Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

My definition of a Sabbatical is the soul-searching break from a world that is polluted with technology and inhuman interactions.

Humans – more often than what we think – need a break from the things that appear to offer instant gratification and to perform tasks that allow us to interact with unnatural elements.

Considering that each and every one of us is born from a womb, carried for several months inside the Mother’s belly, the next best thing to experiencing that flotation is swimming.

Spending time inside bodies of water, such as the sea, lakes, rivers or even the pool is a way to relieve one’s stress.

The key element though, is to abandon all distractions behind. No cellphones. No radio. No email. No computers. Instead, grab a book, a glass of your favorite beverage and absorb the sounds of nature.

Being on a Sabbatical means that you learn the things you *thought* you had learned – all over again. You look closer at the details in front of you, at low level. You bow to nature, you respect it, you don’t antagonize it. You forget for a while that the Internet ever existed or that modern communication often exclusively involves a screen and a keyboard.

As humans we need healing of personal matters, to unleash the junk we often carry along; the burnout from technology is far too much at times. Relaxation during a Sabbatical involves both your mind, your spirit and your body – a triad of personal elements that defines you as a human being.

Make this the last blog post that you will read for a while and embark on a short and gratifying journey, simply to rediscover yourself.

When I read in the news about Joran van der Sloot it’s hard not to remember a novel I read, oh so long ago.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, a thriller revolving around the personality of a young American and wannabe socialite in Europe, is among Patricia Highsmith’s finest novels. When I read it in 1985, it was at an era during which – unlike today – life passed without many daily visual obstructions; there was no Internet, no cellphones, TV had horrible programs (it still does) and the Cold War was still raging.

Somehow, reading about the murderous inclinations of a young man who manages to control his emotions and perform the “perfect murder” was a leap away from all those Agatha Christie novels; where the murderer is uncovered in the end, having made one too many mistakes.

Joran van der Sloot managed to do just that, and despite his many mistakes he was able to utilize the legal system to his benefit for several years. A young man, without having as much as finished college, he seemed to perversely enjoy his fortunate fate; unlike that of Natalee Holloway whom he most likely killed or murdered.

Ironically, on the very 5th anniversary of Natalee Holloway’s murder, perhaps by extrapolating his guilt, anger and clear signs of self-destructiveness, Joran van der Sloot apparently committed yet another crime. The body of Stephany Tatiana Flores Ramirez was found in remote Peru, with multiple stab wounds that denote struggle, perhaps against a failed date-rape attempt using pills.

Unlike psychological novels, however, this is real life.

Joran van der Sloot is an un-talented Mr. Ripley, no matter how much sympathy is left in those that support the notion of “innocent until proven guilty“. The personality, acts and apparent disrespect towards human life of this Dutch man will most likely be used in future literature and movies, web sites and online debates.

Since January, a game of massive proportions has been launched against the euro and the European economy, by American banks – led by Goldman Sachs.

The very bank that is currently under scrutiny at the US Senate, has been known for years to play dirty games not just against institutions but also against entire countries. For an eye opener, I suggest visiting GoldmanSachs666.com

Late last year, Goldman Sachs offered a loan to Greece, then went around and bet against it. It’d be as if your bank that gives you a mortgage speculated that you won’t be able to pay your monthly dues and bought insurance against you.

This is what sports bookies do: they don’t care if they bid for or against a result.

This unethical practice is being currently uncovered by the US senate, at the same time as a war against the Greek economy has been launched. Those outside of the political arena are quick to speculate that an orgy of mismanagement is to blame.

The truth is very different.

Every country has a national debt, including major western powers such as Germany, France, the UK and Russia. Why did I leave out the US?

Because California alone has a debt matching that of Greece.

Imagine having a car loan and the bank increased the rates every month. Imagine that at the same time, they lowered your credit score, each month so that you could not refinance the loan.

That’s exactly what is happening right now with the Greek economy.

Now, all this definitely makes excellent cannon fodder for the news media. Instead of focusing on Wall Street, the mortgage crisis, the failing US economy and the 10% unemployment that President Obama has failed to manage – they are eager to bring the war overseas.

Some media have attempted to induce humor – albeit of the offensive kind – stating that in order to repay its debt, Greece must sell important national monuments or several of its islands in the Aegean.

