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For the last 2 months or so I’ve been taking poi spinning classes with Jon Dickinson of Fire Arts Academy and Fire Arts Collective. All I’ve got to say is that he’s really good… a very good teacher in a good physical space with good students and… well, if you’re going to learn to spin poi, I highly recommend him.

Here’s his recent flier. If you missed these sessions, never fear, the cycle will repeat at some point!

Fire Arts Academy is offering sessions of Poi & Staff classes in Oakland. FAA is now taking registration for poi & staff classes in Oakland starting Tuesday March 11th. Private classes in San Francisco and weekend workshops are available, please contact us or check our website. Continue reading ‘I Spin Poi’ »

2 weeks ago I found a CMS system called Pligg. Before using it, I took a look at the blog on the site. I noted what looked like an overly emotional post about Dreamhost and a billing problem they had recently.

The line was crossed not when they billed me prematurely for two years of service, but rather when they issued an apology email and blog post which felt unapologetic and insincere.

Dreamhost’s blog post opened “Um, Whoops” and had an image of Homer Simpson holding up his finger, an arrow pointing to his finger saying “fat finger”. The post was in Dreamhost’s usual overly plucky tone. If you’ve ever gotten one of their monthly updates, you’d know what I’m talking about. Every one is a parody of itself it’s so plucky… It’s their shtick.

I wrote on Pligg’s blog a comment describing what I thought about Pligg’s criticism. The comment didn’t show up immediately, the system said it had entered moderation, which is a common spam filtering method. I was very surprised when I came back a week later and my comment hadn’t been posted. So I posted it again. A week later, still nothing. Apparently, moderation isn’t just for spam but for differing opinions as well.

My comment was mostly a response to Eric “Yankidank” Heikkinen’s followup comment to his post

January 17th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

Transparent about the whole thing? You mean admitting to charging users $7.5 million that they don’t owe? Dreamhost is a host I have supported for a long time, but their friendly/amateur approach to everything isn’t something that I’m comfortable with in situations like yesterdays debacle. I am especially upset when I feel that a sincere apology is due and they take their usual playful route “oops, we have a fat finger that caused some users to be billed for thousands of dollars”. Granted the charges were reversed within 24 hours…

Here is the comment I was trying to leave on the Pligg blog. Admittedly, it’s a bit sarcastic, but I welcome comments about it (unlike Mr Heikkinen)

>but rather when they issued an apology email and blog post which felt
>unapologetic and insincere

Would the insincere part be the part where they explained exactly what went wrong, why it went wrong, how the problem was fixed, and how they made sure it wouldn’t happen again? Or is it the part about how this problem was discovered and remedied within hours? Maybe it was the part about taking full responsibility for the problem and then doing something about it. Any way you slice it, I see what you mean. I wouldn’t trust Dreamhost after this either.

>Dreamhost has lost our endorsement

And Pligg has lost mine. He he. Pretty funny, huh?

Here’s how to get off junk mail lists

(via) and verified by my research

• Stop “prescreened” offers. Companies check your credit with the big credit reporting agencies all the time. Stop these offers and all those pre-approved credit card offers etc… go to www.OptOutPrescreen.com or call 1-888-567-8688.
• Get off telemarketers mailing lists with the federal Do Not Call list, www.DoNotCall.gov
• Tell the Direct Marketing Association you don’t want junk mail, www.dmachoice.org/consumerassistance.php
• Register at catalogchoice.org and decline individual catalogs that you already receive.
• Sign up for proquo.com and get off a bunch of junk mail lists.
• For all those catalogs you get because you bought something from them 10 years ago, call them or find them online and ask to be removed from their list.
• Get off the Redplum / Valassis faux-newspaper mailing list with ads from Safeway, Luckys etc
• Lots more tidbits

I have temporarily removed the post I made on February 29th titled “gowithabc.com is likely a scam”. I have been communicating with the president of the company, Jim Tracy and it so far seems that my impression was founded on the inappropriate actions of just one employee.

I will keep you, dear reader informed as to the outcome of our discussion.

This could have been done better. I mean, the placebo effect DOES work. Trouble is… (via ABCNews)

… the investigation revealed that Airborne’s clinical trial was conducted by just two people in the absence of a clinic or scientists.

They are settling a lawsuit for $23 million. Monies to be distributed for those stupid enough to that believe this is a preventative and cure for colds.

