Like many, I find conspiracy theories fascinating. There’s something compelling about the idea that what we see isn’t what’s really there, what we’re told isn’t really true, and what we know is just plain wrong. Maybe it’s the result of too many movies and video games and TV shows telling us that the real world is dull and only when there are secret plots and villains can life be interesting. For those of us who find the routines of adulthood stifling and are overwhelmed by the guarantee that most people will get a job, build an average life, die an average death, and disappear into endless nothingness, conspiracies and paranoia are a way of placing ourselves in the midst of something big, serious, and important.

In all likelihood, there are far fewer conspiracies than many would like to believe. Sure, there is undoubtedly some messed up stuff going on, but such is the nature of government. The security and freedom that we enjoy in the US require sacrifice, most likely the sacrifice of my own privacy, and that is something I think we all need to accept.

But then there is the control of our lives that we as individuals have given up in the name of convenience; namely, the trust we heap upon the corporations who control our banking records, our emails, our schedules, our most personal details and darkest secrets. This topic is the nexus of conspiracy theorist rambling and rational examination of risk, and it is something that has been on my mind a lot lately.

I followed LulzSec breathlessly. The whimsical irreverence with which they seemingly popped into networks that should have been secure, walked off with information that should have been secure, and then published said information in plainly insecure, naked text made a profound statement: your trust is misplaced, everything is up for grabs, trust nothing. Sony’s PSN hack was more evidence. Bank of America was hacked in March. It goes on and on, and those are the ones we know about, so just imagine how many major institutions are compromised right now by people who won’t pull the plug and make anyone aware until they have a good reason to do so? Fuck, in April of 2010, an estimated 15% of all web traffic was routed through China and all unencrypted data could have been monitored and modified. Read about it here.

This past year has shown more than ever that the institutions that we think of as organized, smart, and safe are not necessarily any of those things. Major corporations want us to think that they know what’s going on. That’s how they sell shit, that’s how they increase their stock value, that’s how the entire world keeps running. The more I see, the more I realize that most people don’t fully understand the technology that they’re using, but when this is the case with big companies who have big PR budgets, that means that they pay a lot of talented people a lot of money to give the impression of competence when really, there might not be much behind the scenes.

I am afraid of Google and Facebook because they make their money off of the collection and sale of personal information. Their businesses exist to keep records on individuals browsing habits, buying habits, search histories, likes, and dislikes. They have put whatever privacy policies online that they like but when all is said and done, nobody knows exactly what they have or how to make them get rid of it. One can only wonder if Google would even be able to purge their system of everything pertaining to an individual.

More than that, though, I am afraid of the lack of thought that goes into giving away control of my entire life to these corporations. The punk rocker in me is dying. If I got that Crass tattoo I always wanted, it would be burning itself off my skin this very moment. Google and Facebook exude confidence in their abilities to be smarter than everyone else, stay ahead of the curve, and keep our information secure… until they fuck up. And they will fuck up, sooner or later. It’s like something out of some terrible sci-fi movie. “The Day Google Became Self-Aware.” Someone will find a backdoor, something will come out that someone was working with some government or some corrupt entity that wanted to do something wild with our information. This is not paranoia, this is fact: nothing works perfectly forever; the larger an entity becomes, the more incompetence becomes reality; scandal and selfishness and negativity are coded in our DNA.

My points, one last time, one at a time…

The corporations we trust with our lives do not have our best interests at heart, they have their own interests at heart. For now, the individual’s interests and the corporation’s interests converge. Google NEEDS to protect us because when they fuck up, it is game over, so they have no choice but to stay on their toes… but they can’t forever and the more information they have, the harder they will fall.

The corporations we trust with our lives very often invest more in presenting an image of competence and ability than they actually possess. We assumed that Sony knew what they were doing when it came to protecting their PSN and we were wrong. I’m not even going to say anything about HBGary since that link says it all.

