I have been teaching myself about AJAX, and learned the basics after going through O’Reilly’s Head First Ajax. Oh, that is all well and good you may say, but what does your plugin actually do?

Let me remind you of what this plugin does: For you Wordpress users, you might have found that Wordpress differentiates between Posts and Pages, and its not too easy to change one to the other when you accidentally forgot to hit the “Page” link right after going for the “Write” tab. Never fear, this plugin is here to save you from your miserable self resorting to copying and pasting an hours work of typing and thoughts.

p2pConverter makes it extremely easy to convert your Post to a Page, or vice versa.

And now, just introduced in the new version, as per a request and my own desire, this plugin now utilizes AJAX to send requests. It also incorporates and displays a nice interface thanks to Script.aculo.us. Also, I have restructured the code to function on a more Object Oriented Programming nature.

Well, I hope this new update works well for all of you and brings you joy. Especially since you might have need of it according to Lorielle. If you have found that this plugin has been very helpful to you, please be sure to Donate to the poor post-graduate that would be very appreciative.

Let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, problems, or requests with the new version.

• p2pConverter 0.7

Soldier, prisoner, writer, and philosopher Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died Sunday evening, August 3rd, 2008. Growing up in the Soviet Union, he served as a decorated commander for the Red Army, yet he was arrested for an anti-Soviet comment made in a personal letter in early 1945. He was promptly placed in a labor camp called Ekibastuz, which gave him the foundational experiences to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a complete account of a real life day under Stalinist repression. Throughout the rest of his life, Alexandr continued to write, despite Soviet/Russian efforts to censor his works. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but had to wait to accept the award because he was unsure if the Soviet Union would allow him to return at that time. By 1974, he had been deported, and accepted the award at that time.

If you would like to learn more about his life and struggles, you can learn more about him, or read a speech he gave to Harvard classes in 1970.

Alexandr lived a full life, experiencing the depravity that exists, and the atrocities that are committed every day. He rightly states the reason for all of this, our rejection of God most high:

Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

Solzhenitsyn had a good head on his shoulders. He seems to have understood the essence of human nature, and how it can drive mad people to do heart wrenching things. He also understood that it wasn’t just certain people, like Stalin, or Hitler, or the Red Army soldiers who rape a Polish woman just because she looked German. No, he says it best in one of my favorite quotes:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? -Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

You will be missed, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Thank you for your legacy, your compassion, and your hard words courageously expressed amidst a fallen world.

Let me tell you my story about what happened today.

I signed a 2 year contract back in January ‘07, and bought a Razr. It had been working just fine until a month ago when I noticed it started randomly dropping calls (even when it reported having four bars in a densely populated area). I have about a month and a few days before I am eligible to upgrade to a new phone, and so I figured I could stick it out (sometimes it worked fine).Then this past week, the Razr would just randomly shut off on its own (even did this during one or two conversations). Finally today, it seemed to die…at least when it wasn’t on a charger. So I broke down and took it into my friendly local Verizon store.

After explaining the situation, and asking them to resolve the issue, the tech support guy told me that they do not fix phones (anymore), and that my phone was fried (he had tried to install a system update, but said that my onboard mini-USB was flaky, which prevented the update). My only options were to either purchase another Razr refurb for $50, or upgrade to a new phone….Then I got a bunch of mixed hoopla from him and another sales associate about how I would only get a $50 credit instead of the $100 credit that was written on the contract I originally signed towards an upgrade. This was either because of their new two tier plan ($50 credit for less than $79.99 per month plan, $100 for $79.99 or more), or because I was upgrading early ($50 new every year, $100 new every two years), I got both answers, but not any consistency. Frankly, the people I interacted with were pretty jerkish. I decided to walk out and try a different Verizon store across town.

