Category: Uncategorized

I read an article this morning on the theft of customer data (including credit card data) from geeks.com, a site from which I had purchased a cheap graphics tablet on a lark about eight months ago. Of course, I immediately got concerned, and checked my credit cards for any suspicious charges, but found none. (The comments on that article seem to indicate pretty widespread fraud has already taken place, to the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.) Then I checked to see whether or not I had used the “secure online account number” features of my credit cards when I bought the tablet, and was relieved to find out that I had in fact done so. For the uninitiated, they’re card numbers generated for use with specific merchant accounts, linked to your normal card. They can only be used at that specific merchant, though, so they’re mostly useless if stolen. A quick phone call to Discover later, and the card number linked to geeks.com was shut down, presumably eliminating any possibility that I’ll be affected by the data theft. Pretty painless and hassle-free.

I used to think that I was being overly-paranoid by using the secure numbers whenever possible, but this incident has made me a true believer. Annoyingly, there are still some things that you can’t really use them for — cases where you need to present the original card to receive goods or services. But overall, it’s still worth using. I would urge everyone to use these secure number services whenever possible — it’ll give you peace-of-mind and potentially save you a lot of hassle when (not if) you’re affected by a security breach.

So I finally got off of my duff and did an install of Drupal for the main portion of this site, replacing the old placeholder page that was there. Right now there isn’t much (any?) content on there, but I’ll be putting up some projects and other stuff soon, hopefully. I figure it’s better to use an actual content management system for this, rather than cobbling together some bare pages with links to project files…

As an SMU alumnus, I feel compelled to comment on the hiring of June Jones as the new football coach. The football program has been in shambles ever since the NCAA death penalty was brought down on the Mustangs, and, personally, I feel that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to rebuild the program such that it can really compete successfully at the I-A level. I also think that the enormous amount of money pumped into the program since the death penalty (culminating in the construction of the Gerald J. Ford Stadium, a massive edifice that seems out-of-place on the corner of campus) is probably unjustified in the grand scheme of things.

That being said, if there is to ever be any hope of reclaiming gridiron glory, it is going to start by the hiring of (comparatively) big-name coaching talent…so I am cautiously optimistic about this hiring. Hopefully this will give recruits a new reason to examine the possibilities of playing for the Mustangs.

Sapp tells Raiders he’s retiring, ending stellar 13-year career

Sapp posted a two word message on his Web site, www.qbkilla.com, announcing his intention: “I’M DONE!”

I’m sorry, but “QB Killa” sounds like one of the fake names I would use when filling a team up with max-ability-score players in an NFL video game…

I’ve been under the weather lately, but once I’m feeling better, I’ll be back to writing more regularly. Hope everyone out there has a happy new year!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I got Sandy a Tassimo Hot Beverage System, along with a little fondue maker and some new glasses for our kitchen. The Tassimo is pretty neat — we’ve only used it for hot chocolate so far (since I wasn’t sure of exactly the kind of coffee or tea Sandy would prefer), but it lives up to its billing of being fast, easy, and with minimal clean-up required. It wound up being a pretty good deal for a number of reasons:

• We had several 20% off coupons good for any single item at Bed Bath and Beyond. Naturally, I used one of them on this.
• It came with an additional $30 mail-in rebate.
• It also came with a registration code for two free boxes of T-Discs (as an incentive to register it online).
• I also got another coupon for additional free T-Discs upon purchase of 3 boxes at Bed Bath and Beyond.

The cats got some salmon treats, and some fluff balls (which they love). They also got wet food breakfast today, which Oliver always loves. Mia also got a special treat, as Sandy made her some new stuffed mice toys, which she really loves — she bats them around, throws them up in the air, chases them, and carries them around in her mouth. It’s very cute.

As for me, I got a Logitech Harmony 880 remote control, Halo 3, an Anaheim Arsenal jersey, and some other assorted knick-knacks from Sandy. My brother Ray had also earlier given me Guild Wars, NBA Street Homecourt, and BioShock. The biggest problem at this point is going to be finding enough time to plow through all of these games!

I saw a post on the always-amusing Coding Horror regarding the fracturing of online identities. A couple of early blogging pioneers are mentioned, along with the number of separate profiles or identities that they seem to have — in the range of 20-30. The question is, which one of these is “truly” them? The somewhat philosophical question about which of dozens of disparate user identities actually represents a person is an interesting one — it seems possible that abandoned user identities may continue to “outrank” their more updated peers, due to search engine bias or other factors. And, as the article notes, it scarcely seems possible for a regular working person to keep 5, 10, or even 30 different “presences” up-to-date and relevant. The web is littered with abandoned blogs, web sites, software projects, and other detritus, along with sporadically-updated content (such as this blog), for which regular revisits and/or specialized software are required to stay synched.