Overall, I’m disgusted. As someone whose entire life runs around Google services, I am actively searching for a replacement for my email and calendar and I think Zimbra hosted on my own server might be it. I plan on using Facebook as little more than a social networking tool for music and my recording business. I need to do more reading about anonymizing my online footprint. I realize this all sounds paranoid, even comical, but not having something to hide is not a valid reason to relinquish all control of my personal information. This is an issue of personal responsibility and reevaluating the trust that I as an individual and we as a society have placed in corporations that are, frankly, undeserving of our trust.

It’s been a while since I made a positive post that wasn’t some nerdy tech thing so I’m gonna give this a shot.

There are things happening. They are good.

First, the studio is moving. As convenient as working out of my basement is, it is a miracle I am able to get the quality I do thanks to its dimensions. It is too unprofessional, too small, too hot, too… roachy. I have good gear and I do good work, this is an important step to bringing my quality up even higher. I looked around a bit and found an amazing warehouse space in North Philly. Right size, right price, right distance from home. It’s big — 1000 square feet. Deposit was paid a few weeks ago and I actually need to drop a rent check off.

The setup is going to be simple for now. A decent-sized control room and a big live room, huge ceilings, old wood floors. The rooms are being built by a guy who is really fantastic, one of those people who is seemingly great at everything they do. In Quincy’s case, he is working as a carpenter full-time but also has two studios of his own, produces artists who travel quite far for him, fixes old cars and scooters, plays a few instruments, builds and mods all kinds of recording shit… He grew out of metal a long time ago but seems to be excited to be working with me on this. I’m gonna do my best to pull him back in!

I purchased all the lumber for construction last week and yesterday, we brought it all over. The only downside to this location is that it’s a few floors up and there is no elevator. The stairs aren’t too bad, though — 9 at a time, then a landing, then another 9. I’ve definitely played at places where loading in and out was trickier. Yesterday, though, we had to carry all of the lumber up from the ground, and it was a bit of an ordeal. We were aided by my friends Shawn and Steve, who, without complaining, worked their asses off with me and Quincy to get that crap up there. Two other friends showed up at the very end to help us finish the job, I bought everyone dinner (well, I paid for as much as they would allow) and we all went home, satisfied with a good day’s work. Quincy will frame the room up this week, I will buy more stuff, and… then we keep building and buying until it’s ready to go.

So there’s that. Fucking awesome. Hoping to have it ready in time to record Abazagorath, a killer black metal band from Jersey, in July. Gonna be cutting it close!

Woe’s tourdates with Mayhem just went up. We’re doing 13 shows in the Northeast. Now, it needs to be said that I am no fan of big package tours. I just don’t like big venues, I don’t usually like the bands who do those kinds of tours, and I think that the idea of us playing every night at like 6 or 7pm for far less money than we need to survive doesn’t really do anything for the band. This tour, though, is a bit different than your average big douchey package tour cause… Come on, it’s fucking Mayhem. I was never the biggest fan but our drummer is pretty much freaking out and the other guys are pretty pumped too. I sort of think that Mayhem… Euronymous… I don’t need to spell it out. It’s cool to be going on the road with a band who has such history attached to them. Most importantly, though, it’s 13 days on the road with my best friends and even if we were just taking a long road trip, I would be excited for it. This will be my first time playing shows in Canada as well as a few new US cities. All the dates will be up on Woe’s page as soon as I stop being lazy.

I wrote an article that ended up getting a bit more attention than I expected. You can read it here. I really have nothing more to say about it right now other than the fact that I think people’s responses have been kind of interesting to watch. It really got me thinking about the role class in our everyday lives. I’ll probably write something about that soon. You can read Hunter’s… reply (?) here. I have to warn you that if you don’t live in the Northeast or didn’t have an opinion about this dude and this band until now, this will probably all seem really petty and stupid. In a way, it is, but for those of us who live up here and are involved with the microcosm that is American black metal, my article addressed something that has been on a lot of people’s minds. Weeks later, I’m still getting emails and Facebook messages and texts thanking me.

