Chausse.org

A while ago, I raved about 1&1 web hosting, and recommended it to others. I now take back any recommendations. They’ve committed one of my inexcusable online sins, namely, making it overly difficult to cancel service.

I wanted to switch to a different hosting provider for reasons unrelated to the quality of their product. Therefore, I sent a very polite email to “info@1and1.com”, the ONLY email address they offer on their site for correspondence. I sent it on May 18th, and it was COMPLETELY ignored.

On May 24th, I sent a slightly less polite email to info@1and1.com, sales@1and1.com, webmaster@1and1.com, and billing@1and1.com (all randomly guessed, in the hopes of hitting the correct person to write to.)

Today, 4 days later, and still no response, I bite the bullet and CALL them (which I hate, hate, hate, hate doing). When I get someone on the phone, they tell me I have to cancel online, at cancel.1and1.com. This address is NOWHERE on their normal site. They’re forcing you to CALL them, to get a web address. Perhaps if it weren’t the Friday before a long weekend, the phone rep would only have given me the address after a series of plea bargains to stay with the company.

Here’s the kicker. I go to the web site, take a bunch of steps through a very confusing UI, and finally get to the last step which will cancel service. I hit “Submit”, and guess what? I have to FAX the confirmation page to them, to complete the cancellation.

Pathetic. Simply pathetic.

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Following the example of the kiddies on “GetUpMove.com“, who’ve lost crazy amounts of weight by playing Dance Dance Revolution, I’ve decided to try to DDR my way to fitness. It seriously is a great workout. I played for about an hour last night. One thing they don’t warn you about the DDR fitness program is the very painful side effect of having really cheesy euro-pop songs stuck in your head for, like, the rest of your life.

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I’m totally overhauling Chausse.org site to better serve as a site for both personal and professional content. But, meanwhile, I want to point out that all my online photos are over here. Most importantly, pictures from Stacey’s Dental School Graduation are now available! Congrats to Dr. Anastasia Foufas!

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SNL is showing a “Best of Christopher Walken” special on my birthday. How cool is that?

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What can I say, I guess I have a soft spot in my heart for Blogger… Now that they’ve added comments to their system, I’m giving them another chance Sure, WordPress had a lot more features… I’d still love to add categorization… But, long story short, I’ve changed my mind and we’re gonna stick with Blogger for now. Enjoy the new commenting system…

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Three days after I complain about Blogger lacking features, they go ahead and do a total relaunch. I have yet to fully explore this, aside from making this post, but I’ll take a good look later. One thing they’ve apparently added is a “comment” feature

A WordPress based site is still likely, though…

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It’s amazing how such a powerful tool, like CSS, can make trivial things so @#$% complicated.

I wasn’t trying to do anything crazy… I just had a fixed-width page, that I wanted to center. Googling around for a solution, I found that dozens of sites offer solutions that ALMOST work… The major problem is techniques which position the left part of the page off in Never Never Land (not accessible via scrolling the window) in narrow browsers.

Anyway, I finally found this site, which provides the REAL solution (in addition to pointing out the problems of other “not-quite” solutions). It’s pretty simple:

Style your “body” like so:

body
{
text-align: center;
min-width: 763px;
}

And wrap the whole page in a <div> like so:

#fullpage {
position: relative;
text-align: left;
width: 763px;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

Replace “763″ with your actual desired size. Works in all modern browsers, just as well as a table-based solution would, and if the browser is very narrow, you can can access the whole page via horizontal scrolling.

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With so many US companies trying to outsource cheap IT work to India, competition is driving up salaries for India-based IT professionals.

While I’d like to think of this as an indicator that outsourcing will become economically infeasible, my more pessimistic side thinks this just means that highly skilled IT labor will move into India-based companies (since overhead costs would make them too expensive to contribute remotely), and US outsourcers will scrape the bottom of the barrel, continuing American job losses and terrible customer service that plague everyone today.

Of course, if India doesn’t work out, there’s always Elbonia.

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As a part-time DJ who loves to dance, but can’t stand most mainstream music, I’m always on the lookout for danceable tunes from the underground.

By following the interweaving musical paths of the iTunes Music Store users’ “iMixes”, I built a CD-sized list of tunes - from this millenium - that fit my criteria. You can view it in iTunes as an iMix - why not buy the whole thing? I did! This is guaranteed good stuff!

For those who are curious, but don’t have the latest iTunes, here’s the mix (in a relatively random order - I didn’t optimally organize it yet):

C’mon C’mon - The Von Bondies
Ch-Check It Out - Beastie Boys
Irish Blood, English Heart - Morrissey
Comfortably Numb - Scissor Sisters
The Rat - The Walkmen
Molly’s Chambers - Kings of Leon
L’Amour À 3 - Stereo Total
Who’s Gonna Save Us (Album Version) - The Living End
Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand
Glass Corridor - Lansing-Dreiden
Living in America - The Sounds
Dance to the Underground (New Version) [Radio Edit] - Radio 4
My Coco - Stellastarr*

Of course, there are a ton of great danceable modern indie songs that aren’t on this list. These are just songs for which I don’t already own the album.

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I’ve decided I’ll be moving Chausse.org to a new blog tool called “WordPress“. I just set up a test site for it, and it outclasses Blogger by a landslide.

Built-in comments, built-in blogroll, built-in RSS feed (none of this “Atom” silliness that Blogger is promoting), built-in search, automatic XHTML validity enforcement (woohoo!), built-in trackback/pingback, ultra-clean CSS-based layout, and it all lives locally on my server.

This is an incredible product. If you have a host that supports PHP, I STRONGLY recommend you use this product for your weblog.

To the Blogger folks, I’ve been a loyal customer for years, but you gotta try a little harder, guys… I guess it’s easy to rest on your laurels when you’re living off Googlebucks.

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How to do custom underlines with CSS. I think animated underlines should be the new <blink> tag.

Oh yeah, and I fixed the comments. Sorry about that. And I fixed the XML feed. Sorry about that, too

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Having resisted it for a very long time, I’ve added a “Reader Comments” feature to Chausse.org. It was set up using a heavily customized implementation of “Poster Child“, which is a nifty PHP-based script. I hope to add some new features, such as saving your user info in a cookie, and better “anchor” links to make the UI behave better when you open up the comments. But this will do for now. I hope my readers have interesting things to say

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Unlike the PC’s of 7 or 8 years ago, I’ve noticed that over the past couple of years, the various PC’s in my life still feel perfectly usable even after they’re 2 or 3 years old. It looks like Microsoft is working hard to change all that:

Microsoft is expected to recommend that the “average” Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.

Dual-6GHz CPU’s? Just to run the OS? Dang!

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Evan Williams ran into this bizarro user interface when attempting to cancel registration for a domain name. Basically, it works like this. If you want to cancel your registration, you click “Submit” (not “Cancel”). Pressing “Cancel”, on the other hand, cancels your cancellation, thereby NOT canceling your registration.

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