SixTimesEight

TaxSlayer

I filed my taxes last night. For the past three years now I’ve used an online service called TaxSlayer, and this year is no exception. It takes about five minutes to enter all of your information and you pay $10 to have your tax return (if you get one) deposited directly into your bank account, usually within five business days.

Their website is very easy to use and it completely walks you through each step. Also, a very important feature for me is that I don’t have to load up Internet Explorer. TaxSlayer is designed to work in several browsers and my favorite, Firefox, is one of them. You’ll create an account at their website and after that it’s even easier the next year because they already know who you are. I used to pay H&R Block or Jackson Hewitt to do my taxes, but those places are a ripoff. I think I paid almost $70 the last time I went to one of those places. If you haven’t filed yet - which includes about 95% of Americans - check out TaxSlayer.

Posted in Web | No Comments »

Hijacked DNS?

Today I found that one of my domains was not displaying my website, but instead was showing visitors a list of Google AdWords sponsored links, and throwing malicious pop-under windows. I did a quick ping, nslookup and a whois query on it.

The ping replied from 66.45.237.187. Not my domain’s normal address.

The nslookup showed that address and three more:
- 64.20.43.107
- 66.45.232.66
- 66.45.232.75

None of these belong to my hosting provider. They all belong to InterServer, which seems to be a legitimate server leasing company. Pointing your browser at them, you see a sponsor site about mortgages.

So I call my hosting provider (MidPhase) to see if they were having any trouble. Nothing was wrong on their end so I started troubleshooting on my end. I brought up a remote desktop connection to my office workstation and the domain resolved fine over there, so it was clearly limited to my house.

I run a Win2K3 domain controller here in the house which also acts as our DNS server. I restarted the DNS service and cleared the DNS cache. After a few minutes, everything seems to be working normally again.

I’m a little baffled here. I ran a search for those IP addresses and I only found links to whois services, so I’m hoping that this entry will work it’s way into the search results in case anyone else ever encounters this problem. If anyone else has any info about this, please let me know.

Posted in Computing, Tech, Web | 1 Comment »

Mayhem Nation is back!

Several years ago I started hanging out with a few troublemakers in an online multiplayer game called America’s Army. We really got to know each other from the time we spent on a game cheats forum. I can’t for the life of me remember which one it was though.

Eventually someone decided that we should have our own website. The idea was to create our own “Project Mayhem” like Edward Norton in the movie Fight Club. projectmayhem.com was taken so mayhemnation.com was settled upon, and ‘Bucket’ as he went by, took charge and registered the domain effectively making him the leader of our group of miscreants. A day or so later his crappy webhost’s DNS finally propagated to my neck of the woods and mayhemnation.com was born.

Here and there we picked up new members. Some were converts from the game cheat forum and others were people we met in-game. Some were friends we had in real life. The biggest that Mayhem Nation ever got was probably about 12 members, but I loved it. It was our place and we could do whatever we wanted with it.

I visited the site at least daily, but found myself clicking my bookmarked link numerous times most days in hopes of a new bit of… anything really. It was good fun. None of us played America’s Army anymore. Either because we were tired of it, or because we were flat out banned for cheating. That didn’t matter though, we had mayhemnation.com.

The project underwent several evolutions and we eventually found ourselves using a hacked version, then finally a paid version of vBulletin. Several of the site members chipped in and Bucket bought a lifetime license for vBulletin. I would visit the site from time to time and find that it was down, or that the forum was empty because Bucket trashed the database somehow. I honestly can’t remember how many times we lost all of our data and started over with a blank forum. It was good fun nevertheless.

Eventually Bucket’s webhost went tits up and we found ourselves without a place to live… er, make fun of shit and post funny pictures. Supposedly the webhost had the rights to the domain name and they weren’t budging on it. We all sort of lost contact with each other, and mayhemnation.com faded into obscurity.

Until yesterday! I was doing one of those odd things that I do regularly. I was going through the list of domain names that I would like to purchase, seeing if any of them had expired when I noticed that mayhemnation.com was available. I ran and snatched up my credit card, loaded up GoDaddy and bought it right away.

mayhemnation.com is back!

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Here’s to good credit

These days, nearly every company that bills me for something offers the option of “paperless billing”, a feature I am quite fond of. No more monthly hate mail from those that you owe money to. Instead, it’s monthly hate emails. I am free to ignore the emails and only check up on things when I need to. Today I found out why this can be a bad thing.

