Here is the story.

A few weeks ago i found out that a good friend of mine was moving out of state and selling his motorboat. Highly interested in purchasing said boat, I began to search online to look at comparable boats for values and some sites on boating accessories. I needed to find out what the actual cost of boat ownership was.

Like all good searches, I started out with google. I looked for the same model boats out there and ended up on sites like boattrader.com and others. Naturally, I hit some of the other sites out there like boat.com, which is really just a captive search site getting ad money for links that you click on while visiting.

I found some very good information on boat parts, covers, registration info and going sale prices. Good for me!

Then it happened. One Saturday a couple of weeks later, I received a catalog from Overtons.com in the mail. That is postal mail, mind you, not email. I was a bit surprised at the timing of this, as it seemed to fit in pretty well with my needs, but was totally unsolicited.

I next asked my friend and neighbor if they had signed me up for the catalog. Neither did. So now I am pretty shocked that somehow, Overton’s received my Personally Identifiable information, including my name and home address, apparently from search and surfing the web.

Being the Network Security person that I am, I decided to start the hunt for data. First, I started off by simply calling Overton’s to ask them why I was added to their mailing list. The operator there was nice, but she did not know why I was added. She suggested the basics, like it was a mass-mailing for the area. Well, that’s not an option, because Colorado doesn’t have that much water to send unsolicited magazines to non-boat owners.

I then sent an email to Overton’s from their online web email form, asking for assistance with finding out how they added me to the list. A nice gentleman responded that they purchased it from a 3rd party marketing company. This company seemed to be a large marketing company and I realized I probably wouldn’t get anywhere with that lead.

Next I decided to try and back-track my steps with Firefox and NoScript, wondering if this would show anything cookie-wise that might shed some light on the situation. I started off with my original search terms on google.com. One of the early sites I came to was boattrader.com. Using NoScript, I found this site to have a cookie from addthis.com.

I did some research on this domain and found the Registrant information from whois:

Domain Name: ADDTHIS.COMDomain Name: ADDTHIS.COM

Domain Name: ADDTHIS.COM

Registrant:

Clearspring Technologies

8000 Westpark Drive

Suite 625

McLean, Virginia 22102

United States

I then did a google search for “clearspring technologies” and found a wikipedia page that discusses them. One of the comments on the wiki page mentions the methods they use for gathering data:

Well, that certainly seems like a smoking gun to me! Here is one of the websites that I visited AND they have a cookie for addthis.com AND that is run by Clearspring Technologies AND (at least) wikipedia mentions that they actively track users personally identifiable information for sale to direct advertising.

The scary thing is, I can’t verify that this is indeed where my information was stolen. They could have stolen other cookies on my computer that may have had some additional information they used to find my personal data. It’s pretty hard to tell at this point. But the fact remains that someone sold my information, without my knowledge or consent and sent me materials in the mail that I did not request. That should be a scary concept for people that are searching for things other than boats.

Put this in the larger context with all of the news on Privacy with Facebook here, here and here and Google grabbing people’s WiFi data and people should definitely be concerned about what data they share and with whom. It isn’t a question of IF someone will use your information, it is WHEN. My catalog is proof!

That’s pretty amazing compared to the days long past where you had to mail in an ad to some local ad seller, hope it was published in the next edition and that you would get any calls on it.

My favorite thing about it is how you can easily give things away. Just because I have no use for something does not mean it should be thrown away! The best part about that is, things don’t get tossed into the trash and landfills, nearly as much as they would have in the past.

Just yesterday, I decided to give away a car battery charger. I had recently replaced it with a new 3-stage charger to take better care of my expensive deep-cycle batteries for a camper. Those are just too expensive to buy and no one wants to waste a battery that can not be easily recycled.

In fact, I had been given the charger years ago (about 11). It’s still a perfectly fine charger and I have taken great care of it – no rust, corrosion, etc. It only makes sense to give it away again to someone in need.

Here’s a snapshot of my original post acceptance email and the first response:

How about that? 7 minutes from post to purchase! Now someone else has a tool they can use.

Perhaps if we all took better care of our household items, others could get fair use of them without the need to buy new things all the time?

Update: It’s been a few weeks now using the new drive. All things work great and even seems a bit faster with response times. As of right now I have:

• 40 30-minute shows in SD
• 15 1-hour shows in SD
• 16 1-hour shows in HD
• Total: 34 hours SD and 16 hours HD
• Space remaining: 89%

Bring on the Olympics!

