Outage (and why Verizon FIOS sucks)

So, I do know for a fact that there are some people who read my blog prior to it being unceremoniously being taken down due to us moving to Philadelphia and choosing Verizon as our ISP. I have to apologize for being down for the last 7 months.

I was checking out ISP's just before we moved from Rochester and realized that Verizon was offering FIOS Internet in my building. I quickly signed up for it with a one year contract.

I love the speed. It is awesome. I have never had an outage so far with respect to the internet connectivity. I do have to reboot the crappy Actiontec router that came with it once in a while. It just seems to hang when I try to download or stream copious amounts of data.

However, what I did not know was the fact that Verizon blocks incoming traffic to port 80 and port 25. C'mon now, are you kidding me? Such policies make me laugh and cringe at the same time. I can run bittorrent to dowload massive amounts of content, all of it legal BTW ;-), run servers on all other ports but cannot have incoming traffic to these two ports. I just do not understand. I read some forums, Verizon lets you run servers only if you buy their business package.

I wish I were smart enough to realize what Verizon was thinking.

As a result however, I have had to transfer all my content from my trusty old AMD K6/2 to a managed ISP. I have had 1 and 1 as my domain registrar for the last couple of years and they have reasonable hosting plans. I have decided to move my domains over there till either Verizon changes its policy or I move to Comcast, the other ISP in Philadelphia. I am currently paying $4.99 a month to host this blog and my website. Do check it out. It has a nice slide show going now. The 1 and 1 package also comes with 2 blogs that can be set up through their control panel and use Wordpress, something I am comfortable with and have used i the past. The only drawback is, with the cheap plan, I miss out on all the little customizations I had going on with the older version of the blog.

I was also able to hack the Kubrick template to suit my needs for the main page. I may change it later but I am happy with the way it looks now.

Well, all said and done, we are back online. Hope I can continue to post on a regular basis.

Arrogant Apples

Yes, I have been seeing it for years and it is admittedly funny on many an occasion, I do feel Apple's arrogance has peaked to a higher level.



Apple's brand spankin' new OS displays an old CRT monitor with a BSOD as an icon for a Windows PC connected to your network. Not to mention it uses the same icon for drives shared over Samba. I wonder who is looking more stupid here. The old Windows or the new OS X Leopard?

Anil Dash put it very aptly. But I am surprised to see how many people want to dismiss this as a joke. Yes, I understand that all the Mac vs PC ads are to sell Macs and to tell people how much cooler Macs are compared to PC. One however has to question the logic behind this one. Apple has grown in the last couple of years. It is high time they act grown up too.

Hey Mr. Jobs, the folks who bought this machine already know (or are about to find out) how cool your Mac is! Your ad campaign is working. You can stop with the PC bashing for folks who see your ads and buy your computers.

Engadget has some good instructions to make your brand new Mac be a little more politically correct.