I was poking around in the Citi Card website, checking up on the two accounts I have with them, and I clicked on my statement. This is unusual because it’s something I rarely do. It’s a good thing I did though, because right away I noticed that I was charged a $39 dollar late fee on one of my accounts. Apparently one of my payments was a bit late last month. What’s worse than that? It was only about ten hours late. I was immediately thrown into a state of depression, given that I’ve worked VERY hard for the past several years to get my credit to the point it is now; not the best, but still quite respectable.

Panicked, I grabbed my wallet and dialed the number on the back of the card. It’s a ‘Simplicity’ card from Citi, and they are always touting the “Press 0 to speak to a real person” feature. So that’s what I did and in no time at all I was speaking with Mark. Mark assured me that you have to be at least 60 days late before Citi will report you as delinquent. At this point, Mark could have called me dirty names and hung up on me and I would have been just fine with that. At ten hours, I was well within the grace period and my credit score was safe for now.

However, Mark was also kind enough to have the late fee credited to my account since I am such a good little consumer and have payed my bills on time since day one with both of my Citi accounts. I honeslty didn’t care about the late fee though. I would have gladly payed it five times over if it meant keeping that negative mark off of my credit report.

So from now on I will be checking those online statements a bit more frequently.

Posted in Life | No Comments »

Nikon R1C1 Wireless Close-Up Speedlight System

With all of the overtime I’ve logged lately, I decided to do the right thing and spoil myself like any other red-blooded American would do. I ordered the Nikon R1C1 Wireless Close-Up Speedlight System two weeks ago. I immediately ran out and bought a handful of the necessary (and NOT included) CR123A Lithium batteries, unwrapped each of the twenty some odd included pieces of the kit, rigged it all up on my 60mm f/2.8D Micro-Nikkor lens and the D200 and started shooting.

I don’t have any photos to share yet because I haven’t had time to pick out, adjust, sharpen, crop and upload any of them. I’ve been too busy working and taking more pictures. I can assure you though, there are a lot of bugs running around out there, still seeing spots from all of the flashes. There is one particular spider in my backyard who I am sure is nursing second degree burns from all of the close range flash photography.

Insects haven’t been the sole subject of my photography since getting the R1C1 kit though. I’ve taken quite a few shots of common household items too. Mechanical pencils, pennies, fingernails, water faucets and flowing water to name a few of the more interesting ones.

I’ll get some of them on Flickr as soon as I have a bit of free time.

Posted in Photography, Toys | No Comments »

Picture post: spider

Since I got my 50mm macro lens I have been itching to get some good photos of some really small things. I’ve tinkered around with it in the back yard, but I’ve yet to capture anything really interesting out there. This week I decided that it was time for me to start planning more outings with my camera, in search of tiny critters to photograph. So today I drove down to Okaloosa Island and roamed around in the woods for a couple of hours. It was extremely hot and humid, I was sweating and trying to avoid the yellow flies. There were all manner of prickly shrubs poking my feet and legs. All in all, it was wonderful.

Most wonderful of all though, is this lovely picture of a spider, amongst the young buds of a wildflower. It makes all the time and money spent on gear totally worthwhile for me.

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My new camera gear has arrived

The UPS guy knocked on the door last night to hand over my new Nikon DR-6 Rectangular Slip-on Viewfinder, and today the Post Office delivered the Nikon MC-36 Multi-Function Remote. The MC-36 wasn’t available from any retailer that I could find, so I ended up buying it on eBay. As hard as they are to come by, I was surprised when I saw one on eBay for the MSRP of $134.95. I bought it immediately.

I played around with the DR-6 a bit last night and I’ve been fiddling with the MC-36 for the past 30 minutes. I expect to find myself reading as much about HDR photography as I can in the days to come, and then getting out for some test shots.

Posted in Photography, Toys | No Comments »

Genesis

I have just read about a new game, being written by an independent programmer by the name of Gavan Woolery.

“Hello, my name is Gavan Woolery, and I am about to show you something impossible,” his website states (currently being served in a plain vanilla style to save bandwidth with the hordes of new readers).

This game promises to be a one-of-a-kind, truly dynamic, player created, interactive virtual world. You’ll be able to plant a seed and watch it grow into a tree over time, then harvest it for lumber. Plant crops for food. Build your own house or even a castle from the ground up.

He claims that the terrain is volumetric, unlike the SimCity style where you are limited to raising or lowering the ground. In this game you’d be able to hollow out the inside of a hill to make your home, or create a cave for a hide out.

