First Ed McMahon, then Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson, and now Billy Mays has died.  Okay maybe it's weird that I'm a fan of a teevee direct marketing pitchman, but I really liked the guy.  I didn't find his "Hi! Billy Mays here" commercials annoying at all, and I use several of his products and think they work exactly as advertised.  Plus, after watching his show Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel, I really grew to like the guy as a person.  He just seemed like a nice down-to-earth guy who really believed in the products he sold (unlike the shamwow guy, who I find very annoying).  This is a sad day for direct marketing.  Their biggest star, who was still far from his peak, has passed on.

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The title says it all.  No matter what you think about his (admittedly bizarre) personal life, he was an absolute entertainment phenomenon.  There will never be another entertainer like him.  Thriller will always be one of my most prized albums in my collection of vinyl.

With this and the death of Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett, this has turned out to be a hell of a depressing week.  It can't end soon enough.

I ran into a situation today where on our new beta server, we have a custom web application with a subfolder named "Reports."  It always worked fine on my other servers, but on this server no files in that folder could be accessed from the site.  What's more, we'd receive a prompt for user credentials, despite the fact that the only authentication mechanism enabled on the entire site was anonymous.

It turns out it's SQL 2008 Reporting Service's fault.  In SQL 2005 and older, you would see a subfolder called "Reports" and "ReportServer" under the Default Website.  With SQL 2008, it seems SQL does it a little different.  You use its own configuration manager to assign what IP addresses and subfolders respond to Reporting server.  These paths then do NOT show up under IIS.  Since the default is all IP addresses, there was a name collision with our custom web application.

It's an easy fix.  Go into the Reporting Services configuration and make sure the two folders only respond to IPs not associated with your custom web application.

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I think it's great that the people of Iran are beginning what appears to be the start of a revolution against their oppressive theocratic government.  That said, I am always equally disappointed in the American politicians exploiting this situation, where innocent people are dying, using it as a chance to grandstand.  Every American politician that calls for American intervention in the uprising has blood on their hands right now.  The mullahs want westerners to call for Iranian revolution.  It adds credence to their myth that westerners are meddling.  They want any excuse possible to put this thing down.

I also find it very ironic that the same politicians calling for western assistance for the revolutionaries were, not a month ago, supportive of bombing the crap out of Iran.  I'm looking at you, Senator bomb-bomb-bomb McCain.

All that said, if the Iranians ask for help.  I hope they get help...

But we should never forget that this is not just a series of interesting twitter feeds.  There are real consequences and real lives -- innocent lives -- at stake.

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A woman steals something from someone.  Actually, she stole 24 things.  And they were from a company, not a person.  Actually, they are illegal music downloads and she didn't really steal from the copyright holder as much as she obtained copyrighted material from a third party without the copyright holder's permission.  It's still theft.  And you won't hear me argue otherwise because I do believe copyright infringement is a serious crime.

So did she perform an illegal act?  Yes, absolutely.  Should she be forced to pay a civil penalty beyond simply the market value of the product she stole?  Yes, sure.  That's part of the punishment for committing a crime and its also a deterrent for others thinking about committing the same crime.   Should she have to pay a penalty that is 80,000 times the market value of the product?  pfffbbbtbttttttt!  WTF?!  HELL NO!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/minnesota.music.download.fine/

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I don't mean to just turn this into a blog of short blurbs and links, but I've found a lot of excellent posts lately that I want to share.  Here's another one.

I just recently joined the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech).  They are a part of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which itself is a part of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

I had been toying around with the idea of joining a union for a long time.  I knew there were a lot of things happening in the technology world that only organized labor could properly deal with.  For example, outsourcing our jobs to countries where labor is cheaper and the stagnant wages we've seen since the tech bubble burst of 2001.  However, it just didn't seem like there was any option for me as a high tech worker.  I was actually quite envious of my blue collar brethren.

Then I discovered WashTech.  I thought it was awesome that Microsoft workers formed this union, but I just didn't see how that would directly benefit me, living in North Carolina, other than the national advocacy and lobbying they do.

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Thanks, Media Matters, for this piece.  I never thought the administration was calling all right-wingers terrorists.  I also never thought that the report on left-wing terrorists (released around the same time) was unnecessary.

Thanks, Washington Punditry, for your silliness in this serious matter that has led to the deaths of innocent lives, simply due to political views.

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Maybe, says D. Aristophanes from Sadly, No!

You know, I never thought about it from that angle, but it kinda makes sense.  It doesn't make it right, but it does make sense.

Regarding Judge Sotomayor.  Excellent read.  Read it!

Would somebody please explain to reporters that just because they buy everything Apple makes without question, that doesn't mean iPhone is dominant in business mobile communications?  The common refrain I'm seeing in online and print articles is that the new Palm Pre is taking the iPhone on!  No, it's not.  It's taking RIM's Blackberry on.  RIM owns the business sphere.  And the Palm Pre is very much a business phone, like its "in spirit" predecessor, the Treo.  Sure, the iPhone has business users and the Pre non-business users, but that's not the target market.

Apples and oranges, people.  The shocking conclusion will be: some people prefer the iPhone and some people prefer the Pre.  Shocking!!

I can't wait until a Windows Mobile phone has a portrait-oriented slide out keyboard like the Palm Pre.  I love the Blackberry/Treo keyboard, but not the small square screens.  The landscape keyboard that HTC keeps giving us are nice, but the screen orientation switching is a bit annoying.  The Palm Pre fixes this, but I'm too much of a Windows Mobile guy to defect for that small feature.  ;-)

This is so freaking cool.  I hope they can adapt this technique to ears so I can I get super hearing!  http://gizmodo.com/5277456/stem-cell-contact-lenses-cure-blindness-in-less-than-a-month

A coworker just turned me onto the Google Wave presentation.  I must say it looks like the coolest IM client I've ever seen.  But I am skeptical about it replacing email.  I'm old enough to remember when ICQ was going to replace email.  Uhm, not so much.

I'm not a technological luddite – I love new technology.  I just can't see this replacing SMTP email because it is so vastly different.  We haven't even replaced IP4 yet on the internet.  What makes Google think they seriously stand a chance replacing SMTP? 

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Not that I ever really spent much time watching and listening to the Sunday Bobblehead political shows, but this new blog I was turned onto absolutely pwns them.  Not only is it funny in a satirical way, it's also disturbingly accurate.  Now you don't need to waste any more time listening to pundits talk on Sundays!