Among other places, I host some of my domains with Hostcentric. I’ve been with them for, oh, six or seven years, and have had almost no problems (and those I have get resolved quickly). I wrote in for a technical incident for the first time in years and in responding to it, the support agent wrote:

I also noticed that you haven’t set the security question for your account.

[...]

Once you have set the security question for your account, you need to answer the question, when the question is asked by the Support Agents. If the answer provided by you is matches with records on the file, you will be authenticated as the owner of the account.

Here we go again.

I consider these security questions to be an invasion of privacy, open me up to identity theft, and aren’t worthwhile for providing security, so I’ve generally chosen not to answer them. At the very least, it would be much better if I could choose my question and my answer rather than be limited to a set of questions that may lead to problems (or be unanswerable).

In particular, “mother’s maiden name” and “city you were born in” can be used outside Hostcentric for identity theft, while the “name of my high school” is a well-known piece of information for many who know me and therefore not really “secure”.

And of course, “pet’s name” is worthless if you don’t have a pet or have more than one. Beyond that, it’s only useful for security if no one ever hears you call out to your cat.

Likewise, “favorite food” is pretty damn worthless as the answer can change over time. Right now, I’m a big fan of Kettle brand Death Valley Chipotle chips.

I appreciate the desire to improve security, even though these questions are merely an illusion of security: they make everyone feel like “something’s being done”.

In case you’re thinking I’m nuts, I’ve lodged this complaint against all online services that ask for these answers, including Washington Mutual, Bank of America, INGDirect, and several others. Hostcentric is just one of many companies trying to be more secure without actually being more secure.

On the MovieTickets.com “Link to Us” page, where they set the terms for who can link to them (seriously), among the terms is the following:

Any individual that wishes to [show the MovieTicket.com logo and link to the site] represents and warrants that the website in which the MovieTickets.com creative resides does not and will not include any advertisements or other material regarding or containing (i) cigarettes, (ii) hard liquor, (iii) massage parlors, (iv) abortion clinics, (v) firearms and ammunition, (vi) head shops, (vii) illegal (under federal, state, local, and foreign laws) lotteries, (viii) gambling (other than legal lotteries under federal, state, local, and foreign laws), (ix) sexually explicit content, or (x) content that denigrates a particular group based on gender, race, creed, religion, sexual preference or handicap. In addition, sites that are anti-Hollywood or anti-movies in general, sites that are owned or operated by a movie studio, sites offering Internet movie ticketing, and sites with copyrighted materials distributed in violation of copyright are prohibited from posting MovieTickets.com creative. (Emphasis mine.)

Most of those limitations make sense: they want to associate themselves with family-friendly sites. But including abortion clinics takes the definition of “family-friendly” to an unhealthy extreme, don’t you think?

An email is on its way to the PR folks over at MovieTickets.com. I’d like to see their reasons for including abortion clinics.

Of course, this brings up the whole idea of trying to control how and who can link to your site (they allow you to link only to one specific page of their site). It’s against the very nature—and shows a fundamental misunderstanding—of the Internet. Anyone should be able to link to any page of a website without worry and trying to prevent that is fruitless.

And since MovieTickets.com doesn’t appear to do anything technically (like using http rewrites) to enforce these terms, and it’s mentioned only on one page that’s linked from the bottom of their site in small type, they certainly can’t be that serious.

Let’s see what they say.

Less than a year ago iTunes announced iTunes Plus, higher quality songs for $1.29 instead of the regular $0.99. I loved the idea of better sounding music, but I was ticked off that I couldn’t upgrade individual songs for the incremental cost ($0.30 per song). Instead I’d have to upgrade my entire library at once: not an inexpensive proposition.

Now iTunes is selling those iTunes Plus songs at the same price as regular songs. It’s great: I’d much rather buy DRM-free songs, and I’d certainly rather not pay a premium to do so. Now, there’s no reason not to buy a DRM-free song if it’s available, and one less reason to search Amazon’s MP3 store for a song (although Amazon does still sell many songs for $0.89 each, also DRM-free).

Alas, I still can’t upgrade individual songs to DRM-free versions. I don’t mind paying something for the benefit of owning a DRM-free copy, but the additional $0.30 isn’t an understandable price. Before, it was the incremental cost: a regular song cost $0.99, the DRM-free version cost $1.29, you pay the difference.

