Anthony Fedorov Fan Mail

Now that 12% of my traffic comes from various searches involving the name Anthony Fedorov I thought I’d post a followup to my other Anthony Fedorov posts. The reaction I’ve gotten has been an endless source of amusement for me and I want to thank everyone for responding. The following are a collection of the various comments and email I have received regarding the aforementioned posts.

Yea for real if someone likes anthony thats there biz not yours so u need to lay off and get over it if u dont like him than whatever get over other people do just cause u want someone off doesnt mean other people do the world dont revolve around u!!! so get a life and face the facts nobody cares what you want so give it up

It was after this comment that I turned on “AOL Kiddie Filtering” in my blog. No longer are you allowed to post “ppl”, “cuz” and the like on my blog. One of the overwhelmingly obvious traits of the feed back was the complete lack of understanding of the English language; especially punctuation, spelling and the use of upper case.

YOU’RE A PIECE OF ****! Everyone who keeps insulting the “hole in Anthony’s neck” or the fact that he’s Russian (Ukrainian actually) should go f*** themselves! It’s not his fault that he had to go through that operation! And there’s NOTHING wrong with having a Ukrainian American Idol! YOU F****’N RACISTS! ANTHONY DID NOTHING TO YOU SO SHUT THE F*** UP! You have NO right to call him an IDIOT or WANNABE for trying to fufill his dreams! YOU a**holes don’t have the guts to do what he’s doing so get up of ur F***’n ASSES AND DO WHAT HE’S DOING BEFORE YOU OPEN YOUR UNGRATEFUL MOUTHS! JACKASSES!

Everyone who’s telling these people off, you rock. Anthony was excellent and if anyone has a problem with him, KEEP IT TO YOURSELF!

I about fell out of my chair when I read this one. I really couldn’t stop laughing. I’m not sure who Via is, which is the person who sent me this, but thanks for the great laugh.

ANTHONY IS THE BEST SINGER IN THIS COMPETION…WAT R U TALKEN BOUT…I KNOW ANTHONY CAUSE MY FAMILY KNOWS HIS FAMILY..AND JUST BECAUSE HE IS RUSSIAN AND HAS A HOLE IN HIS THROAT DOESNT MEEN HES BAD..OK.I M STILL GONNA VOTE 4 HIM A MILLION TIMES LIKE I ALWAYS.I LOVE ANTHONY AND EVEN THO HE GOT OUT..HE IS GOING TO SELL THE MOST RECORDS. IM HIS #1 FAN…AND YEH WELL SEE HOW FAMOUS HES GOING TO BE…DONT WORRY..AND Y DO U EVEN WRITE ABOUT ANTHONY..HE DID NO SHIT TO U WHAT SO EVER…SO STOP BASHING ON HIM!..DONT SAY ANTHONY IS BAD BECAUSE HE ISNT AND U KNOW THAT!

Now, one of the most troubling things the comments kept bashing me about was the whole “Who cares if he’s Russion?” argument, which I didn’t understand since I hadn’t ever brought that up before. The only thing I said was that the hole in his kneck freaked me out and that I thought he was an idiot. Oh, I also said that I thought he wasn’t a great singer. Good, but nowhere near great.

you (sic) people are so mean to anthony!!! (sic) you (sic) should not be picking on him just (sic) thing in his throat. oh (sic), and by the way its not a hole their is still skin there!!!!! (sic) so stop picking on him! lets (sic) see you get up there and sing in front of millions of people. how (sic) could you be so heartless and pick on someone you dont (sic) even know.!* (sic) you (sic) all are a bunch *idiots*! so (sic) stop being such immature children and you are acting like five year olds, and you might want to go back to 2nd grade and re-take (sic) english! i (sic) mean come on im (sic) in 9th grade and i have better grammer (sic) than you!!!!!! so (sic) shutup (sic) and deal with his hottness (sic)!

Oh man, I laughed and laughed and laughed at this one. What really made me laugh was the following sentence. It just drips with irony.

so stop being such immature children and you are acting like five year olds, and you might want to go back to 2nd grade and re-take english! i mean come on im in 9th grade and i have better grammer than you!!!!!!

