So this morning I tried to process an order a customer had sent me last night.  I went to log into my photolab service provider, exposuremanager.com, just like I always do.  Bzzzt.  Can't get in.  "This link appears to be broken."

Huh, maybe it's my machine.  So I try my daughter's machine, nope she can't see it either.  Internet down?  Nope I can get my email and see all the other sites I use regularly.

So I (reasonably) assume exposuremanager is down.  That's not too cool--because while it is down my customers can't place orders.  So I call customer support and leave them a message that their site is down.

A little while later I get an e-mail from them stating their site is up and running fine (and by the way, nice pictures on your site!) Thanks, but I still can't get in.

So I try the DOS utility "ping" to ping their server.  Sometimes it can't resolve exposuremanager to an IP address (implying a problem with a domain name server at Comcast) and other times it can resolve the IP address but gets no response.  I check with WHOIS on Tucows (their registrar) to see if their domain has expired, but it hasn't.  WTF?

So then I run a traceroute in an attempt to see where the communication fails between me and exposuremanager:

Tracing route to exposuremanager.com [66.254.91.235]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

 

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  www.routerlogin.com [192.168.1.1]

  2     7 ms    10 ms     7 ms  [ my IP omitted ]

  3     8 ms     8 ms     6 ms  ge-1-2-ur01.gardner.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.85.187.109]

  4    11 ms    10 ms     9 ms  te-0-8-0-2-ar01.woburn.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.85.162.93]

  5    14 ms     9 ms     9 ms  pos-0-15-0-0-ar01.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.85.162.145]

  6    15 ms    14 ms    22 ms  pos-0-0-0-0-ar01.chartford.ct.hartford.comcast.net [68.85.162.70]

  7    16 ms    18 ms    17 ms  pos-2-4-0-0-cr01.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.90.61]

  8    22 ms    18 ms    17 ms  Vlan546.icore1.NJY-Newark.as6453.net [206.82.132.41]

  9    17 ms    45 ms    18 ms  if-6-0-0-25.mcore3.NJY-Newark.as6453.net [216.6.57.41]

 10    19 ms    17 ms    18 ms  if-2-0.core1.NTO-NewYork.as6453.net [216.6.57.66]

 11    17 ms    18 ms    19 ms  sl-gw31-nyc-14-0-0.sprintlink.net [160.81.249.29]

 12    18 ms    19 ms    17 ms  sl-crs2-nyc-0-2-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.13.35]

 13    23 ms    27 ms    19 ms  sl-bb20-msq-2-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.74]

 14    22 ms    22 ms    24 ms  sl-bb21-msq-15-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.9.110]

 15    26 ms    26 ms    27 ms  sl-crs1-rly-0-8-5-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.73]

 16    25 ms    25 ms    26 ms  sl-bb20-dc-5-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.8.162]

 17    24 ms    28 ms    25 ms  sl-crs1-dc-0-0-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.15.11]

 18    74 ms    73 ms    74 ms  sl-crs2-fw-0-11-3-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.200]

 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 26     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 27     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 28     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 29     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 30     *        *        *     Request timed out.

 

Trace complete.

As you can see, the communication makes it to "sl-crs2-fw-0-11-3-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.200]" and then fails.  Sprintlink.net is inside of the Sprint network.  To get as far as I did required the services of three companies, Comcast (comcast.net),  Tata Communications (as6453.net), and Sprint (sprintlink.net). None of these companies is my company (sagewoodstudios.com) or my photolab service provider (exposuremanager.com).  In fact after the last hop, I don't know what the next address would be--it might be a fourth company, or another server in the Sprint network.  Exposure Manager can't help me--it's not their computer.  Comcast can't help me--it's not their computer either.  Sprint *might* be able to help me, but I'm not their customer. 

What I do know is, if I didn't have to use this route, I would indeed be able to get there.  I found an online provider of the standard 'net tools (ping, traceroute, etc.) called Network-Tools.com (that's a handy link btw, you might want to bookmark it).  I can get to their server to see their website, and when I ask THEM to do a traceroute to exposuremanager, they can get there just fine:

TraceRoute to 66.254.91.235 [exposuremanager.com]

Hop

(ms)

(ms)

(ms)

