I'm always fascinated by technology and engineering. If it has gears, springs, mechanisms, or otherwise intricate little bits, it stands out, to me, as an artifact of human ingenuity. What is most fascinating, some times, about these seldom thought about tools is just how seldom we think about them. How often do you question the mechanism inside your bedside clock? How often do you contemplate the workings of your furnace, or your electric mixer? You shouldn't spend time thinking about these things, normally, because that's exactly what they're for. Tools, whether as complex as a mechanical clock, or as simple as an upside-down cup for trapping horrifying bugs, exist specifically to allow you to go about your lives with less to think about (or be terrified by, in the case of the bug-trapper). You shouldn't have to worry about whether your clock is accurate. I like to stop, some times, and appreciate just how much hard work and thought has gone into giving me that luxury. There is a certain strange irony in that; a great deal of thought and, certainly, a fair share of sleepless nights went into creating things just to allow others to think and worry less (or sleep just five minutes more). I guess most of these engineers and thinkers just do it for the fame and fortune, but still, even if the function is a side-effect, it seems worthwhile to me.

That's just a long, nerdy way for me to justify and mitigate the inherent nerd-ness of beginning a pedantic exploration of one such tool, writing utensils. I am really sounding like a dork, now.

I've always been interested in pens (and pencils). They're kind of a great equalizer. Even the President uses a pen, when he's signing his autographs or whatever he does. I know it's a little strange for somebody who is as obsessed with electronic gizmos as I am to be interested in something blatantly ye-olde-school, but like I said, they're quite interesting as engineering marvels. I have decided to share my interest with you, my faithful audience. I shall begin collecting pens, using them, and letting you know just how they compare to one another. Does it matter what pen you use, or are they just simple tools that give us yet another thing we don't have to think about? I seek to find out, and I'll keep you updated along the way.

You should know, of course, that I am no expert in the field of writing utensils. I am so much a layman, in fact, that I don't even know what the field is called. However, I'm not sure what qualifications are needed, if any, to review pens, so I'll just have to do my best. If nothing else, I'm a normal person who doesn't mind spending moderate amounts of money to buy as many pens as he can in a quest for the best. Also, I might sometimes make rhymes, so watch out for that.

Still, some questions come up. What questions should I be asking when trying out a new pen? What are important features to consider, or benchmarks I can use to gauge quality? These are, after all, just pens, so perhaps I'm already over thinking this. I shall do my best to answer the most important considerations I can think of, namely the following: comfort, ink and construction quality, ease of use, and price. Perhaps over time I shall develop a set of rigorous tests I can use to quantify these qualities, or perhaps I will be able to develop a loose standard to compare them to, or maybe I'll just make up some numbers. Whatever the case, I think it will be an interesting diversion, if nothing else. What qualities or tests do you think I should apply?

Are there any pens you've used which really stick out as good or bad? Have you seen pens which you want to know more about? Let me know, and I'll check them out for you. Maybe I can save you from having to spend upwards of several dollars getting a bad pen. Nothing is worse than that.

You might be asking, Aren't there other websites which review pens? Aren't pens just basic implements that everybody uses and which can easily be gotten for free (with sweet company slogans printed on them, too)? Aren't reviews in general completely useless because they're based entirely on opinion, which - especially in my case - can vary radically? Who are you, Comrade Question? Maybe you don't have to read these things if you're just going to be so negative.

I just want to have some fun, play around with some neat little gadgets, and learn a thing or two. If you stay tuned right here then just maybe you might learn a thing or two, too.

Heads up, here's another post about my old Halloween costume. Yes, this is the third post titled "Halloween Costume '011, part 4." This is actually part 5. Now, where was I?

The Torso!

I have not forgotten about these pictures! Did you? Remember my Halloween costume from 2011, when I was going as a Tree? No? Remember, I made the whole thing out of paper grocery bags? This really isn't ringing any bells? Well, I don't blame you, it's been like four months since Halloween, and I'm sure nobody cares about that grand old time anymore. Now that we're huddled in our houses trying not to either freeze to death or drown, depending on what crazy weather Chicago is throwing at us, let's kill time by just thinking back to when we were still thinking about the Halloween episode of the Office.

Next up: the TORSO!

From January 9th to the 16th, 2012, this website (DenyConformity.com) was shut down. Though I would love to say that it was because I was engaging in an extended protest of SOPA, it was actually something far more boring. Since I am making a post today, though, I am bound by the INTERNET CODE to reference how evil SOPA is as much as possible, so I apologize in advance for that.