I’ve been a subscriber to DirecTV for the past 8 years. Last year we were forced to purchase a new TV when lightning stuck near the house and killed my 1995 Sony 27″ Trinitron… R.I.P.

We upgraded to HD and received the DTV HR20-700 HD DVR. While this was a fantastic upgrade in picture quality, it was also a downgrade from my previous DirecTV Tivo unit. I still miss the quality of the Tivo, but DTV is getting much better with their own DVR software.

Anyway, with the French Open Tennis ongoing and the 2008 Olympics coming up, there is no way we can continue to get by with the 320GB internal drive. That only holds approximately 50 hours of MPEG4 HD video and with so many HD channels on DTV now, it is very easy to fill that up.

So, I finally decided to try to add an external eSATA drive to expand my storage capacity. Searching on the DTV forums web site I found many articles like this one:

http://forums.directv.com/pe/action/forums/displaypost?postID=10370752

Many of the articles there will refer you to this external site:

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=92029

I decided that the Costco WD MyBook 1TB was probably not the way to go, after hearing all the stories on the forums (although I am quite sure that non-technical people just plug things in an expect them to work, then cry when they don’t understand what’s happening…).

Anything less than 1TB in the upgrade would be useless.

I ended up heading over to microcenter and picked up a WD Caviar GP 1TB SATA hard drive and a Nexstar 3 external SATA->eSATA/USB case for it.

The nice thing about the case is, no fan to make lots of noise (let’s hope the case and heatsink can keep the drive cool enough) and it also has USB, so I can easily use it on my laptop if things fail to work for some reason.

I open the drive and change the jumper setting to drop it down to 1.5Gbps from the default of 3Gbps. According to posts on the dbstalk.com forum.

I then mounted the drive on the case tray, which was very easy to do. Just slide it into the sata connector and use the provided screws to hold it in place.

Here is a picture from the back of the external case. It has a power switch, USB and eSATA connectors.

After I put it all together, which simply consists of sliding the drive tray into the case and securing it with 2 screws, I tested it on my MacBook Pro with USB. It was recognized OK, but had no filesystems on it. I left it unformatted and went into the family room to test on the DVR.

I used the DTV menu to reset the box. Once it was rebooting, I pulled the power plug on the DTV DVR.

I plugged the power cord in for the new drive and connected the drive to the DVR using the eSATA cable that came with the case (that cable is about 2.5 feet long, BTW). I turned on the drive for a few seconds so it could power up, then plugged the DVR power cord back in again.

The DVR booted up and while it was booting, I could see the blue light on the external drive case flash on occasion. Once the system was up, everything seemed to work OK. I had no previous programs, since they are on the internal drive and that is no longer in use. while watching live TV, I could see the activity light on the drive flash as it was writing out the live buffer to disk.

Sweet!

I had to remove the drive after this little test, so my wife would not miss any of the programs on the internal drive. I simply reset the DVR, unplugged the power and removed the eSATA cable. When the DVR rebooted, it had all of our previously recorded programs on the internal drive.

Next I took the drive back to my office and plugged it into my laptop again, using the USB port. The drive showed up, but OS X can’t mount any of the partitions on it. I examined the drive with Disk Utility. Here are the screenshots of the new partitions for the DVR drive. The layout of the 3 partitions is:

• 517MB
• 15GB
• 916GB

I will post some follow-up with stability information once I have this setup running for a while.

This led me to clutch in (it’s a 5-speed manual) while going down hills, while still maintaining the speed limit. I also plan my trips, knowing where I am going and the best routes to get there. Finally, I really try to do what’s best for traffic patterns. One thing that I have found to be a huge benefit is reading the lights ahead and coasting up to a red. I always think of the U2 lyric “running to stand still” when doing this.

However, all around me, I see people with horrible driving patterns! Here I am trying to squeeze out every extra MPG, while people all around drive with reckless abandon! Here are some things I notice with others driving (and this is the MAJORITY of drivers, not a small fraction):

• Full acceleration leaving a light. These are large mini-vans (oxymoron?) and large SUVs
• Accelerating towards red lights! It’s obvious that the light turned red and you are a good distance away, why do you keep on the gas??

