A lot of commotion has stirred up (see comments) lately from the differences between the PlayStation Vita First Edition bundle, which includes a 4GB Memory Card, PlayStation Vita title Little Deviants, a case and the 3G/Wifi version of the PlayStation Vita – comes out on the 15th of February if you pre-order now, and the release day version that was announced recently on the PlayStation Blog which is $50 USD cheaper and includes an 8GB card. Both versions recently got a AT&T DataConnect Pass that also includes a free PlayStation Store download. No details have been released on the specifics of the download you can get, but that’s neither here nor there. The real topic people have been begging to know is can the PlayStation Vita play PS One Classics.

A recent January PlayStation Blogcast said that their “engineers” have not yet opened up the Vita to be able to play PlayStation One games. That’s what we were told… and that’s what we know, until yesterday. Because we got word the Release Day bundle had a 8GB card, which if you’re counting 8 is more than 4, and a case is not that big of a deal to pick one up later or have it shipped out the same day, we took a look at Amazon to compare the difference.

Here’s a link to the PlayStation Vita First Edition Bundle and here’s a link to the WiFi version of the Release Day bundle. Figure it out yet? No? We’ll tell you.

“Vita can play PSP titles, minis, PS one classics, video and comics from the PlayStation Store”.

Need a screenshot? No problem.

Looks like it’s time to sell or trade in your PSP’s and PSPGo’s ladies and gentlemen BEFORE they drop the price on the trade-in value at your local game store… Unless Amazon is wrong, in which case we’re not pleased and hope the feature comes as soon as possible.

Update on Trade-in prices: GameStop is offering a whopping $25 dollars for your $169 investment as a standalone trade-in. Wow. RIP OFF. eBay Instant Sale is offering at the moment $55.88 for a like new PSPGo. And the winner for trade-in is Amazon at just under $83.00 for a “like new” condition PSPGo.

Play Memories was announced as a cloud service to sync Sony devices across a network. Phil Molyneux said the motto was to “Play, Watch, Listen and Share” and to “experience content the way you want to”.

The Sony Tablet P, which has a dual screen display, was unveiled. This is the same line as the Sony Tablet S.

Sony announced a new corporation, the Sony Mobile Communications division which will oversee all Mobile devices, such as the new Xperia Ion – exclusive to AT&T, and the Xperia S which will be available worldwide.

The Sony Bravia lines’ Picture Engine “X-Reality PRO” turns low-resolution internet videos into high-resolution videos.

The Sony Personal 3D Viewer, also known as the HMZ-T1, starts at $799.99, which is an HD headset using 5.1 virtual surround sound. See it online at SonyStyle.

4K Home Theater Systems, which is four times current HD resolutions, will be available soon.

The Sony Bloggie Live HD Camera will be the very first full HD capable WiFi streaming device. See that online at the SonyStyle store. This device is available tomorrow.

The new Sony SS-AR2 speakers were unveiled as well for those who enjoy their home theaters.

Also unveiled the Sony Crystal LED Display TV, which not many details were given, however Sir Howard Stringer said, “I have seen the future and it is a Sony”.

Sony Crystal LED Display

Of course the Sony PlayStation Vita was mentioned and will have 22 games at launch. We’ll be covering that in February and have a full review then. News on that today announced that Netflix should be available at the North American launch.

As announced, the Sony Open Golf Tournament will be covered in 3D.

Here’s the CES 2012 video line-up from Sony Electronics on YouTube:

If you’re at CES or watching online, here’s the full Sony CES 2012 Event Schedule.

We’ll update with more information as it comes to us, but for now, that’s it!

Might as well preface this with: A) It’s technical, B) It’s personal, and C) We gave them ample opportunity to make this problem right before we had to take the issue into our own hands. And in light of recent SOPA problems with GoDaddy, we hope this testimonial is even more of a reason that you don’t use their service. Speaking of, their real CEO, Warren Adelman, put out a statement about SOPA stating that because the Senate couldn’t come to a consensus that GoDaddy was no longer supporting SOPA. Read that again if you need to figure out why we’re astonished or read the whole article about SOPA and GoDaddy sucking. Now, on to the show!

We affiliated ourselves with GoDaddy, a.k.a. GoDaddy.com or Go Daddy, Inc., as an ICANN domain provider back in 2006 before we went public and as a reseller in 2008 to offer competitive pricing and an alternative storefront when we did begin offering public services. As a reseller, they take one of their other companies, Starfield Technologies as well as Wild West Domains (remember this name, it’s key to what went wrong) and have your WHOIS/Registration information pass through them. Since then, we’ve obviously learned that there are just as viable alternatives to domain acquisition and purchases than dealing with GoDaddy, often for pennies more or less. And our network continues to grow.

Looking for a way to keep costs the same or lower and provide the same if not better service, we looked at integrating what was called GoDaddy’s AnyCast DNS now called ‘Premium DNS’. We suspect that they stopped calling it ‘AnyCast DNS’ because you can’t serve DNS from one datacenter and honestly call it AnyCast… sort of a technical oxymoron. This was to be used as an extension of our services and as an alternative to running solely our own network of DNS servers. We didn’t jump in with both feet, but we were deep enough to start losing air before it was too late.

We called and spoke to a sales representative about their services a long time ago, long before our trust was broken and our issue ever occurred. At the time, we declined moving forward with their DNS service because there was no way to CNAME or create a hostname for the servers that matched a domain name of our own as we said a moment ago. When GoDaddy added the ‘vanity name servers’ bit to the DNS service, we were more interested. We called back several months later and spoke to a sales representative that we had make sure with her supervisor her statement was accurate and ordered the Premium DNS service because we were able to not hand out a string like a CDN does. At the time, we had been hosting our own servers and wanted at least one extension off of that for even more redundancy. Since we already had our .com at GoDaddy at the time with the core hostnames coming from GoDaddy, it was easy to say yes to testing out something for like $2.99 a month since we were paying much more than that per DNS server.

