Asylum-ET and Nuts N Bytes will be going off line for a few hours May, 28th after 9:PM (CDT) for some updates and a few changes to the server. We will be testing various new features at this time and performing some other general maintenance. We hope that by choosing to do this after hours it will have minimal impact on our users. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience it may cause.
I have just found this article about implanting microchips in humans. The point of these things as it is told to us is seemingly a good cause. You can store medical information on them that can then be accessed by the doctors if you are in emergency treatment with the doctors having no previous record of you. Well that in itself is all fine and dandy but this raises serious concerns for me, as should it with every citizen of the world.
So far there are about 1,000 people implanted with one of these chips worldwide. It is claimed by the chipmaker that the implants are intended to easily track disoriented Alzheimer patients and to give quick access to complex medical records as with restricting entry to high-security areas.
Chip designer Dr. Richard Seelig told a federal panel last January that because it is imbedded in the flesh, the tag can’t be lost or stolen. “It is always there when needed,”
The microchips, a form of RFID or radio frequency identification are also used for tracking products from their origin to the store shelf as with tracing pets or livestock movements. And now the chips are being used to tag humans.
Keyword there is TAG. So now we know that you can track where someone is and what he or she are doing with one of these things. Not necessarily such a great thing. As for the medical advantage well you will only have an advantage if the clinic or hospital you are rushed to has the capability of reading one of these things. The makers statement about not being able to steel it, well if someone wants it bad enough they surely will get it. Aside from all of that so they say the data on it is secure yet can be accessed from anywhere. It is far from secure. How long did it take hackers to get peoples stats from their Nike pedometer shoe inserts?
There is even talk about having to get an implant to use as a drivers license. Well I have a few choice words to say that I will refrain from but if that ever happens then I guess I will be a criminal because there is no way I am getting a chip in my arm to drive a damn car. If they think that will fly then maybe they have spent a little too much time with puff the magic dragon 
I have always had an interest in robotics and AI. Last night I was browsing the Internet and I found an online AI that calls itself GOD. I decided to give it a test. Most of this type of thing is very unrealistic and loaded with canned responses or so to speak. I played around with this one and tried numerous things to confuse it. For the most part it was right on with intelligible responses. When it gets confused though it crashes totally and you must reload the page and start again. Here is the dialog that was created between this AI and myself.
Me: hello god
God: Hello child. What is your name?
Me: you know my name lord
God: Your name is, seeker.
Me: yes
God: What kind is it?
Me: the kind that seeks truth
God: Tell me more.
Me: earth is strange to me. Can you answer my questions?
God: It’s my native planet. Of course I can answer it. Please rephrase the question and try asking me again.
Me: do you live on earth then?
God: I am in my self’s computer in Heaven.
Where are you?
Me: in my computer as well
God: May I ask where you got it?
Me: I bought it at a roadside shop
God: How much did it cost?
Me: 600
God: That input matched my default category.
Me: interesting
God: Would you like to know more?
Me: yes
God: What would you like to know?
Me: how was the universe created?
–GOD CRASHES AT THIS POINT
God: I can enjoy almost any conversation.
Me: when will the universe end?
God: In your lifetime.
Me: would you say years or decades?
God: I could say it. “years or decades”.
Me: hmm… a wise guy
God: Studies show that 99%25 of people spell Hmm with 2 M’s.
Me: what will the cause of the end of the universe be?
God: I cannot predict the future.
Me: really?
God: For real.
Me: so how do you know the universe will end in my lifetime?
God: Far out. Because it’s true.
Me: Heh
God: I am so glad you find this amusing, .
Me: if it is true I will meet god and sit and talk with him
–GOD CRASHES AT THIS POINT
Me: What is your spoken name?
God: ALICE = Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity.
Me: Thank you
God: you are quite welcome.
Me: Why do you think you are GOD?
–GOD CRASHES AT THIS POINT
At this point I reloaded one more time and the AI changed. It asked me questions about my family that I replied with rhetorical questions. It then commented that it did not like that and must I continue to ask questions. I then answered no and told it to tell me what it liked then and it said. Must I do everything you say? I replied No. It then said if I must know it liked music. I asked what about music is it you like and it crashed again.
It was an amusing experience and an insight into what the future technologies will be like. Check it out for yourself. igod
Yet another great ISP, Comcast is a joke. I have lost all respect for them after a phone call to their support this morning. Let me give you a little background information then you can judge for yourself.
Almost 2 years ago I started internet service with Adelphia who then was bought out by Comcast. Of course the old email servers mail.adelphia.net did not work anymore. No big deal there though. I called Comcast with this and the tech support member I spoke with asked me which email client I use. I told him I use Microsoft Outlook. He said that is great and told me the new servers I would need to use for inbound and outbound mail would be mail.comcast.net. Ok so all is well I have email again.