  1. All of your sentences need to start with an upper case letter (ie. Stop being such immature children …)
  2. The first sentence is a run-on sentence.
  3. It should be “second grade” and “ninth grade”, not “2nd grade” and “9th grade”, though this is up for debate, I suppose..
  4. It’s “retake” and not “re-take”.
  5. Possibly the best part of the sentence is her spelling of “grammer”. It’s “grammar”. Rob is going to love that one.

What is, without a doubt, the best part of all of these comments is that they couldn’t recognize that the only reason I post about American Idol on my blog is because I know the absolute worst on the Internet will drop by and make me laugh with such stupid comments. I could care less who wins American Idol. The funny part is watching 35,000,000 idiots call in over and over for people on the basis of who is “hot” or “nice”, not who can actually sing, and then blogging about the lunacy of it all only to have said people then invade my blog to defend their favorites.

I welcome all to browse around the posts above and read over the comments. There are some true gems in there. I’ve only included a few of the emails I’ve gotten, but they are the best of the best for sure. Hope you laugh as much as I have.

America West Redeems Itself

After a rather annoying flight delay caused by America West in Las Vegas I wrote in to their customer support department outlining my issues. My main issue was that I was delayed about nine hours and the America West representative didn’t even offer to buy me dinner. The delay was only part of my problems, which included being thoroughly searched after having to exit the secure area.

I honestly didn’t think I would ever hear back from them. A few days later I got an email saying that a customer service representative was looking into my complaint and would followup with me shortly. Much to my surprise Lauren told me that I had received a letter from America West.

Enclosed with a letter saying how sorry they were that their customer representatives had failed to provide adequate care was a voucher for $100 off my next America West flight. While this only amounts to about $10 per hour for my delay, I consider it fair retribution for my troubles. Just wanted to let everyone know that, while the delay sucked really bad, America West made amends and did so quickly I might add (voucher and letter of apology in less than two weeks).

War on Terrorism at Work

This is a lawsuit that everyone in the United States should be paying attentiong to. The ACLU, PETA, Greenpeace, American-Arab Anti-discrimination Committee and United for Peace and Justice are suing the FBI over an ignored FOI regarding problems they have had being subjected task forces created to combat terrorism. PETA? Give me a break. All those granola eating tree hugging hippies ever did was spray paint a few fur coats and break into a few animal testing labs. Not even in the same galaxy as Bin Laden (hey, where is that guy anyways?).

This is exactly the problem I have with the PATRIOT Act, in that it will inevitably be used by the whoever is the current administration to monitor groups and people they don’t like. If the Democrats where in power they’d use this horrific piece of legislation to monitor right leaning groups, while the Republicans will use it to monitor left leaning groups.

A few of the above mentioned groups could, I suppose, be considered “radical”, but “terrorists”? Hardly. In fact, I’d say the ACLU has done more to protect the average American’s individual rights than any other group, including our own government, in the last 100 years.

At any rate, this is something to keep your eye on. If the FBI is forced to comply, which may not happen if they invoke “National Security”, and we find out they were monitoring such benign groups it could be another huge mess for the FBI.

Hi, I'm a Sheep

I saw the following quote via the A Whole Lotta Nothing and I must say it’s pretty hilarious.

I saw it first yesterday and thought it was kind of dumb, but in the past 24 hours I’ve found dozens more from folks I read and admire, and I’ve changed my tune — it’s turned out to be kind of cool.

So, let me rephrase this into what Matt is really saying.

I saw it first yesterday and thought it was kind of dumb, but in the past 24 hours I’ve found dozens more from folks I read and admire, and, as a result, I’ve decided that in order to keep my edge as one of the “cool” bloggers I should do the right thing and follow the pack.

Dude, if you think it’s dumb then just say it. It’s OK to think that some of the things the folks you read and admire do is dumb. Don’t follow the herd just because everyone else is.