Humor can go that much far though.

I’d love to see the faces of Americans, if they were asked to privatize the Capitol, or to give the Statue of Liberty back to France. Perhaps, if the Grand Canyon were about to be sold to Mexican investors to turn it into a mega mall, then it’d become apparent what Greece is being asked to do.

The Parthenon is not for sale, dear Westerners.

If anything else, the stolen marbles of its frieze, on display at the British Museum – after being ‘treated’ with storage, molding and vulgar scraping of their Pentelic marble – are being demanded back.

Visit BringThemBack.org to understand that there will be war long before Greece surrenders its heritage and national monuments to the predatory bankers of Wall Street.

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Quite often, I wonder if my definition of quality customer service is too demanding but the answer comes back as a flat “no”.

Having used the services of many companies over the years – from retail to banks – I can honestly say that I’m just an average Joe with regards to what I expect from their procedures, workflow and customer support.

Today I will discuss an incident that, despite my goodwill and thorough participation in the process, kept me on the phone for 60 minutes; all while three companies involved in the domain business did less than their allocated part to assist me with resolving the issue.

A few hours ago I received an email from Register.com with regards to authorizing a domain transfer to them. The email did not list which domain was being transfered; the subject line simply stated “Transfer of .com”.

My first thought was that this was spam; after examining the email headers it was proven legit. Since I had not personally authorized a domain transfer to Register.com I felt compelled to call their support department.

I was able to get through their inbound transfers department quite easily; the wait time was barely a minute. The support associate was polite and explained to me that the domain had been authorized for transfer via the use of the auth code; she would just not let me know which domain that was due to their protocol. She advised me to contact eNom and talk to them, as they’re the losing registrar.

Usually, I don’t sweet-talk female associates on the phone. Being “neutral” and professional is the best way, however, when my property is at risk I feel that anything is permitted. So I sighed, explained that out of thousands of domains I’d have to guess the one that’s at risk of being lost; so judging by her voice that she was so friendly and nice, could she please (PLEASE) help me out?

The Register.com associate laughed, then disclosed that the domain was unlocked; a quick search at my eNom account narrowed that down to 9 domains. I applauded her professional skills and laughed jovially at the same time; this got me the TLD in question: it was a .biz

Not sure if she crossed the line of information disclosure but at that point I was left with 4 potential candidates. I thanked her, got a reference number and called eNom.

Going through eNom’s phone queue took about 5 minutes, at which point a live person got on the phone. After explaining the situation and while he was researching for any unauthorized access, it literally hit me. I asked him to put me on hold and went to Whois.biz – the official WHOIS for the .biz Registry – at which point my hunch was confirmed.

It was a matter of eNom not having synced the WHOIS info with the .biz Registry; the culprit was a .biz I sold via Sedo almost 3 weeks ago. Although upon pushing the domain to the Sedo account with eNom I had opted not to retain the contact info, the domain’s contact info was never updated at the .biz Registry by eNom; it was still mine, according to the WHOIS.

Gotta love false alarms.

Still, I called Register.com and this time I waited 20 minutes on the phone to get someone at the other end of the line, in order to update the ticket. After that, I went ahead and authorized the transfer via the link that had arrived at my email.

So who’s fault was it that I spent one hour on the phone over a situation that I did not initiate?

eNom.com – When I pushed the domain to the Sedo account, they didn’t sync the WHOIS with the .biz Registry.

Sedo.com – When they got the Auth code for the domain from their account, they did not first confirm the WHOIS at the .biz Registry.

Register.com – They would not give me the domain name – which was not mentioned in the email either – but I had to extract bits and pieces by social engineering their associate on the phone.

It’s clearly the fault of every company involved – all three are guilty of doing less than their expected part in a process that involved a buyer and a seller of a domain. Had I not taken an initiative to resolve this, these companies would receive additional inquiries and complaints from the buyer for days to come.

After all this was done and finished, I felt good for an extra reason: I had material to write a blog post on this otherwise slow and boring Sunday evening.

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The announcement by the Library of Congress that it has acquired the entire Twitter database of messages – several billions of it – might seem like trivial to some.

In fact, the only trivial thing I can think of, is that if you tweet, you can now consider yourself officially published. Not many people have achieved that in their lifetime.

