Inside my mind

Over the past few months (okay, longer) I've not really done any blogging. This was brought to my attention recently and so I've decided to make a new blog and actually adopt a focus when I blog, rather than the more disjointed, random posts you've had here over the past three years.

My new blog is going to focus on images, mainly photographs, mainly things that inspire me and that I want to share with everyone. You'll notice the last two from this blog are up on the new one, along with a couple of others. I've called it Share a little and it will be an experiment of sorts, I expect that it'll change and grow as I use it and find things to post.

I haven't made it live yet, but it's accessible through a reverse proxy now so that you can click through and subscribe to the RSS feed if you like. I'll expect that my new blog will replace this one within the next week.

Oh, and feel free to leave comments on either this post or any post on there - let me know if you like it.

Photo by Joe Miller

I have had the unfortunate luck of being one of the 266 people who have lost all their emails in a recent 'incident' at Orcon.

How it impacted me

I can't think of anything I've lost that is hugely worrying, I have a different 'main' email account and this one was more of a secondary/older account. I've had this account for at least 7 years, probably more. There's so much email in there I don't know what I've lost. I may find this annoying one day, but not today.

The Orcon response

First of all I'm still waiting for a reply to the help form I filled in on their website. This is very poor. How long should it take for a response that says "yes we know something is wrong, we are looking into it"?

The best side of Orcon I've seen with this is their twitter account. Orcon put effort into their twitter and ^ER (I'm sorry, I don't know your name) was very helpful, telling me there was an issue (and that it was being looked at). Since then I've got a couple of (timely) updates. It's not been great news, but at least the information has been flowing. I've also been following other twitter users and the geekzone forums.

However, the responses in the news have left me wondering what actually happened. This is a mess and I would like to know more than "Bartlett said Orcon is conducting a full review of the failure".

Where are the backups?

The most disappointing thing is not that the emails were deleted, it's that that Orcon don't seem to have usable (or perhaps any?) backups. Email is a valuable commodity - less valuable to me than others for sure, but still it seems like something your ISP would want to keep around.

Bad stuff happens, people make mistakes. I can understand a mistake, heck last week I broke this blog by accident, but I had a way to recover it - Orcon it seems, don't. This despite the fact that the One News article has them saying "technology fails". They seem to know this, but they have been found unprepared.

The $100 refund

I have a free lifetime email and hosting account with Orcon, so I've never paid them any money. Since I've never paid for this service I'm not sure I should expect much - the paying customers however should let their expectations be known.

The news says I'll get $100 for this inconvenience. I'm not sure if that still applies since I'm not already paying anything, but I don't want $100 account credit - I don't know what I'd use it on. It's a good step by Orcon to repair their reputation but on me it's a bit wasted.

Final thoughts

Backups shouldn't be an afterthought - they should be built into a service that you care about. If Orcon made the decision (by choice or by default) to not properly backup then I personally see that as an indication of how much they care about the service.

By comparison, your gmail is backed up in a few places. I know this is not a 100% guarantee but it shows they thought about this and built it into their system.

Google keeps multiple backup copies of users' emails so that we can recover messages and restore accounts in case of errors or system failure, for some limited periods of time. Even if a message has been deleted or an account is no longer active, messages may remain on our backup systems for some limited period of time. This is standard practice in the email industry, which Gmail and other major webmail services follow in order to provide a reliable service for users. We will make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical.

I would like to offer the $100 rebate back to Orcon for them to spend on sysadmin time to implement backups for customers that stay. I also plan to look at backup options for my other email address - the one with my important things in it.

For want of some time and thought about backups, this could have been a 24 hour outage.

If only ads were this amusing all the time

Original (imgur.com)

Original (thechessworld.com)

Original (image.motortrend.com)

Right now I'm living in America (for a while, I'll be back) and I don't have a phone. Twice in the past week I have had to give away my credit card details and there has been no encrypted way to do it. The first was to a support person for my travel insurance (their encrypted website wasn't letting me submit for some reason) and the other was my travel agent.

I do like my travel agent, but her response to my email question left me a bit sad for the general view of 'security'.

Me: I can pay by credit card - I'd prefer to send my details to you securely if it's possible though.

