John’s Crawlspace

Did you know that Elvis Presley was made an honorary DEA agent by Richard Nixon? I had seen this photo before, but never knew the context in which it was taken.

The irony here is that he was (most likely) out of his mind on all kinds of painkillers when he met Nixon and was made a “Federal Agent at Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. When he died (at 42) on August 16, 1977 he had 14 drugs in his system, including Codeine, Morphine, Quaaludes, Valium, Demerol, and Diazepam.

This is most likely common knowledge to the majority of you, but I thought it was pretty interesting… They mentioned it on Howard Stern on my drive into work.

On a completely unrelated note, I laughed pretty damn hard at this video: My Voice Is Higher Than Your Voice. It may have had something to do with the fact that I had been at work for over 12 hours prior to viewing and was slightly delirious, but I still think it’s funny. That is all, carry on.

If I had access to a super expensive video camera that was capable of recording at 1000 frames per second, I’d like to think that I’d come up with some pretty creative stuff to film. Everything looks cool in slow motion. Some stuff sounds cool, too.

Some band called the Dancing Pigeons (and some dude named Tomas Mankovsky) shot a music video with a Phantom slow motion camera. They also had access to a fire extinguisher… And a flame thrower. Good work, guys.

I have several web-based proxy sites that I run to earn a little AdSense cash. I’ve had them for several years now.

My proxy sites require minimal maintenance, but the hosting is expensive (proxies are extremely resource intensive) and as such don’t end up earning me a whole lot. Most hosts don’t allow proxy sites on their servers for this reason.

I’ve been with 4 different proxy hosts over the past few years, and all of them have ended up disappointing me. I always end up experiencing an unacceptable amount of downtime – We’re talking multiple days per month, sometimes weeks.

Anyway, I switched to FusedHosting.net with the promise of unbeatable uptime and fast servers. For the first few months, this seemed to be the case.

And then the downtime started.

My sites would go down for days at a time. I’d send an email to customer support, only to receive a response days later (when the sites were finally back online) saying that they had zero downtime and that it must be on my end.

I realize that even a day of downtime is unacceptable and should be more than enough reason to make someone switch hosts, but switching ~10 sites to a new host can be somewhat of a pain, especially when you’re as busy as I am.

Communication always sucked with Fused Hosting, but sometimes the downtime was so bad that even the FusedHosting.net domain would be down for days at a time, and emails to their “support team” would bounce back entirely.

When I started to experience downtime that went on for almost a full month, I decided it was time to switch to a new host. It almost seemed like a practical joke, or as if they were testing the limits to see what they could get away with. With extensive downtime comes a serious decline in traffic and a loss in rankings comparable to flushing countless hours of SEO work down the toilet.

On March 17th, I got in touch with someone at Fused Hosting and let them know that I wanted to cancel, and would also like a refund for the obnoxious downtime. They told me, of course, that they would not provide a refund, but that my account had been cancelled. Thank god.

This past month, I was looking at my PayPal account and realized that I was still being billed by FusedHosting. Surprise surprise! They billed me for 4 additional months of hosting for a total of $120.

I attempted to contact them several times regarding this “oversight”, and I wasn’t making any progress. They took days to get back to each email and clearly this was going nowhere. I called several times. Finally I got ahold of someone on the phone.

He took a look at the situation, aka pretended he wasn’t familiar with me, my account, or the situation at hand, and that he had to look it up and familiarize himself. He told me that my paypal account would be refunded, and that it would take 2-3 days to go through. Near the end of the call he also sounded pretty sarcastic, and actually laughed at one point. I wasn’t sure how to react to that, so I just thanked him and decided I’d wait and see what happened.

Well here we are, almost a month later, and nothing. I haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone over there either – They’ve ignored all subsequent calls and emails.

I’m not the only one who has had a bad experience with (or was straight up “scammed” by) FusedHosting. Here is someone else’s story.

I doubt that many of my regular readers are in the market for a proxy host, but I felt obligated to get this out there. Hopefully no one else will get screwed over or scammed by these guys.

This week has been rough. I was in Philadelphia all of last week, and my flight home arrived at LAX on Sunday night. I’ve been recovering from my trip ever since.

While I was back east, I went to Camp Bisco (for the 4th year in a row) with a bunch of friends. I had an absolute blast… Perhaps I had too much fun? I’m not sure, but my body is covered in some sort of hive/rash thing. It’s slowly but surely spreading, and as of today it’s on my face. My eye is all swollen up. Awesome. WebMD, what’s going on?

This is fantastic, too, because I just got over the most ferocious case of poison ivy/oak/whatever that I’ve ever had in my life. That came to me compliments of some hiking in Monterey, CA. I probably leaked enough pus from that to fill a bathtub. Who’s hungry?

Anyway, Camp Bisco was a blast, as usual. Definitely some of the most fun I’ve had all year, despite an insane lightning storm (with tornado warnings) that brought the music to a screeching halt on Saturday afternoon. Brothers Past were about 20 minutes into their set when the death clouds rolled in, and the music was interrupted with a stern warning to “return to your cars and seek shelter immediately”. Another camera was ruined in the process. That’s number 3 this year, which actually isn’t too shabby considering my track record.

I doubt many of you are into The Disco Biscuits, but if you’re interested, I got some halfway decent videos. This one is my favorite (especially right around 8:16) and there are more here, here, etc. I also got some footage of Ween, LCD Soundsystem, and more… Check ‘em out in my YouTube account if you’re interested.

Alright, I need to get back to scratching myself like a crackhead.

Have you ever found yourself walking away from a social interaction, and the perfect comment/compliment/response dawns on you after the fact?

Perhaps someone insulted you, or maybe you were chatting up someone of the opposite sex. Your response to an unexpected insult or compliment was a little less than witty, and you don’t think of something satisfactory to say until after the fact… I think that this happens to all of us every now and then. I’ve never spent a significant amount of time dwelling on these situations, but they can leave you with a slight feeling of regret.

Did you know that there is a name for this phenomenon? I was poking around on Wikipedia, when I came across an entry for “L’esprit de l’escalier”, or “staircase wit”.

This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist Denis Diderot’s description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le comédien. During a dinner at the home of statesman Jacques Necker, a remark was made to him which left him speechless at the time because, he explains, l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier: a sensitive man like me, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he gets to] the bottom of the stairs.

Anyway, I thought that was pretty interesting.