The potential confusion of abandoned versus current identities is part of the reason that I finally decided to buckle down and register eriknovales.com/ — I figured that it would be the easiest and most specific way for people to easily find me. Personal domain names are kind of like the true names of the 20th and 21st centuries — if you know a person’s name, and it’s fairly unique (as mine luckily seems to be), odds are good that if you just try going to “name.com,” you’ll find them. Sadly, in spite of several months worth of posting, and a domain name that matches my own name, my site still only ranks as the 13th “major” result in a Google search for “Erik Novales.” Looks like I’ve still got some work to do to “reclaim” my identity from all these other community sites!

Yesterday I finally managed to redeem the Best Buy rain check for my free copy of Heroes Season 1 on HD-DVD. I originally got this rain check almost two months ago when I bought the HD-DVD add-on for the 360, and the boxed set hasn’t been in stock since then.

Over the last couple of months, I patiently kept checking to see if it was in stock whenever I was at the store, wisely choosing not to rely on the alleged phone notification you get when the item is in stock. (In the end, I never got a phone call of any sort.) I also investigated other avenues. Apparently you can’t redeem a rain check at another store. At another point, I attempted to convince customer service to just give me store credit for it, but apparently they can’t do that either. They told me that I wasn’t even supposed to get a rain check for a free item that was out of stock. I went back and checked the circular for that week, thanks to the archival powers of the Internet, and it did not indicate that was the case. Since the circular did indicate that other free offers were limited to stock on hand, I was pretty sure that I really was due my free boxed set. In the end, thankfully, justice prevailed.

I haven’t watched the boxed set, though. I’ll have to set aside some time to watch it, along with the Arrested Development Season 1 set that my brother gave me which I still haven’t watched…and then, there are still the 5 extra movies that we’re still expecting via the mail-in rebate…

One of the biggest guilty pleasures of my youth, American Gladiators, is being revived for 2008. This past Saturday, me and Sandy went to see a taping of the new show at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. The hosts of the new show are Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali — pretty decent choices in my opinion. When we arrived, they were taping the new “Hit and Run” event in one half of the set, opposite from where we were sitting. In this event, the contestants basically have to dash across a flimsy bridge structure while the gladiators try and knock them into a pool of water below using “demolition balls” (basically tethered medicine balls). We only saw one round of this, but the contestants were pretty conservative, going slow and low — nobody got knocked off. Boo.

On our side of the arena, we got to see Powerball, which, for the uninitiated, involves contestants placing balls into containers in the arena, whilst being deterred from doing so by the gladiators. A bonus for placing a ball in the container in the center of the field provides a risk/reward trade-off. The men’s round, I believe, was dead-even in this event — the gladiators were more focused on stopping the contestants rather than really bringing the pain, so to speak. The women’s round, on the other hand, was a lot more fun to watch, because there were a couple of occasions where the contestants got SLAMMED and THROWN DOWN. Pretty crazy. Even though the show is 100% pure cheese, the actual games themselves definitely seem to be taxing — one of the male contestants came up limping a little bit after Powerball, and the female contestants were pretty much out of breath during the post-event interview. I guess getting BODY SLAMMED will do that to you! (To the producers’ credit, the post-event interviews generally did take place almost immediately after the event — there wasn’t much of a delay in setting up for them.)

We could tell, based on the layout of the arena, what some of the other events are going to be. The Wall is returning — and, now that I have actually done some gym rock climbing, I recognize the fact that it’s generally a very simple course, with lots of monster handholds and lots of choices. I think anyone who’s done a bit of rock climbing would do well at this event — but then, the same thing goes for the gladiators, so it will be interesting to see how this event will play out compared to how it did in the original series. There was also some kind of gigantic half-pyramid structure that contestants would need to ascend while being attacked by gladiators. The steps on the pyramid were probably between 20 and 30 inches high — not a trivial thing to get up. Wikipedia informs me that this event is simply called The Pyramid.

Fortunately, our experience didn’t match that of this other blogger — the taping was actually on schedule, according to a crew member, and there wasn’t too much dead time between takes. We received some cans of an energy drink being promoted during the show, but it didn’t taste too hot, and it didn’t make me want to POUND SOME MORE in an XTREME fashion. The show premieres on January 6th, although I have no idea when the segments we watched will be shown. There’s a decent chance that you’ll be able to pick us out in the footage, though — we were sitting in the 2nd row, near the “friends and family” section. (The parents and other family of several gladiators, as well as the “ref”, were sitting near us, which was pretty funny.)

It’s my 29th birthday today. A quick Google reveals that not only do I share a birthday with Chris Difford of Squeeze (one of my favorite bands), but also Laura Bush. Hmm. Laura Bush is also an alumnus of SMU. Frightening coincidences!