IP Address

Host name

1

8

6

6

206.123.69.137

-

2

9

6

6

8.9.232.73

xe-5-3-0.edge3.dallas1.level3.net

3

12

7

7

4.69.145.140

ae-3-80.edge2.dallas3.level3.net

4

8

15

6

4.71.220.14

xo-communic.edge2.dallas3.level3.net

5

10

12

9

207.88.13.122

207.88.13.122.ptr.us.xo.net

6

41

40

40

207.88.12.46

207.88.12.46.ptr.us.xo.net

7

41

40

40

65.106.1.69

65.106.1.69.ptr.us.xo.net

8

41

49

52

65.106.5.10

p0-0-0.mar2.la-ca.us.xo.net

9

46

40

40

207.88.81.170

p15-0.chr1.la-ca.us.xo.net

10

50

44

45

66.238.50.106

66.238.50.106.ptr.us.xo.net

11

53

45

47

66.254.64.1

gw1.pixelgate.net

12

53

50

47

66.254.91.235

host235.exposuremanager.com

Trace complete

As you can see, because they are starting from a different provider (level3.net) their communication path takes a different route that never involves any of the companies I'm forced to use.  If Network-Tools.com provided a "browser in a browser" basically an embedded frame that I could point anywhere I want to, I'd be able to get to my photolab and process my customer's orders.

In the meantime I'm pretty stuck.  I can't help my customers, and my service provider can't help me.  Welcome to the Internet... where you really "can't get thar from hyar".

What I don't have is interest.  There's a lot going on in my life, and I'd rather get on with it than write about it.  Besides I doubt anybody really wants to read about it.  So I've been neither writing in my blog, nor really reading the blogs of others.  I check in on Aces Full and Pandora's Tea Room every now and again, but that is pretty much it.  I post on MOTL every now and again, but not too frequently now that the werewolf games were cancelled due to people taking them too seriously.

What's been occupying my time is my photography business.  It seems to be picking up, which is great, because I simply love this work.  I did a school dance in February, and a photoshoot for an aspiring actor.  In May I did a costume shoot for a dance school which is the first shoot I've done where I can unequivocably say that I made pretty good money.

June's been hopping.  I did a graduation shoot for a relative (no money, but I did some networking at the school while I was there that might turn into business), and a graduation party for the same relative.  This past Thursday night I shot the dress rehearsal for a stage production of a dance interpretation of Peter Pan.  Friday night I shot the eighth grade dance of a middle school in southeastern Massachusetts.  Then Saturday I shot the 1PM and 7PM performances of Peter Pan (42 Gb of pix in one day... yowza!)

I wrote about this a little bit on a message forum, so I figured I'd share that here.

---

June 12, 2009 11:01 AM

Last night's shoot went well but I am exhausted. I took a chance and produced a 36" x 24" (poster size) print of the main cast (with some added text) and it came out GREAT. I was amazed. I expected at that size the image would be very fuzzy--you know "stand a few feet away and it will look fine". Nope, it was nice and sharp. About 90 minutes of post production and cost about $50 to print, and I gave it to the dance school director as a gift.

She went positively gaga over it and hung it immediately as a poster for her show. The kids loved it too.

Of course I had a couple totally unrealistic parents come up to me after the show asking if I "had any extras" or would "give them one". "These are quite expensive to print. Of course I can have one made and shipped to you but it would cost $100." "Oh forget it then." LOL. It's so hard to make money in this business unless you are doing weddings or products. For the costume shoot I spent 8 hours shooting, and 50 hours in post production. My total profit after printing and shipping was $800--that's $13.75 per hour and no matter what price you charge people think it's too much.

Anyway the dress rehearsal shoot went great, apart from the 580 EX burning though batteries like there's no tomorrow. 4.5 hours of shooting, 1,105 pictures, 30 batteries eaten. I picked up a digital frame and loaded it with a bunch of work I've done over the last couple years and set that up next to the fliers--that got some attention. I had a number of people come up to me after the show and tell me how much they loved my work, which is always nice. We'll see if they still love me when I raise my prices next year. 

So tonight I have a middle school dance to shoot, and then tomorrow I have to shoot the performances that I went to the dress rehearsal for. Busy few days!

---

June 13, 2009 1:55 AM

Tonight's Middle School Dance shoot was exhausting but fun. These kids were different that the kids at my daughter's middle school--they were a lot stiffer... nobody danced for like the first 90 minutes. I was like WTF? Heck I wanted to put the camera down and dance myself. The DJ was great, all the tunes were current.

This was an 8th grade dance and soon the kids will all be going off to different highschools so there was a lot of emotionality... a lot of kids were crying toward the end... that doesn't exactly make for a nice photo.

Kids at my daughter's art school are also more hammy for the camera, these kids pretty much constantly ducked and hid whenever the camera showed up. This behavior drives me nuts, I'm being paid to shoot the dance, these kids are bawling that they're not going to see their friends again, and they're not going to have pictures of their friends to remember because they're too busy responding to the camera in the way they've been trained to respond "ooh don't take my picture I look ugly". You just want to say "Jesus, grow up already." Sometimes I say to them "this may come as a surprise, but we can all see you... we already know what you look like." No matter, I just switched to the 200mm and shot long... you get nice closeups that way and the kids don't know who is being photographed.

