5Q's - Steve Huffman

Another success from the team over at Reddit These guys are tops and despite the issues of the past week are still prepared to indulge unknowns like myself.

1. What are you reading now or what did you last read?
Biggest Brother : The Life of Major Dick Winters, The Man Who Led the Band of Brothers by Larry Alexander

2. What's your best bit of advice?
0x1

3. Half-full or half-empty?
Half-full, but my glass was recently stolen and was later reported to have a crack from which it's leaking.

4. What's your alternative career choice?
Lots: High-school teacher, helicopter pilot, mechanic

5. Who would you get to play you in a movie?
Whomever is also currently playing James Bond.

5Q's - Strikeout

Had my first strike in the 5Q's - interesting to note that this strike is from one of the founders of Digg, a major competitor to Reddit

Striiiiiike

December 2006

• Kevin Rose - digg.com
  
• Om Malik - GigaOm.com

5Q's - Alexis Ohanian

So, I have my first success in the 5Q's - here are Alexis Ohanian of reddit fame - not bad 2 days for my first ever reply with something I wasn't sure would even fly. So now I'm encouraged to keep trying a little longer at least.

Alexis's answers start below the line.

____________________________________________________________

I'd be happy to answer your 5 questions, thanks for coming up with such an eclectic set :-)

1. What are you reading now or what did you last read?
I recently finished A Perfect Mess (great if you're messy) and I'm currently reading Lolita (great if you're...uhh...nevermind).

2. What's your best bit of advice?
Don't take any advice from a 23 year old.

3.Half-full or half-empty?
Half-full, unless I'm thirsty, then it's just empty.

4. What's your alternative career choice?
Someone to help bring habeas corpus back, I miss that dude.

5. Who would you get to play you in a movie?
John Krasinski or Christopher Walken

Best,
Alexis

5 Questions

I have this idea ... I'm going to try it out and see if it flies.

The idea is this:

I approach people** - probably via eMail and ask them 5 questions. That's it, no more, no less and then I publish their answers here. The questions themselves may be the same each time or they may be based upon the person being questioned.

Whether these folks elect to answer some, all or none and how they answer is entirely their choice - I will simply create a new post with their answers.

I may also keep a strike list of those who don't reply and a hit list for those that did reply but declined


** These people are liable to famous if even only very slightly so for some reason or another. Be they a Bill Gates or someone who became infamous beacuse of something they did or that happened to them.

It must be Comms

I've worked in IT now for 3 decades which doesn't necessarily give me a good insight into the behemoth that it is and there are still many, many things about it I don't understand; like SAP.

But the one thing I really don't understand is why everything is always the "fault of comms" and why we, in comms, have to prove it isn't before the other sections of IT will even consider looking at an issue. The other aspects that go with this thinking fall into vague areas, such as ...

• can I ping it
• can't I ping it
• don't know what else to do so will dump the call on comms
• it must be a network fault
  

Whatever, the call is coming our way irrespective of the answer. Only yesterday I had a call passed into the "comms queue" with the words - I was able to term serve to it and ping it and all applications appear to be ok - perhaps comms can shed some light on it - or maybe it is just me?

Perhaps someone can shed some light on this. After all, I'm happy to accept there may be a comms fault and that I or one of my team need to investigate it, but surely to God folks should do their own homework first and if the call comes to them prove all is ok.

Here's another one from yesterday's queue .....

Our website has the following message on:
You are seeing this page because we are experiencing difficulties at present and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Yup, you guessed it, this ended up getting logged as a fault and sent to the comms queue with the immortal words of - are there any comms issues? Let me see, how do I explain this one .... NO you numb nut!

Cyber Stalkers

... or perhaps more accurately I should entitle this as cyber hasslers.

A bit of history first off: I have been into penpalling since days eons (at least it seems that way) before computing ever took off and it required, thought, tact, intelligence and a reasonable grasp of the other persons natural language. This last was my main reason for sticking with English speaking penpals and to be fair, my penpals mostly came from personal knowledge. What does that mean ... simply that I already knew the person to whom I was writing as a friend or at the very least 'a mate'.