I finished a full-length for Immolith and it sounds awesome. Still making some little tweaks to the mix and master but it’s like 99% done. They’re stoked, from what I understand, and I am too. I also did a new song for Abserdo, started working with a new band who have a really unique sound, and put some time into finishing this long-overdue final mix of the Unrest full-length. Everything is sounding fucking awesome.

On top of all of that, Woe has some new music in the works. This next album is going to be the first where I did not write all of the songs. Ben and Shawn have both brought incredible stuff to the table and in many ways, they are out-Woe-ing me. I’m not slacking either, though, and I finished a song that I think is my best since the opening track off my first album. There is another one that is just about done which will end up being better, still! This new album is going to come together quickly, I think. With more of us working and planned writing/demoing sessions, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a new album’s worth of material in a few months. No promises, of course, but I am hopefully.

And that’s the best stuff. There have been some shitty things happening, too, but I want to keep this positive so I’m gonna cut it here. The end.

Thought I’d put this out there since it took me a little bit of time to diagnose and resolve.

Migrating from Exchange 2003 to 2010. Installed 2010 and put the Client Access role on a different machine than all the other roles. OWA worked, ActiveSync worked, but you couldn’t connect using Outlook within the office without wonderfully descriptive errors relating to basic Outlook/Exchange connectivity, the same ones you would get if your server was offline, Address Book Service was stopped, etc,…

Outlook connects to Exchange using RPC so I checked the RPC Client Access log (C:\program files\Exchange Server\V14\Logging\RPC Client Access by default) and found it full of errors like this:

6/19/2011 7:08:20 AM, currently Mounted”,”RopHandler: Logon: [RopExecutionException] Misconfiguration: Mailbox DB LONG-HEX-ID hosted on /o=First Organization/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (MY ADMIN GROUP ID)/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=MY-SERVER-NAME is pointing to RpcClientAccess on this server, /o=First Organization/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (ADMIN GROUP ID AGAIN)/cn=Configuration/cn=Servers/cn=SAME-SERVER, which doesn’t have a ClientAccess role installed. Error code = NoServerSupport”

And there’s your problem. It was looking for client access where client access did not exist. I verified by popping open the Exchange shell and running a few commands.

This showed me all the info about my database, including the Identity, which I needed for the next step, and confirmed that RpcClientAccess was in fact set to the wrong server. The fix was easy.

Set-MailboxDatabase -identity “Mailbox Database ID” -RPCClientAccessServer CORRECT-INTERNAL-DNS-NAME

Worked immediately after changing this. I’m not quite sure why this was necessary. My hunch was that I initially installed the Client Access role on the single machine, then uninstalled it, then installed it on a different machine. There might be a way to change this from the console, too, but this was easy enough.

Hope it helps you out sometime.

I’m sitting in a burger place in Cherry Hill, NJ. When I walked in, the girl at the counter told me that they can only do cash right now because their credit cards system is down. Their entire register would be inoperable if someone hadn’t discovered that they could disconnect the CAT5 to send it into an offline processing mode where it will just queue transactions until later.

The reason is awesome. Apparently, the company that runs their registers is down because their antivirus installed either new definitions or an application update that is preventing something from working, I’m guessing a false positive. They’ve been down since last night. Even better, this took down everyone using these registers, which is apparently a ton of other area businesses. Not sure if it’s national or not but either way, it is hilarious. I hate the antivirus development industry.

I don’t even know what to say at this point. Back in February, I wrote this, an entry about a longstanding bug that makes your system BSOD if you put BESR and BE on the same machine. Well guess what? In the new version of Symantec System Recovery 2011, the bug is still there. And how do I know? Because it just BSOD’ed by office’s server as I was trying to run a backup. There’s something ironic about your backup software causing the need to restore from a backup. We were lucky, no corrupt databases or anything, but seriously, WTF? When I exclaimed to my co-workers about what happened, one of them laughed and threw up his hands to exclaim, “How is this company still in business?” How indeed.