I volunteered to be an election officer, and agrred to have my stipned go to my non-profit orginazation, the Kona Coffee Farmers Association.

We had a few hour breafing and demo mo nths ago and showed up almost bright and bushy-tailed at the polling place (the Painted Church) at 5:30 AM. To do that, I had to go to bed early and awaken at 4 AM. Not easy when sometimes I go to bed at 2am or later!

Because we were told we could not leave the polling place during the day, I packed a luch and snacks. I had 2 ham and cheese sandwiches, some sodas, candy and mochi, etc. I later learened there was some stew and rice available to us that a nice soul brought, but I didn't know.

We helped each other set up just in time for our first voter at 7AM. Most of my day was spent either standing or sitting by the vote registering machine where paper ballots were inserted and counted.

It was a very long day and we finally closed the polls at 6 PM and finished cleaning up and packing up at perhaps 7:15 PM!

A few people even congratulated us and thanked us for being volunteers and we really appreciate that. Ture we get a somewhat small stipend, byut we really did do the job because it is important. I have seen handicapped people wheeled in to vote. I have seen parents take their children into the booth to explain the election process. When we knew a person was voting for the first time, we would applaud after the vote was registered. It was great to see their smile!

Although it was a very long day, I was happy to have served the other side of the table for a change.

1st, software that loads things that you don't want, just because they get paid to do it. For example, if you load WinAmp, Real Player and others, you have to read each config screen closely. Some of these programs grey out items so you think they are disabled, yet you can still turn them off. One program has all the things on your screen disabled, but when you scroll down, there is stuff enabled that you may not want.

I loaded the new version of Google Earth and at the end of the installation, I hit one too many OK's and ended up adding Google Search to me Firefox address bar. What this does is allows you to type a keyword in the address/location bar. If Firefox doesnot see a HTTP at the beginning, it sends the thing to Google to do a search. I personally HATE automatic searches from the address bar (see my previous post this week). I won't even get into the problems you can have by searching for personal information in search engines. Recently, a serach engine search terms were posted on the internet and those terms contained names and social security numbers...

So it took me an hour to find out how to undo the search ability. Firefox talks about a config file which appears to no longer exist. I finally found if I typed "about:config" in the Firefox address bar, I could edit out the Google search criteria. WHEW!

By default, it you have a telephone or mailing address, you automatically receive spam. To take yourself off the junk Telemarketers list, go to http://donotcall.gov and register every telephone you have (cell, home, fax and yes, even voip numbers like Vonage and Packet8).

To remove your name from mailing lists, Clark Howard (ClarkHoward.Com) suggests this: http://clarkhoward.com/topics...

If you are not already a faithful Clark listener or don't read his website, I *HIGHLY* suggest it. Sometimes I even call in from Hawaii, just to get advice! Clark lives back in Atlanta, my previous home.

Anyway, that is enough for tonight.

Aloha for now!

First, if you have been following, some of my customers have been having website issues. It started with email not working, then went downhill as the hosting company has so far, taken over a week to move the accou nts to another server and get the DNS servers and IP routing to point to the sites. They are still unavailable,

So in the meantime, I became my own reseller, created new accounts, moved the customers and even upgraded their version of shopping cart. They should be back up better than ever now. Amazing what I do for my neighbors (who are in direct competition to my own business...) and all for free. I judged the company ineffective and decided to switch.

A few months back, I determined that my car had not been inspected and my registration had lapsed. I got the car inspected and was up in Kona (it appears an hour too late) to get my registration renewed. I decided to park my car and stay in town overnight and get a fresh start at standing in line in the morning. About 100 yards from the parking lot, I was caught and ticketed. here, it appears everyone gets their paperwork renewed at the same time, rather than in the month of your birth like it was in Georgia. Sigh.

If you have been following the news, A&E's famed bounty Hunter "Dog" Chapman and two others were "captured" by Federal Marshalls the other day. A few years back, Duane "Dog" Chapman, Leland (his son) and his friend Timothy, were placed in a Mexican jail, for tracking down and capturing convicted rapist, and Max Factor cosmetic heir Andrew Luster. Why? Well, bounty hunting is illegal in Mexico! Mexico is upset that Dog didn't come back. They may be extradited to Mexico to stand charges.. I heard that all 3 have been released and the judge does not think they are a flight risk. If they did run, the easiest way to find them is to... send in a bounty hunter, and since Dog is one of the best, and he would already know where he was at any given time... he could bring himself in, get the reward and pay his fines. Kinda keeping it all in the family, huh? Besides, it is hard to hid with that A&E film crew following you each week!

In a somewhat related event, the son Leland lives up the road here and it appears I missed seeing him at Safeway last night by about 5 minutes. I hear he may already be wearing a (house arrest) tracking bracelet. I can see it now... "Control, Leland has passed from frozen foods to the meat department... is that out of bounds? Should we capture him?"

Those astute readers know that I used to work for a big, well-respcted computer company, which shall remain nameless. Once Hewlett and Packard were not running the place anymore, things went downhill. First they hired Carley (rhymes with "disaster") who appears to have never been able to control her own life, let alone direct a multi-billion dollar company. Then when the board booted her out, it appears that one of the officers decided that it would be fun to call a private investigator and check out the board. The PI appears to have illegally (or at least inethically) grabbed board members phone records and some of those from the press!

