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... :)

A open letter to Jean Todt, president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA),

Dear Jean,

I have some experience in the world of sound, both as a musician and a record producer. I also have some experience attending Formula 1 races. Regarding the recent criticism of the new rules and lack of loudness of the F1 cars, I applaud the reduction in engine noise levels for this season, and I think Luca Di Montezemolo's analysis that it is the "music of the engine, not the noise" that needs to be addressed is spot on. But louder is not better.

Jonathan Mann sings "Don't blow up the Internet." Why? Because the FCC is about to axe-murder net neutrality. No really, Goodbye, Net Neutrality; Hello, Net Discrimination.