kingsnake

nice to be recognized

Well it sure is nice to be recognized in such prestigious company

"But e-zines, regardless of the intended audience size, show success by at least one key metric: the amounts of time visitors spend on the sites. The duration of visits at many e-zines greatly exceeds that at conventional magazines. For instance, the e-zine Kingsnake.com, targeted at amphibian hobbyists, keeps each visitor on the site for an average of 51 minutes. By contrast, users visiting the magazine sites of Time.com and Reader's Digest Online stay an average of only 7.2 minutes."

taken from The E-zine Advantage - Lessons from Online for Traditional Publishers by Linda K. Pilgrim, Research Editor, Jupiter Research

http://www.ezinehub.com/articles/41.html

I am not a Democrat... yet

But at the rate the Republicans are going it is hard to justify voting for many of them at this point. My hat is off though to Sen. Daniel Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who is standing up to the major telecoms, even when some  of his Democratic compatriots are literally in the back pocket of companies like AT&T/SBC

Inouye is concerned that "that network operators with an ability and incentive to discriminate be prevented from doing so." I am too.

Here is what Tim Berniers-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web has to say about Net Neutrality...

"It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing."

"The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true."

 

"Let us protect the neutrality of the net."

Net Neutrality and You!

Verizon Communications is really pulling out all stops to quash the idea of Net Neutrality saying that the banking industry ( and I guess the rest of us)
"better not start moaning in the future about a lack of sophisticated data links they need"
because if net neutrality laws are passed the communication network may not invest in new networks.

What a load. What an empty threat. What a moronic thing to say.

This is the equivalent of a child threatening to take his marbles home if the rest of us don't play his way. I have got news for Verizon. You aren't the only child with a bag of marbles that wants to play. I seriously doubt that Verizon is stupid enough to actually follow through with such an asinine idea. "Hey if we don't get our way we will just stop growing and innovating". I am sure that would thrill their stockholders to no end, and it lends itself to such a great marketing campaign "Verizon - we're not upgrading just for you" or maybe "Verizon - 20th century network technology for the 21st century"

This is simply an attempt by Verizon, who has been watching their cash cows get slaughtered one after the other, to staunch the outbound flow of revenues to cut rate VOIP, Long Distance and Local phone providers, and replace them with essentially a "packet tax" on data traveling through their system.

Net Neutrality, the idea that the packets move around the net the same for anybody, regardless of 
application, content, or provider, is essential to the growth of new technologies and innovation, especially for small business, the real backbone of this country. The attempts by the  telecommunications industries and others to provide "tiered" service quality and pricing will stifle the development of small businesses on the internet.

I could never have started my business if AOL's message boards and community systems loaded 4-5 times faster simply because they could afford to pay the packet tax, and  my business couldn't. Using email as an example, it would be like AOL wanting to charge a certain class of users to send email to AOL account holders to "ensure" delivery (wait, they are already trying to do that!) Tiered service levels will only help the telecommunications industries and the large corporate entities already in the game run their smaller newer competitors out of business. There would have been no Google, if Yahoo loaded 4 times faster.

A packet tax is not good for anyone, except the ones collecting the tax. The internet one place that we all need a level playing field.

For more information about Net Neutrality see http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Man v. Nature

Ok God...

I get your point. Stop with the hail.
This time I won't replant the garden.

Not much left that I can tell.

More Taxes for Texans - and the rest of you too!

Governer Rick Perry here in Texas is about to sign into law a new tax plan that shifts the burden of paying school funding from property taxes to a corporate business tax. While on the surface it appears to be a "good" plan for property owners, in reality all it does is shift the tax burden to businesses, who will in turn pass this tax along to you, the consumer, all consumers, whether they are in Texas or not.

I mean that is our plan here at OnlineHobbyist, and I am sure that will be Dell's plan, and AMD's plan, and any other company that does business in the state that is impacted by these taxes. We are pretty lean here, we have no extra cash laying around (We're not an oil company you know), that money will have to come from somewhere.

So, lets recap, the governers new tax plan favors property owners, or the "landed gentry" by lowering theirs, and in reality passes the tax back on to the "serfs" or consumers in a roundabout way.
What was that scene from Monty Pythons Holy Grail?  "Help, help, I'm being repressed!"

What a great plan! And what a great reason to relocate your business to Texas! Come to Texas where your business can have higher costs, more administrative overhead, and be less competitive.

I certainly won't be sending any votes to Mr. Perry any time soon, nor to his compatriots that proposed  or approved this re-arranging of the deck chairs. When that coke at the local gas station goes up another nickel or dime, be sure to let Governer Rick know how much you enjoy saving on your property tax.

