Category: Posts

At least seven people have recently searched on Google and arrived at this site for the phrase “soulja boy = moral decay.” I couldn’t agree more.

I was forced into accessing a MySpace page to listen to an upcoming band, and my opinion of the site hasn’t changed. Pages blare music at you; inert backgrounds chew up CPU; and the comments section is filled with “thanks for the add” and fifteen-year old girls that look suspiciously like the one from Your Scene Sucks.

What I find funny… and sad, in a way, is that all external links that aren’t on a whitelist of sites get gated through a splash page at msplinks.com. This is probably old news. It basically says, “don’t give out your username and password.” Are the users really that stupid, or is MySpace’s technology made of that much fail?

So were any of you looking forward to the Rogers BlackBerry and PDA data plan changes? A recent update to that thread noted that the changed rates have been delayed indefinitely. For now, the best choice for data usage is the Telus PDA offer, which is now $30 per month for unlimited data (but not text messaging.)

The upcoming Q2 2008 service changes should make bundling voicemail and caller ID slightly more worthwhile – for $11 per month, you get:

Caller ID
Enhanced Voicemail
Name Display
Who Called
Mobile Backup
125 Text Messages

Considering caller ID and name display are about $9 per month by themselves, this will probably be the extra “standard package” to consider for light text messaging users. There are a few other Communicate Packs listed in the thread. Expect these packages to go live around May 6th.

Oh, and you can now get 1GB of BlackBerry data for $100 per month. Awesome!

…NOT.

Tomorrow I write my database exam. Now, some of you who know a thing or two about me know that:

• I’m not half bad at using database driven applications such as forums, WordPress, etc
• I’ve actually coded a weaksauce CMS before using MySQL

Now, taking that into account – one would assume this course would be a breeze for me. Not the case dear sirs or madams. While the assignments and even the project were relatively easy – pulling me marks between 75-100 percent – both midterms managed to completely ruin me, as I failed them both. How, you might be asking yourself, is this possible? I can’t tell you any names, but it is through a certain person that this has come to pass. A certain person who is employed by a certain university, who teaches a certain course.

Certainly.

This man/woman [I’m not narrowing it down anymore] can not teach worth shit, and they are very aware of it. As such, the course materials – including assignments, midterms, and projects – are allegedly taken almost verbatim from the website for a database course offered in Hong Kong. However, this professor was slightly ashamed of their blatant thievery – so they attempted to change the wording on our final project. Instead of doing so, they managed to horribly muddle the task’s description and cause severe confusion as to how the implementation was to be handled. Magically I ended up with my lowest passing mark in the course – the 75 – from that project.

So I have faced for the last few days, the task of studying for this exam which is sure to test me on things that my professor did not teach [though it should not be implied that my professor actually taught something else, they more so tried and failed miserably to teach something else]. As such, I’ve spent most of my time reading the textbook for the course, and hoping that somehow I’ll have achieved enough of a broad knowledge of the book to scrape by with a pass in the course.

Now that really won’t happen, but I’ll post in the comments once I finish failing the exam to fill you in. So here’s to bell-curves; saving my ass since ’05.

The second episode of Judge Jake was released earlier this week, but The Left Dishon. Judge Jake failed to update the feed until today, or even inform me that it updated. Apparently I was supposed to be checking the Judge Jake specifically instead of expecting there to be a post [much like this one.]

But I digress. This episode covers some of the posts that Jake didn’t have time for in the previous episode. Among the judged are myself, and some MySpace hooligans. Other things of interest in this episode:

• The Man’s Gym
• Correcting teachers
• Jake’s tacky wardrobe
• Judge Jake incurring the wrath of goatse – yeah, he went there
• Corporate tomfoolery
• Soft background music to soothe your soul

Take a listen and feel free to post comments here, or send your comments directly to Jake at his usual email address: jake [at] jakebillo [dot] com.

Grab Episode 2: Rock Band Mic and Followup

Subscribe to Judge Jake RSS feed

Listen now:

[audio:http://jakebillo.com/files/podcast/jj02.mp3]

From the “Let’s Share Our Awesome Wallpapers” thread at Something Awful: Mandolux has some neat nature-themed and macro photography desktops, especially useful if you’re rocking two monitors. (All hail the BenQ FP241W!) I enjoy a nice mint leaf with my desktop icons.

Podcasting is for weasels, but nevertheless I’m launching a new one this evening. It’s less of a podcast and more of a “website that incidentally links to MP3 files, and also has an RSS feed” production.

Judge Jake is an idea I’ve floated around before, and was used in practice to creatively shame Chris Fitzpatrick into paying an extremely overdue bill.

Previously, Judge Jake was planned to function as a group podcast. I’d essentially be in charge of hearing cases in a Judge Judy-esque fashion, insulting the participants throughout the course of the show. For various reasons, this didn’t work out, but I think the core concept is still kind of funny. Feel free to check it out.

Grab Episode 1: Rogers Caps and YouTube

Subscribe to Judge Jake RSS feed

[audio:http://jakebillo.com/files/podcast/jj01.mp3]

The wonderful folks over at HowardForums have posted a definitive FAQ for how long distance is charged for any cell phone on the Rogers network. Firstly, your phone is tied to a “home calling area”. From the “simplified” post:

Inside your home calling area, receiving any calls (from a local or long distance number) uses airtime minutes only. Making a local call only uses airtime, and placing a long-distance call costs an additional 30 cents per minute.

Outside your home calling area, receiving any calls (from a local or long distance number) will use airtime and cost 30 cents per minute. Making calls within the area – that is: using a Waterloo phone in Toronto to call a Toronto number – only uses airtime. Making calls outside the area (Waterloo phone, in Toronto, calling a Waterloo number) uses airtime plus the additional 30 cent charge.

Sufficiently confused? Click to enlarge a crafty diagram – I know a few people have a good time with these. Keep in mind you’ve always using airtime.

Of course, if you have a long distance plan, this really doesn’t apply to you.

For the developers out there who aren’t designers by any means, the Silk icon set is an excellent way to drop in a set of stock action icons for your toolbar or Web interface. It uses a Creative Commons Attribution license, which is incredibly easy to comply with.

It’s happened, and people should start getting upset. Rogers has begun injecting packets to indicate that people have reached their “usage allowance” into arbitrary websites – which curiously does not include Google, likely due to the previous public outcry when test images appeared on Ars Technica.

The top frame on nearly every website obscures text and causes web pages to load extremely slowly. In my testing, the content loaded from 64.71.251.10 and often required websites to be reloaded before they would display properly. Unlike preview screen captures of this technology, there is no way to select “don’t display this message again”.

For interested individuals, the “acknowledge” address is http://64.71.251.10/isnsack.pl, which uses a JavaScript function to submit a CGI request.