We’ll have to go back a bit (just for a few sentences, I promise), to the early days of this website. Back in the ye olde days of 2005, I was a young, go-getting amateur web designer looking for a place to put a website that I could use to learn how to set up a website. After a tiny bit of searching, I found the cheapest host I could find, otherwise known as “Startlogic.com.” I set up my site, and everything worked fine. Over the years I had a few troubles here and there, but most were the fault of my lack of experience with the entire process. Startlogic, it seemed, was perfectly adequate for the task of hosting a low-tech website with an audience of several.

That was a problem solved, then (well, it wasn’t ever really a problem, so I guess it was a problem invented and then also solved). Over the last six (and a half) years, my little website has grown to a . . . well, it’s still the same hacked together, obviously made by somebody who didn’t know what he was doing mess. However, my little web empire has expanded to include quite a few other little kingdoms. I’ve pointed a few other domains at my Startlogic webspace, allowing me to host a couple websites for much cheaper than if I set them up separately. These sites include mynameissmac.com (the website for my mediocre music producing alter-ego), mcgillandhughes.com (the website for my on again, off again podcast with Will Hughes), and factorydinosaur.com (the site for the improv comedy group I am a part of in Chicago). I also set up a few sub-domains for some friends.

In late 2009, things started going rather pear-shaped with good old Startlogic. It was around that time that I started using a service called “Pingdom.” Pingdom will automatically poll a web domain every fifteen minutes, and notify you (via various methods; my favorite is Twitter) when the domain is down. I set it up to check on DenyConformity.com, just to see how good Startlogic’s uptime was.

This elicits a very quick technical aside. One of the more important aspects of a web host is “uptime,” or the percentage of time their servers are actively serving content. I would copy the definition from Wikipedia, but it is currently down in protest. Basically, if they have a problem with their servers or they shut them down for maintenance, their uptime goes down (time). Lower uptime means more time that your site won’t be visible, which is the opposite of what you want your website to be. It’s totally a buzzword, though, like “HD,” “Organic,” or “Democratic.” There’s no regulatory committee keeping track of uptime, and there’s no burden of proof for anybody who claims “99.99%.” Therefore, it’s pretty easy to just fudge the numbers a bit, and most web hosting providers do, in fact, claim 99.99%. Of course, uptime won’t mean anything anymore if SOPA goes through, so you should go call your Senator right now.

According to WebHostingStuff.com (which isn’t blacked out in protest right now), Startlogic’s uptime is 99.99%, which is great. That means in the last 2,319 days (which is how long this WebHostingStuff place has been tracking it), Startlogic has only been down 0.01%. Let’s look at the numbers. 2,319 days is 200,361,600 seconds, and 0.01% of that is 20,036 seconds, or about five and a half hours.

Yeah, but who the crap is WebHostingStuff.com, anyway? They aren't protesting SOPA and so they are evil corporate weiners who are probably in the pocket of Big Webhost. Luckily, I’ve been using my own tracking service for the last three years. In that time, Pingdom has recorded an uptime of only 99.68%. Since October, 2009, DenyConformity.com has been down a total of two days, fourteen hours, fifty-nine minutes and fourty-six seconds!

If you know anything about stats and math, you’ll know that the more numbers you include in your mean average, the closer that mean will approach 100%. A site could be down quite a bit, but if you look at it over six years it will average out to be closer to that 99.99% that everybody claims. Also, if you know anything about the web, you might realize that downtime is a necessary part of how things work, and if a site is down a few hours a month it’s not really a problem if it’s always at 5 AM, when nobody will be trying to look at it, anyway. I could try to paint Startlogic as a bad company (though they are also not protesting today) just because they have some downtime, but in truth it’s nothing to be concerned about.

So anyway, it was then, when I started using Pingdom, that I really started thinking that I should look for a new place to hang my @. I was getting almost daily reports of outages at all times of day, and any time I tried to contact Startlogic to figure out just want their deal was, it was like talking to a brick wall. A brick wall that charges you a bunch of money. My biggest push in this regard was to set up my own server to host my site, and thereby avoid dealing with bad third parties entirely. I wrote a couple posts about those efforts back in April, 2010. I still plan on continuing that tale for you, my only audience member, and it is the subject of a different post than this. However, the short story is that the Official DenyConformity.com Web Server is simply not yet (and will likely never be) quite ready for full-time hosting duties. However, it was, among other things, a distraction from the task at hand, namely G’ing the F O from Startlogic and their oppressive boot of ineptitude.

Presented for your perusal, anecdote number one from the history of DenyConformity.com’s many outages. The two most basic parts of a website are the Domain and the Server, and though you can buy them (though you’re really just renting them) both together, they are basically separate entities. If you aren’t quick enough on the draw and your domain’s aren’t set to auto-renew, after a year or two passes they won’t be yours anymore. Who owns them at that point depends on a lot of strange, theoretical conditions, but the world of domains is still very much the Wild, Wild West. Instead of banditos taking over your ranch, it’s GoDaddy.com squatting on your domain, charging you ridiculous (and illegal) amounts of money to get it back. Instead of revolvers, it’s DNS caches, and instead of Will Smith, it’s Danika Patrick in extremely misleading ads.