Now the state, FBI, SEC, FCC and a raft of others are investigating, all the while there is a shakeup in the boardroom. A Congression subcomittee has told Patricia Dunn not to leave the country.

More of my friends and ex-coworkers have been given the axe back there and it appears the bloodletting continues. Soon they won't need a board of directors. As mad as I am, I am madder still because I have a rebate that has not yet appeared and I want it before the whole company collapses on itself.

It used to be that this unnamed company was tops in the field and one of the most respected companies in the world, and one people beat down the doors to work for. That has definately changed! On Friday I sold what little stock I had left in the company.

SO there you have it, a week of trials and tribulations.

You can put your site up on a free service and put up with popups.

You can host your own server and put up with problems. You are responsible for installing all of the software, all of the webpages and keeping everything running. Many people host their own sites this way and sometimes host other sites (for free or for profit). This server may be in your own home or in a secure data center.

You can rent space on an existing server. The company hosting the server updates the software and generally keeps things running.

This last option is what many of us do with our websites.

As you may know, I manage a number of websites for my neighbors. I found a web hosting company who had the space, bandwidth and IP addresses we needed to host our sites. I loaded shopping carts and configured lots of sites. In case of problems, I usually find problems and work with the hosting company behind the scenes; often without my customers being involved or bothered by the problems. I also have been doing this for free.

Recently the hosting company has had problems with email not working and for some reason, rather than fix the program (sendmail is a common program), they decided that 3 of my accounts needed to be moved to other servers to solve the problem. Perhaps they were going to retire the server and didn't want to spend any time on it, or perhaps there are other issues. In any event, what should have taken a few hours, the moving of the accounts has taken days. That plus the finding of the problem has just drug on and on.

Over the past year or so, this hosting company has continued to have more problems then I think they should have. I used to manage servers larger than these and I don't remember anything like this. I've performed and worked with front and backline support and cannot imagine having customers wait this long to fix problems.

My solution has been to find a new hosting company. In order to be able to tailor a server hosting package specifically for my customers, I became a reseller of service. When I had to open a ticket with the new helpdesk to ask a setup question, I had a reply in 6 minutes fom 1st line support. The problem was investigated and sent to the Admins who solved my problem in 20 minutes or so. Their response was quick and I was happy. So far, so good!

So now, although my own customers can call me with support questions for problems with the shopping cart, they also can call a toll free number (or open an online ticket) and problems like the email being broken, will be addressed by the helpdesk (hopefully as fast as my 1st ticket was).

As a reseller, I actually make a couple dollars a year per account, so I don't have to bill my customers (and neighbors). They are actully still paying less through this arrangement than they did with the last hosting company.

I'll let you know how things progress.

If you are in need of a hosting package, my "Plate Lunch" offering is a pretty good deal for someone who does not need a static IP address, and my "Luau-1-IP" offering comes with a static IP, just so you can add SSL for things like a shopping cart. Anyway, you are welcome to look around at http://Planet-Aloha.Info and all of the plans come with a 30 day money back guarantee (excluding the purchase of any domain names)!

In case you are wondering, I have loaded a brand new shopping cart for my customer, grabbed the IP address and set up the SSL certificate and am ready to enable their website at the new hosting company, and over at the old site, they are still copying the data... What's up with THAT? :-)

Mark - the Happy camper

I have been an earthlink customer since the dialup days of Mindspring and still have a mindspring email address.

Recently, Earthlink rolled out what they say is an "enhancement" yet many people are very upset; me included.

A few months ago, Verisign tried a similar stunt (worldwide) now Earthlink is just irritating their own users. Here is how.

The Internet was designed that if you mistyped a domain name, an error would be returned to your browser that caused your browser to say that the website does not exist. earthlink, is a move to increase revenue, now displays a webpage instead of sending the error message. The webpage says "The web site address you entered could not be found. Please try the related content suggestions and paid advertisements below, or try another search." Note the PAID ADS!!!

Many people are reporting that this webpage (rather than returning an error to your browser) breaks long-standing protocols and procedures of the internet. An Earthlink employee keeps telling us this is good for us and they are working to "enhance" things so they work smoother. He seems to miss the point that many of us are ready to jump ship.

Imagine a friend calls you and instead of your telephone ringing, your phone announces "Hey John is calling you, but first, how about a Budweiser?" Imagine that while they roll oyut such a service that answering machines stop working (because they are expecting a ring and not a vloice announcement). That is not much different than what we are getting now with this new "service".

Earthlink has no idea why we are so mad, mad enough to jump ship.

I spent half an hour on the phone with their technical support trying to explain what was happening. The guy in India had no idea. He laso had no internet access through Earthlink so I could not even give him an example of what was happening.

If you are an Earthlink/Mindspring customer, you may already be able to see this in your area. Just type in a domain name that does not exist like http://www.ryryryryryry.com. Normally you would just see your browser report the domain does not exist. Instead, I see ads for University of Phoenix and Gametap. Sometimes I get a popup to install software like Flash. What I should NOT see is an error page from Earthlink with ads!

If you don't have Earthlink, you should be able to see what I'm talking about here: http://earthlink-help.net/?d=...

Earthlink, you have turned EVIL and if you do not offer an opt-out or stop this insane idea, I will be one of the many who are voting with their feet!

Note: you can read more about this here: http://blogs.earthlink.net/20... )