By Simon, 10 February, 2016

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...

By Simon, 21 January, 2016

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...

By Simon, 14 December, 2015

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...

By Simon, 13 December, 2015

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... :)

By Simon, 5 June, 2014

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.

By Simon, 11 April, 2014

The surreal world that is the United States Intelligence Community has recently released a statement over the Heartbleed vulnerability as a rebuttal to an article from Bloomberg. The government's statement is as follows:

Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before April 2014 are wrong. The Federal government was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL until it was made public in a private sector cybersecurity report.

There are a number of issues I'd like to point out from this (aka the bleedin' obvious)...

By Simon, 6 March, 2014

Tomorrow, March 7th 2014, is the scheduled IPO for Coupons.com, Inc. For those interested (or not), here's my 10 cents on why the SEC filing is a little on the conservative side (they always are). It says Coupons.com, Inc. has never been profitable since they began in 1998. While that's true, it isn't completely true. In another lifetime, Coupons.com was once profitable, under the brand name CouponNet, and I have every confidence that Coupons.com, Inc. will be profitable too.

20 years-ago, I registered a couple of domain names - Coupon.com and Coupons.com. In fact, I had to fight hard to register Coupons.com because, back in 1994, Network Solutions were only registering one domain name per applicant. After carefully explaining that coupons.com was the plural of coupon.com, and that Network Solutions would find themselves with an intellectual property dispute if they registered it to someone else, they reluctantly registered the domain name to me. In December of 1994, I put the first downloadable coupon on the web, which was for a British pub in the Los Angeles area (not exactly a surprise for those of you who know me).