Anyway, this happened to me around September, 2010. I registered DenyConformity.com in August, 2005, and renewed it perfectly well over the next five years. Apparently, though, I forgot, and in 2010 it expired and was eventually sat (or shat) upon by a cyber squatting fiend. Luckily, DenyConformity.com is a lonely person’s seldom visited, angst-filled blog worth almost exactly nothing, so it was somewhat easy to just register it again and point it back at my site. It did mean that for a few days all you got when you went to DenyConformity.com was this garbage:

Particularly amusing is just how these completely automated sites dealt with what they thought DenyConformity.com was for. Apparently the primary categories for my site, according to robots, is “Conformity,” “Deny,” “Real Estate,” and “Apartment for Rent.” I’m glad that for those few days anybody who wanted to see DenyConformity.com immediately got a link for “Conformity.” I guess I should be glad they weren’t making judgements about my life. Well,

According to this robot, I seriously need some psychotherapy, and am also, apparently, a cartoon. That was somewhat disconcerting.

So I lost my domain for a few days and then got it back. Big deal? Well, the question is, how exactly could this have happened? It absolutely shouldn’t have is the answer. The fact is that Startlogic made absolutely no attempts to contact the account owner that their domains were expiring. Sure, the domains were still registered on my Purdue email address, and this was a year after I graduated, but my hosting account was definitely updated properly. They were perfectly content to let me continue to pay them for hosting access, even though my primary domain name, at the time the only way to access that web space, no longer existed. That’s a pretty great business model, I guess.

That should have been my sign that the time to G the F was finally N. I pushed forward with my server at home and settled on a complacent, “eh, who cares?” Eventually, Startlogic dropped the final straw bomb that broke the camel’s back.

It perhaps wouldn’t have been so annoying if Startlogic hadn’t picked the absolute worst time to drop this bomb. I just started a full-time job, so my free time immediately went from tons to nones. The very first day on this new job I received an email from Startlogic, saying the following:

denyconf / Cgi abuse [9156098]

Hello ,

This is to inform you that your website and CGI have been suspended. Your files are causing too many requests to the server and utilizing heavy network/server resources. The files causing the problems are given below:

/home/users/web/b328/sl.denyconf/public_html/content/olds.php

I suggest you to delete these files and upgrade your application and then get back to us. I will then revoke the suspension of website and CGI.

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are available 24x7.

Sincerely,

Dylan Martin
Technical Specialist

That probably doesn’t mean much to someone who doesn’t know anything about web developing, but don’t worry, it doesn’t mean much to me, either. Needless to say I did have further questions. I contacted them that evening, mainly to ask fuck, and what about it. I tried to get them to clarify exactly what they meant, or when or how these heavy resources were being used. However, nobody gave me any info outside what was stated in Dylan’s email. Let me be clear: this site hasn’t changed in six years. That file, /content/olds.php is the same olds.php which has lived right there in /content/ for as long as this site has existed. That’s what I needed clarification on. Just what, exactly, has changed? They had no answer for me.

I understand that they have little room for customers using “heavy network/server resources,” but this time enough was enough. At this point I had no intention of fixing whatever “problem” suddenly appeared for no reason after six years. They made no effort to either warn me of the problem or work with me to fix it. Perhaps I’m being naive, but I feel like that’s not how a company should treat a (until this point) loyal customer of over half a decade. I had no interest in “upgrading” my application.

After an evening or two analyzing my options, I decided to move my business to Bluehost (.com). I’ve worked with Bluehost in the past with no complaints, was referred there by a colleague or two, and had a reasonably positive exchange with one of their support team. Also, hey, they have a big “Stop SOPA” banner on their site today. After finding the host, it took another evening to go through the process of transferring all of my domain names (a process that is far too complicated). Then, frustratingly, I had to sit and wait five more days for the domain transfers to be processed (for which I blame Startlogic). Finally, though, the site is back up and running (as made clear by the fact that you’re reading it now). All that’s left to do is somehow get Startlogic to give me as much refund as I can get out of them.

So, basically, if you need a summary of this post, because I can’t keep from writing page after page on the simplest of subjects, it is this: my website was down, for a reason I don’t know, and it took a week to get running again. Also down with SOPA.

The real sad thing is that I was planning on posting the rest of my Halloween costume pictures last week . . .

It's been a while since I've made much ado about a particular exciting time. The timestamp on this post just happens to be 2011-11-11 11:11:11.

