Leaving, on a jet plane

Obligatory flexing of nerd muscles as I glom onto the wireless at the airport. Interncontinental (I refuse to call it “Bush”) has finally added wireless Internet in the terminals for general consumption.

It’s a fee based system. Sign up for an account and off you go. Normally I would head over to the row of chairs across from the President’s Club and hook up there cuz it’s free, but the terminal I am departing from is off in the new section and it is not so easy to get to from here.

Despite what they show on TV, Vegas is more of a haven for blue-haired old ladies than it is for the young, good looking jet set. A people-mover just deposited a batch of senior citizens I can only assume are off on a gambling junket to the glittering mecca of nickel slots and cheap booze.

Hopefully I will return with much swag from the vendors. Who knows, maybe I will even get my hands on the covetted pink Razr. Won’t you be SOOOO jealous? *snicker!

My flight leaves in an hour. I think I will wonder over to the local concession for some overpriced coffee and an expired pastry of some kind.

Bright light city gonna set my soul on fire

How I wish that there were more
Than the twenty-four hours in the day
’cause even if there were forty more
I wouldn’t sleep a minute away

I’m on the plane first thing in the morning and bound for CES 2006 in shiny Las Vegas.

When I arrive in Vegas I need to get checked into the hotel, over to the convention center to get registered and pick up my wristbands. Then it’s off to the Microsoft VIP reception to schnmooze with Bill Gates and his cronies. After that, it’s over to the Ventian to see the Blue Man Group and then I round off my evening at Mandalay Bay for a private party.

And that’s just day one.

Wheee!!!!

Remember the Maine!

The weekend of Christmas we were visited by my friends Carl and Suzanne from Amsterdam. We had a nice dinner and some drinks and generally caught up on events since our visit to their place in May.

Carl found me a cool vintage postcard featuring a young girl wearing a sailor uniform. The interesting thing about this uniform is the hat which has the Word “Maine” on it signifying it as the uniform of a sailor on the USS Maine.

Why is that significant?

On February 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion destroyed the American battleship Maine in Havana Harbor and helped propel the United States into a war with Spain.

My great grandfather, Lt. John J. Blandin was the officer of the watch when the Maine blew up. The Spanish were blamed and we went to war.

In actuality the explosion was a malfunction. My great grandfather was the highest ranking officer to die as a result of that explosion and, as a result, has his name on the Maine memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

His account of the explosion can be found here.

He died on July 9, 1898…about 5 months after the explosion.
His obituary is here.

Interestingly enough, the US NAVY convened a tribunal annually for 100 years to discuss the disaster.
On the 100th anniversary my aunt sent them the letter my great grandfather sent to his wife right after the explosion. They had never seen it. It caused quite a stir.

This is what it said…note the PS and PPS

SS City of Washington
Havana, Cuba, 1898
February 16

My darling,

You have read of our wreck, and I suppose Dr. Greer has informed you that I am all right. I was on watch when the explosion took place. A more complete and sudden wreck one can’t imagine. All of us left alive climbed onto the poop, and then looked around to see in anything could be done. We pulled out the wounded where we could. The wreck sunk and rested on the bottom, and was soon burning fiercely. When the Captain saw that nothing more could be done, he gave the order to abandon ship. We had two boats left that would float, and the Spanish man-of-war sent 5 boats, the steamer Washington sent 2 boats, and we got all who were alive into them, 80 men and officers were saved, out of 340. So we lost 260 men, or near that. About half of those saved are badly injured, and some will die. We all went to the American Steamship “City of Washington”, of the Ward Line, and were treated with every courtesy. I have just learned that we are to go to Key West this afternoon, and suppose I will get home soon.

Two officers were lost, Jenkins and Merritt, both good friends of mine and fine fellows.

As for myself, I am uninjured. I lost everything except the clothes I have on. Tell Jack that I had a letter to him finished, but it was lost in the wreck.

Thank God, my darling that my life was spared again. Lots of love to my darlings from you own

Jack

P.S No one can tell what caused the explosion. I don’t believe the Spanish had anything to do with it.

Jack

P.P.S Don’t publish this letter.

The mention of his life being spared again was a reference to the wreck of the Trenton.

The thing that ties all this together for me is that is the widely believed notion that William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal articles fueled the flames of war. The sensational journalism propelled us into a bloody conflict with Spain.

Newspapers sent hundreds of reporters, artists, and photographers south to recount Spanish atrocities. The correspondents, including such notables as author Stephen Crane and artist Frederick Remington, found little to report on when they arrived.