Before I get too far into this, a very important part of hosting relies on DNS. DNS to the layman is a server or network system which broadcasts the IP address or location of a server by converting the name of a top-level domain like turkreno.com into an IP address. DNS serves out usually every request that goes through a network and it also plays a very large part in the latency, or speed, in which content is found. There are times when a network is undiscoverable or slow just because of routing issues with backbone service providers. Those providers in the United States, such as AT&T, Global Crossing, Layer3 and others actually run the flow of the Internet and usually own the fiber optic cable on which it runs. So, when a DNS server does a query, the response or reply may tell your traffic to go to Washington first, because that’s where the first router is between you and the domain that resolved and the server you’re asking for, then further “hops” to other locations until your request reaches its destination. Having multiple servers, or an AnyCast-type network, that are within multiple datacenters around the world where those backbones are routed through provides what’s known as a Point-of-Presence (POP) and will decrease latency since the answer is locally cached to that router. In a worst cast scenario, the traffic where a network client requests a site that isn’t cached by the ISP, which is the usual case, the router may have to search or query the router ahead of it to search for a resolving DNS server, thus creating latency. Speed is of the essence and maybe that explains why this improvement is important for any network.

Digressing back to what happened is most likely easier if we just put it into a handy mind map and bullet out the entire issue here for those who don’t want to view a huge PDF. For months this issue was up on the whiteboard in the office and it took precisely that long to fix all of the screwed up issues that happened. We ended up making a mind map chart of what went wrong and we’ll go from there.

GoDaddy Network Failure Mind Map

PDF of the Mind Map — MP3 of the Voicemail

• GoDaddy Network Failure
• Cause/Reasoning
  • > TurkReno.biz hijacked to place to DNS records outside of our control by GoDaddy D/B/A Wild West Domains. Explained in further depth within “Effects”.
    • >> Premium DNS with AnyCast Network selected to improve upon POP in RackSpace ORD1 and DFW
    • >> Inquired about “AnyCast DNS” when plan was released and declined to move forward for fear of the effects that happened.
    • >> Told by sales associate that we could use “vanity name servers” in lieu of hosting our own recursive name servers.
      • >>> This sounded great. It’s much easier to tell a client, even if they’re technically minded, a human friendly and readable address.
    • >> Save money for same DNS purpose without self hosting part of the network. Expansion.
    • >Effects
      • >>> Apathetic responses from GoDaddy
        • >>>> Call from the Office of the President
          • >>>>> Spoke to “Jordan”
            • >>>>>> ”Main concern was getting feedback on how to prevent this in the future” – Actual Results:
              • >>>>>>> Apathetic
              • >>>>>>> Totally on GoDaddy’s Team
              • >>>>>>> Lacking in Technical Expertise, or at least playing extremely dumb.
            • >>>>>> No actual conclusion met. Essentially a feedback loop.
            • >>>>>> Refunded for AnyCast DNS service, but refused to compensate for any outage or brand damage we experienced.
        • >>>> Calls from Manager stating 4 days after the fact that this was due to “Vanity NS’s” not usable with ANY Domains outside my account, even ones within GoDaddy/DPR/WWD
          • >>>>> Recorded message to be put on CDN
            • >>>>>> Voicemail from GoDaddy – Epic admission of what we originally should have been told 5 days before.
            • >>>>>> Phone call from “Jeremy” stating exactly WHY this went wrong. GoDaddy states that you are not allowed to use vanity name servers with domains outside of
          • >>>>> Lack of information on purchase, would have left alone had known this information.
            • >>>>>> To this day, GoDaddy still has not corrected their website to prevent other users from this pitfall.
        • >>>> E-mails from Call Supervisors stating that they would not rest until this was made right.
          • >>>>> Never followed up to me directly after Presidents office called.
      • >>> Call to Registries
        • >>>> Placed call to NeuStar (.biz)
          • >>>>> Told to discuss this matter with Verisign since all domains affected were .com / .net, opened ticket #00406445
        • >>>> Placed call to Verisign (.com/.net)
          • >>>>> Opened ticket #6271
            • >>>>>> Verisign verified that a Wild West Domains employee modified the TLD causing the outage. Exact time of modification given by Verisign was 10:56:36 GMT.
            • >>>>>> Also recalled while on the phone with GoDaddy. GoDaddy support was extremely apprehensive about being on the phone and pretended as if what they were hearing didn’t happen.
      • >>> Distrust of clients
        • >>>> Letters from Client of Clients seeing once sites began re-resolving the message on our end stating to contact the webmaster.
          • >>>>> Clients e-mailing complaint letters
          • >>>>> Clients of Clients e-mailing stating that their travel plans had been ruined.
          • >>>>> Clients stating no traffic, business hurt
      • >>> Inability to correct problem without GoDaddy intervention
        • >>>> Shutdown of 39 Domains for 6 days
          • >>>>> Isolated to our account – per phone call and obvious reasons.
        • >>>> Several tickets opened without our ability to see any of the entry before the ticket was submitted. Basically the equivalent of a person summarizing everything you said on a call into one sentence and submitting it for you on the general contact form of the main website.
        • >>>> Interestingly never shown any of the tickets until after a technician responded to them, no way to reply to them either once responded other than rehashing the entire issue.
        • >>>> Investigative measure taken to identify scope:
          • >>>>> Used kloth.net and robtex.com as an external source to verify local terminal commands.
          • >>>>> Brought GoDaddy on the phone and conferenced in Verisign to have a verbal confirmation recorded by Go Daddy Corporate that WWD/GDI took our traffic offline.
          • >>>>> Purchased full listing of affected domains from domaintools.com to use as a reliable and neutral 3rd-party verifier to event.
            • >>>>>> 39 total domains verified affected by the change.
          • >>>>> Local terminal commands verified events.
            • >>>>>> Primary *nix command: dig turkreno.biz +trace
            • >>>>>> Discovered pleasedropthishost26787.turkreno.biz and pleasedropthishost26788.turkreno.biz – Totally unauthorized.
      • >>> Requests for Reparation
        • >>>> Invoice to GoDaddy
          • >>>>> GoDaddy Cites legal agreements (ToS) on site and says they will not pay any invoice.
        • >>>> No Reparations can be made at this time based on the notes found. Upon further review, subject to change.
      • >>> Removal/Termination of GoDaddy Security Scan from the primary website – Found to be worthless anyway.
      • >>> Deleted TurkReno.biz to attempt to clear GoDaddy NS Records
        • >>>> TurkReno.biz never returned or offered to be returned by GoDaddy. Deleting the domain did not make an immediate difference nor any measurable difference at all that would have happened on other odds.
          • >>>>> TurkReno.biz repurchased on a different ICANN registrar after the domain totally expired out of the Neustar registry as an available domain.
  • >Aftershock
    • >> Anti-GoDaddy Marketing Campaign with Twitter: #ShermanMarchesAgain Launched – (Thanks Tom)
    • >> Boycotting of GoDaddyBowl.com and all things related to the form GMAC Bowl in Mobile, AL.
    • >> Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg following made aware of dissatisfaction.
    • >> Recourse against TurkReno Incorporated.