Since then, many things have intervened for me to lose contact with most of these folks such as leaving school, getting married, moving country, lack of replies and so on and I then moved on to 'doing my penpals via eMail'. This in itself produced issues and broadly fall into the following categories ....

1. I become the next best buddy to mail all your crap too - no, I don't want to see the dancing frogs AGAIN.
2. We become, through no lack of effort on my part, occasional 'how are youers' because you don't know what it means to build a relationship yet you get offended if I stop writing.
3. We hit it off such that we feel like we know each other intimately and have been best buddies since the year dot.
4. You are a total fruitcake and stalk / hassle me non stop.

I can cope with those who fall into the 1's, I just filter your email into the bit bucket. Likewise those of you in the 2's are teetering on the verge of being auto-deleted, it is simply a matter of how often you write me two lines and then complain that I only wrote 30. Those in category 3 ... I need more of you, I love you all .... and finally category 4, the cyber nutters.

I have a long standing principle with my penpals ... on first contact I tell them up front what I am like (yes grumpy, yes boring at times, but get to know me and I'll be a lifelong friend who'll fight tooth and nail for you) and I make one, note it well only 1 guarantee. And that is that I won't just disappear without a trace unless I can't avoid it but don't take my silence as not wanting to write, just my life at present precludes me from being able to do so.

So I have this one, whom no matter how often I remind them, insists on ending the friendship because I don't care, don't like them, have no thought for their feelings and so on. So after >15 attempts over a period of a year to say don't be so silly I have finally had it. So I told them ... I'm not fighting you or your perceptions anymore and this is goodbye ... since then I've had at least 2 eMails a day asking me to tell them to f%*@ off, to forgive them, to give them another chance, that I ate them, etc ..... if this continues I'll just set up a filter to push them straight into the bit bucket or maybe one cruel step further I'll just re-route the mail back to them.

C'est la vie

What's new ....

I was on blogger.com's frontpage when a link rolled past. It meant nothing to me, it still doesn't but for some reason it attracted me in. Anyway, it took me to ...

http://lcmglife.blogspot.com/

Which appears to be a very new blog and with only two posts so far but I have to say that the article on a child safe internet was a very interesting read and the second blog that it linked too was also a good read and both broadly match my views.

What else ... oh yes ...

https://anonybrowser.com/login.php looks interesting, especially in the light of the above two mentioned blogs. For a paltry $4 a month one can have unfettered access to the internet ... or is it too good to be true? I personally am not concerned enough about my privacy to need to hide behind an anoymous company who may disappear tomorrow.

The Apprentice

I have questions ....

1. Why does Alan Sugar insist on having himself called Sir Alan?

- Yes, I know he's a Sir but this smacks of having to 'Lord' it over others because you can because you have a title and a bit of money and in this case because you are looking for sycophants.

2. Was it just me, or did Badge come over as being someone who doesn't need molding or training and in which case she in no way meets the criteria for an apprentice?

3. Are all the apprentices just a little bit - ok then, a lot - anally retentive? I haven't watched the series avidly but to a person they are all totally full of themselves and in need of personalities.

Is life really a better place because we have these over ambitious self-centred achievers appearing on our TV?

For my part I will walk away from anybody who comes over this way as my life doesn't need the grief. If this makes them happy then fair enough it's their life - but you only had to look at each of their faces as they were fired to realise that not one of them are happy. Is this what they (and here they becomes more generic to represent anybody like this and in my time I've met a few) believe they are here for? Is it their sole purpose to climb the corporate ladder? come the end of the road, will they look back happy that they've made it? What is their legacy going to be?

I'm only asking these questions because I now work with somebody whom I can see has similar traits and I'm trying to work out what it is that drives them. This person - let's call him/her Z - had to go on a grad course recently and was so anti it you'd have thought that Z had already been on the course and knew it's content. Well surprisingly Z has come back from this course with an entirely different attitude and is determined to move on - that's good for Z but what I spotted as Z regaled us with stories of the course was shades of 'The Badger' - arrogance and over-confident attitude dressed up as competence and ability in a young package.

