – yeah, let’s do that.

But maybe these were just very fast moving jets. I managed to snap a few photos, but my camera couldn’t zoom in enough to get a detailed picture of the craft.  I can say that whatever they were they were moving extremely fast. They traveled across the sky, from the West to the East, in only about one minute. Hit the jump for more photos.

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In 1997 I had an idea for a website. My concept was to make a place where non-technical people could fill out a form and it would build a sub-site for them. I wanted it to be futuristic. A place or a land of the future, where people could have a digital home and connect with friends and family. My first thought for a domain name was FUTURELAND.COM, but at the time it was taken. So instead I registered TOMORROWLAND.COM. I’ve owned that domain name ever since. In 1999 I had a slight legal scrimmage with a certain theme park company, but my council helped me retail the domain name. The truth was that my use of the name TOMORROWLAND.COM was not in competition with a division of a particular theme park. No market confusion had happened up to that point – and it still doesn’t. I didn’t then and I still don’t get email at that address from people looking for something else. I get virtually no walk-on traffic. Like I said, I’ve had the domain name for almost 15 years – back before most people even knew what the web was. And for the record, TOMORROWLAND.COM, along with other web sites and intellectual properties, is owned by Bad Weasel, LLC.  It is, of course, in no way related in any way to any theme park or the gigantic mouse-run entertainment company.

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It’s been a rather busy week and it’s not going to let up any time soon. It’s probably better that I accept defeat right now. I’ll be back next week with a review of the Harman/Kardon AVR254 and some discussion of 7.1 Audio. In the mean time here’s a nice little distraction…

While it’s been quiet here the last few days at Diffusion (at michaelsmith.tv), I’m actually working on prepping 4 different posts all at the same time.  Everything has been in a state of almost being finished, but none of them are done enough to publish the posts.  Here’s a quick status report of what I’m working on:

1. On Monday I got ahold of a Harman/Kardon AVR 254 7.1 home theatre amplifier. Then Wednesday I bought new speakers to go with it. So I haven’t posted on it yet because it’s not fully set up.  Remounting the new 5.1 speakers is enough of a job but now I also have to find room for the 2 additional ones.  One of them is requiring me to run a wire under the hardwood floor.
2. That has lead to an article about 5.1 and 7.1 but I’m still researching it a bit. It may be folded into the same post as above, but again, still working that out.
3. The folks at Paint On Screen liked my bog on screens being overrated so much that they sent me a gallon of their product.  I’ll be testing it side by side with the white paint I’m already using.  We’ll be painting half the wall on Saturday, testing Saturday night, and then finishing the job on Sunday.  Will the $200/gallon paint out perform the $30/gallon paint?
4. The new Sony Webbie HD camera – unboxed and reviewed.  I’ll also be posting some actual .MP4 files so you can see for yourself if it’s good or not.  Surely it’s worth the low $200 price tag, but check the RSS feed to find out.