We spent hours on this with them. Hours we want back from our lives. Maybe we can save you some time. Switch hosting to us, we’re not on GoDaddy’s crappy 4GH Network or whatever they want to call it. Or maybe you want to contact the Office of the President for GoDaddy. No problem, here’s all of their contact info:

E-Mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Phone: 408-505-8828

CEO: Warren Adelman

Alt. Numbers to GoDaddy Corporate Offices: 408-505-8800

So, when you think of DNS hopefully GoDaddy won’t be the first that comes to mind. We’ve got an awesome platform setup to accommodate multiple types of needs, including those of web masters using Linux or WHM/cPanel. Contact us if you’re interested. It’s private for the time being, but will be live soon.

Don’t trust GoDaddy with your DNS, their SysAdmins know NOTHING of how to complete a ticket and they COULD be stealing your traffic, or worse, blocking it because their tech support knows NOTHING.

This Act, when read in further detail, not only pressures Internet Service Providers like TurkReno to make rather extraneous measures to filter content and national providers of ICANN services to block a domain that they blacklist from search engine results and beyond. If they passes it to the US Senate then you can expect more than one derivative of its kind following SOPA. You see, it’s failed before. And, like a bad cold, this is another variant. Here’s the best summary from Wikipedia that shows what it was and how it’s moving:

The PROTECT IP Act is a re-write of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which failed to pass in 2010. A similar House version of the bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced on October 26, 2011.

What’s disgusting about this is that GoDaddy, one of the largest ICANN domain registrars was, and under speculation still is, supporting the writing of this Act. They crafted it themselves. And then they release a press release today stating they would not further support SOPA, but we don’t trust it and neither should you. If they knew what they were getting themselves into, then it’s clear that their Executives are bluffing their way into keeping business. What really matters here is that they see the big picture. GoDaddy isn’t the only registrar.

Caption 1: Wow. This is GoDaddy Overselling Hosting.

And, with as much content as GoDaddy hosts, and over-sells (see Caption 1), they’d shut down 5,000 to 6,000, yes – THOUSAND, customers at a time per ONE (1) SOPA takedown order.

And here’s what they had to say:

GoDaddy No Longer Supports SOPA

Looks to Internet Community & Fellow Tech Leaders to Develop Legislation We All Support

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) – Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.

“As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy,” said Adelman.

In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.

“Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future,” Jones said.

Found at: http://www.godaddy.com/newscenter/release-view.aspx?news_item_id=378

Notice how they say "they" spoke. Who is "they"? Also, they avoid commenting on SOPA.

Here’s the great crux in this Press Release: SOPA has not been introduced to the US Senate. And it’s a reaction, not something they’ve done after hearing the SOPA proceedings. As celebrities threatened to leave GoDaddy, they pushed this out to stop the bail out. It’s a House of Representatives Bill. As stated on the US House of Representatives Website under “How Are Laws Made?” this answer can be found (We’re at the In Committee phase):

Laws begin as ideas. First, a representative sponsors a bill. The bill is then assigned to a committee for study. If released by the committee, the bill is put on a calendar to be voted on, debated or amended. If the bill passes by simple majority (218 of 435), the bill moves to the Senate. In the Senate, the bill is assigned to another committee and, if released, debated and voted on. Again, a simple majority (51 of 100) passes the bill. Finally, a conference committee made of House and Senate members works out any differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. The resulting bill returns to the House and Senate for final approval. The Government Printing Office prints the revised bill in a process called enrolling. The President has 10 days to sign or veto the enrolled bill.

Anyone with half a brain can see this is just a PR stunt on GoDaddy’s behalf. Maybe even the protection of the recent additional DNSSEC properties which don’t totally jive with their product offerings. And admittedly DNSSEC doesn’t really jive with SOPA either, but it’s their main point of pressure to go after when attempting to take down a domain aside from seizing the name registration itself.

And the kicker to both Go Daddy and the rest of the world? DNSSEC is all controlled by IANA, Verisign, the gTLD (Generic Top-Level Domain) registrar for ALL .com and .net domains, acknowledging these Zone directives. ICANN and the U. S. Department of Commerce. Don’t believe me? http://www.root-dnssec.org.