Now there is no difference, yet I still have to pay $0.30 per song, and I have to do it on all of my songs. I might really like Here I Am (Come and Take Me) by UB40, but not enough to pay a third of the price again.

iTunes, please let me upgrade individual songs to DRM-free!

My 2008-2009 assessed value notice for my property tax arrived recently. Each year for the last two years my home’s assessed value was increased 2% to keep up with inflation, even though my home’s actual value hasn’t increased the last couple of years (and in fact may have decreased a bit).

The new assessed value is about 9.5% less than my purchase price. This is a “temporarily reduced” value, about 13% less than what it “should” be. That should translate to a decent savings in my property tax bill this year.

This reduction was automatic. I didn’t have to do anything to get it; many California counties are reassessing tens of thousands of homes, for free.

So imagine my surprise when I got an official-looking brown envelope from “Property Tax Adjusters, Inc.” guaranteeing a reduction in my property tax, for a mere $125.

Besides the official-looking envelope, the letter itself has lots of jargon explaining why I got this letter and what they’ll do, along with my “Assessor Parcel Number”; this number is public information, but not everyone knows that, thus lending an air of authenticity.

The Santa Clara Office of the County Assessor, the folks who decide how much property taxes I pay, put out an “Assessor Consumer Alert” for a similar service by Aim Best Appraisals. The Assessor, Larry Stone, said in that alert:

It’s disgraceful, there’s simply no reason at all for a property owner to pay a fee to a private company for a service taxpayers receive from the Assessor’s Office without charge.

He went on to call ABA “bottom dwellers who are feeding upon the increased fears of homeowners.” Ouch.

The website for Property Tax Adjusters (I won’t link to them; search for their name; they use “prop” in their URL) is nothing more than a series of questions and answers, with no information on costs or the company. The address they give is in Oceanside, CA; Google Maps places them in a seemingly undeveloped-part of Southern California. Searching for their telephone number brings up a Better Business Bureau entry that shows the company started in August 2007 and joined the BBB in May 2008. You’ll also find a different address for them, in Carlsbad, CA, about a 15 minute drive from Oceanside.

Property Tax Adjusters is reportedly under investigation by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office:

Deputy District Attorney David Lim said services like those offered by Connection Plus Inc. of Foster City and San Diego County-based Property Tax Adjusters Inc. could be illegal. “At first blush, it looks like it may not be illegal, but we need to investigate if there’s a crime there. We don’t know what they’re doing once they meet with people.”

Lim was also quoted as saying:

You should definitely be wary of this, especially when you realize the county is doing it for free. They are not going to provide you with anything you already get, so why pay them?

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I love Netflix. I’ve been a subscriber for about two years (on the three-at-a-time, unlimited plan). I list the movies I currently have at home on this site, along with an ad for them (if you sign up from the ad I get a small commission). I even own a bit of Netflix (NFLX) stock (which has gone up about 37% since I purchased it a few months ago).

My biggest complaint with Netflix has been my inability to use their service to stream video to my computer, because they don’t support Macs. That may all be moot now, since they’ve announced a new device that handles the streaming, directly to my TV.

Called The Netflix Player by Roku, it’s a tiny rectangular box you connect to your high-speed internet connection, and to your TV via HDMI, composite or component cables. In some ways it’s a competitor to Apple TV, TiVo & Amazon’s Unbox partnership and Vudu.

It’s biggest advantage though is its price: a mere $100. If, like me, you’re already a fan of Netflix and joined at least the $8.99 a month plan, there is no other cost. (If you’re not yet a Netflix subscriber, join up and try it for two weeks for free.)

Of the 268 titles in my Netflix queue, only 22 are available for streaming, including Funny Girl, Supersize Me, MI-5 Volume 1, and Superfly. Among the complete collection (about 10,000 titles of the 100,000 in Netflix) are the likes of 30 Rock (NBC), Passenger 57, and a bunch of old TV shows like The Incredible Hulk, Gimme a Break and Charles in Charge.

Not exactly a vast and exciting selection, and you won’t find many recent releases here like you would on Apple TV or TiVo/Amazon Unbox, but, like The New York Times suggests, The Netflix Player is the “first shot of the revolution“. It’s a one-point-oh product which can only improve as content selection and internet speed improves.

