January 4th, 2009
Newspapers wonder why subscriptions are down. They wonder why they can’t make any money and why more and more are going bankrupt. They’re using a flawed business model. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones using that model.
My local newspaper subscription ended today. I only received the Sunday paper for the ads and coupons. The Sunday paper itself was always a bit on the thin side with ads and coupons varying at times, sometimes with hardly any. It only includes a few sections: Front Page / World News, Local, Sports, Money, Real Estate, Entertainment, Automotive, and Classifieds. Of those sections I only read a few and sometimes, only an article or two of those sections.
Recently I’ve been finding more of my news online. From independent sources that do not skew an article one way or another and give you all the facts instead of just the facts they want you to know. I don’t have money to buy a new house so I skip the real estate section, same goes for entertainment. If I want to see a show somewhere, I look up my options online. I do usually check the local section, but despite the fact they publish a local section for my county, I always get a local section for another county meaning the news in that section is never local.
I’ve also found that the time I invest in cutting coupons plus my annual subscription for the paper outweighs the savings I actually get from those coupons. Doesn’t make good fiscal sense does it?
Now to the failed model that is killing newspapers: when demand drops, they raise prices to make up for it. Couple that with the fact they haven’t figured out how to use the internet and you have a dead industry. When I received my paper today it included a letter from the Circulation Director noting a deal they were having to lock in 2008 rates if I pre-pay for 2009.
Because of the economy raising prices on raw materials and lack of demand for the paper in general, they need to raise subscription rates from $1.50 to $2.00 for Sunday and from $0.50 to $0.75 for daily papers. This baffles me because the newsstand price of the Sunday edition was already $1.50. When I lived closer to Philadelphia, we got a newspaper in a larger market that had double the amount of news and ads for only $1.25 on Sunday… and that was the “out of area” price because we lived an hour outside of the city.
When I moved to the Harrisburg area, I never liked that the local paper cost me $1.50 on Sunday and was quite lacking. But now, because of lack of demand it will be $2.00. No Thanks! Maybe they should look for ways to provide better content for a cheaper price. If the Sunday edition was only $1.00 for what they offer now, I might be more inclined to keep my service.
Tags: Economy, newspaper
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January 2nd, 2009
Since its been getting colder recently, I’ve returned to my winter tradition of drinking hot cocoa. You might ask how I have a recipe for this since most people just dump a packet of power in a mug and pour in hot water. If that’s what you’re drinking, there’s a whole new world that only costs a few cents more.
First, what you’ll need:
- Hot cocoa mix
- Ice cream (Mint or Vanilla works best)
The process:
- Boil water. Make sure it’s nice and hot… boiling, not steaming is preferred.
- Empty a packet of hot cocoa mix into the mug then fill halfway with boiling water
- Stir hot cocoa so it’s thoroughly dissolved
- Add one scoop of ice cream
- Top up mug with boiling water
- Stir ice cream until completely dissolved (repeatedly dunking ice cream with the spoon is for 30-60 seconds should be sufficient)
What you’re left with is hot cocoa that you can drink almost right away without having to wait for it to cool. The ice cream makes it very creamy and flavors it nicely if you choose something other than vanilla. Ice cream without added ingredients (nuts, fruit, chocolate chunks, etc) works best. If you use mint chocolate chip, you end up with unmelted chocolate chips at the bottom of your mug. Try it once and you’ll be hooked. I guarantee it!
Tags: Cooking, hot cocoa, recipe
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January 2nd, 2009
I’ve been scratching my head since I got this tracking number Wednesday night. I had ordered a new card reader from Amazon.com and paid the $3.99 overnight shipping for Amazon Prime members hoping to receive the package on Friday. Amazon shipped the package Next Day Air Saver from a warehouse about 10 miles from my house. This is where things get strange.
I checked the tracking Thursday morning expecting it to see it in the local sort facility waiting to go out for delivery Friday, but instead, it had been placed on a plane and flown to the UPS hub in Louisville, KY! By Friday morning it had come back to the regional sort facility, but too late to get to my local sort facility to go out today.