Travel Agent: Cool. You can either send the credit card digits in 2 separate emails or call me and give over the phone

I'm sure this viewpoint is not uncommon. I ended up Skyping my parents and getting them to call, it seemed like the less poor way, but I know it could still have been intercepted... so I want to make something that will make this easier in the future.

Since encrypted email isn't really an option and most places don't have encrypted places to use to send data I'm wondering about this idea.

I want to make an encrypted (SSL) one-time access pastebin. The idea would be I'd put my details into the pastebin and it would store it (encrypted) in a database and generate a one-time link. This link could only be accessed once and would be sent to the intended recipient. After the first access the data is removed and a message telling the user they are not the first person to read the data is displayed.

I know that this isn't a perfect system - someone could still intercept the message and get to the details first. It's my hope that the intended recipient would email back saying they couldn't get the details and I'd know to cancel that card and order a new one.

Of course, if it all goes well then the recipient would access the details and any late interception would result in a useless message.

Have I missed anything? Would this really work?

I've been somewhat saddened and surprised at how much of a challenge not tweeting for a month was. I found that when I heard something amusing or interesting I wanted to tweet it. When I got pissed off at something I wanted to tweet and vent. I realised that my twitter account had become a spewage area for bits of my brain.

This is not a bad thing, however. Interaction, good. Venting anger, good. Discussion with others, good. Not being able to enjoy something without feeling the need to share it with twitter, bad. Wondering what's going on in twitter instead of having proper focus on the task at hand, bad.

Over the past month my reliance on twitter has dropped substantially. In moments of boredom I have logged on and read your tweets, laughed at the funny images you posted and lamented my self imposed trial without it. This has put me at a crossroads. I know I can happily live my life without twitter. I would miss out on some good stuff but I'd also miss out on the bad stuff it encourages. At the same time twitter is not intrinsically good or bad, and if used in a more sensible - less 'pay attention to me' - way I think I could get more out of it.

So I'm kinda back. I'm not sure how much I'll tweet or read, but I'm not gone for good.

The following thread is bouncing around the office

feeling grotty again. going home. contactable by smoke signal and carrier pigeon.

Does your carrier pigeon support openVPN?

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

IPoAC?

Given Raoul the cat's hunting prowess, I would expect significant connectivity problems owing to packet loss.

and fragmentation

and missing headers

I've been thinking about doing this for a while and figured what the heck, lets give it a go. Twitter has been a wonderful tool for communication however it's had some unexpected impacts on how I live.

I have been using it to feed the part of me that desires attention and this side has kept on growing at a steady rate. This is not the side that trolls for attention (normally), it's the part of me that seeks validation, which experience has taught me rarely comes from the Internet.

Twitter has also become a common distraction for me, which is fine to a point as everyone needs something for their idle mind to do but I think that point has passed and I'm into territory where I'm better off without it. Add into this the inability for me to see @replies from people I do follow to people I don't follow and Twitter loses that very valuable way for me to meet new people.

So, I'm going to try going one month without tweeting. This isn't a ban for myself of all twitter (I won't be blocking my access to it, tweets can have lots of useful stuff in them). I just won't tweet from 20th June 2009 to 20th July 2009 (inclusive). I will still get emails about DMs and respond as needed.

I will of course fall back to the other forms of communication I have available to me: txt messaging, email, MSN and phone. In addition there are the ones I have but don't really use: blag comments, facebook, bebo, carrier pidgin, etc.

At the end of the month (if I realised it has passed) I'll decide if I come back or just let my account go idle.

I'll preface this post by saying if you're easily offended then stop here and go do something else. I'm going to talk about the mess that has been the Miss California saga. The outrage surrounding this 23 year old is quite amazing.

Hilton, who is openly gay, asked: "Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalise same-sex marriage. Do you think every state should follow suit. Why or why not?"

"I think it's great Americans are able to choose one or the other," Prejean answered. "We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage.

"And you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.

"No offence to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be between a man and a woman."

Miss California defends gay stance - stuff.co.nz

Carrie Prejean was asked the question. She didn't volunteer her opinions, didn't twist the question to make a point, she was asked very plainly. There are three possible answers: Yes, No and I haven't decided. The judge would have known ahead of asking this question that Carrie was a Christian and would most likely be answering No or I haven't decided - both of which are valid answers but I think she answered the question both honestly and reasonably.

