We’ve been working a lot on
cvillemusic.com. Like, a whole lot. Many late nights
of developing mySQL and PHP.
But after 14 months of work, it’s actually starting to look (and function) really good. But now
we have to be cautious not to rush to the finish line and end up with a poor product. We’re actually
looking for beta testers. Interested?

Also, WAM! has been doing really well. We just bought a bunch of much-needed software. (If anybody
thinks that Indesign is worth getting,
let me know, will ya’?) We’re waiting on the
Ikea 2000 catalogue to order some desks, so we can stop using
these secondhand ones. And, my favourite, we’re getting a
Windows box, just a little
eMachines, so that we can test our pages on it. It’s not like we
don’t already test ’em on Windows machines, but we’d like to be able to test more during
the development process.

Oh, and I’m moving this site over to my Linux box, and not a second too soon. I don’t think
that there will any downtime. I’ll keep the MX records at Red Light,
and just run all of the other services from here. That way I can back this site up with some databasing,
so that I can get the AT journals up to spec.

I saw Beetlejuice again last night. What a great
movie.

As if Friday hadn’t been enough, I’m in Wired again. This time, the print version 7.09, the September issue. Actually, it’s just a little letter to the editor. The funny thing is that it doesn’t really apply anymore. The letter, which is about digital phone service, was written a couple of months ago, when I used Intelos. That was before they moved me from unlimited time to a 700-minute plan, with no reduced cost. They just ignored their contract and said that I couldn’t have unlimited anymore. Ungrateful bastards; I spent many, many hours on the phone with their tech support, helping them debug their lousy implementation of CDMA. So, I switched to SunCom, a division of AT&T, with whom I have a dual-mode TDMA / analog phone. My SunCom phone, the Nokia 6162, is not nearly as sexy as my Intelos phone, with whom I have the Sony D-Wave Zuma. I’ve switched to the $20 / month plan at Intelos and given the phone to my father. I couldn’t bear to give it up. :)

Anyhow, that’s the background behind the letter.

So, Max was going to EBay‘s site this morning, and it didn’t come up. He asked me to try. It didn’t work. I did a traceroute, and it pretty much spun out after it got past ebay-2-gw.customer.alter.net. The next machine identified itself as “10.1.2.3”. That didn’t look right. So I did a whois on ARIN‘s site. That IP was registered to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, presumably making it an unused IP. In any case, it wasn’t EBay’s. So I did a little pinging, and Max did an address scan of EBay’s actual IP range. Of a couple hundred machines, only half-a-dozen replied. (A few gateways, a switch, and one, lonely, machine.) So I e-mailed tips@wired.com and Adam Penenberg. The phone rang a few minutes later.

Max: Hello? [pause] Um…yeah. Just a minute. [covers mouthpiece] Waldo, it’s James from Wired.
Waldo: Hello? James Glave? Wow. Yeah, sure, I’d be happy to.

So I talked to him, not knowing whether I was being interviewed, or if he was just looking for help on the story. Either way seemed cool. Well, he asked how to spell my name, and I knew that we were in.

Shortly thereafter, at 12:25pm, the story appeared on Wired. Woo!

And that’s pretty much all there is to it.

I’ve started on Apptrail Journal v2.0. As some of you may have noticed, I went up to v1.1 recently, touching up some of the errors and such on the original site. Without changing any of the text, WAM!design is going to re-create the site. We’ll be creating a database to store all of the text, making it fully searchable. Along with that will come a new interface and a bunch of new entries. I hope y’all like it.