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I am with Conan. Conan plays the really smart guy doing really dumb humor thing very well. He has been different and has brought new life into late night. Now, because of a raw deal. He will be leaving. I don't feel sorry for Conan, I feel sorry for his crew and for his fans who may have to go without for a while. I am sure he will land on his feet and find a some way to keep his fans entertained. Maybe he will go on a rockabilly tour.

This is a good year for winning free stuff. I am on my way to never having to pay for a computer again. Kingston hosted a webinar and 5 of the attendees got a free Kingston 64GB SSD. I was number 4. They are going for around $140 so not bad at all. To top it all off, it was a decent webinar. This will make a nice OS drive indeed. A few games and commonly used programs should fit on there as well. I think something really bad must be right around the corner.

I am not a baseball player. There is another Ryan Coultas out there that has somehow become for famous than me. How could this possibly happen you ask? Well in 2004 he was drafted into the Mets minor league and has dominated search results since then. So just in case you think I am a baseball player, I am not. I am a computer nerd, and not in the cool way of how everyone says, "I am such a nerd." As if to say, "I am really not, I just want you to think I am quirky and smart. I will do anything to differentiate myself and since being a nerd is now cool, that is what I am."

My company signed up as a reseller with Bandwidth.com and we have seen nothing but problems. Our rep, Thomas Viracola (tviracola@bandwidth.com), started out our relationship by not putting through our paperwork while giving himself the credit for our clients. When we repeatedly asked him to help the situation, he refused and we had to go over his head. Several months later we were signed up as a reseller and got a few commission checks. They offered nothing but excuses for why our account was not setup correctly and we had to threaten to invoice and sue them to collect our commission.

To top it all off, after a few months of being setup correctly, Bandwidth.com sends us a letter canceling our agreement. To top it off, we were reassigned to Thomas Viracola, who I trust as far as I can throw him. So all those months of work getting setup correctly with them and we get nothing. They decided we were not bringing business to them fast enough so our reseller account was canceled. They get to keep our clients while we don't get any compensation. As soon as our clients are out of contract, we will be switching them to another provider that values their resellers. This was my reply to our reassignment:

" We are unhappy with almost every aspect of bandwidth.com.  From the beginning it seems like you just don't want to work with us. I get the message and I will oblige. As soon as our current client's contracts run out, we will be moving them to a new provider. I figure if our clients are not large enough for you then you just don't deserve to have them and won't even miss them. "

I have not gotten any reply back.

It is. I have to get perl working on one of our web servers for work and I swear I am going to shoot a puppy in the face. I have been dicking around with this for a solid 8 hours now. We have a production web server and it does not have perl installed. We have one legacy client we are still hosting with another provider and they need perl because their shopping cart was script was carved on the wall on a goddamn cave.

We use CENTOS and that is a great OS for this stuff and I use yum to install packages. Well, I have mod_perl installed and it appears to be running. When I try to run a .pl script, I get source code. Seriously, I install the apache perl module and I have to tell apache that I want it to process .pl files? So, I set the handler correctly so it will process the .pl file and now I get a 500 internal server error even on a hello world script.

After hours of googleing and tweaking the script, the httpd server, and permissions I am no closer than when I started. By the way, all of the forums posts about this issue remain completely unanswered.
 

I have a blog to share my ideas and thoughts with the world. I have none. Read up everyone!

There I was minding my own business at work and I get a phone call from the good folks at Acer. They called to let me know that I won an Acer Predator gaming system complete with 24" LCD, and Logitech gaming keyboard and mouse. I was floored about this. I figure my odds of winning were about 1 in 500 so I am feeling pretty lucky about it. They are also running a contest again now that ends in September that I have a whole lot better chance of winning so that would be really great.
I have been using the predator for about 2 weeks now and I really like it. It is a different experience for me to have a personal computer that just works (see my post below). I did have one issue though. When I went to turn it on, I was getting a beep codes right out of the box. My friend took a video of it and posted it to you tube.
 

All I had to do was reseat the video card though. I figure it was knocked a bit loose in shipping. I have heard a lot about the overheating and recall problems with these but mine seems to be running great. My only complaints are that the door on the hard drive cage seems a little awkward to open and close, and the case is hard to lug around to LAN parties.

I was installing a new web server today and I came across an odd issue. I was unable to install mod_ssl, the apache interface to OpenSSL. I had already installed the newest versions of apache and openSSL through yum but what I did a "yum install mod_ssl" I was missing the ssl.conf file in/etc/httpd/conf.d . I google around and found the command "yum install mod_ssl openssl" with the openssl on the tail of it.  So, I ran "yum remove mod_ssl" and the ran "yum install mod_ssl openssl" and sure enough, my config file appeared.

Since the dawn of time, I have never been satisfied with a single computer I have ever owned. I am not sure if this can be attributed to my own incompetence or just bad karma. To be specific, gaming is always the main thing I have problems with. I always have one or two games that just simply refuse to run on my machine.

Every computer I have owned personally has been built by me, and after 7 years of wallowing in my own shit I think I may just have to bite the bullet and buy an actually brand name PC. That way, I can at least blame a company rather than wanting the light myself on fire and jam a wire coat hanger up my pee hole.

In the end, my only suggestion to someone wanting to buy a computer would be... DON'T. Not a PC, not a MAC, not a Linux box. You would be better of just moving to New Zealand and living in Hobbiton.  There, you can drink yourself happy and at least look forward to scoring on some sweet hobbit ass.

I just saw this movie and I am very surprised that this is so obscure in the US. It is a film by French director Luc Besson.  Shot in black and white in Paris, this movie has many of the elements I have come to enjoy in a Luc Besson story. An Arab frenchman is about to jump off a bridge when he meets a tall blond woman doing the same.  He saves her and she decides to stay with him and help him where she can. Angel-A captures some great moments between these two and deserves a lot more attention than it has recieved.