Now, part of life is learning that everyone has an opinion. You might think her opinion is wrong, but it is her opinion, not yours. If you're willing to ask a question be willing to accept an answer you don't like. If you think that the answer will damage your competition then I suggest you don't ask it at all.

As a Christian I find myself in a position where people assume I'm closed minded and judgemental before they've even met me. I work hard to dispel this preconception, however I feel there's a double standard here. If someone demands the right to be themselves, to express their opinions and beliefs then why can't they offer that to others?

Does Perez Hilton have more rights than Carrie Prejean? Does being Miss USA mean you should give up your beliefs and wave the USA flag proudly in your dress while promoters and sponsors lead you the way they want? If the competition is a way to find a pretty puppet then why ask questions?

This post could be about a different topic, different issue. This isn't an isolated case or group, but it is one that's received a lot of media coverage. The bottom line is this woman is entitled to her opinion, they asked for her opinion and then when they didn't like it they stirred up a media storm against her. I think she's done very well to stick to her beliefs and not bow to peer pressure. I'm also pleased that Donald Trump let the result stand.

So Telecom is launching their new network ahead of their announced date of "sometime in June", which I was dubious about anyway. This means my birthday will be after the launch now, making it a good time to buy a new phone to replace my current Nokia 6275i, which is a good phone but I'd like something newer, faster and more ergonomic for txting. Walking home I thought back on all the phones I've owned and what I liked or disliked about them, why I switched networks and changed number and what will make me buy another handset.

Starting off with my Alcatel One Touch Easy on Vodafone. This was back in the day when txting was brand new, you couldn't txt people on a different network, it cost to send and receive txts and I didn't care. Just to own a phone was a huge deal and I still remember being so frustrated having to wait for the initial battery charge to play with it. I had an 021 number that I can't for the life of me remember. Over time I realised that having only 2 lines was a huge limitation and that I wanted something that had a menu that was usable. I had played with other Nokias and wanted my own, but couldn't afford it.

Enter Pulsate, which was what Boost Mobile used to be branded as. They had a deal: you and 4 of your friends bring in your working Vodafone phones and you'll get a brand new Nokia 5120i on the Telecom network. This was a tricky decision at the time because it meant leaving all the people I could txt on Vodafone behind, but a few of us switched so it was worth it. I still have that phone which had an 025 number that I do still remember. It was a great handset with one design flaw: the battery would work itself loose over time, so lots of us ended up taping it in place. Aside from that there was nothing wrong with it except the bulk and I was a happy camper.

Then I got a call from Telecom, the new 027 network was starting up and they needed people to test the pilot. They picked 1000 people at random and in exchange for a new phone and unlimited calls, txts and WAP during the trial period I had to fill in 2 online questionnaires a week - good deal, I thought. The handset I picked from the launch options was the Samsung SCH-N105 and I could only find one image of it online. It was small, but had one huge flaw and a number of large ones. The biggest was this: When you wanted to send a txt you had to manually type the number before sending the txt and you couldn't search your address book. This left you looking in your address book, memorising a 10 digit number then quickly going to txt and typing it in. If this seems stupid to you, you're right. I had enough and went looking for a good Telecom handset, only to find that there were none.

So I went back to Vodafone which opened up a huge collection of Nokia handsets, which I spent a long time researching. I ended up picking a Nokia 8250 and to this day I can't fault this phone. It txted, it called and it had a blue backlight. The butterfly menu key was really nice to use and it was small and light. I was sad to have the battery on the phone drop to unusable levels

It should be noted that up until this point all txts have cost me 20 cents each. This is a ridiculous price for such a small amount of data but the problem was everyone was charging that and it was only a matter of time before someone made a move. The first big move came from Vodafone, with free txt weekends, which clogged up the entire SMS part of the network all weekend.

I replaced my phone with another Nokia on Vodafone: a Nokia 6100. This Nokia is again nice and small, has a colour screen and is light, however the buttons were tough for txting on so whilst it's a good business phone I don't have a special memory of it.

Then I started txting people on both Telecom and Vodafone, which started getting expensive. I was given a Nokia 2280 by a friend and connected it with a new number. Now I have both an 027 and an 021 handset, which was very popular for a time. It was an unbreakable phone, and Telecom had two $10 txt deals, the one I had was $10 for 500 txts to both networks - nice and cheap compared to Vodafone. The 021 was mostly to keep contact with people who only had that number and the 027 was my primary handset. This lasted until someone tried to guess my 021 PIN and PUK codes, frying my SIM card and Vodafone said I needed to spend $30 to get a new SIM and that I couldn't get my address book back from my current SIM. So I walked away. That said, the 2280 was getting a bit old and some of the buttons would double tap, but I refused to give it up as the only better handset was $500, which wasn't worth it.