All in all I think it went well. Two big shoots tomorrow... man am I beat.

---

June 13, 2009 9:44 AM

Fell out of bed about 8:20... showered, shaved, and will be heading out for the third and biggest of this weeks three shoots. What an exhausting time this has been! No flash today ('cept before and after) so I shouldn't need a frickin' gross of AA batts...

---

June 14, 2009 7:37 PM

Yesterday's shoots were positively EXHAUSTING! But I think it went well. At the end of the afternoon performance I knew I was in trouble tho... I had shot 20+ Gb of pictures, and I only had 22 Gb in CF cards with me. I had time before the 7PM performance so I went to best buy and purchased another 20 Gb of CF memory (1x 8 GB, 3x 4 Gb). During the second performance I shot the entire remaining 22 Gb. For the after photos I had to switch from RAW to JPG, and pull out my old "emergency card"--a 512 mB card that I've often questioned why I still carry it. Thank heavens I had it!

But 42 jigglebytes in a single day is some outrageous shooting. About 3,500 pictures. Sorting through this is going to be fun. Lightroom is chewing on them now and probably will be until tomorrow.

Emma was able to perform as Peter Pan, which was nice, though she had to hold back and give a slightly more subdued performance to prevent further injury to her ankle. It was nice seeing her dance at all though.

The "movie poster" was a big hit. About 700 people filed past it and every time I went out into the hall to shoot candids there were people looking at it and my digital frame (yay!). The thing I liked best was when I caught the dancers looking at it, they really liked it and it made for some nice photos. Have I mentioned how much I love this work?

I got more compliments and requests on Saturday, some people looking to buy the poster print. I added it to the show gallery and enabled large format printing options (and T-shirts, which my lab has begun to offer).

So now begins the long slog of post processing. But with so many pictures to choose from I should be able to come up with some that are sure to please. And the post work should be hella easier than the costume shoot was.

Gonna be a lot of busy nights tho... but not today, today I am recuperating... 12 hours of driving over the last 3 days, getting home every night after 1 AM, sore as heck from shooting...

(Good news, I had two orders today from earlier galleries. Yay! Only $70 but I'm taking it as a good sign.)

Wow am I beat. But it's a good kind of beat, when you feel like you accomplished something.

On a quick run through the performance photos I found a nice little series. Peter Pan was not on a wire, so she got about by making beautiful acrobatic leaps. I managed to snap a series of leaps (on the tail end of the leap as she was coming down) as she leapt around the dancer playing the part of Wendy Darling. In the series it looks like Peter is flying...  Sweet!

---

So today I found myself agreeing with someone online and went to type "hear hear" but then remembered seeing someone else type "here here" a couple days earlier.

I was pretty sure the correct phrase was "hear hear" as opposed to the other variants I'd seen ("here here", "hear here", "here hear") but I'd never actually looked it up. So I decided to check popular internet usage using Google:

1. "hear hear" = 1,740,000 hits
    
2. "here here" = 3,880,000 hits
    
3. "hear here" = 307,000 hits
    
4. "here hear" = 334,000 hits

Well dang. According to popular usage twice as many people say "here here" than say "hear hear". But is that correct? Wikipedia says no:

Hear hear (Wikipedia):
...Hear, hear is an expression used as a short repeated form of hear ye and hear him. It represents a listener's agreement with the point being made by a speaker.

It was originally an imperative for directing attention to speakers, and has since been used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as "the regular form of cheering in the House of Commons", with many purposes depending on the intonation of its user. It is often incorrectly spelled "here here", especially on websites...

A quick double check of OneLook Dictionary Search confirms this. Six dictionaries list "hear hear" and only one lists "here here" (and that one happens to be the wiki article above.)

Popular usage drives the movement of meaning, though, so at some point in the future "here here" may end up being the correct phrase if we don't do something about it.

So if you want to avoid yet another English colloquialism that will have your great grandchildren scratching their heads and saying "WTF?" (or whatever kids will be saying in those days) then type "hear hear" at every opportunity.

Go on, say it, you know you want to.

---

Sheesh!  Time to get back to work.  Talk to you guys later today.  I'll keep checking the outstanding states and senate seats.

If you are a US citizen and planning to vote I could use your help. During each presidential election I run a blogathon and one thing I like to do is publish "polling station reports". Basically I have friends and acquaintances drop me an e-mail after they vote to tell me about their experience at the polls. I'm looking to do the same thing this year, and I'd love to get poll reports from any of my friends or readers who are interested in helping out.