Either way, this is part one of a few more that will outline why GoDaddy is failing as a company and why we believe that it’s not in your best interests to continue to do business with them.

Update 1/5/2012: GoDaddy, in all of it’s uncanny glory, has released a statement from CEO Warren Adleman. They don’t support SOPA because the representatives could not reach a consensus. I like one of the comments that state that “transparency should be a two-way street and not a one-way mirror”. Here’s the statement:

Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

Still don’t trust them. Part two coming soon.

In the article, BI outlines that according to this list the companies could no longer be found. They state this about SOPA:

SOPA, along with the PROTECT IP act in the Senate, give content-producing companies the right to order a take down for a website that they believe is infringing on a copyright. If you even host links to content that infringes on a copyright, you have to take it down.

Our stance on SOPA is quite simple: In its current form, we do not support it. We believe that linking to pirated content is supporting piracy, ergo the mindset the Representatives have is a worthwhile one. It’s surprising that it’s taken this long since the DMCA – which is a US-based law and really only enforceable within the United States only – for those who pass legislature to catch on. And by catching on, we mean to the actual methods like linking that piracy continues to prevail using. As of right now, Safe Harbor is granted to those who simply link to a file sharing website like MediaFire or MegaUpload since it’s passing the infringing Intellectual Property on to the place where the files actually are. In all fairness this is simply skirting around what is right and wrong, evading a DMCA takedown notice to the infringing party and more cat-and-mouse games.

Honestly, we’re glad to see that the list has dwindled down. It’s now down to makeup companies, music and book publishers and a few Federal agencies to push this through. As more awareness is being brought to the table, and as corporations and private entities continue to read more than the title of the Bill and do some research, it seems that they’re also realizing just how harmful doing something like blocking someone at the DNS level can be. No one company, government or organization should have total power over the .com and .net registry. And no one company, government or organization should have the ability to censor free speech – the very thing this bill states that it will not do on line #1.

“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.” - William Pitt, Earl of Chatham and British Prime Minister, 1766 to 1778. 

Spotted from: Business Insider

Anonymous To “Destroy” Sony’s Online Network for SOPA Support

With Sony’s online service hacked and brought down earlier in the year by internet activists Anonymous, gamers everywhere suffered from the downtime of the PlayStation Network and its subsequent hack. Unfortunately, if you thought that it was all over, then you’d sadly be wrong – Anonymous seems to have declared war on Sony, again.

YouTube channel TheAnonMessage uploaded the following video on Google’s video service:

Hello, SONY.
We are Anonymous.

It has come to the attention of the Anonymous activist community that you have chosen to stand by the Stop Online Piracy Act. This act will halt online businesses and restrict access to many sites for many users. Supporting SOPA is like trying to throw an entire company from off a bridge. Your support to the act is a signed death warrant to SONY Company and Associates. Therefore, yet again, we have decided to destroy your network. We will dismantle your phantom from the internet. Prepare to be extinguished. Justice will be swift, and it will be for the people, whether some like it or not. Sony, you have been warned.

To those doubting our powers. We’ve infiltrated the servers of Bank of America, The United States Department of Defense, The United Nations, and Lockheed Martin. In one day.

For their approval to SOPA, we have also declared that our fury be brought upon the following persons. Justin Bieber. Lady Gaga. Kim Kardashian. and Taylor Swift.

Operation Blackout, engaged.
Operation Mayhem, engaged.
Operation LulzXmas, engaged.

We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.

Supporters of SOPA, you should’ve expected us.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the highly controversial bill that, if passed, would give the US government and copyright holders powers to block access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods”. But SOPA has received growing criticism by free speech activists and tech companies like Google and Facebook due to the vague terminology of the bill, which could mean sites like YouTube (or even PSLS) could be blocked for having copyrighted material submitted by users rather than the actual site owners.

With Sony being one of the largest publishers and producers of films, music and games, piracy has severely impacted their profits, and have a vested interest in SOPA being passed. While it’s fair to protest SOPA and any company that supports it, Anonymous’ actions earlier this year showed that the group is willing to let normal consumers suffer from their attacks.

It’s important to note that Anonymous have no central leadership, and this video seems to be the only declaration of war against Sony so far, so it’s hard to tell just how many Anonymous ‘members’ are actually behind the new attack.

Via: http://playstationlifestyle.net/2011/12/29/anonymous-to-destroy-sonys-online-network-for-sopa-support/

—

While we don’t support SOPA ourselves, we do understand the importance of anti-piracy measures. As stated above, no one knows just how many people are behind this, but it screams “look at me, we need attention” on behalf of Anonymous. This ridiculousness needs to be stopped, and by stopped I mean Anonymous stopped.

Black Friday is upon us again, and the deals are very tempting. Electronics are always a big draw, so I check the ads to see what’s going on. Best Buy loves Black Friday, and they are playing hard for your dollar this week. Now, don’t jump to conclusions. I’m not about to start trashing Best Buy, or even chain-stores. I already told you I shop at Wal-Mart for some things.

You see, I’m a small-business owner. I can’t sell a 42″ Sharp TV for $199, like Best Buy is offering on Black Friday. In fact, (and I swear this is true), my DEALER cost on a Toshiba 40″ LCD TV is $449 (plus shipping), and I might sell it for $479. Best Buy wins! Hip, hip, hooray!

Now, am I mad at Best Buy for offering a TV like that a price that low? Not at all. It’s a decent TV (not as good as the Toshiba) at a sleep-on-the-sidewalk price. In some respects, I am not in competition with Best Buy, as we offer two very different services. I clown on them from time to time, but I have purchased plenty of products from them myself over the years, and for the most part the experience has been OK.

