It's been a while since I posted here.
I've moved house, travelled around the world a couple of times (which I don't need to bore anyone with), was picked up by a tornado in Kansas (apparently it's a thing there, but, again I don't need to bore anyone with) and... finally... the album I've been co-producing with Bo Menart is out.
High prices for life saving medicine isn't cool. So how could it get worse? Try the blatant misuse of coupons (or "savings cards") to cover up and hide the extortionate pricing of medicine. You've probably heard about by now the EpiPen fiasco. It's an Epinephrine autoinjector sold by Mylan. Epinephrine is the only treatment for a severe allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis, which affects up to 1 in 50 Americans. If left untreated can be fatal.
Mylan raised the price from $57 in 2007 to over $600 in 2016. The SEC filings for Mylan show that CEO Heather Bresch's compensation package jumped from $2,453,456 in 2007 to $18,931,068 in 2015 (a 671% increase). All this to deliver a dose of Epinephrine worth about a dollar. Now they've been publicly shamed, they're offering a promotional "savings card" to appease the sickly masses. Except it's a bit worse and much more insidious than this.
Malvertising is back. It had mellowed off recently (if there is such a thing), but last weekend malicious advertising traffic spiked again. You can follow the stories at Ars Technica and Trend Micro Labs.
A couple of weeks ago my 2011 MacBook Pro died. Well, not quite died, but the video stopped working which amounts to the same thing. Both the screen and external monitors exhibited severe monochromatic lines and ghosting of said lines. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't even art. It was infuriating as it was outside of the AppleCare warranty, plus this had happened once before and had been repaired.
Some people are having a hard time understanding why women, especially young women, are passing over the female Democrat candidate for an elderly white haired guy. Gloria Steinem says "When you’re younger, you think: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’" while Madeleine Albright says "Just remember, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other."
Simply put, young women supporting Sanders would say they prefer him to Clinton because they prefer his approach to politics. - Michelle Hackman
There are three articles you need to read, by modern feminists, to understand why Steinem and Albright are dead wrong...
If you haven't heard this album yet, you should especially check it out. Dave Brons is one of the great undiscovered guitar talents out there.
I'm an idiot. No really. This web page has been down for last 3 weeks because SELinux apparently works. Visitors to this page were met with the following message after rebooting the server:
PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2003] Can't connect to MySQL server on 'my-database.amazonaws.com' (13) in lock_may_be_available() (line 167 of /var/www/html/includes/lock.inc).
Read on to find out how to fix it...
If you haven't read my rants about advertising and ad blockers, you should. Rarely does an ad convince me ever to buy something, but recently something managed to get around the ad blocks and filters to appear in front of me, and I screamed out "Take My Money!!!" Yeah. They got me. They got me really good.
I blame Dan Shapiro...
Ad blocking tools have become popular in the recent months, especially with Apple allowing ad blocking apps in IOS. Having been a dot com pioneer in advertising, I'm going to delve into the realities of ads and ad blocking. It's not pretty, and it will no doubt upset some people in the ad industry.
But first, let me tell you a little story...
It's been a while since I put anything up here. Things got really busy in 2014. We moved the servers around and things were offline for a while thanks to a security upgrade that got delayed by life. Oh yes, and we had another baby. That was a year ago. Babies are much more fun and much, much messier than servers and blogs. Now I've found a few hours to put this back online.
It shall be all downhill from here... :)