“There is no war,” Remington wrote to his boss. “Request to be recalled.”

Remington’s boss, William Randolph Hearst, sent a cable in reply:

“Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”

Hearst was true to his word.
For weeks after the Maine disaster, the Journal devoted more than eight pages a day to the story.
Not to be outdone, other papers followed Hearst’s lead. Hundreds of editorials demanded that the Maine and American honor be avenged. Many Americans agreed. Soon a rallying cry could be heard everywhere — in the papers, on the streets, and in the halls of Congress: “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain.”

The Hearst corporation owns the Houston Chronicle. The very paper that publishes my column each week.

It’s just all so very odd when I stop and think about it.

Good times

The show last Friday was very nice. We had an awesome turn out for the evening as we were joined by new friends and old. It was reminiscent of our shows back in the days when were were playing regularly at Munchies.

My friends Theresa and Albert came and gave us hand painted gnomes that matched each of the band members costumes worn at the Ren Faire. That was super kind of them and quite unexpected.

jRant

You know that program for Windows called Weatherbug? That little application you install on your PC to give you weather updates live to your desktop? That program that chirps at you when a line of thunderstorms is barreling down on your location? Of course you do. You might even use it yourself.

I hate that program.

And this is not an idle hate, born of ignorance and perpetuated by misunderstandings. This is a hate born of experience and nurtured by facts.

As many people know, I am a huge anti-spyware activist. I write about it alot in my columns, I rant about it on my radio show and fight it each and every day at my job. I have even gone so far as to document my own remedy, affectionately known as the Jay Lee Patented Spyware Removal System that outlines some free programs and useful steps to help rid one’s computer of this scourge of technology.

Many years ago (back in the day as the kids say) when the Intraweb was just getting started ingenious web designers discovered that they could imbed HTML code in a web site that would cause a window to spontaneously erupt on your computer screen. And it wasn’t long before someone figured out that this window could hold an advertisement and the dreaded pop-up was born.

Web sites around the world utilized the pop-up as a way of pushing content to their web browsing visitors. These same sites recognized the earning potential of the pop-up when the realized they could sell this space to various advertisers like so many virtual billboards and pop-ups soon rivaled or even replaced the more common banner click-through ad that one would see on any given web page.

This, of course, gave birth to a burgeoning cottage industry. Pop-up blockers; useful little utilities that you could run on your computer that would close a pop-up window with a satisfying “pop” sound effect.

As pop-up blockers grew in popularity I can recall discussions on the ethics of using them. Otherwise sane people in the Internet industry would say “You must not run pop-up blockers! Those web site depend on the revenue of the advertisers! How will the web remain free?”

They argued that pop-ups were a necessary evil and that pop-up blockers were more harmful than helpful.

Nobody listened. Maybe they should have. Regardless, pop-up blockers became common place and pop-up ads were steadily being squashed. Web surfers were putting the mouse pedal to the metal and blazing along at speeds of 33.6 and some of the more fortunate propelled themselves forward at a staggering 56k.

Many web sites gave up as the potential revenue from pop-up ads declined. Why advertise in pop-up form if your potential audience never even saw the ad? Most advertisers went back to the old fashioned pay per hit method of the click-through banner ad and all seemed right with the world.

I don’t know what year it was. It had to be about five years ago. I was happily cruising along, surfing the net and for some reason I was compelled to look at the logs of my pop-up blocker (Adsgone as I recall) and I noticed that an awful lot of ads had been blocked in the short time I was surfing the web. For some now forgotten reason I decided to shut down the pop-up blocker and see what would happen.

Much to my dismay, my screen began to fill with pop-up advertisements! Not just the one or two you would expect from normal web browsing of the time, but dozens of them. As I dug around and explored and Google-searched the matter I came to a gruesome discovery. I had programs running on my computer that were generating pop-up ads! These were not the pop-ups I was familiar with, pop-ups generated by HTML code in a web site. These were coming from a stand alone program installed on my PC! Not only that but I noticed additional search bars in my web browser. Add-ons that were redirecting my web traffic to who knows where.

This is my first revelation and experience in dealing with what is commonly referred to today as spyware and adware.

Before I go on I should mention here that the term spyware is pretty loosely used these days. Many programs that are called spyware are not, in fact, spying on you. More often it is adware, software designed to steer you toward advertising. Another term for spyware and adware is malware (malicious software). No matter what you call it, it usually on your PC and you want it gone.

The primary culprit in my situation was a program called Weatherbug. Like so many people I just didn’t know that this little “free” utility came bundled with some other programs, programs that caused my computer to spew pop-up ads and installed browser helpers designed to redirect my web surfing to advertisers sites.