Happy eleven day, everybody.

Halloween has come and gone, and I still have a great deal of pictures to post of my sweet costume. I will continue to post them, if just for my own benefit next year when I need inspiration for my "End of the World" costume in 2012 (I just made that up, but it would actually be a sweet costume). Anyway, here is another update on my 2011 Halloween costume.

I went as a tree this year.

Are you all working hard on your Halloween costumes? The other day, I posted a few pictures showing how I made a sweet tree shogun Kap, and today I'll show you the next step in my Halloween 2011 costume.

I will be going as a tree this year.

Halloween is coming up in a couple weeks, and this year Alyson and I are going to Nashville to a big party a friend of hers is throwing. I decided that I had better get a good costume together, because of how much I hate looking the fool in front of people. For the last few days, I've been working on a new costume.

I will be going as a tree this year.

I made some product reviews on Amazon.com today. They're mildly amusing, so I thought I would post them here since I haven't posted anything here in months.

Item: Magnum Copper Sleeve: 65 MM X 100 MM Card Sized -"7 Wonders"

See this review

Item: Worldwise Imports Manual Card Shuffler

See this review

Check out this ad I recently posted on Craigslist.

http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/zip/2490850648.html

Free!! Act now! Up to TWO (2) sacks of old computer cords! Free!!

FREE:

Two sacks of random computer cords.

USB! Firewire! Parallel! Serial*! RCA! PS2! Lots, Lots more (maybe)! These sacks each contain a random tangle of numerous old wires and plugs. There's all kinds of cables in these sacks. I think I see a webcam there, and also some USB brackets. These would be a perfect gift for Cable Enthusiasts, Copper Addicts, and "Connector Collectors." I would love to see these sacks go to a good home. Tell me when and where, and I'll meet you there with a sack in each hand so you can pick which one you want. I will be willing to swap some cables from one sack to the other if you are kind of a greedy dude, but don't go crazy. I'm not in this just to swap stuff from sack to sack all day. Seriously, greedy dude, just pick a sack and live with what you get.

These sacks are great. They have maybe fifty cables each, and each cable has (at least) one connector on each end. That's like twice as many connectors! These sacks would be great for people who like wires, but obviously they would be even better (twice as better) for people who like plugs and stuff.

Get one for the kids! Toss them a sack and tell them to go start untangling. That'll shut them up. Also they'll get a history lesson about the different number of prongs you can pack into S-Video connectors! When they're done, tell them to tangle them back up for later.

These are perfect for movie props! Your characters can use them to hack the internet! Tie some to a few road flares and a clock and you have a great fake bomb!** Use them in your sketch you wrote about a guy trying to hock useless old cables on Craigslist. Some of this stuff might help you get closer to finishing that Borg costume you've been working on for years.

Toss one at your friend! See what he does. I don't know, maybe he's the kind of guy who likes having sacks of wires thrown at him.*** Try it out with a friend you don't like very much first.

Carry them around with you all over town. People will ask you to help them with their computer problems all the time probably. Nothing says "I know computers" like a rocking a couple of cable sacks, akimbo-style. They'll be all, "hey, you look like you can help me set up my printer!" Imagine how superior to them you'll feel when you tell them to screw off.

My life was a pointless, directionless blur before I got these cables. The mere thought of potentially not having a MOLEX to SATA adapter kept me huddling under the covers. I spent almost 15 years trying to get one of every cable. Then I realized that was a kind of stupid quest. Then I got into comic books. Then I became the type of guy who hocks useless old cables on Craigslist because he's bored. They can do the same for you!

I should warn you that the sacks have some holes in them. They can barely contain the number of cables inside. That's surely 8 - 10% more cables than the next guy. Your neighbors, your friends, even your coworkers will be shamed by the pure inadequacy of their cable sacks.

I would horde this amazing collection all for myself, but I'm moving in with my girlfriend and she told me I have to cut down on my collection of "useless old junk." Better make room for face cream and laserjet prints of Justin Bieber, am I right?

Act now (or ever) and I'll throw in an old CPU heatsink for each sack. Keep one in your purse to brain potential muggers (like I always say, "if you brain them now, they won't mug you later"). Use them to keep things slightly cooler, like power transformers, sub-woofers, and battlemechs. Strap them to your head to totally stick it to those jerk-wads who keep calling you a "hothead." Melt them down and you'll have like 8 ounces of actual aluminum which you can forge into seriously anything. I'm basically giving you your wildest aluminum dreams. You should be paying me.

*This item is not to be mixed with milk and eaten for breakfast or as an afternoon snack.
**This is not to be used in any way to build an actual explosive device.
***I am not responsible for any lost friendships or "falling outs" that happen as a result of these sacks being tossed.