And since Z's return to work Z has done precisely nothing in terms of what they are supposed to be doing. Z has spent time eMailing new mentors (found from the course) and studying. Neither of which is a bad thing when we have nothing to do .... I'll leave it to you to figure out if we have nothing to do.

Don't any of these people realise that life is so much more than our achievements?

HDDLife - An Update

I was so wanting for the folks at BinarySense Ltd (aka HDDLife) to not respond to my post and to not supply their promised license but I was also determined not to let is slide too easily.

So I persisted, filled in their form several times and eventually - though I held no hope for an answer - sent them a personal eMail via their only locatable eMail address.

Here's the reply I received - you can excuse the English as I believe they are a Russian based company.

#00FF00<sub>Sorry for inconvenience, due to some error in configuration, posts from form don't pass in our automatic ticket system, so we don't see them.

Now all fixed and we parsing posts, your license will be send tomorrow.</sub>

And I am happy to report that I now have my license and what's more my first Whoop Whoop alert which woke me up. The alert is due to me not changing the defaults - which is perhaps one area where this little app could be improved. Default levels for different hardware platforms (laptops always work much hotter than desktops).

HDDlife.

Here is one of my rare utility promotions - it's the way my life goes but one thing is certain... if I blog about it then I like it. Anyway the heading says it all I guess. HDD, as in Hard Disk Drive and life as in, well life !!! The companies website front page tag line says it all - HDDlife is the protection of your personal information. In short, this little utility sits there using minimal resources and in it's most basic form will report on the life of your hard drve. It does this using S.M.A.R.T technology built into all modern drives be they SCSI, IDE or ATA.

What in a nutshell does it do then I hear you ask?
It advises on the 'health' of your hard drive. Using the above mentioned technology it determines the likeliness of your hard drive failing and advises you with clear simple graphs. It will also do simple benchmarking, advise on your drive filling up and so on.

What doesn't it do?
It doesn't fix your drives if they have a problem; it doesn't protect your data or back it up. All it purports to do, and so far do it well, is to give a clear graphical idea of if your hard drive is likely to fail.

So, for a simple - yes I keep saying that - utility that takes minimal resources that can give you a good indicator of your hard drives time on this earth then, for me at least, it is a no brainer to purchase. And at $29 for a single license it won't break the bank.

So give me the low down then .....
Fly over here to HDDLife and grab yourself a trial copy.

I guess, if I have to, there is one downside .... the trial version is for 14 days but it doesn't save any settings and after a reboot you will need to reset any choices and the popups can be very annoying. But then I guess something this simple and this good should be registered soonest to remove the annoyance. Go on, give them a try.

Learn details about HDDlife
Publish your opinion in your blog and get a license for free!

Mac AppZapper

I have a Mac - I am not a diehard PC fan ..... but them nice Mac folks forgot an App Uninstaller, so here's one that will be free if enough people link to it.

If not, it'll just be cheaper than usual .... anyway, here's my link http://maczot.com/

Oh and least I forget, don't bother after April 3rd .....

Stress Bunnies

My posting back on Nov 6th seems to have been quite accurate - I mentioned that I'd asked an innocent and genuine question and ever since it would seem that this person has been seething and probably stressing about it all. Whilst I don't agree with his work ethic I do like him as a person, so I've offered via my go-between, that if it helps him to get over my supposed insult then I'll buy him a pint - lets see if this calms him down as I know he likes his alcohol.

Digg It Man

As in Digg.com has been around since November of 2004 and is now regarded as one of the places to go for technology news. In their own words ...

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

So what makes this so different to other technews sites such as /.? Good question and simply put it is user power that decides what stories float to the top or in print terms make it to the front page. If a story is irrelevant, not tech based or quite simply just plain sucks then it doesn't get Dugg by its members and will not appear on the front page. There is hotly debated comments system which allows for individuals to post their opinions on the story presented and once you become a member, any story you Digg can be cross-posted to your own blog. The stories are presented as headlines with a brief snippet of the opening lines and a click on the headline takes one off to the source of the entry - usually a blog or news site that was first 'spotted' as carrying the story.

If you haven't discovered Digg yet, then I heartily recommend you wander on over and start excavating.