https://login.quickbooks.com/

This is interesting to me because WorkingPoint, an online invoicing solution has never been down.

We’ve been very careful to only add new functionality and features doing off peak hours. We have literally stayed up past midnight just to launch new features, so that none of the customers are affected.

It’s kind of amazing that quickbooks online is down because I bet a lot of people rely on them. How will people do their business invoicing? accounting? and what not?

Hopefully WorkingPoint can continue a good recorded of uptime. A lot of customers are on WorkingPoint at every hour of the day taking care of their business accounting.

Actually on further inspection, the entire quickbooks site is down!

Here is a test: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/quickbooks.com

1. It only works on WiFi – What are the chances the person you want to talk with will also be near a WiFi location?
2. Texting is easier – We’ve already abandon “talking” on the phone in favor of texting and twitter. Why would we go all the way back to “video calling”? Might as well visit the person physically…
3. What kind of serious conversation could you possibly have while staring at someone’s face?
4. Requires an iPhone 4 – Not all of us are rich. Sorry Apple.

The reality is, Apple is way late to the game. They are trying to teach an old dog new tricks, but it’s just not as impressive as it could be. What’s worse, since AT&T has announced that they will limit and throttle data to 2GB, many of the iPhone new video features will be completely useless.

However, I must say that some of the technology, like the Retina Display is pretty amazing. The new design is also very nice and clean. Here’s to hoping that Apple will match their technology with similar amazing data service.

Learn more about the iPhone FaceTime

What’s even more interesting, it does work when I deploy into production.

So I snooped around in my development.rb config and here is the offending line:

config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false

commenting out that line got actionmailer sending again. I noticed this problem showing up several times in rails forums, so I hope this helps someone.

First order of business, go here to unlike that page if you are a victim:

http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://allhqpics.com/the-man-with-the-biggest-dick-on-earth.html&layout=standard&show_faces=false&width=450&action=like&font=tahoma&colorscheme=light&height=80

Secondly, here is what you see when you visit that page:

They use this javascript:

to move the facebook “like” button where ever your mouse move, including right into the area that says “Click Here to See our Hero!” … So you click on it, and now you “like” that page, and it will show up on your profile.. (you can see it in my screenshot because I used firebug to unhid the like button)

As I am wathing this, every 30 minutes, about 1000 new people are tricked. If have been tricked, follow the link above and unlike it. Also hide it from your profile to stop spreading this trick.

Btw, I felled for this trick in the beginning too. I followed the link, but I did not click on the face.

1. Use the http://spiritjb.com/ to jailbreak your phone
2. Go into Cydia and install MyWi with Rock
3. Sign up for a free Rock account then turn on MyWi
4. You will now have tethering enabled, but here are the rules:

• Do not uninstall MyWi or Rock, it will disable your tethering
• Do not open the MyWi app again, or you will have to buy the app – This is really the trick here. I just hide MyWi and Rock on a different page so I never turn them on again. If you don’t turn it on again, it won’t know that you have expired your free trial. This way you can have tethering permanently.
• You should turn off the Wifi since it will drain your battery
• Tethering will ALWAYS be enabled. You can’t turn it off with this hack. But do not worry, I can last a whole day without charging even with tethering enabled all the time

1) I wrote this one because the default WordPress “Recent Post” widget does not show dates. It is important to have dates, so here it is:

https://gist.github.com/0c80a1918d6f66683f42

2) I was using a plugin called “get recent comments” that was working fine. But I thought it was a bit bloated for my needs, so I rewrote it as a simple wordpress widget. Here it is:

https://gist.github.com/ae68f29fd288e78e4272

If you want to use them. Just download them, put it inside your plugin folder and activate the plugin. Then you can go to the widgets menu and stick them in your sidebar.

The Google Chrome browser on my MacBook Pro literally took half a minute to startup. Here is how to make it bootup in less than 5 seconds.

1) Chrome >> Clear Browsing Data...
2) Check all boxes
3) Select "everything" from the drop-down
3) Click "Clear Browsing Data"

Chrome will freeze. It took me about 5 minutes to clear the cache. I am not sure why so much was cached, but it was.

One of the downside to clearing your cache is losing all your saved passwords. However, because Google Chrome stores passwords in the keychain, you can safely deselect clearing passwords and all your passwords will still be available.

All done. Enjoy!

