COMODO EasyVPN

You always hear about good programs, why arent't here more negative reviews of these things? I guess it's hard to rip on a free program. You didn't pay for it, it didn't cost anything other than time to use it, why bad mouth it?

And why should I really? On the other hand, maybe there's ome hope that the creator fo the program will hear and may look into some of the issues that a user has had. This free program, EasyVPN (Free for personal use) is one that I've had issus with lately. So I'm removing it.

This program will create a "Virtual" VPN connection betwen two computers. Hey, you just said "Virtual Virtual Private Network, isn't that some sort of double negative style issue?" Maybe so, but that's the best term for it. Generally a "real" VPN involves two firewalls, or a firewall and a program. The point is, at some point is a piece of physical hardware that manages this thing. This is two pieces of software that communicate over a 3rd party's management.

I've used a few solutions similar to this, the problem is, they often don't quite serve the same need as efficiently. For example, I use Live Mesh for syncing files in real time between several machines. It's great for backing up as well. I use Sync Toy at hoem to make back ups of the "My Documents" folders on my PC to a secondary larger hard drive.

I picked up EasyVPN for one purpose. I wanted to sync my iTunes library between two PCs (work and home) using SyncToy. With EasyVPN, I could map shared folders between these two machines over the internet securely. The sync can be a bit slow since there's some delay in the folder scanning across the internet so I set it up to run in the middle of the night.

The problem is, for whatever reason, the connection seemed to break every night. I'd wake up and find that SyncToy was sitting on my desktop telling me that it had failed to run. Neither machine is set to go to sleep or anything since I strongly dislike "Sleep Mode" and "Standby Mode" so that's not part of the issue. IT's just a straight reset of some kind, every evening.

So I'm dumping it. I've used LogMeIn.com's Hamachi in the past and will probaly go back to using this since it works better anyway. I just was hoping for a slightly more efficient solution. Why iTunes doesn't let you do this on it's own (or just allow you to sync an iPod to more than one library) is beyond my comprehension. Part of that annoying "Apple Control" issue.

State of My Blog Network

One of my "New Years Resolutions" is to get back to actually regularly posting to my multiple blogs. With that in mind, I figure I'll do a quick run down of what I'm currently updating and working on and maybe point out a few things that are dead. This is mostly organizational for myself because honestly, of all of my Blogs, this is the least popular.

I've moved everything, once again, off of my own hosting. This time it's all on blogger.com however instead of Wordpress.

Anyway, we have JoshMiller.net, which is here. This is mostly my "Personal Blog". Other than "Random occasional life observation", I sometimes post technology or computer related articles here.

Next up we have Lameazoid.com. I need to fix a lot of the image links and for reasons unknown "lameazoid.com" without the www is not working even though it's all set up to work, but I'll get that fixed. This is "Games and Toys and Geek/Nerd stuff". Anyone who has known me for any length of time will likely know what Lameazoid is and will know it is my "Flagship blog". It's currently in a state of "Team Fortress 2 + Other Random funny Youtube Videos".

Thirdly we have Opinion Stated As Fact or OSAF for short. I've had an increasing interest in worldy news and politics these days and this blog serves as my outlet for that. It's also a bit of an attempt to get back into my more popular "mildly inflammatory writing style" of the days of yore. So far it's pretty weak in that department, but I'm getting there. If you're a fan of Lameazoid and have an interest in news, you'll probably like OSAF.

On the subject of dead projects. Over the course of 2009 I've killed a few of my other side projects. I'm using Twitter exclusively for "Microblogging". I experimented with Plurk and a few others, but I've found I've been over reaching on the social networking so I've been cutting back with a machete.

I've also more or less killed my use of Posterous. I was experimenting with ti as a Mobile Blog platform and only updating it with photos and musings from my phone but I've had a few annoying roadblocks with that and quite honestly, it's something I could just use Flickr for. I like Flickr, I pay for Flickr, I have been severely neglecting Flickr.

Some may remember my short lived Everyman Tech blog. I've dumped that too. I don't care about being a "helpful Tech Enthusiast" enough to update it regularly. Those posts are now part of Joshmiller.net.

On another note, I've been doing a bit of "Outside Work". Outside being "Not something I directly control". I've done a few episodes of the Gitmo Nation Roundtable Podcast. I've also been posting some articles to my employer's website (Not all of these posts are mine).

Finally, I'll close with some upcomming ideas and projects and some direction fo where things will be heading in 2010. First off, Audio and video are comming. I say "First Off" like there's any other angles here....

Anyway, I have a shinny new video camera and a strong desire to do a regular Podcast I havn't quite desiced on if this will be weekly or bi weekly, and I'm not quite sure of if it's going to swing more OSAF or more Lameazoid. It will likely be a mix of these two areas of discussion. I plan to make it a solo venture but I'm not totally adverse to the idea of guests hosts.

The Podcast will be audio only. The video camera I mentioned will be for new Video Reviews for Lameazoid. Sort of... Everyone is doing crummy video reviews these days, I don't plan to do many straight out video reviews. More likely, I'll use video to augment text reviews. I prefer text reviews all around, I've just been extremely burnt out on doing them.

I also am looking into doing a few "Audio Mixes" for some audio streams that some of my fellow GNR peoples are working on. I'm not quite sure if this will pan out but it' something I'm toying with. The main issue is looking moe into how copyright works. Most likely I'll end up using Podsafe Music. for these mixes so it'll be stuff you've probably not heard before.

Anyway, that's a look at the year ahead.

2010 Ongoing Video Games List

This page will ocasionally be updated.