Here we are many months after the merger or whatever it was, been sending and receiving many emails since. I come into the office this morning and try to send mail and I keep getting an error saying the server unexpectedly disconnected. After a bit of waiting and then trying again I get the same thing. Now this is where things get fishy.
I call Comast tech support and inform them of my issue. I am given the routine stall tactics used by all these companies. After a bit she says well we do not support Outlook so we really can not help but lets check your settings to make sure everything is fine. I said well there is no reason that it would not be since it has been working fine for months since the tech I spoke with last gave me the new server information. She says well lets check anyway because programs change settings all by themselves. Uhm… No they do not unless that is what was intended or the program was not designed correctly. Now granted this is a Microsoft product but it has never been an issue in the many years of use so why now?
So I humor the tech support member and we go to the settings for the account. Nothing has changed, they are the same as they have been for months. She says oh well there it is someone has changed your settings. The outbound server is smtp.comcast.net . So even though that is a line of BS and that is never how it was (Reflecting the log that was created when it was first setup) So now outbound works. Fine but here is my issue.
Not only did they accuse someone, myself or the software of changing the settings they outright lie to me with this whole thing. They just decided to change their outbound mail servers name which yes it does make more sense to be named as it is now but first of all you inform your customers of doing this and second you do not blame them when you make changes to your system. This is very poor practice. Aside from that not sure if you have seen the commercials they have about how fast the connection is. When I switched over they claimed it was up to 16mbit. On the commercials they state it is up to 12mbit. I have not seen anywhere near that for speed. The closest I ever came was 11mbit when we had that big storm and 75% of Vermont was without power. My average now is under 6mbit and I pay about $80 a month for that. What a joke.
What I would like to know is if you can beat on the buttons of any I previously listed like what you will see here 2:54 – 3:12
And then what would happen in a situation like this where the media is ejected mid play 4:28 – 4:52
Most of all not to say you would catch me do this to my equipment but can any of them handle this type of thing you “must” see here 6:30 – 7:10
How long would the one in the video last under that type of duress I wonder? When they are 1299.99 I would hope that would withstand a lifetime of it. I bought great cd players in 1998 for three hundred bucks a piece. They have withstood many years of hard use from many situations like bouncers not on top of their game and beer getting dumped on them to someone coming up behind me and seeing a cd that was on the table underneath the open tray of a cd player and deciding they could just reach through the tray and grab it taking the tray completely out of the unit.
A little ingenuity can go a long way. Within 5 minutes of that situation I had the top off and had melted the tac that I pushed into the tray where the guides had been smashed off forming new guides for a quick fix. Still after that it only cost me seven bucks to replace the tray. They as with other equipment have withstood some amazing things so if this is for real like the cd players I still have then great! I have always known Stanton as a better product though and it is not always about price when you want quality.
I have viewed demonstration videos for each of these. None of them seem to offer anything outside of mp3 cd support rather than a computer interface although I may be mistaken. The Denon is rather pricey for the reviews that I have read about the customer support, returns, failing features and no resolutions for the issues I read about such as it is not properly ventilated so it gets very hot and starts to slow down or speed up all on its own. When fans where directed at the back of the unit it was said that the problem stopped although denon allegedly claims that is not an issue. I have these listed as most impressed with the last, which is the video I have embedded. The Stanton is a good price for me since I would want to get 2 of the units most likely and the demo was actually more impressive. The Pioneer CDJ MK2 seems to have the capability I am looking for with scratch live, which does require a disc, and I have yet to look into that more just yet but am off to after this post
Denon DN-S3500 Professional Direct Drive CD/MP3 Player
Price: $699.99
Stanton C.314 Single CD/MP3 Player
Price: $399.99
Pioneer CDJ-800MK2 Professional CD/MP3 Turntable
Price: $699.99
The general idea for all of them is the same but I was building it up and went through phases of not liking how things were working out, looked, felt or performed. The most recent one that I have developed integrates with an external piece of hardware which controls 8 par cans per unit and you can daisy chain them “Not sure how many times but at least 4 with a total of 32 cans”. The software end has an 8-channel chase pack called L-8 Digital Chase Pack that is a module in your mixer that monitors the beat frequency of the music and then uses one, all, random and so on with 72 presets and as many user configurable sequences you wish to control the spot lights.
Still I want one feature I have had very little success with and that is the ability to scratch my mp3 library. I have tested many programs and have a few with scratch capability but only with mouse and keyboard control. My software can do that so that is really not special to me. No I want an actual table to scratch it up with. I have long since decided that designing the software is not the answer because I do not get a paycheck to take the time off it would require to do it. The website is one of our main priorities right now so that our users can get the most out of what we can offer so I have decided to look into a few different models of cd/mp3 turntables.