It is estimated by the National Retail Federation that holiday shopping this year will be 2.8% higher than 2010, and hit $465.6 billion. That’s a big pie to share. So while I can’t price-compete with certain products on Black Friday, I can offer a bit of advice and direction.

Flat Panel TVs

I have written extensively on the differences between plasma, LCD and LED/LCD. In short, plasma has gotten a black eye for years over its supposed short half-life span of 60,000 hours. (That 20 years at 8 hours usage per day, but who’s counting?) Plasma still offers the most natural picture, consistently wins best TV viewing experience, etc. I love plasma, and so do many of my clients. (It should come as little surprise that you won’t find top-shelf plasmas at bargain basement prices this weekend, but I digress.) In my home, one of the TV watch is a 60″ 720p plasma that is more than eight years old. Not exactly cutting-edge technology, but it still produces a rich, vivid picture that LCD can’t touch.

If you are looking for a TV for the bedroom, kid’s room or back patio, grab one of the Black Friday specials. Target has a 46″ Westinghouse for $298! (Westinghouse… don’t they make light bulbs and air conditioners!?)

One important thing to remember is that for every HD TV in your home, you need either an HD cable box or an HD satellite receiver to receive HD programming. A large HD TV (even a cheap one) looks worse on basic cable than the little 24″ TV you’ve had since 1993. It’s like a giant magnifying glass, and it wants to see and display high definition.

But if you are ready for an upgrade on your primary TV, please don’t waste your money on the cheapest deal without doing a bit of research first. It may or may not make sense to buy your TVs from BSUN Media, but it would be smart to consult with us and help you make the right purchase. The truth is we are very competitive in price with most online and brick-and-mortar retailers. We just offer a higher level of customer service.

TV Mounts and Accessories

Here is where it get’s a bit more interesting. When you purchase your TV from Sam’s Club or Target or Best Buy, the eager young sales associate will pressure you to buy a mount, power conditioner andtheir super-duper HDMI cables. This is the time I beg you, plead with you, to say “No, thank You.”

He will continue on, in a slightly more firm tone to his voice:  ”Our mounts are specifically designed for this TV.” Your response: “No thanks.”

His brow will furrow with rage, and his fists will silently clench, and his robotic training will dig deep to find a chink in your armor.   “Our HDMI cables have been clinically tested to bring happiness even to dark orphanages in southern Asia! You must buy them, you must… you MUST!” Be firm, but say no.

Let me explain. The profits for the store are in the cables, mounts and accessories. Now, of course I am all for business making a fair profit, mine included. But when the products they sell are inferior and more costly than mine, I have to intervene. We install countless TVs every year. We hang them from pipes, on walls, on fireplaces, you name it. I know more about TV mounts than a normal person should, and the store brand mounts are, for the part, pure junk. Typically I would say you get what you pay for, but in this department you pay far more than you should for products laughably inferior to professional grade.

The BSUN Media Way

We installed some TVs this past week for a client who bought the mounts with the TVs, and hired us to do the installation. Usually I insist on using our Strong Technologies mounts, but I decided to be nice and use the store brand. I won’t bore you with the technical or structural details, but it was a nightmare. Trust me, avoid the mounts and talk to me.

As for HDMI cables, you will be encouraged to buy gold-plated, diamond-studded cables hand-made by craftsman in Germany who don’t marry so they can focus completely on the quality transport of electrons over copper. If you want to spend $175 on a piece of wire that sends a digital (numbers) signal from one device to another, PLEASE call me! Seriously, we offer great quality HDMI cables that start at just $22.

Surge Suppressors/Power Conditioners

Another one of those “You really need one of these products to protect your investment” products. Is it true? Absolutely. In fact, I would estimate in the last 18 months I have installed more than $100,000 worth of equipment due to lightning strikes and power surges. Having said that, there is no product that I am aware of that will absolutely protect a home theater from a direct lightning strike. That’s why we have home owner’s insurance.

Quality surge suppressors are great at keeping a wall between your stuff and voltage surges coming in from the power lines, which does happen. A $19 unit is essentially an extension cord, with no particular value other than more outlets. You should look for a model that offers a guarantee for anything connected to it. For example, the entry level Episode Surge Suppressor I sell comes with a lifetime $25K warrantee protecting anything connected to it. It costs $99, and it’s worth every penny. For larger, more complex systems we have battery back-up systems and voltage stabilizers, but that’s not really Black Friday friendly is it?

All-In-One-Surround-Systems

TV speakers are generally awful. Once you make the investment on the big TV, the sales associate is going to remind how much better the experience will be with surround sound. Everyone has surround sound! Even pets in Bel Air, California have little surround sound systems in their dog houses! (I just made that up, but it could be true.) Next you will be presented with an array of kits we call them…

Seriously?

HTIBs: Home Theater In a Box. They contain the speakers, subwoofer, surround amplifier and Blu-ray player all in one box. They even color-code the wires!

Now let me proceed with a bit of caution here. If you have $19/month of disposable income, you don’t need a surround system, you need groceries. But if you can afford and appreciate a certain degree of quality, you should pay attention. HTIB’s are the lowest form of surround sound. HTIB are to home theater’s as what mopeds are to motorcycle enthusiasts. They have their place, but they aren’t home theater. And, you get what you pay for.

Best Buy is offering a Samsung 1000-watt home theater system (Blu-ray, speakers, subwoofer!) for $199. That’s incredible! It is sort of on-par with the cheapest car in the world, the Tata Nano, which sells for 100,000 rupees ($2500) in India. It will get you to where you want to, for the most part, hopefully.

