Now whether this story happens to be a bit dramatized or not remains to be debated … I guess I’d like to think that a multi-billion dollar company like Pixar would have backups of their backups of their backups when it comes to their production movie files, but either way, talk about an absolutely terrifying account nonetheless!
I had to try it for myself just to confirm that it wasn’t a Photoshop job, and yes, it does work… 
Neat concept, although apparently it’s getting so much traffic right now that they’re maxing out the API calls to Google Search and all I got back was “Try again later…”
Still, a fun reminder of the good, old days of ASCII art and 2400-baud modems and waiting an hour and a half to download the latest mods for Doom!
Wait a minute – 2400-baud was 1 kb/s?! Whereas today I have an always-on cable connection into my house offering up 20,000 kb/s?!?!?!
Ok, so maybe not all of it was necessarily “good,” albeit the “old” moniker still definitely holds up strong…
As it seems like I am pretty much every other month these days, I’m up in the air once again entertaining the idea of switching over from cable to FiOS.
It’s mainly the money that’s got me curious this time – I know that I’ve bitched in the past about promotional pricing being a giant racket, but we’re paying an embarrassingly obscene amount for cable these days … the service arguably hasn’t really even improved (more so worsened, if you ask my wife!) and yet their prices continue to inch up a la inflation like just about everything else except my income, so I guess I’m just at the breaking point where I feel like something’s gotta give!
P.S. It also probably helped that while visiting one of Sara’s friends last night, I got a chance to finally see the FiOS TV interface for myself and wow, does it just look so much better than the clunky, spreadsheet-esque guide that our cable company is still drudging us through! I saw a handful of features right off the bat that just seemed really smart - stuff like better organization of recorded programs and pretty station logos you can browse for the different channels - and it made me feel a little better about considering the switch because one of my biggest fears has always been going through all of the hassle of changing over, only to find that the experience is a) virtually identical, and b) 6-months in, actually costing me more than cable had before I jumped ship…
Thankfully, it looks like Verizon finally got it in gear and re-wrote their checkout system to better spell out what to expect of their promotional pricing, so maybe this won’t be so bad after all.
Even after trimming off a couple of unneeded channels from our cable package first, the year #2 price for FiOS is still about $10 cheaper than what we’re paying for cable now, and you can see for that first year it’s more in the neighborhood of a $30/month discount, which would be kinda nice! My wife is eager to switch literally tomorrow because she just despises that the on-demand channels never seem to work with cable for her. I myself see it a little more lax because I hardly watch any TV at all right now, although we have been having ongoing issues with our router and I’m pretty sure we get a fancy, new one with FiOS so that might be my incentive to make the switch.
Everybody who I talk to about FiOS says that once they got it installed, they’ve never even looked back, and I was even excited about it myself when it was first announced … I just found myself gradually soured when Verizon completely failed at their attempt to install it in my apartment about five years ago. But maybe it’s time to give it another try – clearly they’ve done a lot of installs between now and then, and no apartment means no crumbling walls this time to have to deal with … plus, it might be nice to actually use HBO On-Demand at 2am instead of seeing Bright House’s clear as mud Error 1 – Try Again Later when all I want is a little Curb before drifting off to Never Never Land! 
Fellow Flickr users will know that whenever they login to flickr.com, they’re met with a little greeting in a foreign language. Well, this one in particular made me chuckle this evening…
Anyone who reads this blog a lot knows that I sometimes romanticise about how far technology has come even just in my own little lifetime, especially with regards to the endless incredible marvel that is the Information Superhighway. Admittedly, a lot of the recent strides have been from companies like Google and Apple, and here’s another great example of exactly why it’s just really exciting for me to be living in a time like this!