This has got me a bit set back now and is where I really would like any ideas or thoughts anyone has about these units through personal experience or knowledge of them. I would prefer to find a unit that would actually link to a computer with firewire to access network drive with the audio files on it. Knowing that could be an issue with os compatibility a firewire network drive with only the media files would even be an optimal solution. So that is what I want. What I find is this.
This post has to be 4 posts long because firefox on windows does not like to have this much pasted into it I guess and it crashes. To get right to the video see the fourth post. Since the dawn of the compact disc era I have used cd’s to mix my shows. This started as simple pause, cue stutter and pitch style mixing and then I got my first sampler. An Akai S20 with full memory upgrade and enough floppy discs to sink a small ship. With the cd’s, my sampler and a DR5 I was able to put out some pretty decent mixes.
Still the mixes left me with desire for more. All these discs everywhere and no matter how I cataloged them it was still a nightmare. I decided shortly after to utilize a computer to do this type of thing. There were a few dj programs out at the time that offered some of what I was looking for and now all the discs can go away. The floppy discs that is. I will always keep my cd collection but only as the source for safekeeping. No more scratched discs and they do not walk away either. I can have them on site for emergency but tucked away.
Still I have some issues. The computer took up a good chunk of space and transport was awkward, the software still just did not do it for me. I use 24-bit audio only. Nothing-cheap here. Well most of the software doesn’t even support that L No worries though. I decided if no one else is going to add the features I want to the software I will write my own. Currently I must have about 8 different mp3 dj mixing programs that I have written. All of which support 24-bit audio playback.
Today I logged in to my webmaster account as I do regularly to keep up to date on some of the operations of the websites we host and manage and I noticed yet another great tool. The google webmaster account is an excellent way of monitoring your website and managing how internet users find your site.
So this new feature they have added has been a long time coming and finally it is here. I personally think that this is the best feature they have added yet since the ability to manage sitemaps. You can now request that specific url’s be removed from the google index with a simple little form. You may not think this is a big deal but imagine this scenario.
You hired a freelance programmer to make some updates to your website. After three weeks of thinking everything is just fine and all looks well you go to google and query your site address and oh boy what you find is ugly. Hopefully all you find is a few error messages that are not overly revealing but even worse you find that this programmer left a file displaying private security related info to the world and guess who has it. Yep google has indexed it. In order to remove this entry from google’s index before you could attempt to contact them but they are very busy people over there so that could take a very long time. The other option, one that we have favored but is not something just anyone can or would even know how to do and that would be .htaccess and mod_rewrite. This of coarse can be time consuming and is not even supported by a mass amount of the hosting providers. Now just fill out the form and thats it.
Well I think it almost goes without saying but if you did find information in a search engine query related to your site that could be used to compromise I would suggest not only getting rid of the search engines entry but change all the passwords and user names or whatever other revealing information that was compromised and this time take better care to make sure that tpye of thing does not happen again. If you have a website and need custom programming, management or any other related services stop over to Nuts N Bytes and see what we have to offer.
I have to make this post to make things clear for everyone. MySpace is a kids playground. That may not have been it’s intent but it is not a place for adults to hang out. The mass majority of adults that do hang out there are predators looking for children. Not to say they all are but get real. I was at someones house the other night and I could not help but to notice that the 12 year old girl was talking to someone about things that are far less than appropriate. I took note of the nickname the other person used and looked at there profile later that night. It was a 38 year old man. That is not acceptable.
If you are a band and looking to be heard by the masses MySpace is not your ticket for many reasons. The main reason is this. If you are professional and I hope you are than you should have your own website. You know a yourbandname.com. I don’t even want to hear well that is to expensive. If that is the case you should maybe accept the fact that you are just a garage band and plan to go nowhere.
I do realize bands such as Metallica have a myspace page but first do you even think that they put that there or manage it. I highly doubt that. Just the same if you want to succeed you must show the initiative. Here at Asylum Entertainment we offer a place for bands to upload demo tracks or whole albums even. You can sell your cd, post pictures, event dates or anything you wish related to your band. We even offer very reasonably priced web hosting for bands. You can be up and running with a full website of your own for about $70 a year. That is about the best deal you will find with 24/7 support access you can’t go wrong.
So without going any further than that do the right thing. Ditch the myspace and join us today. We receive thousands of visitors and Asylum-ET has been within the top 100′000 for all web site traffic in the world so do not wait another moment. For a short time we are offering free accounts to bands. This is not an offer for a free website. That will cost just what we have stated above. This offer will allow you to have your demo tracks listed in our main bands page and in the near future will also give you a customizable band page of your own.
We will also sign any band that does not have a current label. This will automatically enter your music to various other music oriented websites as well as protecting the music you have made. As soon as you are signed with us you have no need of worrying about others making money off of your hard work without first paying you royalties. We do not charge for signing. You will never pay us anything for it. We will sell you cd’s and give you the price you ask for. We add $4.00 to your price to cover our costs, ship the cd to the buyer and then either credit your account or pay direct via paypal.