Bill Sempf

I just spent the evening playing board games with my four year old son.  For a lot of people this would be an exercise in boredom, but it shouldn't be.  Teaching games is something that is very similar to teaching the kind of thinking that makes software design work.  It’s important, logical thinking.

Board games with young children doesn’t have to be limited to chutes and ladders and Candyland – random games with zero strategy.  Kids need to LEARN strategy.  The only way they will learn is to be led, hand in hand, though the process of making game decisions.  For instance, tonight Adam and I played Living Labyrinth . He can’t quite read the cards, and he has a hard time making decisions about how to use the cards.  But how else will he learn?

We played open hand, and I walked him through every move.  I reminded him to play his card first then move, and point blank told him what moves to make and why.  It wasn’t competitive, but it was a blast, and Adam learned a ton.  I’m betting that next time we play he’ll remember the cards and be able to make some decisions about his card use.

After that, we played a much less sophisticated game, Guess Who? This game is a deduction game similar to the old logic puzzles with the grid that we all did in the puzzle magazines.  The kicker here – Adam beat me five out of five games.  I can’t explain it, unless it is just that he is a good guesser.  We play fair and square, no help, no hints, and he has to sound out the name of the mystery person for his final guess.  Beat my pants off.

Next time I am introducing him to Kids of Catan .

This remarkable game will not only be a great rule learning adventure, but the pieces are cool and we can make up our own games – another important skill.

Plus, I can have him play against Jeff Blankenburg next year at CodeMash.

My current client has blocked Twitter and Live Mesh at the firewall.  At what point are organizations going to realize that social networking is beneficial to project progress?  Now, I can no longer access my network of peers (well, I "can" but they are trying to prevent me), which has already provided me with many leads, links and ideas related to making this project better.  Now I can no longer access my repository of project files, where I am getting all of my templates and reference documentation.

What is the point?  Are they trying to prevent people from wasting time?  How about blocking YouTube?  How about uninstalling Solitare?  How about not providing access to the external internet at all?  There are a lot of clericals here, and many of them are temps, so why don't you just lock everything down?  If that is too draconion, how about two firewall profiles, one for developers and another for clericals?

This fear of the Internet is remarkable in this day and age.  Watching organizations (especially government organizations) try to bridge the gap of providing free access to information and keeping the temps from surfing porn is very frustrating for me.

This site is getting probably twenty spam comments a day.  I know that these are inexpensive workers that are paid by the post to get past my Captcha.  They say something unrelated and put their employer's URL in the Link field of the post to increase the link count for that URL, thus increasing the Google rank for that post.  It is one of the ways that the fake SEO companies 'guarentee' you a top ten ranking for your URL.

I have a message for these people.

All comments on this site are approved by me.  I don't approve spam posts.  You are wasting your time, and taking money out of your OWN POCKET bothering to spam here.  Please leave me alone.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I was an early adopter of Live ID.  I was a Passport user before you could use your own email address; my first passport was sempf@hotmail.com.  After it went to Live ID I set up an ID at bill@pointweb.net.  I mostly use the hotmail address for personal stuff like xbox, and the pointweb account for professional stuff, like my partnership account.

After the 2006 Author's Summit I learned about the early beta of Office Live, and joined.  I created a new ID - webmaster@pointweb.net - specifially for the project, but I included bill@pointweb.net in the Office Live account so I could integrate my email.

Long story short, Office Live isn't very good.  It is basically the Google Apps, but it costs $20 a month and breaks a lot.  So, I went to Google in the summer of last year.  I moved my email, and cancelled my Office Live account.  All was happy.

Two weeks ago, I figured out that Office Live has been billing me for a year for the service I cancelled.  I logged into billing.microsoft.com and cancelled the service.  Then I got ready to write an email ripping Office Live a new one.  I went back to billing.microsoft.com to get my history ... and couldn't.  My webmaster@pointweb.net Live ID account was deleted when I cancelled the service.  "Well, that's OK," I thought, "I set up that account just for that reason."

But, they deleted my bill@pointweb.net account too.

I couldn't believe it.  Looked EVERYWHERE for a phone number - not phone support for Live ID.  Put in email tickets.  After 32 responses, I gave up.  All they did was say "check your password ... account is disabled ... check with Office Live."  Office Live, after 40 responses, told me to leave them alone.  Not their problem.

So basically, Microsoft screwed me.  My Mesh account, my Asure account, my Connect account, Messenger, MSDN, my Partner account, my Live Space, everything is gone.  Can't get it back. 

Notice something.  All of those services are free.  Microsoft doesn't care.  How could they?  I'm not paying them!  They are within their rights to delete any of those accounts anytime they want.

It was my fault for trusting them with my information.