I mean, sure – there are obvious questions like whether you actually want pop-ups springing forth into your field of vision at any random moment and please keep in mind that this is an extremely early prototype that the engineers at Google are playing around with, but it’s still pretty neat to see all of the social and location-based tie-ins that can be built into a device, whether it be a pair of glasses or even just your smart phone, to further enhance whatever else it is that you happen to be doing at the time. It’s kind of crazy for me to take a look at something like my iPhone – a device that I absolutely love and couldn’t imagine living without, even having only had it for a little over a year, and then seeing the next generation beyond that as we continue to build on the live maps and always-on mobile connectivity that we’re already enjoying today!
Now that said, there’s one other link that I wanted to share that’s equally cool, though I also just found out about this one pretty recently, too. Google Maps Street View – I always thought that it was kinda neat if you wanted to get an idea of the building that you’re looking for or maybe just to further stalk your ex, but I had no idea some of the very cool and different applications that they were now introducing to the technology. Like, you know, if you say wanted to take a virtual tour of the Amazon rainforest, just to name an example…
Google is now using this 360 technology that they perfectly with the initial launch of street view to now offer tours of the White House, the Swiss Alps, Sea World Orlando, Hollywood Boulevard, and just all sorts of random landmark-type places will literally allow you to simulate walking down the street (or jungle path) as if you were actually there for yourself! And here I thought it was cool a few years ago when they loaded all of the data from the Mars rovers and the moon landing into Google Maps … well, that’s still very cool, but now so is this!
I guess I just love seeing tech companies actually innovating like this because what these guys are doing is so much more than just giving us new stuff to goof around with on our cell phones. These are tools that will grow to enhance our lives in ways that we probably can’t even predict yet, and that’s just very, very exciting to me. 
It looks like we’re getting an early sneak peek at Google’s April Fools’ Day project for this year, and it’s pretty freaking sweet! Below is a quick route of the adventure before me the next time I want to take a trip over to Disney World … I hear the Wyverns along I-4 are pretty bad this time of year, too…
The video really sealed it for me – especially right around the 0:50 mark! Almost makes me feel like digging out my old Dragon Warrior NES cartridge, even though I know the chances of it still working are less than slim to none!
We’re home! We’re finally home!!!
And even a week ahead of schedule, too – who would’ve believed that a month ago?!
Not I, said the duck… 
Thankfully, the whole thing really ended up going relatively smoothly – ten domains across two different shared accounts, and really the only one that saw any real impacted downtime was Just Laugh, coincidentally because being the biggest that one was also the very last to go and I ended up missing something that I overlooked because a cache didn’t get cleared in my browser to catch the error quicker. But all is well now – traffic is flowing smoothly across all of my sites and the old shared accounts were both closed out just before I had to pay another month for each of them, as a nice, little added bonus!
I kind of already talked about the benefits of this migration in my first post – my control over this server is just a whole lot better (I’ve been loving the real-time monitoring to see bandwidth coming in and out throughout the day!), not to mention it’s got the capacity of over 13 times the bandwidth that my previous account allowed, plus dedicated CPU and memory to handle it all without worry of being choked out by other random sites that just happened to be sharing server space with me in the past. And although I don’t necessarily need all of that extra horsepower right now, it’s just nice having one less thing to worry about as I move on to other projects – the extra juice is there if I need it!
So that’s about it, really – it was an interesting experience with some hiccups, but luckily nothing major. A special thanks to the folks at InterServer for helping answer all of my questions within a matter of hours so that nothing fell through the cracks as domains were migrated over a few at a time. Even though I hadn’t really planned on doing this in March and it did take a bit of my time that could’ve gone elsewhere, ultimately it’s going to be a good thing in the long run just because I would’ve had to do it eventually on down the road … why not attack it right now while I’m still churning on old projects rather than after some have been completed and I’m afraid of disrupting the new influxes of traffic that are hopefully flooding in as a result?!
Fun, geeky computer stuff … but enough of that for now – back to writing! 
It’s like it’s 1998 all over again!
Though I’ve honestly gotten a bit bored with the Lego Star Wars line (unless somebody wants to splurge on a Star Destroyer for me!), I could definitely see picking up one of these in a couple of months to hold down one of my shelves…
Ooof – that $179.99 sticker price does sting just a bit, though!