Though my blog is very opinionated, the poll reports are not intended to be partisan--I'm not asking who you voted for or why. The sort of info I would be looking for is:

1. Where did you vote (City/State--even if you voted absentee):

2. What date and time of day:

3. What were the conditions like? (i.e. was it crowded or deserted, chaotic or organized, did you have to wait a long time, were the staff professional, were they nice or rude, what kind of location was being used for voting--i.e. gymnasium, school, post office, church, etc.)

4. If your station used voting machines, did they seem to be working or were they out of order? What sort of machines were they (hole-punch, optical scanner, touch-screen, etc.)?

5. Were you the subject of (or did you witness) a voter challenge? If so what was that like?

6. If you voted early or by absentee ballot, how did that work out?

7. Anything else you want to add.

This should basically boil down to a few lines in e-mail. Doesn't matter if you cover all of the points above--basic idea is to say where you voted and what it was like. I will likely edit/digest reports I receive for grammar and clarity before posting them to my blog.

If you are interested in helping out, please drop me an e-mail with your poll report after you vote on November 4. Poll reports should be sent to: pollreport@plastereddragon.com. That e-mail address will be disabled on November 5. All reports should be sent on November 4th (or earlier if you voted early/absentee)--the idea is to log things as they happen.

So, the creators of Spore, Electronic Arts, created an online discussion forum where people could talk about Spore.  Unfortunately they made the mistake of offering a feedback forum where people could post feedback about the game, and the reviews are positively ghastly.  So many people are irate about how shallow the game is and the various bugs in it that last week EA released a patch for the game, only a week after the game went to market.  Anybody in software development knows what happens when you rush a patch out the door.  And it happened big time... the patch made the game experience WORSE for a lot of users, fixing some bugs but creating a whole host of new ones.  Interest in the game is visibly on the wane, online Spore traffic has been pretty much falling since day one and people are already clamoring for "expansion packs".  It's generally not a good sign if you are looking for game expansions after owning the game for one week. By comparison I've owned Oblivion IV for over a year now and I only purchased one of the available expansions.  I haven't needed to buy any more because there is plenty of content there to keep I (and my family) entertained.  But I digress..

The interesting thing is (as you might expect) a number of EA's customers are not at all pleased that they are limited to 3 installs of their game before it won't install anymore, and some are unhappy with SecuRom being installed on their machines without their consent.  So along with feedback about various other flaws in the game, EA gets plenty of feedback about DRM and the headaches it is causing their customers.

Which they delete.

Yeah, you heard that right.  If you post feedback about the DRM in Spore, they simply delete your feedback.  They don't want customers discussing DRM or complaining about DRM.  And the reason is quite simply this:

DRM does not stop pirates. It never did.  The day Spore was released, there was already a DRM-free hacked version available for download from the various piracy sites.  ANYBODY who did not have an ethical problem with stealing the game, could simply download a fully functional pirate version.  Personally, I think game makers should be paid for their efforts, so this is not an option for me.

Electronic Arts isn't staffed by morons--they have tech savvy engineers working there who know full well that DRM will not stop pirates.  So why do they keep claiming they put it in there to prevent pirates from stealing their game?  Why is it really there?

My theory (and a lot of other people think so too) is they want to control (or basically kill) the resale market.  If you want to play Spore and figure you'll buy a used copy in a year or so, think again.  By putting the install limit on the game, EA prevents you from selling your property to a third party when you tire of it.  Why would anyone buy Spore if it had only 1 install left, or less?  So if someone wants Spore six months from now, they're going to have to buy it from EA--or they will get stiffed on reinstalls if one is ever needed.

That's fairly evil and a number of people (including myself) have posted threads to that effect on EA's feedback forum only to have them quietly disappear.

Which is also evil.

Well I spent this afternoon making some more updates to my business website. I incorporated a few more images and rearranged the order of the images on the thumb bar at the bottom of the page.

I also added arrow buttons to allow the user to manually rotate through the thumbs, and also set the thumb bar to auto-rotate if the image currently displayed by the slideshow doesn't appear on the thumb bar.

One invisible but important change was to set up timely preloading of the images such that there shouldn't be a big wait for individual images to load, but also no big wait up front. Basically the page now loads an image, and schedules the preload of the next image a few seconds later, long before the slideshow will automatically display it. In this way, the next image is loading while the user is viewing the current image, and should avoid delays.

If the user dorks with the thumb-bar the preloads and slideshow are cancelled and rescheduled to be further out. Theoretically this should prevent the user from being interrupted while working the toolbar with annoying delays or images loading.