Dissociated Press

Man, some days I really love the Internet. By now, you almost have to be aware of lolcats, a.k.a, cheezcats, a.k.a. macro cats. I don’t know why, exactly, but I find pictures of cute cats (and other animals) with silly captions, with terrible grammar and spelling, inordinately amusing. I could, and have, spend hours browsing lolcat collections like I Can Has Cheezburger?

What really strikes me as interesting is how pervasive lolcats have become in a short time. I noticed the occasional lolcat (and lolowl) on Fark.com, but all the sudden they’re literally everywhere. Now the lolcat language is being turned into a programming language!

I wonder if Larry Wall and crew could be persuaded to support lolcat in Perl 6? Seems pretty straightforward — here’s Hello World!

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE

If you’re a heavy terminal user, you might want to check out this article on KDE.News about Konsole for KDE 4. They’re pulling in some features from YaKuake and adding split view… for geeks who spend a lot of time in terminals under KDE, this is some sexy stuff.

I’m really looking forward to beta releases of KDE 4. The wait is making me crazy…

This really ought to be a national holiday… May 25th is Towel Day — so don’t forget to have your towel tomorrow to show your appreciation for the works of Douglas Adams.

Why a towel? To quote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Do you know where your towel is?

This is getting very annoying — I have a Ubuntu VPS running on OpenVZ, from VPSLink.com. I set up autopay when I set up the account so I wouldn’t have to think about billing — since I am billed monthly for student loans, rent, electric, cable, phone, student loans, credit cards, and several other goodies, I like to set as much of that as autopay as possible since I’m not so good with the remembering monthly pay dates.

Earlier this year, I got a payment due notice from VPSLink, saying I hadn’t paid my bill. Which, since I have autopay enabled and well more in the account than the $40 a month that I pay for the account, was odd. I emailed billing and got a super-prompt response from VPSLink saying — basically — “our bad, we upgraded our billing software and it dropped some customers from autopay this month.” Okay, problem solved, right?

Apparently not, because I got the same notice this month. This time I tried to email billing again, and received a weird failure notice from their server.

Okay… so I went ahead and paid the bill manually and opened a ticket through their Web-based ticket system.

That was Monday. It’s now Thursday, and I have received zero response. None. Nada.

Well, so the company can’t handle autopayments and they can’t even respond to a trouble ticket in 72 hours. This is very encouraging. Yes, I want to trust my site to a company that can neither handle simple recurring billing, nor do they respond to tickets about problems with billing in a timely fashion.

The sad thing is they’ve been great as far as uptime goes — so far I haven’t noticed any outages — but I don’t need to worry about having my account shut off if I miss one of their reminder emails because they can’t seem to get their act together for autopayments. And I’m certainly not willing to trust my site to a company that won’t even acknowledge trouble tickets.

So, anybody have recommendations for a reliable VPS hosting company that has OpenVZ and Ubuntu?