Snake owners make easy targets

The recently passed bill S 990 adding more restrictions to the ownership of large pythons in Florida did so with a bi-partisan unanimous vote despite the vociferous activities of many herpers and herp organizations to at least slow or modify the bill. It still has to get other approvals and be passed upstream to be signed by the governer, and with the year sliding into hurricane season the Florida legislature may soon be too busy to push it much further along the process this year.

This issue was decided the minute the press published the now infamous "exploding" python photo and no matter how much the herp industry did it's passage was pretty certain. Once the press got ahold of the photo,  every errant reptile report became front page news fodder. I would hazard more than a guess that the many many more cat and dog calls made by animal control in the same time period did not receive the same measure of media attention.

There was probably a race between politicians from both parties to propose the bill, its approval almost fated from the start,  since it directly effected such a small number of people and businesses (AKA voters), was not a republican v. democrat issue, and it gave the appearance that the government was taking "strong" action to address a situation in the media. Congratulations go out to Ralph Poppell, R-Titusville who won the race to be the first to jump on this ripe easy target served up by the media on a platter and propose legislation that does nothing to actually fix the problem. Of course the new laws aren't really enforceable (the current laws aren't really enforced), will have no real impact on the problem, and since they aren't providing a budget anyway it doesn't really matter. What matters is the APPEARANCE in the PRESS that they are doing something, and the APPEARANCE to Mr. Poppell's constituents that he is on the job, not that they have actually solved or fixed anything.

So congrats Ralph you get your 15 minutes at our hobby's expense and the expense of Florida's taxpayers that now have to pay to see their legislators waste time on creating laws that do nothing to solve the real problem.

Ralph how about addressing Florida's abandoned cat and dog problems? I will bet there were substantially more of those collected  last year than the 95 burmese pythons? Afraid to address that furry issue? Too many of your constituents cat or dog owners? You might actually have to listen to their opinions and input.

Or how about that recurring shark problem you have there. That gets lots of media attention from time to time, and is relatively non-partisan. Surely your media advisers can come up with something, maybe banning sharks in coastal waters and fining them if they come closer than 5 miles from shore?

But I am glad that Florida's legislature is once again so quick on the draw here, waiting once again until some dramatic press frenzy to take action. At least this time it didn't take a child being beaten to death in a state sponsored "boot" camp or children "lost" by its child  welfare services organizations appearing in the press to get the legislature to address the issue, all that died here was apparently an alligator and a python.

I am glad, however, to see that the industry and its users did pull out all stops to have some impact on the process and that grass roots activism is still alive and well in the herp community. Invasive animals, whether they be released or escaped pets, or hitchhikers, are a serious issue that require educated attention from all sides involved, but not the attention driven by a sensationalized press frenzy.

Herpers and the Jury Rig culture

20 years ago or so when I first started keeping herps with more than a child's interest, aside from the plastic "do-it yourself salmonella factories" with the plastic palm tree you could buy to keep your red-eared slider in, very little was available in the way of professional herpetology equipment and care items. There was also very little in the way of quality reading material on breeding and keeping herps, and of course the internet was still years away from it's public debut.

Old herpers are imbued with a do-it-yourself spirit because we didn't have a lot of the neat toys some of the younger folk have had the opportunities to work with. When I built my first snake racks no one made commercial rack systems, the closest thing you could get to a commercial reptile enclosure was a manufactured screen top for your aquarium, and if you were lucky you might be able to find a hot rock.
Everything else you basically had to come up with on your own, and weekly trips to hardware stores, craft stores, close-out stores, and radio shack were the wellsprings from which your herper toolkit expanded.
Sometimes you had to look far beyond a products traditional use to see its applications in herpetoculture, sometimes it was so obvious you had to try it just to prove the technology.

I remember designing and building a prototype digital cage controller unit to moderate temperature and humidity for my electronic class in 1989 using stuff scavenged from an old radio, a few parts from Radio Shack, and some equipment obtained from a medical supply house. My snake hunting kit was mostly stuff
kludged together from Academy Surplus, Home Depot, and Radio Shack. One of the hunting lights rigged to the side of my truck was a lawn light, gutted to use 12 volts, zip-tied to my fender. Herpers have always found themselves playing "McGyver" to overcome problems and answer questions.

This jury-rig culture is so ingrained in myself in particular, that it bled over into my internet interests. Certainly the Alterna Page and the first couple of years of kingsnake.com, many of the technologies I used on the site  were modifications of something that was designed for a some completely different use. The best example of this was the original classifieds, which was a stripped & dipped version of Matt's original BBS script. In fact, although we have re-written the software so many times, for both the classifieds and the forums, that none of Matt's original code still exists, its influence is still heavily felt in both systems.
It was looking beyond what Matt had originally intended his program to do that allowed us to modify it to our needs and uses. Matt's script turned out to be the wellspring from which many of our original ideas and applications sprang forth.