Weatherbug is a company and like any company they have one primary goal and that is to generate revenue.
Part of their revenue stream is derived from the add-ons to their software that generate the pop-ups and hijack your web browser. If you purchase their program you can get rid of the ads but if you want to use the “free” version you have to live with the pop-ups and other nastiness.

At this point I am annoyed. I looked at Weatherbug and checked out their Terms Of Use and End User License Agreement. It plainly states that the free version comes with MyWebSearch which is adware. If you remove MyWebSearch then Weatherbug ceases to function unless you opt for the pay version.

Fine by me. It’s all going away. I’ll get my weather from weather.com or NOAA.

The uninstall goes ok. Not great, but ok. I have to struggle a bit with it and go in and manually delete some things and it’s gone. I immediately notice an improvement in performance of my PC and I even get rid of my ad blocking software as the ads are minimal and I gain even more system resources.

Hallelujah! I’m free!

At this point I probably would not have given two darns or a heck about Weatherbug. In my mind it was a victory to discover that the program was a source of problems and simply ridding myself of it was all I needed to re-vitalize my Internet optimism. Little did I know what was coming.

In my day to day I do a lot of computer advising. My day job, my ra-didio show and my weekly column and almost daily Helpline blog not to mention the family members, friends and friends of friends who call, e-mail or shout their computer questions at me on a daily basis. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a chosen path and one I embrace.

In the course of solving my own problems I use this experience, strength and hope to assist others and it wasn’t long before a question about Weatherbug came along. I used it in my column for the Houston Chronicle and I outlined the pitfalls of this application and cautioned my readers against installing or using this program.

Much to my surprise I received not one, not two but THREE e-mails from three different employees of Weatherbug. Apparently my column was found and sent around their company. They each took the time to explain that their program was not spyware and it was not adware and how great they were and yadda-yadda-yadda. I tried e-mailing back and referencing the section in their Terms Of Use and End User License Agreement where it plainly states that the free version comes with MyWebSearch which is adware but they would have none of it.

After a few e-mail exchanges I gave up. Was this the end of my ongoing saga with Weatherbug? Nope!

As my crusade against spyware/adware/malware continued I found myself fielding question after question about this problem. I worked it into the column as often as I could. The radio show began to sound like the Spyware Show for crying out loud. This was/is a problem of epic proportions.

As I wrote my column I would end up mentioning Weatherbug on occasion. I was always careful not to call the program adware or spyware or even Malware. I just pointed out that if you have it installed on your computer you might find your life to be way more pleasant and worth living if you were to remove it.

And guess what? Each and every time I would mention it I would get contacted by Weatherbug challenging what I had to say.

I appreciate that they want to evangelize their product and protect it’s reputation. I even respect that. Sadly, one fact remains. When you install the free version you get a pile of software crap on your PC you would be better off without. I won’t hesitate to tell you that and I likely won’t be changing my position on this anytime soon.

I only casually mentioned Weatherbug in today’s HelpLine Blog which you can read here. I was comparing it to another malware offender known as Smiley Central which also installs garbage on your computer. The article had not been online more than one hour when I received a comment from the CTO of Weatherbug, Benjamin Beroukhim. He wanted to direct me to his editorial reply at networkworld.com where he was responding to NetBuzz columnist Paul McNamara and his recent observations regarding Weatherbug’s efforts to bolster their corporate image at the 2005 Interop conference in Las Vegas.

In his response to Mcnamara and Networkworld Beroukhim (The CTO of Weatherbug) went so far as to post this missive on the Weatherbug corporate blog in which he called into question Paul McNamara and Network World’s regard for human life. Good lord!

On of McNamara’s readers did respond by saying that “It looks like WeatherBug only cares about the lives of Windows-using employees since there is no version for Mac or Unix/Linux,” “Maybe it’s part of a bigger Microsoft plot to eliminate users of competing operating systems?”

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

So I guess this blog entry is my response to Beroukhim. With the proper tags in this blog entry and all the right keywords like “spyware” and “weatherbug” in the same story I fully expect a response from him or one of the other Weatherbug faitful within the hour. Maybe I should have him on the show?

Nahhhh…it would end up being an infomercial for malware and what kind of anti-spyware crusader would I be if I were to allow that to happen?

I would like to go out on a positive note and I will do that by promoting Konfabulator (now called Yahoo Widget Engine), a nifty desktop utility for Windows that will magically provide current weather conditions to your desktop for free and without one single pop-up. Will wonders never cease.

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