Lauren gets all the cool toys

Argh! Lauren has been getting all sorts of fun new toys in the last few weeks. What do I get? Nothing. For the first time in my life my significant other has what is, arguably, a better machine as far as technical specs go. The following is a list of news toys she has gotten in the last few weeks, amazingly with my blessing.

  1. 1.2GHz iBook – Faster CPU than my machine, but I’ve got a 15 inch screen, much more RAM and a larger hard drive. It’s a zippy little machine for a mere $999. Probably one of the best buys for laptops right now.
  2. 4GB iPod Mini – She’s training for a half marathon and running with a full size iPod was a little cumbersome for her. So we got her a mini with an arm band. She’s all set now.

To her credit she managed to take me to the Apple store twice in less than a week and keep me from buying myself one of those hot new Apple displays.

Followup to Tyranny of the Majority

Before I respond to Mark’s comment, I want to make a few things clear. First, I was talking about the dangers of the simple majority. Obviously, if 90% of Americans think that something should be so there is little, if anything, someone could do to stop them. Also, what I do in public, versus what I do in private are two very different things. I should be given wide latitude to do whatever I wish in the confines of my own home and, especially, in my own head.

Liberties I’ve lost in the last few years:

  1. It’s now legal for authorities to search my home via a secret, sealed warrant, without my knowledge (violating my right to due process, privacy and a slew of other rights).
  2. It’s now legal to hold me indefinitely without charges on the sole basis of being a suspected terrorist (violating my right to due process).
  3. If I were a cheerleader in Texas I couldn’t shake my booty quite as much as I could in other states (violating my right to free speech, or, in this case, my right to shake my booty).
  4. I can no longer check a book out from the library without the government having access to my reading list (chilling effect on freedom of speech).
  5. Banks must no report any “suspicious” activity in my bank accounts directly to the government (illegal search and seizure).
  6. In three years, when the Real ID Act goes into effect, I’ll have to carry around a form of ID that, literally, broadcasts my vital personal information (age, sex, location, photo, signature, etc.) (illegal search and seizure).

If you want to tell the world that Jefferson really hates majoritys, maybe you should question why our political system is based on the representation of the majority. It certainly isn’t the fault of any one party.

Actually, thanks to the Bill of Rights, our system isn’t set up solely on the basis of majority representation. In fact, there is something called “checks and balances”, that was built into the system to prevent this very thing. Just because 51% of Americans think we should make it a crime to speak your mind, doesn’t give the simple majority the right to strike down the First Amendment.

We don’t live within a spread landscape of hundreds of miles between towns spanning state-to-state. We must deal with what we, the people, have decided based on our majority.

This is true. For the most part this is how it works, but if 51% of Americans think that two men holding hands or two girls kissing in public should be outlawed should we make it so? Hopefully, such a law would be struck down as it violates the First Amendment. What if 51% of Americans think it should be illegal to carry a concealed weapon? Again, this violates your Second Amendment rights.

Well how isn’t a no-smoking section a tyrannical-majority? Are all non-smokers now officially biggots because they want to be segregated from those evil smoke-inhaling fiends of Satan?

No, this is a good example of a law that was enacted because smoking does affect the people around you when you are in a public place. I would link to the plethora of studies that support the fact that second-hand smoke is deadly and causes cancer, but I trust we can all use Google here. Also, it should be noted that smoking has been banned within the confines of small places (resturants, bars, etc.) and not in wide open public places (parks, sidewalks, etc.). I would fight any ban on smoking in wide open public places, but I think bans on smoking in, say, airplanes and resturants makes perfect sense.

If your party and ideals were happening, you know you wouldn’t be saying all of this…

Can’t argue here. If a Libertarian was in office I’d be doing a naked jig in the streets of Seattle. We’d have strictly enforced personal rights, a small federal government and we sure as hell wouldn’t be in Iraq. I, however, wouldn’t be any happier if a Democrat was in office.