We take a bit more pride in our designs, and truthfully I can’t build you a surround system for $199. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy the Samsung, but don’t expect it to wow your friends, or your ears.

White-Glove Installation

I know the routine. Remember our frisky little friend from before, trying to push you to buy the mounting bracket? He’s going to size you up and suggest that you are not capable of mounting a TV yourself, you should hire the store’s well-trained professionals to do it for you. Be strong my friend, this is a vital decision. You must not crumble.

He will talk about the weight of a TV, and the dangers associated with having a TV fall off the wall and crushing entire classrooms of children if not installed by the White-Glove professionals his store has on staff. At this point you must smile and say, “No thanks, I have that covered.”

Veins will bulge on his forehead! He may need a drink of water to keep from exploding! With teeth clenched, and his voice now a frightening rasp, he will seethe, “Covered? You have that… covered?”

Your response should be, “Yep, it’s covered. I just need the TV.”

All jokes aside, I have seen (and cleaned up) plenty of “white-glove” install jobs. When you are dealing with an 800 number and guy with 7 stops on his clipboard, brace yourself for a bad experience. Save time, money and a headache and call us first to get it done right.

Wrap It Up

I’m like you. I love a bargain, but I also love value. Many of our installations are running smoothly years after the money was invested, with unmatched customer service and attention to detail. Sure, we can sell you a TV, but first we will meet with you, and ask a lot of questions. We will look at the space, make suggestions, and most importantly, listen. The design we come up with will be yours, to match your wish list and budget. No surprises, no pressure.

Black Friday has virtually overtaken Thanksgiving, and that’s too bad. I love Thanksgiving as a time to pause and truly give thanks to God for family, friends, and the countless blessings we have received.

This Friday the stores will be exploding with some too-good-to-be-true deals. There will be music, cinnamon rolls, coffee and crowds of eager, sleepy shoppers. It has become an American tradition, and I’ve saved quite a few dollars myself. Just spend a bit of time measuring short-term savings versus long-term value on your electronic purchases, and you are way ahead of the pack.

Will I be sitting on a cold concrete floor this Friday morning? I doubt it, but I’ll think about you if I wake up early.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Brad Sundberg
B-SUN MEDIA SYSTEMS SOUTH
251.990.6599

Owner and TurkReno Incorporated Client Brad Sundberg brings many years of unique experience to the table. Early in his career he worked with Michael Jackson as technical director on the albums, “Bad”, “Dangerous”, and “HIStory”, as well as Quincy Jones’ incredible album, “Back On The Block.” These projects led him to begin working in the homes of many of his studio clients and their friends. In the early 90′s, Michael Jackson asked Brad to start building music and video systems at Neverland, and that was the start of BSUN. Through the years Brad has designed and installed systems in Los Angeles, New York, Florida, France and England. His studio background (he is a voting member of the GRAMMYs) gives him a distinct edge when it comes to sonic quality, and he loves new challenges, large or small.

Brad has been happily married to Debbie since 1985, and lives in Fairhope with his four beautiful daughters.

Four years ago, if you would have asked me to sign up for Twitter I would have refused, laughed at you and mocked it as the next MySpace. So what was it that stopped us four years ago? Privacy concerns? Not wanting to play into what we thought may be a fad? Refusing to adopt new technology (weird to hear here, I know.)? It’s obvious we’re on Twitter, enjoy ourselves being there and interact with a pretty entertaining number of people and brands. So I’d say it’s probably a mix of all of the above. But we just keep Tweeting!

As I sit here writing this, I have two memories come to mind “before Twitter”. The first is a radio broadcast on NPR, I believe. It was about the growing concern of Internet privacy discussing how we were becoming a culture of over-sharers – letting complete strangers into our innermost thoughts. The broadcast went on talk about Facebook’s polices, how people weren’t able to actually delete their profiles and how the content when shared became a part of Facebook. Then the talk became more centric around a younger audience who were already sharing everything in their lives and already feeling the sting of being fired because of what they posted they did last Friday on Facebook. And how Facebook’s policies were already longer than the constitution. It put me on edge and I joined in with the rest of the people who reacted to the media and committed “Facebook suicide“.

Before you go off the deep end and think that “Facebook suicide” is actual suicide, it’s not. It’s actually the process of completely removing everything that you shared, posted, linked, removing every tag you were tagged in – virtually vanishing and removing your face from Facebook. Since I already had a pretty good feel for Social Media and was seeing Digg and Mixx die, I knew as an advertiser I had to do something to drive traffic and attention to gain business on the Internet. Reddit was a no-go. At the time, I certainly wasn’t inspired to do what I do on Facebook today. Google Wave was horrible. I had no choice; I had to join Twitter. And it was awesome.

The second memory is one that comes from about 2,500 tweets in to participating on Twitter when I was being asked to teach a group how to use and market with social media platform. The same philosophy that I taught then I still have to this day. Be real and engage people. No one sits in a dark room actually expecting people to come to them and be social. You have to go outside, do things that you enjoy and engage others that enjoy those things, too. For me, a lot of my time was spent playing video games or doing introverted things. But I learned some valuable lessons. Talking to people can open doors. And if you don’t know how to converse, it makes it even more difficult. I don’t have any of my notes from my lecture, but several thousand tweets later, following and un-following lots of different types of personalities, the notes have pretty much become embedded.

Twitter still is a confusing platform. The searches people do to find you are all based off of what you say. A human search engine, sort of. I remember people being baffled about hash tags and know some who still are or who will complain about what the top trending topics are. You see, Twitter is contextual and somewhat like Facebook, you start to meet people you have similar interests in. A hashtag in 2008 could connect you with likeminded people pretty quickly and to this day still does. But then there was the even more baffling limit of 140 characters. People began shortening their thoughts, seeing it as a restriction. I saw it as a challenge. What better to do than mix hash tags with a topic that interests you. Conversations were abound and people were sharing what was happening and what they thought instantly. The pressure to share “what’s on your mind” was and is still there, but it, as the broadcast predicted, became easier and easier to do.

