Diary of a Network Geek

Oh, I got my glasses yesterday!

Sometime back, I decided that I would get some new glasses from a discount eyeglass place on the Internet. Well, the other night, while I was out, a nose-piece fell off my hoidy-toidy, expensive glasses that have never fit right.  It was the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.  That very night I got home and immediately ordered a pair of glasses from Goggles4U.com, per reccomendations on GlassyEyes.com.  After picking a set of frames and filling out the form with my perscription, my total, including shipping, came to $25.99.  The only downside?  They’d take ten to fourteen business days to arrive.

Well, they did finally arrive Tuesday via the regular, U.S. Postal mail.  They were quite well packaged and came with a hard case and an extra set of nose-pieces!  Also, right out of the packaging they fit better than the one’s I’d paid over $150 for about eighteen months ago.  In short, I’m quite happy with them.  So happy, in fact, that I’ll be ordering at least one other pair, so I have a back-up pair and fashion options.  I think this time, I’ll go rimless.  Possibly, I get a third pair that are different still.  At these prices, it’s almost a shame not to do so.

Sorry, though, no pictures yet.  Not enough hair for pictures, yet.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"As human beings, we all want to be happy and free from misery. We have learned that the key to happiness is inner peace. The greatest obstacles to inner peace are disturbing emotions such as anger and attachment, fear and suspicion, while love and compassion, a sense of universal responsibility, are the sources of peace and happiness."
   --Dalai Lama

Wow, people sure are paranoid about nothing.

Look, I’m all in favor of high-level paranoia.  In fact, there have been times that a major portion of my job has been all about being paranoid enough.  And, God knows, in this age of identity theft and on-line fraud, being a little extra paranoid is probably a pretty good idea.  (For those of you with ex-spouses, or soon-to-be ex-spouses, that goes double.  Trust me!)  But, this big noise over on Slashdot about the latest version of WordPress sending “private, user data” back to servers at WordPress.org is just going a bit too far.

First of all, the only thing it sends to the server is the url of the blog, the version of WordPress and its plugins and the basic server settings of the web server running the blog.  I mean, c’mon, that’s mostly public information in the first place!  I can collect two thirds of that data from most servers in less time than it took me to write this post!
Secondly, Matt Mullenweg, the main developer of WordPress, and a Houston native, posted about this on the developer’s mailing list, including how to install plugins to disable the code.  (If you’re paranoid, the plugins are called Disable WordPress Core Update and Disable WordPress Plugin Updates.)
Thirdly, let’s not get ahead of ourselves on blaming a free, OpenSource project like this for not being great about disclosing absolutely everything they’re doing behind the scenes.  I mean, it’s not like they’re doing silent updates without notifying paying customers or anything.

In any case, I thought I should mention the issue, and the solutions, since I’ve been so vocal in support of WordPress in the past.
So, there you have it.