Yes dramatic effect is fun… but more importantly… we can sensationalize anything you want to pretend is a right given by our fore-fathers. They wanted us to marry brother and brother, smoke weed, drink at 9, hug a tree, and make sure a God-loving man was never President for fear of morality!

Actually, George Washington owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson even banged a few of his slaves and Benjamin Franklin was a natorious womanizer and drunk. In fact, Franklin once said “Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy.” So I doubt he’d be too happy about our current drinking laws. I should also note that weed was legal until the early 1900’s, but had been in America long before that, so I doubt the Founding Fathers found many problems with weed. Washington was so distraught as a young boy over having killed a cherry tree he confessed to his sins. I’m not sure how they’d feel about gays, but I’m fairly sure they’d recognize that what people do in their own homes is up to them. This is a good place to mention that the reason marriage licenses even exist today was because they were once used to restrict interracial couples from marrying. An absurd though by today’s standards.

I have no problem with a religious man being President as long as he realizes and understands, as Jefferson implied with his use of the word “Creator”, that his God is not the only god and that his morals aren’t the only morals in the country. Our country is a country filled with Muslims, Roman Catholics, Jews and even a few atheists.

My point is if you are unhappy with the government then do something more proactive to change it rather than complain retroactively about the election. The election has come and gone. 3 1/2 more years of this evil tyranny. Creator [not God] save us all from these Tyrannical Christians; who knows, they may keep trying to save babies and prevent planes from flying at our buildings. The horror of it all.

I’m doing what I can. I email/write/call my representatives and I vote. Other than running for office or organizing protests I’m not sure what else I can do. Also, please go and read my post again. Not once did I mention the election nor did I complain about it.

Also, I’m all for saving babies! Babies, despite being annoying and dirty little creatures, they are kind of cute and have their moments of being funny. However, an egg is not a baby in the same way that an egg at the super market is not a chicken. I recognize that we need to define when a fetus is “alive” and use that as a benchmark for abortions. I think a good measure would be the age at which the average featus could survive outside of the womb, although I am not a doctor so I can’t say for sure.

And, as numerous reports and studies are showing, the measures put into place and the billions spent on airport security have not made us significantly more safe in any real way from terrorist attacks such as the ones carried out on 9/11. Making a woman drink her own breast milk does not make us safer.

The mindset that 51% of a population can dictate what the other 49% of the population does is completely insane, which is why we have the Bill of Rights. It’s also why it takes a vote of 3/4 of the states to change The Constitution. I think the current sense of entitlement or that the current administration has a “mandate” is absurd. In my previous post I was merely stating that I find this idea that a minority majority (I won’t say “majority” since less than half the population votes) can rule the rest of the country with total disregard to the Bill of Rights, The Constitution and the thought that the rest of the country doesn’t matter is disgusting. It, also, “doesn’t scale well”.

Tyranny of Majority Rule

I have to say that as I look around the current political climate of the United States I see more things that I don’t like than I do like. The current attitude in most of the US is that “you’re either with us or your with the terrorists”. Any thoughts that deviate from the agenda are seen as unpatriotic and evil. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote about the tyranny of majority rule (the thought that 51% of the people could rule 49% of the people). It’s happening right now and I’m getting pretty depressed about it. People think that if 51% of the population doesn’t care about civil liberties then the rest of us should blindly follow. I guess those people have forgotten that the Constitution applies to people in singularity and not “the majority”. After all the great document starts with “We the people” and not “We the majority”.

Last time I checked it’s my right and, some would say, my obligation to question the government and the decisions it makes if I don’t agree with them. So, the next time you tell someone that what they’re doing is “unpatriotic” or “not right” or “against God’s will” think about this: who are you to decide what is right for that person? If what they are doing isn’t personally affecting you then why the hell do you care? And, for everyone else’s sake, please don’t envoke the “our Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves” defense.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Let’s destruct this famous quote by Thomas Jefferson. First off he says “their Creator”, which oddly enough, isn’t “God”. Even over 200 years ago Jefferson was intelligent enough to recognize that not everone believed in a single creator. Also, note those two crazy words at the end of the quote: “Liberty” and “Happiness”. I really like those words. I particularily like “Happiness”. Jefferson, I think, is recognizing the fact that the world is full of all sorts of different people and that each one defines that word differently. Some people define happiness as a day at the park, others define it as hating a specific race and dressing up in white sheets. The point is that, no matter what makes you happy, you have a right to be happy, though I think we all understand that you can’t tread on other peoples’ “self-evident” and “unalienable” Rights.

