JeffHester.net

Few things irk me more than running across a “me too” website that steals my content without so much as a link back. This site was caught lifting this article from BigBlueBall verbatim, including a hotlink to an image I created and host.

I’d send a complaint letter to their hosting service, but their identity is concealed. A WHOIS inquiry yeilded the following information:

Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.

DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: ILOVEIM.COM
Created on: 12-Feb-05
Expires on: 12-Feb-07
Last Updated on: 26-Jan-06

Administrative Contact:
Private, Registration ILOVEIM.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599

Technical Contact:
Private, Registration ILOVEIM.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.EVERYDNS.NET
NS2.EVERYDNS.NET

Registry Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK

Any suggestions on how to combat this?

I’ll admit, I put a lot on my plate. More than I should, at times, but there’s a lot that I want to do. Yesterday I read how scientists are developing new drugs that will allow people to survive on only two hours of sleep a day. These ‘lifestyle’ drugs will supposedly deliver sleep that is deeper and more refreshing than the real thing in a fraction of the time.

The idea of a pharmacological solution to the ‘problem’ of sleep isn’t so far-fetched. We already have drugs like Modafinil which allow people to wake up refreshed after just four hours of sleep. It’s regularly dispensed to soldiers and pilots, and though it’s intended use is to curb the symptoms of narcolepsy, business travelers have been known to use it to counteract jet lag.  

Does this sound good to you? How about the story of a Vietnamese farmer who hasn’t slept in 33 years. I’m skeptical of the authenticity of the report, but it does raise an interesting question. We love to joke about wanting a longer day. "There just aren’t enough hours in the day…" But if we could radically reduce the amount of sleep we required, with no adverse physical impact, would our lives be richer?

If you could live on just two hours of sleep, what would you do with the ‘extra’ hours?

technorati tags: sleep, circadian

Google Gmail Chat now includes animated smileys or emoticons. Is this a sign of what’s to come for Google Talk? We’ve already seen a preview of buddy icons in Talk. Now that they are working with AOL, can we expect more of the same?

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Yes, Web 2.0 is over-hyped. Yes, talk about another “bubble” is silly. Or is it?

Aqeel at BigBlueBall pointed out this story on Wired about a guy who has started a company that will sell rooftop advertising, ostensibly for viewing via Google Earth and Google Maps and other sites with satellite imagery.

Colin Fitz-Gerald runs a roofing business in Massachusetts and has started a company called RoofShout to create promotional messages on rooftops.

“I’m currently launching RoofShout.com with no money, no real experience running a business on the internet, and no real solid business plan,” Fitz-Gerald said. “But I figure there’s a lot of blank roofs and a lot of advertising that could go on the roofs.”

No experience? No business plan? Sounds a lot like the bubble days.

Yes, I was quoted in a front page story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Was it about Web 2.0? Knowledge management? Social media? How about “none of the above?”

Times staff writer Susannah Rosenblatt interviewed me for a story titled Growing Remote Areas See Fringe Benefits in Gov.’s Plan. The article discusses Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to improve California’s roads and infrastructure, particular in the inland regions around Los Angeles and other coastal communities.

Software specialist Jeff Hester has lived in Murrieta since 1989, before the town had a single stoplight. He’s watched his southwest Riverside County community mushroom from 44,000 in 2000 to 75,000 and growing.

Roads and freeways have gotten so congested that Hester and his wife must carefully choose when to dine out in nearby Temecula because traffic on the 215 and adjacent 15 is so snarled.

“Do we really want to travel across town [to make] what used to be a 10-minute, what will be a 35- to 40-minute drive?” Hester said. “The traffic on the freeway has gotten so bad now, the surface streets that connect the two cities have gotten so bad, you really have to think about … do we have time to fight the traffic, depending on what day of the week or what hour it is.”

Though he enjoys living in Murrieta, Hester — like many of his neighbors — works many miles away. Hester avoids the worst of commuter gridlock tying up the 91 and the 215 freeways, but he still spends about 90 minutes each way on the Ortega Highway, winding 53 miles through the mountains to his job in Orange County’s Aliso Viejo several days a week, when he’s not telecommuting.