This still happens even today. Our new music site, set to launch on May 1st, is built on a popular BLOG software frame because we like the technologies it encompassed, the capabilities it afforded us in delivering content, and a format that suited our ideas. Does that mean that the new music site is a BLOG?

I don't know.

BLOG purists might say yes because it is built on a BLOG platform and has BLOG functionality, but to me a BLOG has less to do with the software and technology used and more with the intent. To me a traditional BLOG is a diary, or personal events log, for a person or a business, and what we are building is a non-traditional BLOG in more of a webzine type of format. On May 1st you will be able to look yourself and tell me what you think. Until then what do YOU think a BLOG is and what is the strangest off the shelf product that you found a non-traditional herp use for?

(for the more intrepid and adventurous, some of the search engines have found the music site already and if you can't wait til May 1st to see what we are doing, well we can't stop you...)

God smites my garden...

For those wondering why no posts since the 20th, I have spent that time un-doing some of god's handiwork.

On friday the clouds roiled and rumbled, and a great torrent of rain and hail burst from the skies, scything all living plants from my garden, relieving my house of numerous shingles, and eating the wireless relay tower and shed upon which my internet connection is based.

While my internet connectivity was restored on Saturday, alas my garden was not. Literally every plant had been reduced to a naked stem, save those few protected from the hail by fallen roofing shingles. Luckily I was able to replace the tomato and pepper plants with the assistance of my brother, and was able to re-seed some of the garden, there will be much more work to do before it gets back to where we were friday morning before the storm.

Snakes on a Podcast!

It certainly brought back a lot of memories of when I was doing this in 00/01 and the issues I had to deal with. Making sure call waiting was disabled, turning off the TVs and other noise making devices, one of the new things I had to deal with and completely forgot was the dogs. In the middle of the first session the dogs wanted to go outside and so I let them out in hopes that they would stay quiet. When I opened my door there was a BIIIIIGGGGG creak that occurred right in the middle of a comment from the guest and was impossible for me to edit out.

I did have a few issues trying to format it in an RSS podcast format, but thanks to our tech guru Clint Gilders we got that rapidly ironed out and it has even been approved and listed in Apples iTunes. If you have iTunes you can subscribe at http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=149241003&s=143441
If you would rather just listen to or download the .mp3 you can do that at http://kingsnake.com/radio

The first interview is with Jules Sylvester who wrangled the snakes for the upcoming movie "Snakes On A Plane" . It's a little scratchy but I am sure it will improve with experience. I am hoping to have a famous musician for the second interview. and use that to announce the launch of the new super secret kingsnake.com music web site that is being developed by our "skunk works" team. We hope to be able to invite you to the club on May 1 but til then...

More online fraud fighting tips...

Yesterday I had a conversation with a law enforcement agent(who shall remain nameless) regarding the issues he sees. His role is as the head of the fraud/cybercrime division of a large metropolitan law enforcement agency.

Law enforcement on the internet has not kept up with the growth of internet usership and the simple mass numbers of people worldwide using the net, and the numbers using it to commit fraud is far beyond the ability of enforcement to reach out. And even when they can, privacy laws, and the threats of lawsuits have made it a lot more problematic for enforcement to obtain the information they need to conduct investigations. After 10 years it is still very very much the wild west out here on the internet.

We both agreed that the biggest factor in stopping online fraud right now is to make online consumers more educated and wary and to use more basic common sense when purchasing online.

Some of the most important tips we came up with are:

• Background - do some background checking on the person or company that you are dealing with. Good businesses can always provide some references.
• Always use a credit card for online purchases - Don't send money, checks, money orders or use your ATM/Check card (even if it's b randed as a Visa or M/C). Its much easier to trace the money using a credit card, and as a consumer there are more protections attached.
• Be wary of  "Dead Drop Email" - freeware email web solutions on the net abound and are commonly used by fraud artists to mask their identity. Yahoo, Hotmail, and GMail are all popular among scam artists but there are others as well
• If your taken report it no matter how small - Law enforcement cannot take any action if they don't know about it. While it is true that they are probably not going to do much with a single complaint of someone scamming you for $20, if they scammed a couple hundred people, it adds up quickly. Make sure to report it on the IC3 web site (formerly the IFCC). The minute a report is generated there it is disseminated to the agencies that will do the investigations, and the faster they have the info the faster they can take action.

The IC3 has a great number of resources for consumers on how to protect themselves online
one of which is their "tips" page the other is their "schemes" page.