Start a family and reproduce. Or just hit up the brothels if family isn’t your thing. Your children will have a mix of traits from both parents, opening up the possibility of selective breeding to create a better avatar within the virtual realm.

Your avatars will also apparently be susceptible to death, and cannot, except in rare cases, be resurrected. I haven’t read anything about whether or not age will play a factor. Your actual presence within the game would be that of a spirit which can inhabit an available body. So if your avatar croaks, you can just move on to the next host body.

Also, Gavan hopes to release this game for free if he can find an alternate way to pay the bills.

Screenshots and a google video for your viewing pleasure. The rendering engine he has created appears to be capable of some absolutely breathtaking effects.

Posted in Games | 3 Comments »

Nikon MC-36 Multi-Function Remote

Hot on the tails of my previous post about the Nikon DR-6 Rectangular Slip-on Viewfinder, it’s another post for the Photography and Toys categories; two of my favorites.

After careful consideration, I’ve decided to also add the Nikon MC-36 Multi-Function Remote to my collection of gear.

I noticed that a lot of my recent macro pictures have been slightly blurred. There are several reasons for this. One is that in order to get any respectable amount of a given shot to fall within the depth of field when using my Nikon 60mm f/2.8D, I need to kick up the aperture a few notches, which in turn increases the amount of time that the shutter must remain open. That problem will be properly eliminated after I splurge on the Nikon R1C1 Wireless Close-Up Speedlight System. For now I’ll just have to suffer with finding shots that have enough ambient light available.

Another reason for blurred pictures is the act of pressing the shutter release button on the camera. It is nearly impossible for someone to hold a camera still with their bare hands. Throw in the button pushing factor and you can pretty much forget it. Even if you’re working with a tripod, when you push that button, you move the camera. End of story. With the MC-36, or any other shutter release cable for that matter, the button is no longer on the camera. Problem solved.

Aside from remote shutter capabilities, the MC-36 is able to activate “bulb” mode for extremely long exposures (over 30 seconds), can be programmed to operate as an intervalometer, and can adjust basically every exposure setting remotely. Hopefully it will be here before the weekend so I can put it through it’s paces sooner rather than later.

Posted in Photography, Toys | No Comments »

Nikon DR-6 Right Angle Viewfinder

Since I got my new Nikon 60mm f/2.8D I’ve frequently found myself hunched over on my knees and twisted to the side, or laying down with my face in the dirt, trying to get a good angle on my subjects - mostly tiny insects. Ten, or even five years ago I wouldn’t have been all that bothered. But as much as I hate to admit it, I’m getting older and I’m not in quite the shape I was when I rode a bicycle everywhere. Repeatedly getting into positions like that tends to give me acid reflux and that is not pleasant.

When I had the Canon Powershot G5 it wasn’t an issue thanks to the nifty swiveling LCD.

With an SLR though, even the digital kind, you have to actually use the viewfinder to preview your shot. I know, I know… old school. In fact, when I first got my Nikon D200, I thought it was broken because there was no “image preview” before taking a picture. Before I even took the first shot with it I read all through the manual and ended up searching around online for anyone else that might be having this same “problem” with their brand new D200. Trust me though, even the most seasoned point-and-shoot digital user will adapt to using a viewfinder rather than their LCD almost immediately. I think that most of them will even prefer it. I know I do. Besides, given the amount of processing power that goes into taking each photograph with a digital SLR, not to mention the fairly large LCD, using it to frame each shot would eat your battery after about 30 or 40 pictures. The camera manufacturers, noting this, haven’t even left you with the option of doing it that way. At least none of the DSLR’s that I’ve read about have the option available.

Anyway, I had remembered seeing some look-down style view finders listed amongst the available accessories for my camera while I was shopping for it earlier this year. So, a few days ago I set about looking them up. What I found was the Nikon DR-6 Rectangular Slip-on Viewfinder.

This neat little gadget clips into place over the viewfinder on your camera and allows you to take those pictures where your camera is on or very near to the ground, without you being on the ground. It also sports 2x magnification, although most people that reviewed it say that the vignetting at 2x on the D200 makes it nearly impossible to use. No worries for me though. I don’t need it to magnify anything. I just hope it helps save my neck and lets me get those low to the ground shots that I’ve been missing out on.

If it helps me get the shots I’m looking for, it will be well worth the $185(US) retail price. I look forward to UPS having it here by Thursday.

Here’s to hoping that the state of affairs at UPS are not as bad as this guy makes it out to be at FedEx.

Posted in Photography, Toys | No Comments »