“We could use some improvements in our infrastructure around here,” Hester said. Widening the 215 would “make a huge dent” in the traffic woes.

So what’s interesting about this? Well, apart from the truth of the story itself (the freeways around here were never meant to handle the traffic they currently carry), there’s the question — How did the LA TImes come to interview Jeff Hester? Which is precisely where this blog comes in.

Ms. Rosenbloom faced an impending editorial deadline. She had talked to the government officials and analysts. She needed to talk to a “normal person” living through the problem to share their personal experience. The solution? Search the Internet. Somehow a search for people who commute from Riverside County to Orange County brought up a link to my blog.

What I appreciated was the fact that the Los Angeles Times confirmed what I’ve been trying to tell my family for ages; I’m a “normal person.”

According to Wikipedia, the seven deadly sins were introduced by St. Gregory the Great. He ranked them from least serious to most: lust, gluttony, sadness (later replaced by sloth), avarice (greed), anger, envy and pride.

If we assume the blogosphere to be a microcosm of the world at large (which we can’t really, since it reflects those geeky and vain enough to bother creating a blog in the first place)… but IF we assume so, could we use the blogoshpere as a prediction market for the seven deadly sins? What sins or hot (or not)?

Fortunately, Intelliseek’s BlogPulse tools reveal the answer. As you can see from the report, pride and anger compete for the top spot, with lust surprisingly a distant third. Presumably, bloggers as a whole are an angry, proud lot with an occasional lusty desire.

Sloth and gluttony fall at the bottom of the heap. Maybe bloggers by the very fact that they bother to blog at all are less inclined toward sloth. I suspect gluttony would be ranked much higher if the keyword and it’s variants were replaced with more commonly used synonyms.

Check out more amusing trends at BlogPulse.

Mike Oswalt saw hesternal over on A.Word.A.Day and naturally was compelled to forward to me. You might presume that it means something like “…of or relating to a Hester” but you would, of course, be incorrect. What does hesternal mean?

hesternal (he-STER-nuhl) adjective

Of yesterday.

[From Latin hesternus (of yesterday).]

Wikipedia adds a bit more context:

Hesternal tense is a group of grammatical tenses that are defined relative to the previous day. Pre-hesternal past tense refers to events happening previous to yesterday, whereas hesternal past tense refers to events happening yesterday.

I never really cared much for grammer. I love language, reading and writing. I’m just not enamored by the mechanics. Disecting the structure of a sentence is akin to performing a post-portem on a dead poet’s blood, sweat and tears.

In spite of that, I’m putting one grammatical term to good use, and posting this yesterday instead of hodiernal.

Nicole on the Windows Live Messenger team posted news of Windows Live Messenger beta invites being auctioned on eBay. The WLM team even has a pool to see how high the bid price for an invite will go. Of course, I’m still giving away WLM invites for free, although it’s a long, slow process. To date, I’ve only been given 13 invites to share (and yes, they’ve already been given out).

You can argue the ethics of auctioning off an invite to beta test a product that Microsoft will give away for free, but early Gmail users will remember a similar phenomenon when Google begain testing their email service.

Yes, I promised invitations, but I’m still waiting for Microsoft to give me any invitations to distribute. This is a bit of a problem, because Windows Live Messenger and MSN Messenger cannot coexist on the same computer. If you share a computer with other people who also use Messenger, they also need to be a beta tester or they won’t be able to sign-in.

I’m going to attempt to contact the team to get an ETA on the invitations. In the meantime, I’ve posted a few more screenshots.

Apparently there has been some confusion caused by image cacheing. The Kubrick style that the blog has been modeling for a couple days uses an image of the famed director Stanley Kubrick, looking rather disturbed. I had swapped that out with one of my own, but in my laziness left the filename the same.

Some people had apparently already visited the site and got the original image in their browser cache, so when they said I looked evil, they were really looking at Stanley, not Jeff. What a relief!