I decided to jot down some thoughts that I came to know as truisms for Twitter over the years, hence this post. To some, you may disagree and to others, it may be exactly why you seem to be beating your head against a wall and what you can do about it to soften those hard knocks.

1. Follow Friday is a Twitter tradition. Participate in it. You may have someone you’re following who you’ve seen using the hashtags #FollowFriday and #FF with a list of @ names following. Quite simply, this is how you participate in Follow Friday. My business partner at the time and I came up with a not-so-unique idea since Twitter has evolved called TWIFF (TWItter Follow Friday) that generated a list of your followers in a random order and in no more than 110 to 120 characters a list of automated tweets. In less than 10 minutes every Friday we ran our scripts, tweeted out the entire list of people we followed back and who mutually followed us as well in nice organized tweets. The key was to be random every time since duplicate tweets at the time were frowned upon. Nevertheless, instant Twitter karma, more followers mentioning us, new followers every Friday and it brightened someone’s day every time to be mentioned. Eventually Twitter’s staff got pretty mad and didn’t like the volume of traffic we were creating and suspended us and probably would do the same if you recreated TWIFF. Today, the API restricts us from really going about Follow Friday in a not so annoying way, but at least Twitter has stopped frowning upon “scheduled tweets” or automation. I digress. Follow Friday is a tradition and a way to show your followers that you remember talking to them and want to engage them. So why not tweet more than 120 characters?

2. Try not to tweet using more than 120 characters. In short, you’re taking up room that someone could use to reply and quote you. When we joined Twitter, being mentioned was king. It somehow ranked you higher in their algorithm to be seen the more you were talked about — the more you were engaged. You still can easily spin a topic or subject into a conversation or cut yourself out of one just by re-wording what you said into something shorter. But why not just say what you’re thinking?

3. Don’t share irrelevant information; Be concise and informative. For example, no one wants to read what the weather is like unless they ask. Sure, you may love the sunny day or hate the hurricane you’re living through, but that’s what The Weather Channel is for. Try to talk about something that excites you. And if the weather really does excite you, share it and engage them with it. And preferably with a hashtag so other people who enjoy talking ’bout the weather get to know you. But if you’re a brand or business, how do you share your products and services?

4. No one wants to be sold something on Twitter. Do you remember the last time you went to a car dealership and wanted to have an annoying salesman engage you for the purposes of luring you into his office to buy a brand new vehicle? If you said “Yes” to that, we should have a chat. Soon. No one wants to be haggled, annoyed, told how great one service or good is over and over…and over. It comes across the same way the bastardized idea of a used-car salesman is. Sure you can be excited for a product or brand, and if you follow us you know we have one in mind we love to talk about. The difference is that we use those products or services to engage in a conversation with people we’ve gotten to know over the years. Or maybe we find something that we love at the office, like our Keurig coffee machine. The coffee machine is worth talking about because it’s cool and we like it! The difference is we’re not trying to sell you one. Perhaps we are losing a potential market by not tweeting about what we can do for Web Design or what we’ve done for our clients in the past, but Twitter is a “right here, right now” social media platform. And what about those people who won’t shut up?

5. Chances are the people who won’t stop talking, who are generally annoying or honestly don’t get Twitter have a disproportionate follow-back ratio. People are not engaging them for some reason. If you scroll down their timeline and take a moment to read what they’ve had to say in the past, you may find instantly that you’re not going to enjoy engaging them. One really good reason is because they’re a feed, or rather they have linked their Facebook profile to Twitter thinking they can knock two birds out with one stone. No one wants to read Facebook when they’re on Twitter. Why talk to someone or interact with a brand you don’t like. If you like Deadmau5, it’s probably likely that you’re not going to get along on Twitter with someone who likes to talk about Justin Bieber constantly. Proportion of follow-backs, I said? Yes, I did. Before you hit that follow button, look at how many people someone is following and more importantly, how many people are following that tweeter back. One of the most important things I’ve learned is NOT to follow others on Twitter who are following way more people than are following them back. Easily 9 out of 10 times within a week, I’ll unfollow them. What about celebrities and huge corporate companies?

6. Engage those you find interesting! If I didn’t make my point clear enough, this is the part where it becomes crystal clear. Sure, celebrities may have hundreds of thousands of followers and are only following a few dozen back. Most of them followed the people they’re following back because they are relevant, concise, don’t over share, don’t try to sell them something and have engaged them in conversation — or at least attempted to — on more than one occasion. And most of the time they’ll have a cute little sticker showing they’re “verified” when they’re actually who they say they are. Unlike the account @Apple, which at one point simply had “I like apples” as the only tweet, it’s not actually Apple in Cupertino. Occasionally you’ll engage a celebrity out of dislike, which someone here at the office did, and they responded. Jimmy Kimmel. I don’t find him funny and neither did who tweeted at them. It was one of his very first tweets and apparently it “bruises his balls“, but it got some interesting attention and engagement. Here’s the thing: when a famous personality engages you, the most important thing to do is be yourself. After all, that’s what Twitter is all about.

So I’ll end this with two sites that I’ve found extremely helpful in managing the numbers game of followers on Twitter. The first is a site simply called Friend or Follow. You don’t have to sign up or sign in. Simply type in your username and it will show you who you’re following that’s not following you back. That annoying tweeter who you want to get rid of, I can almost guarantee you he’s probably already un-followed you as Twitter has made it pretty difficult and not so obvious for the average user to know the status of being followed back.

