Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

My email just stopped this morning. No warning, no notice. I tried to log into my bluehost.com account to reset my password and couldn’t get in at all. “Call us” it says.

So I called, waited in the queue, and the rep can’t help me. Transfers me to the abuse department. Abuse? I run a low-volume blog and some email.

The abuse rep finally comes on the line. Heather is her name. Her tone clearly says she thinks I’m scum. She informs me with McCainish contempt that I am in violation of the terms of service because I have “stored files” in my account. Apparently, they changed their TOS back in April to say any file has to be served as part of a website and they crawled all my sites and couldn’t find a way to get to those files.

I log in through ssh after she reactivates that part and find that the “offending files” are about 90G worth of music and picture backups from when I was upgrading to Leopard. I just forgot to delete them. She says she can’t reactivate my email and sites until the files are gone.

I type rm -rf * inside the directory and ask her to wait for it to complete. She has other customers and says I have to call back. Can’t she see the files going away? Sorry, can’t wait. I ask for a supervisor. Without even missing a beat “she’s in a meeting.” Yeah, right. I ask her how much of the data remains to be deleted. She doesn’t answer or even say goodbye — just hags up on me. The rm finishes.

My files may have been a violation of the TOS, but I didn’t know that. There was no urgent reason to deactivate my account when they could have sent an email.

I have sent email to their CEO since their support department no longer accepts email. You have to call them.

You know, maybe Heather is just a bad apple who needs to be fired and Bluehost made a bad hiring decision, but deactivating my account unnecessarily is the big crime here as far as I’m concerned.

My advice would be to avoid any company that treats your data with so little care. Based on my experience with them, Bluehost.com is definitely one to avoid on that score.

I’m really starting to think that the whole rush to bail out wall street is a fraud.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio):

Rep. Peter Defazio (D-Oregon):

Definitely a nice break from the current vitriol.

Many generalities, as usual, but also some very important specifics. I particularly like the first bit regarding his lobbying rules.

Krugman writes:

If the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.

That’s what happened in the savings and loan crisis: the feds took over ownership of the bad banks, not just their bad assets. It’s also what happened with Fannie and Freddie. (And by the way, that rescue has done what it was supposed to. Mortgage interest rates have come down sharply since the federal takeover.)

But Mr. Paulson insists that he wants a “clean” plan. “Clean,” in this context, means a taxpayer-financed bailout with no strings attached — no quid pro quo on the part of those being bailed out. Why is that a good thing? Add to this the fact that Mr. Paulson is also demanding dictatorial authority, plus immunity from review “by any court of law or any administrative agency,” and this adds up to an unacceptable proposal.

Write your newspaper editors, congressmen and senators, people. This is a $700 BILLION mistake that our grandchildren will be paying off. Here is a sample letter.

How awesome is this?

At the New Yorker’s 2007 conference “2012: Stories from the near future”, the social and cultural psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about the five foundations of morality, and why liberals and conservatives tend to talk right past each other.

I found this talk very enlightening and if, like me, you have ever wondered why conservatives just “don’t get it,” have a look! (hint: they do)

Thanks to Nick for the link.

Thanks to Matt Pennig for pointing me at Wikipedia’s entry on Traffic Waves. I first started thinking about this while reading “The Goal”, a management book. There was a chapter where the author wondered why all the machines in a factory could never achieve maximum throughput no matter how carefully they were balanced. This notion of small variances causing big results is exactly behind those stop-and-go-for-no-reason jams we see on the roads.

Here’s a corroborating experiment:

Interestingly, a Seattle driver has arrived at the same conclusion, and has thoughts on how to be an un-jammer:

Breaking Up a Traffic Jam!

Ah, Wikipedia. Is there anything you don’t know?

Required viewing:

Lawrence Lessig on McCain on Technology

Is it just me, or does ARD fight with screen sharing? If I have been running ARD, screen sharing will ALWAYS fail. Quitting ARD doesn’t help. If I reboot my machine, screen sharing works well until I fire up ARD again. Anyone else seeing this behavior?