Those are the major issues I see on a daily basis. If people would only adjust their driving patterns a slight amount, the percentage of fuel used in the US could be dramatically reduced (1-2% is a HUGE difference).

Maybe some day, everyone will have at least a 28.8MPG long-term average like I do…

Just this week, Qwest Communications announced plans to roll out a new fiber to the home (FTTH) service in 28 markets. Initially, I thought, “wow! I can get more than 3Mbs of speed!,” but then I realized, this plan might not make a lot of sense for many providers and customers. These two new packages are the Quantum (20Mbps) and Titanium (12Mbps).

The plans are $99/month and $49/month, respectively, if you bundle the service with your home phone line. Overall, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal, but will it really work? And if so, for how long? It does not take many subscribers using these links to the full capacity to quickly make Qwest re-think their costs and speeds.

So what will likely end up happening? My guess is that these lines will end up being rate-limited, especially during peak times of day. This will surely generate numerous complaints by consumers that they “paid for 20Mbps and expect 20Mbps at all times.” So why not be creative and offer service-specific offerings that people are willing to pay more for, but not cost the provider in expensive CAPEX funds for new interfaces and routers?

For example, I primarily work from home. I have a 3Mbps line that isn’t bad, but I would love some additional bandwidth for downloading ISO images. I would also enjoy more speed for VoIP calls and if my VPN were a priority, it would make working from home even better.

So how about this for a plan?

I primarily use my line during the day, which is typically the lower trough of traffic from a broadband subscriber. Give me this:

1. 5-10Mbps link speed down
2. 1-3Mbps link speed up
3. from 6AM to 6PM, prioritize my VPN/IPSEC traffic and VoIP
4. from 6PM to 6AM, put me in a big bucket with everyone else with limited bandwidth for applications hogs, like P2P.

Sounds like a Win-Win to me!

The provider gets to fill up their links with more traffic during the day.
I get great VPN and VoIP traffic during these hours.
The provider gets some relief at the peak hours of usage because I agree to be limited.

What’s wrong with that picture? Both parties get something good (me bandwidth when I need it most and the provider gets more revenue) and that makes for happy individuals.

Something to think about, I guess.

Copying the 10GB image to the card was no problem and I really like how the card sits right inside my computer and doesn’t stick out like a USB flash drive.

Once I started running the parallels image, however, I realized that my goal would not be met with this device. Parallels ran OK, but running applications, menu actions, etc, were all painfully slow. I am 99% sure this is due to the nature of parallels and the speed of the card.

Parallels uses a single harddrive image file for your guest OS. In my case, that is Windows XP. This is an image of about 10GB for my use.

This design causes lots of “seeks” in the file to locate the application or whatever data it is you need to run. I’m sure that the seeking for data in the flash drive was just too slow for normal everyday use. Perhaps if my guest OS was only 2GB, it would work fine, but you will never get that with XP unless you have no applications installed…

I decided to move my parallels image back to the internal hard drive and just move things like iTunes music and some other large directories to the SSD card. This has freed up about 14GB on my internal drive, which I am more than happy with. My overall satisfaction is high, as I met my goal of getting more space on my laptop, but my desire for a faster parallels image is not going to be met with this solution.

I run Parallels software for Microsoft Windows XP. This is, unfortunately, a requirement for work. Being as I only have about 4GB free on my drive, I really need to offload the XP drive somewhere else. That will both free up about 8GB on my drive for more iTunes songs/podcasts and photos.

I just ordered a Lexar ExpressCard 16GB model to try out. Some reviews say the speed is too slow to use, but no one has really used it with Parallels images, yet.

That will all change! Once I get it in, I plan to move my 8GB drive image to it and see how well it performs. My hope is, the disk I/O on my internal drive will decrease and have less contention than it does today, slowing down both XP and OS X at the same time.

I will post back here with updates as it arrives and I can begin testing.

See you back soon!

The iPhone simply does not do the things that I need a “smart” phone to do for me.