Curious about the UPS holiday schedule, I looked it up only to find that as long as my package went out on Wednesday as either international or Next Day Air, it would be delivered on Friday.
Wednesday, Dec. 31, New Year’s Eve
Delivery of air and international packages only. No UPS Ground pickups or deliveries today. Pickup service provided for air and international shipments via UPS On-Call Pickup service, at all UPS Drop Boxes or if prearranged by Tuesday, Dec. 30. (Next Day Air packages picked up today will be delivered on Friday, Jan. 2.)
Friday was originally reflected as the delivery date before it was diverted to Louisville. Friday morning it was showing “On Time” with a delivery date of Monday, January 5th. Oddly enough UPS somehow managed to get the package to my door today. I guess maybe it was just a glitch with their tracking system.
Tags: amazon.com, shipping, ups
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January 1st, 2009
For those of you out there that use Plesk and Mailman, if you have not yet upgraded to 9.0, hold off. Once I upgraded to 9.0, Mailman stopped working. Any email sent to the lists return with this error:
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at xxxxxxxxxx.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
<xxxx-xxx@xxxxxxx.org>:
preline: fatal: unable to run /var/qmail/bin/mm_wrapper: file does not exist
This has been noted on the Parallels Plesk forums and a few tickets have been opened with Parallels, but no response so far. This seems to be the same treatment we get every time Plesk is upgraded. Parallels breaks things and then expects you to pay for them to be fixed. Its a horrible business model and a lose-lose for Parallels customers.
Tags: linux, mailman, Plesk, server
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January 1st, 2009
Just wanted to wish everybody a Happy New Year. What resolutions or goals have you set for yourself for 2009?
Tags: new years
Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »
December 22nd, 2008
I was looking through the ads in the newspaper yesterday morning and came across one I didn’t expect to see. The ad is for Value City Furniture and was titled “After Christmas Sale - Starts Today!”
Confused, I looked at my watch, and it was indeed only December 21st, 4 days before Christmas. Just to double check, I looked at the back of the ad and it said that sale prices were “in effect from receipt of circular through January 5th, 2009.”
I’m really not sure if the ad came early by accident or if the furniture companies really are getting that ruthless and have begun a new sort of post-Christmas-sale creep.
Tags: advertisement, christmas
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December 8th, 2008
I’ve been using virtualized systems for years now and finally began using Xen. Xen is similar to a bare-metal hypervisor like VMWare ESX but instead of using a proprietary host OS, Xen uses Linux. Most of the common Linux distros like Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedore/CentOS, etc provide support for Xen out of the box. I’m used to using Linux and have used it for years, so it just made sense.
Previously I had used VMWare Workstation for creating test servers, etc., but that required a full host operating system. For a while, I had used Windows, then I was using Linux, but it was still clunky. I had to manually start machines after reboot and if I upgraded the kernel on the host, I had to re-run some perl script to configure VMWare. After a while, I realized it was time to let go and do things the smart way, the Xen way. However, I do still use Parallels Desktop on my Mac just to have something available when I travel.
I have a custom server in my basement that I built a few years back and have modified over time. It has a 2TB RAID 5 array that I use for my network storage. It also has a dual-core AMD processor that I might swap out for a quad-core Phenom early next year. Just before rebuilding it as a Xen box, I upgraded the RAM to the maximum 8GB. Oh, and I added a 640GB drive to store my Xen machines.
I got the Xen Dom0 built the other week and have it running just enough to basically boot and allow me SSH access. This was really just a matter of doing a base install plus the Xen kernel and booting to the Xen kernel post-install. I kept the services to a minimum for security purposes and will run what’s needed off one of the DomU machines. Before I rebuilt this box with Xen, the host OS also doubled as the file and print server. This will be moved over to the first Xen DomU I create.