So what does a computer geek do to prove his worth? Well… here are a couple of things I did with computers all in an attempt to impressive the girls:

1) In High School, I had a huge crush on one girl (ok, I lied, it was more than one), but she was way out of my league back then and I was too chicken shiet to talk to her. One day I passed her in the hallway to class. I asked her what’s up and she told me she was heading to her computer class to take a final, and it was going to suck. So what is a computer knight like myself suppose to do? I went into another computer room and crashed all the computers in the computer lab. Yep… I WinNuked all the computers in the lab making them BSOD. The lab teacher had no idea what happened so he had to let the class go. I waited for her in the hallway, but she didn’t even see me on the way out, and I never got the chance to regail her with the story of my knighthood. Looking back, I want to apologize to the computer lab teacher for ruining his test day. I am sorry Sir. I was in love.

2) Back in the day, it was all about AOL. If you were not on AOL, you were practically not online. But I was poor, and my parents had to borrow money from their friends just to buy me a computer, so we could not afford to pay for the AOL subscription. But I desperately wanted to be online because all the girls were in the “Bay Area AZN” chatrooms. First I tried using those brute force scripts, and that worked for a while, but it was too difficult to do that all the time. So I resorted to something evil – I keylogged all the computers at school. I knew it was evil, so I made it a rule to only skim those logs for passwords. It worked. I stole many AOL accounts and constantly hung out in those AZN chatrooms after school. Needless to say, the attemping to find romance aspect of it didn’t work. Girls were not impressed by boys in AZN chatrooms. Till this day, I feel really bad for keylogging all the computers.

3) Those two things were fun and all, but my biggest computer stunt to impress a girl: I got a computer job. Yup… to impress and provide for my soon to be wife, I gave up my life as a deadbeat gambler to become a web developer. It pays wells, great hours, and I never have to wear a tie to work. Best of all, I don’t have to do anything illegal… at least not ones that I can blog about today.

What about you? Have you done anything geeky to impress your lady friends?

Apparently the iPad’s purpose is to bridge the gap between traditional print media and online content. That is why magazine publishers are getting very excited and have signed on to become content producers for the iPad. So next time, instead of picking up a newspaper or magazine from the newstand, you will be reading it on your iPad.

The Amazon Kindle did a good job of replacing traditional books, but it can not replace a full color magazine. The Apple iPad is slated to do just that.

The other great benefit of the iPad is that it has a built in advertisement infrastructure, so it is a viable transition for print media. This is something that they could not do successfully with just online content.

Now it all makes sense. I really thought Steve Jobs was a nutcase for releasing the stripped down iPad, but just like when Apple released the iPod and changed the way we buy music, this will change the way people consume print media.

Step 1: Buy a cable modem, hook it up, and connect it directly to your computer. Open up your browser and try visiting comcast.net. You should get this screen:

Step 2: Since you are technician – select it, then you will get this

Step 3: Your cable modem will show up on that list. Notice the matching MAC address? Now click “Next”

Step 4: Click continue to begin.

Step 5: Activation Complete. Enjoy!

Note: You might get charged an “returned equipment fee” because every time you change your modem, they charge you. But since you didn’t use their equipment, they will reverse the fee if you call them.

Why am I posting this? Because I called Comcast this morning and they gave me a really hard time. I was trying to figure out why my internet was down, and they told me that I did not have internet. They said my account only has TV, and thats all I am being charged for.

This annoyed the shit out of me because I ordered Internet + TV, not just TV, and I had called them to fix this mix up before.

The guy on the phone kept insisting that I was wrong and that I needed to upgrade to the “Triple Play” for $120. That annoyed me even more. I do not want your freaking Triple Play. Who the hell still uses landlines, let alone buy landlines through their cable company. Stop trying to sell me some bullshit I don’t want. My internet is not working, this is an emergency you jackass!

I told him I just wanted to fix my internet connection, but he started insinuating that because I did not have internet service on my account, I am stealing internet service!

Now I am extremely annoyed.

I told him that I ordered TV + Internet and they had a technician come install it a couple months ago, so how the hell are they going to tell me I didn’t have internet?!?! I’ve been using it all this time!

I then asked to be transfered to cancel my account. At the Retention Department I told them my story and told them I wanted to cancel because it doesn’t seem like they care about their customers. Then the retention guy started questioning why I think they don’t care about me. But he did it in a way that made it feel like he wanted to prove me wrong. Damnit you idiot. I am a customer. I pay you for service. If I am not happy, don’t give me an attitude about it.

I only signed up for Comcast because I used to like their service, not anymore.

So I am sharing this with you because I think this is how you can hook yourself up with free comcast internet. I only discovered this because I couldn’t contact Comcast to setup my new cable modem, so I fooled around and found this menu. Enjoy! Tell me if it works for you.