And in about 45 minutes, I’ll be heading back to the SLC airport for the flight to Chicago, which connects me to my flight to São Paulo. It’s going to be a busy weekend and week, as we upgrade this large airline to a newer version of their core reservations system — a project on which I have been engaged for almost two years.

Hmmm. Another two-year mission in Brazil. This one certainly pays better.

I loaded the Netflix app yesterday and ended up watching a couple of movies on my iPad (Zombieland anyone?). Even as big of a geek as I am, I was still amazed that something just seems to work—with no fiddling, no settings and no grief.

I also watched one on my big screen using PS3 as the streamer. Blockbuster—you are toast.

I just found out that this site had been hacked and that after a minute or two on here, it would automatically redirect the viewer to another site.

Believe me, I fixed this as soon as I could. It involved changing of passwords, overwriting the header.php file (which is where the code actually was performing the redirect) and deleting the sorry sack of shit who had somehow set himself up as an Admin (WTF, WordPress?!?).

I always have the latest, most secure version (2.9.1 as of this writing), so this is upsetting, to say the least.

I am in the process of creating a new blog that will deal with a more broad-based range of issues than the narrowly-focused Gay, ex-Mormon viewpoint expounded upon via this one since 2001.

While I will continue to update this blog sporadically, I foresee my main focus moving to the new blog.

You can visit it by clicking Snarkcasm.com.

I hope to see you there!

I spent a chunk of time last night on the phone to Adobe’s customer service center (apparently still in India).

I had previously qualified to purchase the CS4 Premium Design suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) from my Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 suite last year (Adobe had purchased Macromedia), but quickly found out then, that in order to activate it, I had to call their customer service center.

From there — after proving to the rep that I had a legitimate copy and that, yes, I was entitled to upgrade from my previous Dreamweaver product (had he ever been to the Adobe site?) — I was provided with a series of keystrokes that took me to a hidden window where a “challenge code” was displayed that had to then be relayed via phone to obtain a “response code”, which would allow me to actually use the programs I had just spend $600 to buy.

On Tuesday, I got a new Mac and in order to install the suite, had to “deactivate” it on my old laptop (which I sold to a co-worker’s mother yesterday). I then spent a good hour installing it on the new 17″ MacBook Pro last night and ran yet again into the same “challenge/response” requirement.

You know, I could have “found” a pirated/hacked copy and bypassed this crap — and saved a lot of time and money.

I love how their anti-piracy policies punish legitimate buyers. Reminds me of why I left Microsoft and their draconian policies that are very similar. I still get a “this copy of Windows XP is not valid” every few times I start it up via Parallels on my Mac and then it is disabled until I reboot.

Fun.

ABC News published this story today. I can’t imagine that Amazon did this deliberately and seems less than-than-forthcoming because of the possibility that someone may have relatively easily hacked into their system.

That’s not a good message from a security/trust/confidence standpoint.

‘Glitch’ or Hacker?: Gay Titles Deep-Sixed at Amazon
Authors Cry Foul Over Removal of Gay Book Rankings from Amazon.com Site

By RUSSELL GOLDMAN
April 14, 2009—

Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer, blamed a computer “glitch” for stripping scores of gay-themed books of their sales ranking, preventing them from appearing on the site’s best seller lists. But a notorious Internet hacker is also claiming to be behind the mysterious happenings at the Web site, which is the top online book seller.

Amazon would not elaborate on the cause of the glitch or why it seemed to mainly target books about gay and lesbians — from academic treatises to romance novels. Some authors of the targeted books believe the company actively engaged in a discriminatory policy that hurt their sales.
(more…)

I made some cosmetic and other changes to this blog Saturday — some minor, some not so much.

For the most part, I made the blog the focus of my main LGS page and lost the less-used pages (humor, links, writings, etc.).

Simplification, generally.

I started looking for a specific photograph last night and ended up using my film scanner to process more than 240 negatives at 4800 dpi into an average size of 15MB (5600 x 3600 ) digital files. That’s almost 4GB of new images if anyone’s counting.

I ended up covering 1983 — the year I lived in Washington DC — to 1985, two years before I moved to Houston and eventually met my partner.

Here is a quick sample:

I spent a month in Cody, Wyoming during the holidays running the local Senate office

I worked for a senator from Wyoming in Washington DC for all of 1983

Two of my nieces in Wyoming

Me at Christmas at some friends’ in Provo, Utah

My niece

A bevy of beauties from Wyoming

My parents, aunts and a cousin visiting the FBI in Washington DC

One of my company’s planes taxis out of Newark, NJ

My parents, aunts and a cousin visit the World Trade Center in New York

I went back to Brazil five years after my mission

Me at Liberty State Park – a few miles from my home in Jersey City, NJ

I think you can ignore Thursday’s entry wherein I described cosmetic changes I had made to this blog.

I just started over from scratch this morning and just completed a totally new “theme”.