Oof. Not good news for people who use Media Temple to host their sites.
GoDaddy is a sleazy company.
I put them in the up there with Dov Charney and his American Apparel.

Yes, MacGyver actually said that.

So, this whole government shutdown? Republicans have had it planned for a while:

With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, conservatives believe that the public is behind them. Although the law’s opponents say that shutting down the government was not their objective, the activists anticipated that a shutdown could occur — and worked with members of the Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a red line against a law they despise.

A defunding “tool kit” created in early September included talking points for the question, “What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for it?” The suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: “We are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.”
Partisan politics. So effective.

Look at that mess. This website is so broken they can’t even be bothered with loading CSS while they’re trying to fix the backend. Two weeks into the Affordable Care Act rollout and this is what New Yorkers are dealing with.
And it’s not just New Yorkers. The national website, healthcare.gov, is so broken that people are having trouble even logging in. As bad as New York’s site is, at least I was able to progress to the eligibility portion of the process before it finally shit itself completely.
Republicans in Congress and conservative pundits have been working up some effective framing about the health care rollout this past week. On this morning’s talk shows, it went something like this:
“This isn’t a glitch. The system is breaking down…repeal Obamacare.”
To be sure, the technology failures plaguing the rollout are serious and inexcusable, especially considering the government had three years to develop this program, and spent more than 400 million dollars, just for the national website. Many millions more have, of course, been spent on the twenty or so state-run sites. The technical requirements for running these exchanges is enormous, but doable. As Paul Krugman tried to point out on This Week, before he was shouted down by a wave of talking points, the exchange in the nation’s largest state, California, has been working well, auguring the fact that given time, the technical challenges will be overcome.
What is disheartening is that, even though these pundits and politicians are reading from a script, they do seem to believe that the technical problems mean the health care program is fundamentally untenable, and they couldn’t be more wrong. These are people who make their livings in the world of partisan proclamations and ideological utterances. They tend to be middle-aged, and probably began their careers hammering away on IBM Selectrics. They wouldn’t know how a webapp works from a hole in the ground. When I see Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius stumble through an interview on The Daily Show, or Peggy Noonan spout her rhetoric at Krugman, I wonder why I have yet to see any of these shows bring on someone with experience building websites.
I want to see someone on these shows who has had experience with phased rollouts (something the government unwisely decided not to do). I want to see someone who has spent weeks or months whittling down a bug list. Most importantly, I want to hear from the people who saw this train wreck coming from months away. No web project this fucked up could have possibly been a surprise to the people involved. Having been on some doomed projects here and there, I can imagine the waves of feature creep and endless conference calls throughout this past spring and summer as, all of a sudden, the deadline for rollout approached.
And the reason I want to hear from these people, is because they, and only they, can give the public an accurate representation of what is happening regarding these websites. That is, they can point out that the problems are not indicative of an unworkable law. Rather, they are indicative of complex challengess that are technical in nature. And technical problems are eminently solvable. The fact that some states do have working exchanges shows that time and effort will resolve the issues plaguing the systems.
So, I have confidence that the insurance exchanges will be up and running. Critically for me, and millions of other Americans, is that the sites be fixed before the technological illiterates that run the government pull the plug. This is it. This is the only way I, and so many others, will be able to find affordable coverage. We need this more than most people can imagine. We’re not going to see the Medicare rolls expanded into universal coverage. We’re in a health care limbo whose costs in both lives and dollars is too high. The Affordable Care Act is probably the only step we’re going to see in our lifetimes towards righting an unconscionable wrong in this country. I, for one, am willing to give the law more than thirteen days before I throw up my hands in despair and declare it time to scrap the whole thing. But the people responsible for this royal fuckup aren’t making my position any easier.

Dear New York,
Your health care website is garbage. Fix it.

via Head Like and Orange

From Webdesigner Depot:

Just weeks after the successful launches of the first Firefox OS smartphones to Spain, Colombia, Venezuela and Poland, Mozilla has announced that new launches of Firefox OS smartphones will begin soon with more devices and in more markets around the world.

App designers may already know this is not “yet another platform” to factor for projects. Rather than building apps for Firefox OS — developers are able to build HTML5 apps for the Web. Part of the Firefox OS genius is that it enables developers to access the hardware of the phone by means of Web APIs.
How very 2007 of you, Firefox.
I’m sure this makes developers SUPER excited.

—George Bernard Shaw

BlackBerry Co-Founders Lazaridis, Fregin Mulling Bid to Buy Back Company

BlackBerry co-founder and former co-CEO Mike Lazaridis is considering taking a run at his former company with fellow co-founder Doug Fregin.

According to a regulatory filing released Thursday, the pair are exploring a potential takeover bid for the struggling smartphone company, which is already entertaining a $4.7 billion offer from its largest shareholder Fairfax Financial.
Because, well, why not?
Why shouldn’t he get the chance to run his company into the ground a second time?
It’s the American way.
Wait, Blackberry is Canadian, right? Shit.

Hipster Ipsum

via Flickr

A few weekends ago, while I was visiting my parents I decided to see what antique stores I could find near me in northwestern New Jersey.
My problem is always finding shops with printed matter. There’s fewer and fewer antique shops with good collections of books and magazines. Then I stumbled upon Get a Grip & More–a shop specializing in tools, antiques & electronics. What?! It didn’t seem likely I’d find a lot of printed matter, but the attitude this shop seemed to have wasn’t something The Combustion Chamber could pass up.
I was right that they didn’t have too much printed matter (although they did have some great old manuals for old 70’s Camaros). Regardless, I still managed to hit the jackpot with a 1911, second edition of History Made Visible: Croscup’s Synchronic Chart of United States History by George E. Croscup (you can find them on eBay too, if you’re interested).
The cover was a bit warped and stained but the inside pages–specifically the maps–were in great shape.
I mean, shit, look at these maps:




*A version of this post originally appeared on the The Combustion Chamber.