CentOS 5.2 comes with Xen 3.0 and unfortunately, none of the default repos have Xen built other than 3.0. Xen 3.0 is fairly outdated and I was looking to update to a more recent version to take advantage of the new features. The only options for updating were to upgrade/install from source or to use the wonderful Gitco repo that has a few Xen versions built for EL5 based operating systems.
I’m now the proud owner of a Xen box! I’ve learned quite a bit so far and have gotten my first DomU created. I’ll detail that more in a later post. I’m also looking at setting up Puppet to deploy and manage my machines. That’ll probably be the second DomU that I create.
Tags: network, puppet, virtualization, xen
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December 2nd, 2008
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend Barcamp Philly. It was my first Barcamp and it was an enjoyable experience. I met up with some old friends, Owen and Skippy, both of which I have not seen in the past 2-3 years. Technically, that’s not true, I saw Owen three weeks prior at CPOSC.
There were some good discussions and thankfully it wasn’t all “social media” topics like I’ve heard rumors of from other Barcamps. Most of the discussions I went to were good, and as usual, there were a few I wish I had skipped and a few I wish I had attended. The big one I missed was the discussion by Comcast Interactive Media where they discussed the web technologies and back end hardware used to power comcast.net.
One of my other favorites was “Building Better Web Developers - What Should Colleges be Teaching?” by Jason Wertz. Jason is a teacher at Montgomery County Community College and was looking to rebuild his cirriculum. There were a lot of bright minds at this and a lot of good ideas thrown around. Topics discussed included how to develop skill sets, what subject matter can be skipped as well as what subject matter isn’t being taught, but should be reqiured. It was interesting to see people there with very different backgrounds too. Some had just graduated, some had graduated 20 years ago. Come people had Computer Science degrees, and others had degrees nowhere relating to Computer Science.
Overall it was a good experience and I hope to go back if it is ever held again. Unfortunately I live in central Pennsylvania and there aren’t as many tech related conferences and thriving meetups in the area. Philadelphia has plenty going on, but it’s a 2 hour drive for me which is a bit too long to make on a regular basis.
Tags: barcamp, philly, Technology
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November 28th, 2008
I’ve finally made the transition to my new routers at home. I don’t have anything wireless N yet, but I bought two new Linksys WRT600N’s just for the Gigabit switches built in. I wanted the speed for when I transfer large files, and since all my laptops have Gigabit NICs I can just plug in for a few minutes if I need to transfer something. The main reason for this is that my office is upstairs and my server is located in the basement where it’s nice and cool.
I’ve been a DD-WRT fan for many years, and had been a hardcore user of the Linksys WRT54G (and later WRT54GL after Linksys cut the memory in the WRT54G). I’ve had my eyes on the new N routers, especially one with a Gigabit switch and finally pulled the trigger the other month. I’m running a v24 pre SP2 build (svn 10431 to be precise) and it seems to be working fine. I have my main router set up to handle DHCP and the second router forwards request to the main one. Wireless is set up on both so no matter where I am in the house I have coverage.
I also set up a second BSSID, or virtual wireless access point to allow visitors internet access. The SSID doesn’t broadcast, but it’s open for up to 5 users if you know the name. It’s cut off from the rest of my network for security. I just got tired of dealing with people visiting and having them connect directly to my network and having to give them credentials to connect. Not cool. This was a feature of DD-WRT v24, if your router supported it. Cliff Pennock has an awesome tutorial on how to set this up.
I’m quite content now that I have everything working as expected and my network is blazing fast. Now I can get back to working on my Xen server and building virtual machines!
Tags: dd-wrt, linksys, network, wrt600n
Posted in Networking | No Comments »
November 12th, 2008
I know there are a few people that still subscribe to my feed, so please don’t have a heart attract now that something actually appeared in your feed reader. I’m starting to get back to my online life, one I had for years and one that I so abruptly left three years ago. There will be more to come soon, so please, stay tuned!
Posted in Personal | 5 Comments »