Joe's Random Ramblings

I recently got this amusing little piece of email from a motel chain:

As a Wyndham Rewards member, we hope you know how much we value you. But what you might not have known is that your membership is about to expire on NaN/NaN/NaN.
To keep your Wyndham Rewards membership active, you have to have a redemption or earning once every 18 months–which gives you -108 days to save your membership.

They obviously went with the most junior database programmer they could find. Probably somebody who just read a "Teach yourself database programming in 24 hours" book

Update: They sent me another email, claiming that the previous email was sent in error:

So if you just got a message from us saying your account was about to expire, well, that's our fault—and we're extremely sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

They didn't address the "NaN" (Not a Number) database query error, though

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The lawyer of Arizona sheriff nutcase Joe Arpaio faces debarment.
About time.
I hope this nutcase sheriff also gets a prison sentence soon. He is a disgrace to law enforcement. As a "Birther", he has already shown that he is detached from reality. Such a delusional character has no place in law enforcement.

Update: the lawyer, Andres Thomas, now is disbarred.

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Ars Technica reports that at least 18 Senators have declared their opposition to PIPA, some changed from support to opposition.
The EFF reported over 1 million emails to Congress people going through their site. Google reported 4.5 million signatures on their petition against SOPA and PIPA.
I haven't found numbers on the number of petitions/emails filed through Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia blackout was of course very important since that's what got pretty much every news outlet to report on the blackout (although often in a somewhat slanted way, not surprising with the big media companies supporting SOPA and PIPA.)
Some companies, like Facebook and Microsoft, jumped onto the bandwagon very late, but it is important that they spoke out against SOPA. The inevitable backlash from the MPAA and other media companies about the "Internet pirates" is rendered ineffective by companies like Microsoft opposing SOPA and PIPA. Microsoft is not known for piracy, and indeed, Bill Gates has a reputation dating back to the very early days of MS of fighting against piracy (see the TV documentary "Nerds 2.0" by Bob Cringely.)

Update: Ars Technica now reports that Wikipedia had reached 162 million people with their blackout website, and 8 million looked up their Congressperson through the site. And Google got 7 million signatures on its petition (an update from the 4.5m reported earlier.)

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The main stream media has been pretty quiet on the opposition to the SOPA and PIPA censorship bills in Congress. Not all that surprising, since the media companies are all supporters of the bill, and have been lobbying hard for them.
My own domains had been registered with GoDaddy, which was a SOPA supporter. I have since moved my domains off GoDaddy, to the Namecheap registrar. GoDaddy later did a weaselly withdrawal of their SOPA support. Money talks

Anyway, my websites will go dark in protest tomorrow, Jan. 18, 2012. I will be redirecting to http://sopastrike.com/strike the whole day.
I have of course also sent mail to my Senators and Representatives. I urge everybody to do the same.

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie-1941-2011-computer-scientist-unix-co-creator-c-co-inventor.html
RIP. Your legacy lives on. Unix and C shaped the modern computer world.

Steve Jobs was standing on the shoulders of giants. One of those giants was Dennis Ritchie.

Update: A great eulogy by Herb Sutter.

And more from Wired, echoing my own sentiment above:

The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should.

And then some.