The truth is, that anyone believing that their publicly broadcast messages over Twitter are somehow erased or fade into some sort of digital purgatory needs to have their noob status checked. Anything you send off by hitting that “tweet” button is permanently stored.

The question that arises is, who will benefit from the storage of billions of messages, some as plain as “Yummy, just had lasagna” or as incriminating as “FTW! I banged Missy the other night in her parents’ bedroom!”.

Does the Library of Congress believe that the terabytes of information is of some inherent value, even if it includes president Obama’s first tweet or those of important politicians or celebrities? Is there some other ‘force’ and motive behind this acquisition of information?

I’m not sure what to believe of this massive acquisition of data, however, as with every amount of raw data it doesn’t matter what you have, it’s how you use it. The analysis and processing of such an immense database can generate a lot of important secondary data, that cannot normally be obtained by observing feeds or keywords alone.

In today’s digital world, information can be cross-compared to other data, combined, reformatted – even altered – to the extent that it becomes an alter ego of someone, for purposes known only to the handler of this digital information.

And that’s precisely when things become dangerous.

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I do not define a man’s worth by their accomplishments in life.

It’s not who they are and what have achieved; what matters to me is how they got there and how they stand, as people, if their title and status were to be stripped off.

Mike Mann is well known for his domain portfolio, investments in the domain industry – including the Sex.com uber-domain – and for the Grassroots.org non-profit incentive.

At some point, I became concerned and baffled, due to his personal life being exposed – by no other than himself – and despite the initial shock, I realized that it was a man’s agony over the single most important “product” in life: his child.

That’s one thing I admire in people, and it’s fighting the good fight. In a game where the opponent plays a dirty fight, one must remain above the mud and the low blows. The truth shines above any dark cloud and as long as one sticks to the truth, they shall prevail.

On Friday, I started reading Mike Mann’s book “Make Millions and Make Change!” which I downloaded as a PDF from his web site, MikeMann.com. Reading hurts my eyes after a while, and because I didn’t want to put down this emotionally-charged but pragmatic publication, I started listening to the audio book, also available for free from Mike Mann’s web site.

And that’s another thing I like in people: sharing their life’s experiences, for free. If it were not for those individuals that share their successes and failures with others, it would take each and everyone of us several hundred lifetimes to achieve any progress on our own. Imagine, having to re-invent the wheel, daily.

After reading Mike Mann’s book in a single go over the weekend – a rare feat for me – I was left with a combination of amazement and epiphany. The amazement part was related to the sheer, honest simplicity of how things work in life but how badly we ignore the knowledge bestowed upon us by others. The epiphany part was even stronger; it was a sensation that by letting another moment pass by, not materializing what I had learned from this book, I would be undoing all of its benefits.

The third thing I outlined from this book is the reference to using your position, at any moment during your course to achieve success, finding the time to donate, to contribute – to shake hands with strangers that need a little bit of support; to acknowledge their own separate route in life.

By reading Mike Mann’s book you might have a different reaction, positive or negative. But you won’t know, unless you finish it – cover to cover.

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There were no hair trimmers in Greek mythology

Often times, I wish we could see Hollywood producing films with titles that are longer than a couple of words, so that any sane person would never type the .com in their browser.

This would probably lead to less domain squatting of movie titles. Surely, ClashOfTheTitans.com is receiving some insane traffic by now.

But the real point is, most of today’s movies are mish-mashes of other movies, or remakes with the plot being given very little rejuvenation, other than the usual overload of computer generated imagery.

It is not just Hollywood that is guilty of repeating itself ad nauseam – it’s also the writers of books that eventually lead to movies. Who would have imagined that Harry Potter would rip so many elements of Greek mythology, mix them all together in a “sorcery” blender and serve it – double-baked – to millions of unsuspected teenagers?

The latest mish-mash is of course the remake of Clash of the Titans.

As if it weren’t enough to brutalize the memory of a childhood favorite, the question that pops to mind – more often than the pixelized bits of digital nudity – is this:

Which Hollywood genius buzzed the long, wavy hair of Perseus with a trimmer – Quake Arena style?

In all seriousness, I don’t believe that Hollywood will change its ways anytime soon. Clash of the Titans 2010 is not a bad movie – as long as you were born in the 90′s or never read Greek mythology from a book.

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