My hunch was correct, I walked in and told them about my issue. I mentioned the fact that I had come from the other store, and told her what they had said. She immediately handed me off to the manager, Kenny. Kenny looked at my phone, and told me I had the two options the other store had first mentioned. I questioned him on the $50 upgrade credit, and he said it was the two-tier policy change that Verizon recently made, and I reasoned with him about what I signed in my original contract. I also mentioned the fact that the people at the other store had been jerks, and that I had heard that the people at this store would treat you right. He still did not budge, but he did take my old phone to see about an update. While I was waiting for the update to occur, he mentioned to me that he made a note on my file to go ahead and give me the $100 credit when I did come into upgrade (”since apparently you didn’t know about the new policy” were his words). A few minutes later, he let me know that they were unable to upgrade my phone, so they were going to give me a new refurb to last me the last month, for free, since I was having all this trouble. Just 10 more minutes of waiting, and downloading my contacts from Backup Assistant, and I was on my way. Thanks so much for the help Kenny! You are awesome!

My advice, if one store is harassing you, try another one. Be sure to tell them that the other store were jerks, and that you heard that the people at this store would treat you right. Be polite, firm, but realize that these are people too. And be sure to give them accolades when they do go out of their way to help you.

P.S. Users can also use this website to submit comments about what Verizon can do better: https://www.survey.verizonwireless.com/vzwsurvey/

I have been listening to the new record by The Classic Crime, The Silver Chord (you can find my review here), lately. I noticed at the beginning of their hit Abracadavers, that there is the whispering that you cannot really make out just before he screams, “It’s like I never had time!”

I was thinking about it, and the thought occured to me that it sounded like words were being spoken backwards. So I fired up Audacity and reversed the beginning of the track. Sure enough, I was right:

Everyone must dance the dance of death…everyone must dance the dance of death…

Which seems to go right along with the song itself. If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself, or have a listen here.

• Abracadavers Intro

Microsoft just decided to pull off a ridiculous PR stunt with their “Mojave Experiment” this past week.

Apparently the word-of-mouth campaign that us techie people have initiated without any real organization has informed all of our non-geek friends of our innate dislike of Vista. Yeah, everyone knows that Vista is crappy, from the media, from us IT people, from actual users.

Microsoft decided that our friends needed a second opinion.

Their answer was the “Mojave Experiment” where they talked to 140 non-Vista users about their thoughts on Vista, and then had them “test-drive” the “newest” version of Windows, Windows Mojave. I’m guessing that Microsoft hacked their own system to replace all occurrences of “Vista” with “Mojave” for these purposes.

After watching the intro video, click on some of the other faces to get different *select* reactions. Also, be sure to check out the “facts” where Microsoft propagates what a truly awesome product Vista is, and tells us *some* of the stats and methods used in this experiment.

According to the site, they used an HP Pavillion DV2000, with 2GB of RAM…that is all the info given about the computer used. Let it be known that base model specs only come with 1GB of RAM, and use integrated graphics card, but I would bet that they upgraded to the Nvidia GeForce Go 7200 for this model, if not a higher end card. But you don’t get the kind of hardware you need to run Vista on a brand new computer. You know they probably maxed out the notebook as much as possible, installed the O/S without all the extra junk you get on a new computer these days, ensure that all the correct drivers were working before allowing the users to test spin it.

Tell me, do you really think they would let the test users experience awful tasks such as hooking up external devices to the computer for the first time, trying to configure a network, installing new software (thank you UAC!), or try to run multiple high performance programs (i.e. Firefox…or, ahem, I mean, IE7 and Adobe Photoshop and AIM, er, I mean, Windows Messenger, and Outlook, etc) all at the same time. See if there is no slow down there.

According to the site, which you can verify for yourself, most of the users were completely surprised that what they were being showed was actually Vista. I am guessing that like I said, these users were probably allowed to do simple tasks one at a time like play a card game of Spider Solitaire, check their Hotmail email, and type up a simple document, without any heavy duty testing that might happen in a real world environment.

But this guy, though the site calls him a skeptic, probably shows these true colors of this PR stunt.

Claim: “Windows Mojave really is Windows Vista.”

Response: “But why is it faster?”

He saw through these phonies. Obviously, these experimenters weren’t playing quite fair as I have stated.

UPDATE:
A couple of other thoughts I had: Why is the site created in Adobe Flash? Why not use their own Silverlight? I’ll tell you why. Because they want people to actually see the videos and people don’t want to have to download another plugin to view the website. I don’t have Silverlight.
Also, which version of Vista did they actually show users? I guarantee you it wasn’t Vista Basic, even though that is the prime operating system that comes on new computers now.