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frost Amazon Does not Accept Colorado Associates - Subscribe
Recently, I wanted to try and sign up to be an Amazon Associate to promote a few books I have read etc. Deciding that this would be pretty trivial to setup, I ventured out to do become an Amazon Associate. Well the process was not trivial at all. When I was trying to signup, Amazon kept telling me that I had a bad state. No other error message. After using 3 different browsers and many different variations of for Colorado, thinking it wanted the state in a specific format, I opted to contact Amazon. Well here is Amazon's response:
Amazon Not Longer Allows Coloradans to be Associates
quote:

Thank you for contacting us about the Colorado legislation. The Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to "voluntarily" collect Colorado sales tax -- a course we won't take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally permissible system applied evenhandedly. The U.S. Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado's new law to members of the General Assembly (http://www.leg.state.co.us/Clics/CLICS2010A/csl.nsf/directory?openframeset) and to Governor Bill Ritter (http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite/GovRitter/GOVR/1177024890452), who signed the bill.

We appreciate your understanding.

Best regards,

Heather T
Amazon.com Associates Program


Well that sucks for me and Amazon I guess. I just wish instead of blindly blocking Colorado they would have at least put an error message about it. I wasted a couple hours doing this and was not very happy. I of course understand their position, they just need to be more verbose about the situation and not try and hide it and make people even more confused. If you live in Colorado, I would ask you to take a stand, and if you feel the above is wrong, contact the Colorado General Assembly and urge them to change it.

(sarcasm)But hey! At least Amazon still wants to sell to Coloradans. (end sarcasm) They just do not want Coloradans to become Associates to earn a little money on the side. In my opinion, if Amazon wants to do this right they need to man up and not even sell anything to Coloradans and explain why they are not doing it. I highly doubt that blocking people from being associates is going to make the Law Makers change their minds.
0 Comments
Mood: vain
KeyWords: associates, amazon, colorado, not, allowed, sell, laws, coloradans, money, earn, exception, accept, allow, disallowed, not allowed

frost Tupac Shakur Still Alive? PBS.org Hacked! May 30th, 2011 01:06 - Subscribe
Late Sunday night, PBS.org was hacked and a news story was posted saying that Tupac Shakur and Biggie were still alive and living in a small town in New Zealand. Tupac apparently sent his Diary to a family member and the New Zealand city, to be unnamed, was closed down for security reasons. A friend of mine on IRC captured the image of the original site before it was taken down, see the image below.

PBS.org Hacked, Tupac Shakur and Biggie alive in New Zealand, picture of article

Not long after the posting PBS.org removed the article.

For more information see Hacked PBS Reports Tupac Biggie Alive

Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!
0 Comments
Mood: bootylicious
KeyWords: tupac, original, shakur, new, article, alive, pbs, hacked, new zealand, biggie, rappers, famous, alive, well living, closed, down, image, security

frost Sony Vaio F11 Laptop Review - Ubuntu Linux May 26th, 2011 23:13 - Subscribe
Last month I was in need of a new laptop. After doing my looking at deals I came to a decision to purchase a Sony Vaio F11. It was on sale at NewEgg and had everything I was looking for in a laptop. Well the laptop was bought, thanks to David, and I have been using it solidly for about a month now. Over the month I have tried various Operating Systems on the Sony Vaio laptop, from Windows 7 to Ubuntu to Arch Linux. I have to say, my initial impressions were not great and my frustration level was very high. To avoid any real negative feedback, I still love my Vaio now that I finally have it working with Arch Linux, but it was rough getting to that point and here is how it panned out.

Sony Vaio F11 Series Not Ubuntu Friendly

Let's Use Ubuntu...or Not
I have always had success with using Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is generally a 15 minute install without any hassle, especially on a brand new computer where nothing needs to be backed up. Well the Sony Vaio F11 is not an easy system to get up and running with Ubuntu. Right after the Live Ubuntu CD has been inserted you immediately encounter a problem...the touchpad does not work! Well, having used Ubuntu before and preferring not to use a touchpad, this was easy to work around to get Ubuntu installed, just tab to "Install Ubuntu" and use the keyboard shortcuts to do the rest. Ok, the installation was going through. After the installation and Ubuntu loaded up guess what? The touchpad was still not working. Having a USB Mouse to plug into the computer, I connected my eth0 to get online and do some googling using Firefox. What I found was that for whatever reason Ubuntu does not recognize the Sony Touchpad (I found this eerily weird given Ubuntu's Easy setup reputation) and there is a hack to get it working thanks to the Ubuntu Forums.

