For whatever reason, I've started playing with Twitter. I'm still not sure why.

No - that's not entirely true. It started out with the thought that it might be an interesting way to keep folks informed about what my business is doing. So I set up an account under my company name. Then I figured I might as well set one up for personal stuff too. Why not, huh?

So if you're among the Twitter-inclined (and have any desire to do so), you can follow me at http://twitter.com/lorenlang. And if you want to follow developments at my company, go to http://twitter.com/jwsinteractive.

As some of you may know, I own and operate a small web solutions company (hosting, design, custom programming, etc.) and it is primarily powered by the Apache web server. Fair warning, what follows is techie crap and may make your eyes glaze over if you're not so inclined.

Apparently, there's a shell history thread making its way around the tech blogs and Dr. Bacchus put in his two cents. So in the spirit of "if you don't even really care about trying to beat them, you might as well join them," I submit mine from my web server:

[llang@jwsinteractive1 ~]# history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
274 ls
126 cd
104 vim
40 rm
32 cp
26 mv
20 mkdir
20 locate
19 ftp
19 exit

Being a remote server for a fledgling web business, I've spent a lot of time getting files into the right places and editing config files and code. Not to mention the time spent just looking for the right thing to edit.

Apple announced the other day that it would only accept credit cards at it's stores for iPhones. Plus, they are limiting purchases to two. And now, having apparently seen the loophole in this stunningly stupid and short-sighted policy, they refuse to accept their own gift cards for them as well.

Well - it works. And I'm not sure if I can be mad at the service provider or just at myself. I'm leaning toward them...

Living out in the suburbs of nowhere, it's pretty much impossible to get many of the same services that people in the "Big City" take for granted. Being semi-geeky, The most notable of these for me is broadband internet access.

I stumbled across this list of the oldest 100 .COM domains this morning and found it interesting in a "Hey-look-at-that-cute-little-nostalgia-over-there" sort of way. Two observations: (1) It's not a comprehensive list of the oldest domains. It's only for .COMs and (2) it only take into account those that are still currently registered (or at least were when it was compiled.) Still it's got a bit of geek interest.

It gets really frustrating trying to track down problems that don't really exist...

For the last couple of days, I've been playing with the HP SureStore DAT8e (e=external) drive that I was given so that I might actually be able to do backups of my all important data. Alas, I just found out that the drive is, in actuality, a SureStore DAT8eU (U=Unix).

So, no joy in Tapeville for me today since the machine that I really need it on at the moment is a Windows box. I guess I'll hang on to it for a while and play with it under Linux, but that means a whole new set of frustrations, as well as (probably) having to acquire another SCSI card and cable.

I just stumbled over an interesting feature in my browser of choice, Opera v7.20. It seems that, when viewing Opera's help system (written in HTML, of course), a new toolbar shows up automatically. It includes choices such as Contents, Glossary, First, Next, Last, Previous, Search and some other more specialized buttons.

But for whatever reason, it is also activated when viewing an article page on some blogs. I've only noticed it on blogs that use Movable Type, but it may happen on others as well. The only active buttons seem to be Home, Previous and Next but they work perfectly.