Currently Playing

GTA: Chinatown Wars (NDS)
The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (NDS)
New Super Mario Brothers Wii (Wii)
Team Fortress 2 (PC)

Completed

World of Goo (PC)
Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (NDS)

2010 Ongoing Reading List

For the last several years I've been keeping track of my reading consumption and Video Game Consumption. This was slightly easier with Wordpress' pages but this post will work allright for now. This page will ocasionally be updated.

Books Rolling Over from 2009Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Audio)
The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

2010 Books Finished
Falling Up by Shel Silverstien (170pages)

The New Location of Joshmiller.net

In case anyone has shown up here, previous readers may notice I've moved to Blogger, new users should know, I've moved to Blogger. Also I'm still in the process of importing old posts. I'm not real sure why some of the images aren't showing up anymore as they worked earlier this morning.

I'll get the bugs worked out. I've got maybe 100-150 more posts to import over the next few days. Google only lets you import 50 per day.

Moving JoshMiller.net to Blogger

For various reasons, including the fact that self hosting a website is generally unreliable, I'm moving my personal blog to Blogger.

I'm also planning to move Lameazoid.com to Blogger assuming things go well with this.

If you're subscribing to the Feed, please add this feed....
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Joshmillernet
... in it's place. I can update the Feedburner feed take anything no matter where I'm hosted so it's your best bet anyway.

A few reasons I'm moving to Blogger over Wordpress...

• I've actually always preferred Blogger to Wordpress.  Mostly I like Wordpress' ability to create static pages.


• I have several other Blogspot blogs going now already.  This will simplify them.


• Blogspot is owned by Google so you get the benefits of Google with less work.


• I can map my Domain names properly for free as opposed to Wordpress.com's "charge you an obscene amount yearly" plan.


• Blogger supports Scripting in posts and the sidebar.  I can properly embed videos from non Youtube sources.


• Blogger lets you run ads, if I ever feel included to do so in any serious manner.


• Blogger gives you full access tot he page code for Tweeking.   Wordpress.com does not.

Now granted, half of these do not apply to THIS blog since it's locally hosted but it's more of a set of reasons why I'm not moving back to Wordpress.com for free hosting and instead have chosen Blogspot.

I'm in the process of importing all of my posts over and eventually Joshmiller.net will simply point to this blog and I'll loose the joshmiller.net/blog.  Unfortunately I can't import comments.  It's a loss I've decided to take.  I can fake my own static pages through various methods as well.  Basically though I'm tired of my blog being "down" a lot.  Technically I shouldn't be self hosting anyway as my ISP probably would frown upon it.

In short, this will be the last post on the blog in this form and for anyone using this RSS feed.  Anything else will push through Feed Burner.

The Celebrity Death Phenomenon

Patrick Swayze is the latest. Michael Jackson was the biggest. There was also Billie Mays, Bea Arthur, Dom Deluise, Farrah Fawcett, Ed MaHon, John Hughes, Les Paul, Ted Kennedy, and countless other lesser known celebrities have died this year. Celebrities die all the time though, why does this year feel different?

People are starting to make a big deal about how these celebrities are dropping dead left and right. I have a few ideas about why this phenomenon seems like a huge deal. It’s essentially a convergence of several otherwise incidental concepts.

First off, possibly the biggest deal, the heavy penetration of Social Media. In the past, some celebrity dies, maybe the morning radio show is talking about it, maybe you spot an article in a tabloid newspaper while waiting to check out, basically, news just didn’t travel as fast.

Now we’ve got news that travels literally at the speed of light. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, because I’m not and I don’t care, but I was probably one of the first hundred or so people to tweet “Michael Jackson is dead”. Why? Because the television station I work for shows TMZ. TMZ broke the story on their website and immediately sent out an email telling us we needed to get a reefed of the show with “breaking news”. I get these sorts of emails all the time. The point though is that almost instantly, (in fact before it was confirmed because TMZ was being ambitious), this news had gone across some news desk, out into email, out to my Twitter and the spreading across my web of followers. This same stem of information was spewing from hundreds of other sources as well.

Within maybe, 15 minutes, essentially everyone would know that Michael Jackson had died. The news spreads through Twitter and Facebook and personal IMs and IRC and across the news. You don’t have to wait until you hear about it on the news or the Morning zoo, then wait till you drive to work to discuss it with your coworkers. It’s all nearly instantaneous.

But the social web isn’t the only factor. Look at that list of names. When were these people stars (for the most part)? The 1980s and 1990s. The 1980s saw a massive increase in the use of Cable Television. It also saw the advent of the VHS VCR, allowing us to watch these people over and over. It saw the advent of pop culture pushers like MTV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV), E!, People Magazine (actually the 70s), and in general, it was the rise of the concept of “celebrity”.

Previously we had the concept of “The Star”. These would be people like The Beatles or Frank Sinatra, or John Wayne. They were popular icons of entertainment but for the most part our exposure to them was limited. Suddenly we had television out the wazoo and magazines telling us every detail of the glamorous life of Hollywood.

Move ahead 10-20 years and throw in the internet. Now you can find entire websites dedicated to telling us every tiny detail of the lives of people like Paris Hilton or Angelina Jolie. Every act, no matter how insignificant is documented by at least a dozen obsessive fans.

Also, keeping with the time frame of popularity in the 80s, Many of these people were already 30-40 years old during their heydays in the 1970s and 1980s. That was nearly 30 years ago, these celebrities are now in their 60s and 70s. Traditionally, people in these sorts of positions don’t tend to lead the most cautious lives when it comes to keeping up their health. Many of these celebrities are simply reaching the point when they are ready to kick the bucket. His coupled with the increase in the number of celebrities hanging out in the public eye for longer periods of time makes it seem like there are a lot of people dying all at once.

The end result is that this increase in popular celebrity deaths isn’t something that is going to go away any time soon. I predict that it’s only going to get “worse” as the year rolls on and increase even more so in the years to come.