So I kept the 2280 until my ex's dad took pity on me and found me a 2nd hand Nokia 6275i, my current handset. This was the only decent 'candybar' Nokia that Telecom had on offer. It's a very good phone with a big colour screen, nice interface, easy to txt with, however it's not perfect. The buttons are a bit small and holding it to txt is just a little bit more stressful than it needs to be. Add to that the earpiece is quiet and I'm in the market again. The only difference now is that I'm on 2000 txts to just Telecom for $10/month (which I can change on any given month, well done Telecom) and that I occasionally check twitter from my phone.

So with this new network, what am I looking for? I won't buy a flip top and I only like Nokias. I have to be able to send lots of txts. If Vodafone offered and guaranteed 2000 txts to both networks for $10 I'd be tempted, except my friends are mostly on Telecom with the same deal I have. However, Vodafone have BestMate and Mobile Number Portability so I could keep my 027 number. I don't need a new handset, but I do want one. I want a phone that doesn't get in my way and a cost that doesn't get in my way. If you offer a plan that has things I don't want, it gets in my way. If you force me to think about prepaying for services each month, that gets in my way. If you try to lock me in for a long time, that gets in my way. If you try to charge me for customer service, that gets in my way.

In this game, Telecom is still winning. They targeted the student, with a low cost, high usage plan that appealed to those who only have pocket money or only want to spend pocket money. They have managed to get lots of kids onto the network and these kids will grow up less likely to change. Vodafone have targeted business customers and I assume that's going well for them, but I'm not a business.

I also don't care that the new network will be faster. I care that Telecom have unlocked a lot of Nokia handsets for my use. If they don't keep the $10 txt plans on the new network I will cling to the current CDMA network, however if the plans prove to be universal and don't lock me in, you'll probably see me with a new handset soon.

With Camp Survivor fast approaching I've started looking at getting a proper DSLR again. I currently own a Canon Ixus 850IS which is an awesome Point and Shoot camera. It has full manual controls for ISO, exposure, a few white balance modes etc. but it doesn't do well in low light or for distance shots.

I'm looking at brands and models and I've almost decided to go with Canon again. I believe I'd enjoy owning a Nikon more, but they lose out because of price and the increased noise/less sharpness at the higher end of the ISO range compared to their Canon rivals.

Add to this the fact that all my friends own Canon and I can pretty please borrow their lenses and it's almost game over, but not if I find a Nikon at the right price.

I'm aiming to spend $1000, but I know if I also want a twin lens kit then it'll be more. So far in the running for Canon are the 1000D, 400D, 450D and 350D in that order. The 1000D has 'Live View' which I think i'll use and takes SD cards, which makes it less likely to break from putting a card in backwards than the 450D. That said, it does make it slower. If I planned to shoot in RAW I would stay away from the 1000D but I really don't think I'll shoot in RAW for a long time, so my main consideration is JPEG.

Things that draw me to the 1000D are price, weight and the fact that dpreview gave it a Highly Recommended. I still need to go into a store and play with one, but I'm sure I can organise that soon.

Update: Oooohh, this looks decent: CANON EOS 1000D SLR 2L Kit

Andrew Whitehead from Baptist Youth Ministries is talking about how to do discipleship from the viewpoint of a leader.

Formal Discipleship - Bible study

1. Get one of the youth to open in prayer, give them ownership of the night
2. Make everyone feel welcome, feel the love
3. Don't be scared of silence, people need time to process their thoughts
4. Don't answer the questions (if there's just silence) else they will always expect all the answers from you
5. Consider the personalitites of the people in the study. Extraverts speak a lot (think outloud), introverts think a lot and speak much less.
6. If you use a persons name for an answer you can put lots of pressure on introverts. Ask an extravert first, give the introverts more time
7. Ask follow up questions if you get the basic fob-off answer to a question
8. For questions, make sure you put them to the floor for everyone to answer
9. Encourage people sharing
10. Don't make stuff up. If you don't know, don't fake it. Say you'll find out for next week.
11. Make sure you ask for verses to back up things said.
12. Seek God's guidance on whether things need adding
13. Ontrack/offtrack - if it's glorifying God then it's not a bad thing to go offtrack
14. Take notes and ask how people went with the things discussed - follow up and show you care

