Literal Barrage

Ahhhh, Sony BMG, how we love to hate thee! Not only have you been caught installing unauthorized rootkits on your customers' PCs, but it's been found that you're illegally using LGPL'd software to do so.
Tsk tsk. What's the Japanese word for schadenfreude, anyways?
Anti-Competitive Update #1: Via Fark, we find out that Sony [...]

As many of you may have noticed, I was having loads of problems with my previous hosting company. My site's been down a few times over the past few days which finally pushed me over the edge. I've moved the site over to Dreamhost which, while more expensive on a monthly basis, provides [...]

After learning that I had been the victim of credit card "skimming" fraud, I found out that the dispute process is nowhere near as easy as card vendors (particularly American Express) make it seem in their advertisements. A portion of the procedure involves, apparently, getting an official dispute statement notarized in a timely fashion. [...]

After a 60 hours + downtime, Literal Barrage is back on line. I've received no explanation from VizaWeb, nor do I think that I am likely to. In light of recent events, please leave your recommendations for reliable hosting with ssh access and php4/5+mysql access.
Thanks.

Jeff over at the Shape of Days has discovered the "joys" of shopping provided by big name electronics stores (in this case, CompUSA). As regular readers will recall, I've had my own experiences with big box retailers, although not CompUSA specifically.
Jeff lays out his experience with painstakingly amusing [...]

Or: How I Have Virtually Assured Myself Of The Irrelevance Of The Information Contained Herein By Merit Of Waiting Until A Full Two Weeks After Bride And Groom Returned From Their Honeymoon To Post This Drivel
I am many things to many people, but those that know me best know that there is one thing that [...]

Shame on Lileks. He went to Best Buy (cbtn) to replace a fritzy DVD player, managed to get upsold on a shady "HDTV" player and then discovered that Best Buy (cbtn) is no longer content with simply taking his money. Now they want his demographic information too:

At the checkout counter the [...]