Oops X 2

About a month ago, I noticed that my subscription to the Dell Datasafe service that had come with my computer was expiring. I wanted to hang on to an online backup system, but, frankly, I was a little unhappy with the Dell service, and I figured if I was going to pay more than the $20 or so that they were charging, I might as well go with someone I knew to be a pretty good company. Enter Carbonite

Part 2

Last night I was playing around with Huggle. Huggle is a program written to make it easier to revert vandalism in Wikipedia. I like a clean encyclopedia, and I've been doing some vandalism reversion sorta manually for a while, but Huggle takes this process and adds crack. After about 45 minutes or so on Huggle, I reverted something like 300 vandalisms.

Little did I know that I had stumbled into the hornets nest. I was reverting entries that had been chosen for vandalism by people on a certain website known for being, well, to use a term found liberally on that website, asshats (hint: this is not the "goon" website, but the other one). They decided to go after me. I'm told by another Wikipedia person that they posted all kinds of personal stuff about me -- as evidenced by the number of hits to my photo blog that the tracker said came from either Wikipedia, Facebook, or the website in question between 11:00pm and 4:00am (haha, they made money for me thanks to Google Adsense!!).

But these particular asshats are the kind that would probably like to retaliate, and with that in mind, I decided that I needed to dial up the level of vigilance on my identity protection. I signed myself and my wife up for a LifeLock account to supplement the other services I have in place.

If you know me, you probably know that I consider myself somewhat left of the political center. Not crazy-out-there-left, but certainly closer to Jon Stewart than Bill O'Reilly. So, imagine my surprise when I found out that there is a big boycott of the Glenn Beck show, and, damn it, I have given business to two of the last 13 advertisers he has.

I guess it makes sense, both of these businesses are easy sells to people who are scared, and noone scares people like Glenn Beck. The same people who are going to dump everything into gold because the evil socialist facist Nazi is going to bankrupt us and send us into a depression are suckers for data backup and identity protection.

I've sent them a couple of carefully worded e-mails to the effect that "you got my money for this period, but no more, and I really feel bad because you are good choices for these services, but I don't want to support (change to really evil looking, blood dripping font) him (back to normal font)."