Apple TV is a better product in many ways, from the higher quality (720p HD with Dolby Digital 5.1) to new movies released the same day as the DVD. If you mostly watch new movies, don’t have Netflix, and own an HDTV, Apple TV is a better choice.

I’m a huge TiVo fan (I own three, one now decommissioned but operational), and can use the Amazon Unbox service with it, and yet I’ve never bought or rented a download through their service. I think it’s because I don’t like the idea of paying $3.99 to rent a movie for 24 hours, or $9.99 to own a movie when I could get the physical DVD for the same price. (Which is odd, as I have no problems buying music through Amazon and iTunes.)

If you already pay for Netflix, though, and like (or would like to see) classic or little-known movies and TV shows, or, like me, don’t yet have an HDTV (horrors!), The Netflix Player, at just $100, might make a nifty addition to your home theatre setup. I expect it’ll soon have a place in my home.

Several sites have already done reviews. Take a look at CrunchGear’s review (pictures, including approximate video quality), CNET’s video review, or engadget’s first impressions.

I bring you proof that a geek can’t change his spots. I came across some old blog entries from 2000, 2001 and 2002, back when I was experimenting with the concept (and Movable Type). Even then I loved the idea of self-publishing and content management systems. I didn’t write too many entries, but I thought I thought I’d add them to Jasonian.

Of course, the topic of interest was the same as what it is now: technology and how people react to it. And they’re written with what I like to think of as my trademark snarkiness.

• The Mac’s strength is its usability
• Ultimate Re-cap: MacWorld Expo, San Francisco 2001
• Apple releases new machines
• One Airport deserves another
  
• Reasons to hate Microsoft (today)
  
• (Re-) Covering your Assests
  
• Media delays facts about Apple
  
• Love me, love my virus
  
• This Is Not Mac OS 9
  
• Pick a card, any card
  

What I find funny about some of these entries is how they feel like I could have written them yesterday. In Ultimate Re-cap, I wrote:

This has to be the sexiest laptop I’ve seen since the Sony Vaio. Unless you’re in the market for a new portable, don’t get anywhere near this baby. Sure, the long list of technical specs … are fantastic, but that’s not what had everyone who caressed this hotrod ooh-ing and ahh-ing.

The new MacBook Air? Nope, the original PowerBook G4 titanium, which measured up at a mere 1″ thick.

Or in One Airport Deserves Another, written just two years after Apple released their first Airport-enabled Macs:

I’ve believed for a long time that wireless internet connectivity is going to become ubiquitous, simply because the Internet has taken on such a central part of many people’s lives. We’re demanding the ability to find a decent Thai restaurant in a strange city, with ratings, prices and turn-by-turn directions at our carpal-tunnelled fingertips, and we don’t want to stroll through the yellow pages (or the wrong part of town) to do it.

Although it hasn’t become quite ubiquitous, there are fewer and fewer places where you can’t find a wireless hotspot.

There’s the obligatory Microsoft bashing (Reasons to hate Microsoft (today)), the expected Apple defending (Media delays facts about Apple) and a rant or two (This Is Not Mac OS 9). There’s even an early “Mac OS X sucks!” style entry (The Mac’s strength is its usability):

… using Mac OS X feels like we’ve stepped into the Way-Back Machine, to a time before many of the problems of previous Mac OS incarnations were not fixed…. The interface’s consistency has gone down the drain.

(This was written about the Mac OS X Public Beta; fortunately, the later versions of Mac OS X regularly improved on the interface consistency.)

Overall, these older entries show that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I hope you enjoy them.

I’ve long been frustrated by San Francisco Chronicle’s “computer guy” column by David Einstein. He regularly ignores Macs in his columns, either willfully, through ignorance, or because he believes that his audience doesn’t care about Macs.

In his most recent set of questions and answers, from May 5, 2008 included a question about setting limits on computer usage for middle schoolers. In his response, he said:

If your computer is running Windows Vista, the User Accounts and Family Safety feature in the Control Panel will let you create a user ID for your child and restrict the time of the day when he or she can sign on. If you don’t have Vista, don’t despair, because you still have options.

How disappointing that those “options” didn’t include anything other than Windows. The latest version of Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” has great parental controls, including the ability to limit total computer time (say, 3 hours a day), with separate limits for weekends, and prevent use during specified times (“bedtimes”).