Now the following took 3 seconds of investigative reporting. Look at the image I snapped of their website today. It says “The famous original formula – created by a school teacher – contains 17 herbs and nutrients…”

The ingredients list:

• 8 “herbal extract proprietary blend”
• 2 “amino acids”
• 8 “other ingredients” are sorbital, citric acid, sodium bicarbonate, orange flavor, mineral oil, acesulfame potasium, sucralose.

If I’ve got my math right, only one of those “other ingredients” isn’t a “nutrient”. Do you think it’s the mineral oil or the orange flavor? Yeah, right.

The best taqueria in San Francisco has reopened.

It looked like El Toro was gone… it had been boarded up for several months. I spoke to the owner (who also owns Pancho Villa and the building that El Toro is in) the night before they reopened… last Sunday night if I recall correctly. He said they had to do some structural work and it took longer than they anticipated.

I went in a few days after they opened. The owner said they kept 6 employees from the old El Toro… they had been shuttled around to the other restaurant to keep them working. The woman serving me was cutely shy… she didn’t speak English well and I figured out that she was making her very first enchilada. The chef and 2 others on the line were experienced so it wasn’t a terrible experience but it’ll be a while before they’re running smoothly.

Here is an excellent site to print out whatever graph paper you need. Incompetech graph paper. He’s got ALL kinds of graphpaper there. Regular, mult-width (Engineering), dots, hex, semi-bisected trapezoid, iso-dots, octagonal, hexagonal, variable triangle… yowza!

This is what I created out for sketching out solar installations. To the right is a png of it.

I just got an HP Color Laserjet 2605dn printer. Wow, the color images come out like photographs. HP is selling them on their website for $250 after a rebate.

As I was recommending to my sister recently…

Don’t buy an inkjet printer, the cost of the ink will kill you over time.

HP has the guts to tell us how expensive it really is.

With the good HP 99 ink, they says you’ll get 130 4″x6″ photos out of a $25 cartridge. That’s $0.20 per photo for the ink. Multiply that by 4 if you’re printing 8 1/2″ x 11″ = $0.80 per sheet.

For the laser printer, I recently printed 400 8 1/2″x11″ full-color brochures and the toner monitor tells me I’ve used up 20% of the capacity… IE I’ll get 2,000 full-size-full-color copies out of my $250 in color cartridges. That’s $0.12 per sheet.

But wait, there’s more! I can refill my color toner twice before the drum wears out for $80 per refill (I’ve refilled toner before and it takes < 15 minutes) That makes the cost per page for 6,000 full-size-full color pages $0.07 per page.

And if you’re not into refilling cartridges, then listen to this: the HP 2605dn comes with full toner cartridges… That means you get $0.12/sheet color printing out of the box. when the toner is empty, throw the whole printer away and get a new one for the price of toner cartridges. (that isn’t very ecologically minded, is it? No!)

More benefits to color laser printing:

• Laser toner doesn’t dry out on you like inkjet does. If you don’t use your inkjet printer for a few months, it’ll dry out and you need a new cartridge. It’s happened to me :-(
• Laser color usually looks better than color ink
• You can use more types of paper in a laser printer
• Laser printers tend to jam much less

Oh and did I mention that the HP 2605dn has automatic duplex printing (IE, double sided printing)? Oh and it has ethernet built in too if you wanted a network printer.

Go buy a color laser printer. Tell ’em I sent you.

I just got update:returned a new laptop. It has Windows Vista, mostly because getting Windows XP via Dell would have cost $200 EXTRA. Though I heard last night from Rick L that if you call them on the phone and tell them, “I’m not buying a computer from you if it has Vista”, you can get XP at no additional charge.

I’ve been using Vista for about 1 hr and I’m just about ready to go back to XP. Vista is very pretty. Performance-wise, it makes my 1.9 Ghz dual core processor feel like a 400Mhz PII. It’ll often show you a screen but actually it’s not ready for you to click on it for 3 or 5 or 8 seconds. It’s very frustrating.

And for the security… this is how I feel:

local version:

2-12-08 Followup: I returned the Vista Laptop. Here’s another humorous video on the subject:

“I switched back to XP 3 weeks ago. …So much happier.”

local version:

.

2-14-08 Followup: Derek points us to this one (original)

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Hey will ya look at that. Regseeker actually made my computer a little faster. I had it remove a few thousand unused registry entries and my Windows XP computer got a little faster. I was a bit worried that it would do Very Bad Things to my registry. I made backups and stuff. It’s been a week and so far, no earth-shattering “kaboom” like that accident with the space modulator.

It’s freeware available in many places, including locally.