Edit /etc/default/grub to include GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="i8042.nopnp"

sudo update-grub


Great, I now have a touchpad to use finally. Thinking it is wise to do an upgrade, I went ahead and ran: 

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade


The process goes through smoothly and I decide to reboot because Ubuntu tells me I need to Restart. I go ahead and reboot...wait a second, I was suppose to see Ubuntu show up...it appears the updates broke my system and now all I see is a black screen, which you can tell the system is on (given the green LED on the power button). Well this is the pits. After some more googling (from my wife's computer) it appears that the NVIDIA drivers that are in the Ubuntu repository do not go well with the Sony Vaio. The fix was again, easy, but annoying. I loaded up the Ubuntu Live CD, had my USB Mouse plugged in, went to "Try Ubuntu". Once there I loaded up a terminal (Alt + Ctrl + T) and blacklisted the NVIDIA driver. To do this I had to mount my drive and create a file, during the fdisk -l /dev/sda part, we need to find the sda number that is set for the root drive. This will generally be sda3 / sda4 / sda5, depending on how you set it up. If you did the automatic with a separate home partition it should be sda3. No matter, after you mount it, if it is not the right drive, use `umount /media/sdaX` and then try the next number. To know its the right drive, doing an `ls /media/sda` should come back with folders like `/etc` `/bin`... 

sudo su -

cd /media

mkdir sda

fdisk -l /dev/sda

mount -a /dev/sda3 /media/sda

cd /media/sda/etc/modprobe.d/

nano blacklist-nvidia.conf

#Paste this text in the blacklist file

# we black list the nouveau so we can install the proper nvidia drivers later

blacklist nvidia

blacklist nouveau

#Save with Ctrl+X


That should blacklist the driver. Before we reboot the computer, we will want to go and download the latest driver for the video card at NVIDIA, mine was a 450m Cuda, yours may be different depending on the model. We will want to save them to `/media/sda/opt`, if that is not a directory, go ahead and make it and then using Firefox, download the drivers and move them to that folder.

Once that has been done, go ahead and reboot. Once the Ubuntu Login screen comes up, we want to run a TTY, so hold Ctrl+Alt+F2, this should take you to a terminal go ahead and login, your normal account should suffice (we will just sudo later). Once in the terminal, let's go ahead and install the proper NVIDIA drivers.

sudo su -

cd /opt

chmod +x NVIDIA*

./NVIDIA*


Go ahead and follow the prompts, at the end it should say it was installed, at this point we need to enable the NVIDIA driver.

cd /etc/modprobe.d/

nano blacklist-nvidia.conf


Leave the nouvea driver blacklisted, but delete the nvidia line. Once this has been done and saved, type `reboot` and the computer should restart and you should have a working version of Ubuntu with the Sony Vaio F Series. Caveats, never upgrade NVIDIA from the Ubuntu Repository, it will ask you to, do not or else you have to go through this mess again. You cannot change the brightness etc without doing some modifications to the xorg.conf, if you would like this feature check out Vaio-F11 on Linux. Finally, under Linux, in order to get proper power management for a Vaio Laptop, you will need to compile a custom kernel (see the Vaio-F11 Linux site above for how to do that). Compiling a Kernel is not easy, but after you do it a few times it get's easier, given I need to re-compile mine I may write a blog about how to do it. But all in all, you now have a working Vaio F11 Series laptop on Ubuntu Linux! Congratulations (now aren't you glad you found this blog!).

Conclusion for Ubuntu on Sony Vaio F11 Series
I would not really recommend running Ubuntu on the Sony Vaio F11 series, until Ubuntu or Sony can address the major issues. If you do run it, at least you know the hacks / work around's to fix it. It is very unfortunate that the drivers are not compatible, and I do not blame Ubuntu in the slightest. Sony is notorious for having it's own set of drivers that use proprietary software which is not available on Linux except through hacks. It is workable, but just beware that it takes a lot of effort to get Ubuntu working on the Sony Vaio F11 Series. For me it took a good 5+ hours to find all this information and get everything "working". I formatted a few days later to see how the Sony Vaio F11 Series laptop ran on Windows 7..

Continuation
I will write a new blog in a few days about my experiences with the Sony Vaio F11 series laptop under Windows 7 and another on Arch Linux, given the extent of the information I have. So please check back, or better yet, subscribe to my RSS feed! I will update this blog with links once I post those items.
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Mood: inadequate
KeyWords: linux, vaio, f11, f series, f11 series, series, ubuntu, arch, windows, review, good, bad, hacks, work arounds, tutorial, instructions, code, vaio laptop, laptop, vaio linux, nvidia, nvidia drivers, nvidia vaio, 425m, touchpad

frost Sketchers Shoe and Store Review May 25th, 2011 19:14 - Subscribe
Recently I acquired a pair of Sketchers Shoes from the Sketchers store at Colorado Mills in Golden, CO. I am a huge fan of Sketchers for a few reasons, my first is I really like their designs they just suit me. The second reason and perhaps the main reason; they have "WIDE" shoes available. The WIDE shoes that Sketchers offer I find much more comfortable for my feet, in other words, they actually have room to breathe. Let's dive a bit further into the shoes themselves.

Sketchers CityWalk Midnight

Comfort Levels of Sketchers
The new pair of Sketchers I bought are mildly comfortable. They are not nearly as comfortable as my older pair, probably because I bought them to look a bit nicer for work. After the first week of wearing them and breaking in my new shoes, they became quite a bit more comfortable to wear. It just took that initial time of wearing them to get them just right. Now I love those shoes, and it is too bad I want to keep them nice looking for work, because I only wear them to work and nothing else (unless a fancy dinner comes up). All in all the new Sketchers I bought were not very comfortable at first, but after breaking them in they have become much more comfortable to wear daily.