You can also limit who your child emails and chats, allowing only certain email and chat addresses, and restrict which websites can be viewed. You can even limit which applications can be used.

Beyond what’s provided by Leopard itself, other applications include their own parental controls. For example, iTunes lets you restrict movies and TV shows by rating (G, PG, etc.) and to prevent purchase of “explicit”-tagged content. You can even prevent access to iTunes Store completely.

For parents, Leopard provides a significant control over how a child uses their computer. I don’t understand how Mr. Einstein could fail to acknowledge the Mac at all in his response, and it bugs me every time he does it.

If you don’t believe your life can change twenty-four hours from now, you’re deluding yourself. Twice in the last three weeks I was reminded in the most graphic way possible that you can be out of a job tomorrow.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been with your company, or how invaluable you think you are. If you violate corporate policy, or your role is no longer important, or you just piss off the wrong person, you might find yourself job hunting, perhaps for the first time in 20 years.

So, what are you going to do about it?

I have a few suggestions.

• Accept that your company has very little loyalty to you. You provide a service, and if you’re lucky, maybe even directly affect their bottom line, but if money’s tight, or they decide to go in a “different direction,” or maybe they get acquired by another, bigger entity, what little loyalty they did have will be replaced by cold, hard logic.

• Get rid of anything personal residing on your work computer. If you’re unemployed tomorrow, you probably won’t have time to delete it, and who knows who’ll go through that stuff. Have a computer at home. A Mac mini is cheap.

• Don’t keep your only copy of your baby’s first steps on your work computer. Really. If you understand the previous suggestion, this one follows logically. Your office machine should never be the only copy of important personal files. Grab an external drive, move your personal data onto it, and take it home.

• Don’t be stupid. If you love watching naked jello wrestling, or think music ought to be free, pursue your predilections in the privacy of your own home. Don’t download copyrighted or objectionable material at work. That’s just dumb.

• Keep notes on your successful projects. Key dates, accomplishments and other details are valuable reminders of the great job you did, should you find yourself putting together a new résumé. Keep in mind that some of that is company confidential, so making copies of your address book, email, project files, and other documents that belong to the company is probably a bad idea.

• Prepare financially. Losing your only income is, to understate it, a bad thing. So, save some of it. Take a few dollars every paycheck and stick it in a savings account, or, if you’re a risk taker, the stock market. If you don’t have a few months of ready cash already, start building that up, now. Figure out how much you need to pay your monthly expenses, and get one month in the bank, then try for two months. Eventually three to six months would be ideal. Cut out those daily lattes for a few weeks.

• Diversify your income. If your only source of income is your nine-to-five, brainstorm other ways you might generate some free cash flow. Buy growth or dividend producing stocks. Sell stuff on eBay or Craig’s List. Start a business online. Have some other way of bringing in money so losing your main gig isn’t a major setback.

• Think about the future. Do you want to work for this company forever? Do you even want to work forever? If you want to retire eventually (or sooner), envision how you’d spend your tomorrows, and start planning for that today. Want to travel when you retire? Buy a condo somewhere else. Or get a credit card that gives you miles toward free tickets. Or join a hotel rewards program that offers free nights. Or star writing about travel so you can get paid to do it when you “retire”.

• Realize you’re employable. You have this job, don’t you? You can always find another one.

I consider myself lucky. I learned these lessons over twenty years ago. Now, I’m not afraid to lose my job. I’m eminently employable, with a broad set of highly marketable skills and, putting aside salary, job satisfaction, and the vagaries of the job market, I could get a job almost anywhere. Not to mention all these business ideas rattling around in my brain.

I’m also lucky enough to have the financial wherewithal to withstand a sudden loss of income. I’ll still be able to pay my mortgage, put food on the table and even enjoy a brief vacation without worry. At least for a little while.

And most importantly, I know that I can count on my family and friends in a time of crisis. I know that, should the need arise, I could stay with The Girl for a few months. Or, as I joked to her recently, all it takes is a $500 JetBlue ticket back to the East Coast to stay with my parents.

I used to think I would never lose my job. I found out the hard way how wrong I was. I was reminded how true it remains. Now I’m prepared, without being paranoid.

Are you ready?