My point? My point is, that if you don’t like my point you are free to click the Back button or close your browser window, or simply browse to google.com and look for something that defines happiness for you.

RPU – Random Personal Update

So, Joe, what have you been up to? Well, other than mourning the loss of my RAID array, I’ve been working some late hours. I’ve been working on a small side project, which has led to some late hours. I’m also working on preparing for a major site revamp at enotes.com. At this very moment I’m cleaning up an old web server in preparation of turning it into a replication server.

Lauren and I have decided to start taking Chinese this fall at one of the local community colleges. My motives for this differ from hers. We both want to learn Chinese before our anticipated trip to the 2008 Summer Olympics. I also want to learn Chinese because 20% of the world speaks Chinese and I fully expect that China will quickly join the ranks of “Super Power” along with the United States within the next 20 years or so.

We have also been looking into what it is involved with migrating to another country. I’m not sure it would be a permanent move, but both of us are extremely interested in living abroad for a few years. Top on our list is Australia, which would avoid the whole language barrier. It’s all very tentative and wouldn’t happen for another five years or so, but it’s exciting to think about.

Backups / Failed RAID Array

So, you’re really cool. You’ve set up a huge RAID1 array on your server. You sleep at night knowing that the chances of losing two disks before you can rebuild the array is pretty small. And then on a nice cool Monday morning your systems administrator tells you that a drive in the array has failed. You order a replacement and have it sent overnight. On Tuesday night the systems administrator calls you with the worst possible news; the second drive is failing and the array has not been rebuilt. You frantically try everything you can; upgrade the kernel, check for bad ram, fsck the hard drives. All provide no solution. Your data, it appears, is lost forever.

You assess the situation. You, personally, have lost 3 years of email. A client of yours has lost a database application with about 80GB of data. Other clients have lost various amounts of email as well. Sound like something that doesn’t happen? Think again. It happened to me this week. I’ve learned my lesson: never trust RAID. It doesn’t matter how many drives you have, never trust the array. So what are my options?

  1. Drink heavily to dull the pain.
  2. Contact a hard drive recover operation and find out what your options are.

It looks like it’s going to cost me $100 to get the drive evaluated. If they can recover any of the files off the drive they will send me a list of files and a solid quote (which will be between $500 and $2400). I should know by the end of next week as to what the outcome of the evaluation is. I can’t afford $2400, but I’d think long and hard about the $500. I didn’t even know that such places exist, but if it works it will be a total life saver.

93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.

Needless to say I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of days setting up rsync scripts to back up email, databases and web folders. I first rsync database dumps, mail and web folders into the user’s home directory. I then rsync my own directories and other important directories down to my 300GB firewire hard drive.

If I end up doing the disk recovery service I’ll post a review to the site and let everyone know how it goes.

Goodbye Anthony "hole in neck" Fedorov

Well, sanity has finally returned to American Idol. We are now down to the top three contestants after Anthony Fedorov was finally ousted. Looking back at who I chose to be American Idol finalists, I’d say I did pretty good in picking two out of three.

I called Bo Brice and Carrie Underwood as possible finalists. Luckily, I was totally wrong about Mikalah Gordon. I underestimated America’s willpower to vote against her. Also, after watching Anwar I’m not surprised he was voted off. Despite having an amazing voice, which I still think was one of the best voices in the competition, his performances were a complete snoozefest.

Out of the three finalists we now have I could care less who wins. I think they are all great. Bo doesn’t have the strongest voice out of the three, but he’s clearly the best performer. Carrie and Vonzell have amazing voices, but I expect Vonzell will edge Carrie out if it were to come down to those two.