Price vs Value
The Price of the Sketchers that I paid was reasonable. They had a deal going on Buy One get the Second Half Off. Of course my wife was with me when I bought my shoes and I gave in and let her pick out a pair for her. So for around $70 we walked out with 2 new pair of Sketcher shoes. Hers are more relaxed wear, but she loves how comfortable hers are. So given that I paid roughly $35 for my shoes, I would say that we came off with a pretty good deal. I am not one to spend a ton of money on shoes, and I was pretty happy with that price. For the price, I would say I got a great value on my new pair of shoes.

Sketchers WIDE Fit
I am not seen many brands that make a "WIDE" shoe for fat feet. But before I started buying Sketchers, it seemed no matter what shoe I bought my big toes would end up being sore, even after they were broken in. This was annoying to say the least, as having sore toes are not fun. Then one day, I was looking at shoes and saw the Sketchers with the "WIDE" tag. I tried them on and just fell in love. Since then I have kept my eye out for "WIDE" shoes in different brands, like Nike's. And I have yet to really find a "WIDE" shoe that fits me as well as Sketchers and maintains a great Price to Value ratio.

Sketchers at the Colorado Mills Mall
The Sketchers store at the Colorado Mills, seemed a bit high priced to me. The higher prices could have been because the store was in the Mall. Luckily they had the Buy one Get one Half Off deal going on, or I probably would not have bought my shoes. The last Sketchers I bought, before these ones, I found at DSW Shoe Warehouse on Clearance for $30 or so. I probably just got lucky to find them there at the time, but that seemed very reasonable to me for a pair of shoes, so I bought them. I was sad to say that I did check out DSW Shoe Warehouse and other places before going to the Sketchers Store at the Colorado Mills Mall, and was unable to find a pair of Sketchers that I liked for a reasonable price. For comparison, the Sketchers Store at the Colorado Mills Mall was about the same price as the Sketchers at DSW Shoe Warehouse, not on clearance. My take, if you cannot find a good deal at another place, you might as well just go to the Sketchers Store and buy from them directly. However, if you are lucky enough to stumble upon a Pair of Sketchers on Clearance that suit you, you are probably better off buying them from that store.

Overall Satisfaction
Overall I am satisfied with my Sketchers purchase, not as satisfied as I was with my last pair, but still satisfied. Their comfort level is decent and the WIDE Sketchers are just awesome, given I do not get sore toes anymore. The Colorado Mills Mall Sketchers Store is not the cheapest place you can find Sketchers, but they do have deals that go on throughout the year, which may make your next pair a decent deal. Their stock may not be the best, but they had what I needed. So if you are in the Golden area and find yourself needing a new pair of shoes, go ahead and stop by the Sketchers Store at the Mills, who knows, you may find your next good pair of shoes there!
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Mood: done
KeyWords: sketchers, s, its the, its the s, review, city, walk, comfortable, value, price, buck, co, mills store, mall store, wide, wide width, offer, breathe, comfy, good, buy, excellent, like

frost Marriott Hotel Get the Composite HDMI VGA Jack Pack to Work Apr 25th, 2011 23:55 - Subscribe
I stay at the Ft. Collins Colorado Marriott Hotel when I travel. Throughout my travels I have had a hit or miss with the TV and Marriott's "Jack Pack" which has Composite / VGA / HDMI inputs to go to the TV. This is to make hooking up your own electronics (such as a DVD Player) easier to do. Unfortunately, it seems the system is still buggy and likes to lock you out. This can be very annoying and disheartening if you were looking forward to watching your own media. Fortunately, I have found some great information on how to get past this annoyance of a hit or miss depending on your room. Well look no further, here is the much needed information to get your Computer / Laptop / Media Player / DVD Player / Wii / PS3 / XBox / XBox 360 to work in your Marriott Hotel room using their Jack Pack panel.

Jack Pack Panel Picture

The concept is rather simple, turn the TV on. Get out of the On Command menu (click Channel Up). You should be on Channel 2 or something similar. From here, Enter a Channel between 90-96. These are the channels set aside for the Jack Pack, you should be able to find the general input Channels (AV1 AV2 HDMI Composite DVI) etc. And it should pull up the right connection when you go to it! If that fails, check the side of the TV for the AV2 inputs etc and you should be able to directly connect to those (pending if the Marriott Hotel has them locked down, the Ft. Collins Marriott does not). And viola, you should be able to watch your own media!

Hope this helps you out, it sure helped me out and took me a long time to find this information. If you have questions or extra tips, please add a comment!
3 Comments
Mood: splendid
KeyWords: solved, help. resolve, media, dvd, ps3, xbox, playstation, hookup, solution, marriott, jack, jack pack, pack, rca, vga, composite, component, vga, svga, laptop, connect, dvi, hdmi, audio, channels, hack, tv, lg, series, hotel, break, not working, working,