Sure, I’ve held one, played with it, enjoyed the awesome looking screen and marveled at the touch-screen capabilities, however it just does not do the things that I really need a phone to do. What are these magical things that hundreds of thousands of other users didn’t end up needing? It’s a pretty short list, really. I’m just not willing to pay $600 for a phone that doesn’t do the few things I need it to do. (OK, I admit, if I had the spare cash to drop, I’d get one)

Multiple Voice-mail announcements selected by a setting on the phone

What this really means is, I want to record several different voicemail announcements for people that call me. Some examples might be, “I’m in a meeting right now” or “I’m currently traveling and will get back to you when I am back on the ground.” Each would be pre-recorded ahead of time and all I need to do is change a setting on the phone to pick which one. Now, when I’m in a meeting, the person calling me would get a message stating that I am in a meeting and hopefully won’t call 5 times in a row.

Another good use is to have custom greetings per contact. Wouldn’t it be nice if when you call your wife you get a personal vm?

A calendar that actually works when you move to other timezones

OK, maybe this works on the iPhone today. I’m not really sure and haven’t read anything online that would indicated that it does. I need a calendar that, when I have a meeting that was set for 9 AM MDT, if I am now on the west coast, that meeting will automatically be moved to 10 AM PDT. My “smart phone” today runs Windows Mobile 5.0 and doesn’t even get it’s time from the cell towers.

Multiple options for sending a call to voice-mail with custom greetings

Why do phones still only have two options? You either answer the call or ignore it and it goes to voice-mail. How about letting me have a couple of custom selections that would pla a pre-recorded voice-mail greeting to the caller? Like, “I’m in a meeting and can call you back in about 30 minutes” or “I am quite busy now, please leave a message and I will get back to you when I have a moment.”

Wouldn’t that be nice?

I know that the iPhone has a lot of potential. Apple has done a great job so far, but it’s far from revolutionary until I can make it do all the things I want it to do.

The particular commercial that came on was the one where the two guys order the mini-banana splits and the passenger tries to pay for it with “mini-money.”

Something seemed really odd about the show, so I took full advantage of Tivo and rewound the commercial again. Sure enough, this is what I saw:

I think it is pretty obvious that the seatbelts used in the commercial car are fakes! The guy in the passenger seat moves all around with what looks more like a crossing guard stripe from gradeschool than a seatbelt! Here is another photo:

If you zoom in on the corner where the belt should be attached to the car, I think you can see the real seatbelt has been pulled back into the rear seat and strapped down out of sight:

Call me crazy, but I can’t imagine why they would put fake belts on for the commercial, unless they needed to move around for the camera and the real belts made that difficult. Anyway, thanks to Tivo for making TV useful and thanks to Sonic for making some really funny commercials!

These needs are acceptible to us and we gladly, if not tiredly, try to fullfill them on-demand. This got me thinking about how many needs we have in todays fast-food and instant gratification society. Has life always been like this? It seems that in the past, people were more accepting of lines and taking their turns while being considerate of others. Today, that does not seem to be the case.

When people go out for dinner it is unacceptible to wait for more than a few minutes for a table. Even fast-food can not be quick enough. We can not even park our cars to enter the restaurant and order, we need to have a drive-through so we can stay in our cars.

Driving on the highway and roads is a “me first” type of event. I can not count the number of times I see people that continue to pass in lanes they know are merging ahead while others are passing on the right, well-exceeding the limits. The automobile seems to lend a level of anonymity that lets people cut in line.

At the gas station we pay at the pump to avoid the time-consuming madness of walking 20 feet to the station and pay at the register. After all, some joker might be in front of us in line and paying with a check!

Recently, DirecTV sent me a special card with a number that allows me to avoid the hassle of normal customer support lines and go straight to the front. How many times have I called them in the past 5 years? Three? Four? Does that really justify the need for a special direct line?

It seems that any time there is a line (or queue for our European friends) people will do most anything to cut in front of others. As with computer programming, a single line with multiple servers is the most efficient way to process people (think 5 cashiers and one line of customers like Blockbuster checkouts). When in lines that are not managed well, I always see those people that try to lane jump and cut in front, oblivious to the others who have been waiting longer.

Has chilvery finally died? Or is it just in a dorment period? Am I the only person that sees the benefit to letting the mom with three kids go before me at the postoffice? Does that not help society by meeting the kids “on-demand” needs (with three kids there must be at least some justified demand most of the time) while at the same time helping the mom get on with her day? Would she be better in an SUV and a bad mood?

I may just be getting older and grumpy, but for now, I will try my best to limit my own “on-demand” needs while focusing on satisfying those of my daughter. Maybe we truly can learn from the children.