Informal Discipleship - Everything else

1. Don't underestimate the power of a txt/question as to how they're going
2. Include them in your life - do some stuff together
3. If you go out and do stuff with your youth you get more of a right to talk into their lives
4. If talking to guys don't sit face to face - it's better if you're doing something like working on a car or surfing
5. If talking to girls you can talk face to face because girls will talk whenever and they like face to face
6. Informal is what really makes a ministry
7. You have to live it yourself - young people can spot it miles away if you're not. It's not like a coat you can put on and off
8. Once a youth pastor, always a youth pastor
9. You have to stand and call people towards you, not try and move youth to where you aren't
10. Don't sell your youth short
11. Don't be afraid to ask the hard God questions
12. Don't live with what if's - take the risk if God is trying to move you
13. Don't confuse busyness with effectiveness

For the past year I've had a folder in my Trash called 'Archive' that I tried to delete but was never able to. I assumed this was the mail servers fault and ignored it. I recently got ssh access to the mail server so I could filter my emails using procmail. Whilst I was here, why not delete the annoying folder and be rid of it?. The folder wasn't there.

This means it's Thunderbird that's at fault. I tried lots of things - removing referenced to 'Archive' in panacea.dat and on the file system resulted in no joy, the folder kept coming back.

The solution is rather simple and rather hidden.

<ben> does anyone know why Thunderbird/Icedove would refuse to forget a folder?
<ben> it's not on godel and I've deleted the referenced in panacea.dat and the folder on my filesystem
<matt> have you unsubscribed from it in tbird?
<ben> I don't believe i've ever subscribed to a folder
<matt> click on the top of the tree and then 'Manage folder subscriptions'
<matt> it's an 'Advanced feature', apparently
<matt> your removed folder may just go away if you refresh the list
<ben> success! thank you matt 
<matt> np

So, left click on the item just above your Inbox on the left, then pick 'Manage folder subscriptions' from the list that appears in the pane on the right. It's not ordered like your inbox, so you may have to look around to find the one you're after.

There are times when I have to eat my words. This may be one of those times. Today I said:

"deliberately not blacking out his avatar because: 1. It will achieve nothing, 2. It's harder to actually use twitter with people doing it."

Source: http://twitter.com/serenecloud/status/1213425907

Whilst the second is still true the impact of having 2 pages full of black avatars is hard to ignore and appear to have been proven wrong about the first, but have I? The blackout caught on faster than I thought it would and even jumped different groups of people I know in twitter, so in that sense it's been a great success.

However the goal of this campaign is to stop Section 92A of the Copyright Act from being passed into law and I just don't see that happening. I've seen lots of stupid laws passed but this one takes the cake for me because it has both the people it will hurt and the people it's designed to benefit against it.

The argument goes 'Copyright is good because artists need copyright to make money'. I'm not arguing that artists should make money, but when you have artists signing a petition against 92A (myself included) you've got to wonder what the heck is going on.

Another comment I made today rings true in this:

"Democracy: The loudest group of voices gets what they want. Sounds fine until you realise some groups can afford megaphones."

Source: http://twitter.com/serenecloud/status/1213558355

I could go on for pages about how the industry has been lobbying for this. To make criminals out of NZers without the burden of proof. It's a dream come true for them, but I won't because google can find these blogs for you and Brenda has quite a few emotive posts.

What I will say is that I have lost any illusions I had about democracy being fair and balanced. The odds are stacked firmly against the general public and in favour of the companies that have the money to push their message. I hope this blackout gets media attention and gets the law delayed, reviewed or just thrown out, however that was my hope when CFF launched and when the media originally picked up the stories.

All I've seen from that media coverage has been exposure of the issue, but also the Government denying the issues and the pro-92A lobby calling me and my fellow thought-capable workmates/friends liers for taking this out of context, promise it won't be abused and just generally spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

New Zealand - prove me wrong. Prove democracy can work. Else I'll be right, this effort will achieve nothing and this is a time I want to be wrong.