We all do this alot.  Why pay for software if you can get it for free, right?  Free is cheaper, right?  Well, no, not when the REAL owner of the software has an attitude like this.

So, I need to not depend on free services.  I am getting out of Google too, because if they cancelled things right now, I would be toast.  Going back to SmarterMail for my email, or something like it.  Something I control; somethign I paid for.  I moved my blog back to a server I can touch too (thought I am using free software, but at least it is my build).

Remember this when you recommend something free to a client.  They will get what they paid for.

EDIT: Here is some Google fodder: Windows Live ID Error 80048826 means "Your Live ID is gone because the Live ID Database is hopelessly corrupt due to poor architecture and worse implementation.  We wish we'd used OpenID too."

I have started and deleted this post three times because I am so fired up.  I ended up just making a comment on this guys blog, but I thought I would post it here since there is exactly 0% chance he will approve it.  The post is by an internet lawyer and points out how 'nasty' Defcon is and that it should be 'shut down' if it doesn't 'clean up it's act'.  I am tense.  Very, VERY tense.

OK, here is my comment:

Imagine you are in charge of infosec for a large bank, running Oracle. There are 3,000 developers - most of them contractors - working with various databases inside your firewall. It's you, with nothing, versus 3,000 people you don't know backed potentially by 22,000 Russian and Chinese criminals with the latest 0day exploits. What are you going to do?

Well, first, you are going to go to Defcon, where without telling them which bank you work for you will learn the latest on these exploits from hackers who would be glad to give the information away nearly for free (since Oracle rarely does anything about them). This way, you know what you are faced with from the people who aren't so open. We usually call those people the criminals. I am sure you have heard the term.

Second, you are going to use Metasploit to test said database. Why? Because it is a framework for penetration testing with all of those exploits already in place. You can make sure that your database can't be compromised by those nameless criminals (there's that word again), all due to the VERY hard work of just a few extremely smart ... wait for it ... hackers.

You, my "internet lawyer" friend, have completely failed to get the point. You mention "finding an alternative approach for sharing knowledge and information away from the public eye." All of this information is already out there for those who care to find it. Defcon makes it available to the overwhelmed many who are tasked with protecting what we have. And that's a bad thing exactly how?

Thoughts are welcome from the peanut gallery.  Remember to read his post first, and the comments.  I do give him credit for allowing a few comments through.  Gah, sorry, I am just astounded that there are people still like this in the industry.

EDIT:  Ok, I was wrong.  He actually did publish my comment and published his own rebuttal, and my respect for him increased somewhat.  Nonetheless, it's that old argument: if you make owning a gun criminal, only the criminals will own the guns.

So I posted a search on Bing today, so check some statistics , like I would with Google.  You know, you search for a unique term, and then search for it in conjunction with another unique term, and you look at the denla, and you learn something.

Well I learned something alright.  Lo and behold, Bing didn't like my search.  Instead of results I got a plain white page that said:

We are seeing an increased volume of traffic by some malware software. In order to protect our customers from damage from that malware, we are blocking your query. A few legitimate queries may get flagged, and for that we apologize. Please be assured that we are hard at work on this problem and hope to get it resolved even better as soon as possible.

Imagine my suprise.  I wonder if there will be a large collection of blue towncars and Bill Gates dressed like Wolverine in my driveway in the next ten minutes.  Seriously, if I vanish, check for pieces of my DNA in Steve Ballmer's bathroom.

This is a lesson to those of use looking to the Internet to be the be-all and end-all of storage devices.  Remember, you don't OWN crap.  Jason Scott said it best in his blog post Fuck The Cloud, so I won't repeat it here.  Be warned that if you post something that someone doesn't like, and they own the box, no law on earth is going to keep them from doing damn well what they want with it.

For now, my default search engine is Google, and I publish my information to servers I can touch.

Now you have to know that I am just not a fan of the Heisman race.  First, football is a team game, and picking "the best player in college football" is much more a reflection of the team than the player.  Every year, there is the best player, and then the one who wins.  Why?  Because you have to have a good team around you to win games, and if you don't win games you aren't on the ballot.
Second, I am really tired of people talking the award in the preseason.  It's like preseason polls - how the heck do you expect to know who will win before anyone plays games?  Like they say, the games aren't played on paper, they are played on grass.
Nonetheless, I can't believe that they sold the Heisman to Nissan.  When the Rose Bowl went, I thought "Well, there goes the farm.  Now everything is for sale."  I never ever ever thought that the Heisman was up to the highest bidder.  It's college football.  These guys are amateurs.  They are playing for fun.  Some of them get hurt and mess up their lives - all for fun.  Why, I ask, does everyone have to make money on them, except them?  Does that seem fair?
Anyway, rant over.  I am a fan of the free enterprise system.  But.  Come on.