The second site I give high kudos to. It’s called TwitCleaner. You sign in, allow it to scan who you’re following and it will give an analysis of your followers back to you that’s surprisingly brutally honest. The site was created by a New Zealander named Si Dawson. (Just to nail the other point home, he’s following less people than are following him back. Quality usually comes from people who show this proportion.) I’ve yet to find a more accurate tool on Twitter to gauge just how many people you’re following are really just trashing your timeline up. It will tell you if they never engage others, if they are nothing but app abusers, if they have been inactive on Twitter for a period of time and so much more. Invaluable information to someone who is serious about quality and not quantity. Go use it, we promise it’s amazing and tweet that TurkReno sent you for good measure.

• April 19th – Amazon:

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We’re excited to announce the launch of live HTTP streaming for Amazon CloudFront, AWS’s easy-to-use content delivery network.

Using Amazon CloudFront with Amazon EC2 running Adobe’s Flash Media Server and Amazon Route 53 (AWS’s DNS service), you can now easily and cost-effectively deliver your live video via AWS. And, we’ve made it simple to get started by creating an AWS CloudFormation template that handles all of the provisioning and sequencing for all the AWS resources you need for this live streaming stack.

Portal 2 on Steam, XB360 and PS3, SOCOM 4 Launches.

• April 20th – GigaOm:

The first graph gives an idea of normal Amazon EC2 response times over the last 30 days, but notice the US-EAST region start to spike at April 20.

The outage that affected a hundreds of applications running in the provider’s US-EAST region is almost resolved, more than 24 hours after a “networking event” took down a number of popular services, including EC2, Elastic Block Storage and Relational Database Service.

We continue to see progress in recovering volumes, and have heard many additional customers confirm that they’re recovering. Our current estimate is that the majority of volumes will be recovered over the next 5 to 6 hours.

First 24 hours of outage (worldwide)

Foursquare, Quora, Amazon, Sony, Apple, Reddit, Hootsuite, Wattpad – All went down.

• April 21st – Sony:

While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running.

• April 22nd – Sony:

An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services.

• April 22nd – ZDNet:

Amazon’s Web Services outage: End of cloud innocence?

• April 24th – 1:42 AM Amazon:

Service disruption: Database instance connectivity and latency issues

In line with the most recent Amazon EC2 update, we wanted to let you know that the team continues to be all-hands on deck working on the remaining database instances in the single affected Availability Zone. It’s taking us longer than we anticipated. When we have an updated ETA or meaningful new update, we will make sure to post it here. But, we can assure you that the team is working this hard and will do so as long as it takes to get this resolved.

At the time, Amazon’s AWS Service Health Dashboard was at red.

• April 24 – 2:08 PM Amazon:

The number of Database Instances without access continues to reduce steadily. As the access to these remaining database instances is restored, they will become usable without additional action on your end. If your Database Instance is not yet available, you also have the option to initiate a Point-in-time-Restore operation using the steps outlined in our previous post at 10:08 AM PDT. We are in the process of contacting this small set of customers who still do not have access to their Database Instances.

• April 25 – 8:20AM Sony:

I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online. Unfortunately, I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time.

As we previously noted, this is a time intensive process and we’re working to get them back online quickly. We’ll keep you updated with information as it becomes available. We once again thank you for your patience.

• April 25 – 7:39PM Amazon:

We are digging deeply into the root causes of this event and will post a detailed post-mortem.

Amazon and Sony appear to be taking a very similar approach. So was the attack on the PlayStation Network, on Amazon Web Services, or are they one in the same? The answer is: No, they are not.

—

Others blame Anonymous who had taken credit for a separate hacking attempt earlier in the month towards SCEA. Some believe that this is also partially motivated by Geohot’s impending court rulings. First IANAL, but it would seem there’s a certain level of legality that has been crossed. Clearly he’s not getting hired right now by Sony at the moment because he’s probably being prosecuted by the US DOJ because he’s IN FEDERAL COURT. When a Corporation files a complaint of that caliber, especially one with a DMCA, Copyright Infringement and allegations of Computer Fraud and other crimes, that could be the act of a number of different things including faking the identify of Sony, misuse of the Sony logo or other things that we’ll never hear about. “Geohot” may deserve what’s coming to him just like any one who has walked across a line that fine. He alone will decide what he does with his life at that point.

First, start by defining your business in as few sentences as possible. If you are creating profiles on the top social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you want to have a consistent description of your business on each site. Evaluate what categories or industries you most likely fall under. This is the beginning of developing your personal online brand. Develop a list of 10 descriptive keywords that you can consistently use to describe your business and that match up with your websites content. You have to think of yourself as a client who is searching for your service information online. If you were the customer what keywords would you type in a search engine to find your products and services? If you offer more than one service it is important to develop a list of keywords relevant to each service.

This may seem simple however it takes a lot of planning and developing to determine what keywords are most beneficial to use. You have to consider what keywords your competitors are using, what the monthly search rate is for your keywords (Are the words to broad? Do you have a chance to rank well for these words?), if you keywords not searched often enough, and so on. It is important to find the appropriate keywords most suitable for your business that you have a chance of ranking high for and optimizing those words throughout you’re online marketing campaign.

Thorough descriptions, professional web design, relevant content, optimized keywords and content, targeted niche audience, these are all important factors to evaluate for your online brand and must always remain consistent across the board. If you are in the beginning of developing your Business Website then TurkReno can help you focus on Website Development, Website Design, and Online Marketing, such as Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click Management. Choosing one business to help develop all three categories will be best for your online branding to stay consistent. Luckily, there are companies, such as TurkReno, that focus in great depth on Online Branding and can truly bring success to your website through online marketing.