Joe Levi

The final episode of Jericho aired yesterday and brought the second season's theme to a tidy end. If you missed it you can watch the full episode online at CBS.com. Spoilers follow, you've been warned.

From the beginning I've loved Jericho.

In the first season, a nuclear attack is made against the country (something that's sadly becoming more of a reality) and the little town of Jericho, KS is spared, but caught up in the middle of everything. They avoid the imediate blasts and the aftermath of fallout and radiation, but find themselves caught up with having to provide not only for themselves but for the influx of refugees that are left homeless and wounded by the attack.

The town pulls together and makes ends meet, but illustrates the potential for internal strife, the complications of free-trade in a communal emergency, the tensions with the neighboring towns (New Breen in particular), and eventually leads into what will become a full-blown battle. Season one ends with the series being cancelled.

Due mainly to a grass roots, online campaign, CBS sees that online numbers really do matter, and when they factor online viewership into the equation, the ratings for the show jumped almost an entire point (which is miraculous, but telling of where media distrubution is heading). You could watch Jerich the same day it aired online at CBS.com, though the XBOS Live Marketplace, and rumor has it through Netflix on demand and iTunes as well (Zune Marketplace where where you?). That's an awefully large chunk of viewers not to include in ratings.

The campaign was successful and fans were given another season (albeit only 7 episodes split in two groups).

Season two stared with the Cheyenne government's military (under a new President-elect, flying a new flag, amd going by the moniker "The Allied States of America") cluster bombing the boarder skirmish between Jericho and New Breen. Then the occupation began -- under the guise of a reconstruction. Season two changed from a small town pulling together and addressing simple needs such as power (generated via wind turbines), food planted and grown on family farms, and salt from the town's mine traded with trading posts for other staples to something entirely different: how a town deals with an assumed reconstruction turned occupation by a corrupt government using private security forces to handle everything from reconstruction projects to trading in old for new currency.

I won't go in to details about how the season and the series ultimately end, but it involved a piece of evidence that will prove the conspiracy and tip the power away from the new Cheyenne government and the Allied States of America, the statement by the mayor of Jericho at the Constitutional Convention that a government prefers a citizenry that can't shoot back after the Second Amendment was written out of the New Constitution (before lunch!), and the Embassy of the Independant Republic of Texas stepping in to expose the evidence to anyone that will listen.

Season two ends with two Cheyenne fighters being shot down with the Texas Air National Guard, and the assumption that America is poised for a second Civil War. Even the occupation of Jericho by Cheyenne's Military is convinced they're on the wrong side and tear the Allied flag from their uniforms.

It's really a must-see, and to the best of my knowledge you can still watch every episode streamed from CBS.com (not in high-definition, and not in true full-screen, but good enough to beat buying the episodes on XBOX Live Marketplace).

Let me know what you think... and how you're preparing your family just in case something like that actually happens...

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I recently sent the following letter to Senators Orrin Hatch (R, UT) and Robert Bennett (R, UT). Replies follow.

Dear Senator:

I urge you to OPPOSE the nomination of Michael J. Sullivan for the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Under his leadership, the ATF has gone berserk. Sure, the problems at ATF didn't originate with him, but Sullivan has certainly done nothing to put out the fire.

In July, a House committee report on HR 3093 rebuked the ATF for pursuing license revocations and denials against firearms dealers based on "violations that consist largely of [minor] record keeping errors of various types" that are unlikely to impede tracing investigations or prosecution of individuals who use firearms in crime.

Red's Trading Post in Idaho is one of the many gun dealers that have been frequently harassed by the ATF. Even though one ATF agent told the manager that Red's was "one of the best small gun shops" he'd ever seen, the ATF has continued its assault on this gun shop (which has been in business for decades) for minor clerical mistakes and failing to put up a poster.

According to WorldNetDaily, one judge who is familiar with the Red's Trading Post case found "the ATF speaks of violations found during the inspections of 2000 and 2005, but fails to reveal that additional investigations in 2001 and 2007 revealed no violations or problems." The judge also noted the ATF was exaggerating the situation by "double counting" some violations.

Finally, the fact that Ted Kennedy wants to work with Sullivan on gun control is reason enough to find another candidate to head up the ATF. Kennedy said, "We'll miss him in Massachusetts, but he’ll be a strong leader at ATF, and I look forward to working with him on key issues on gun control."

Because of these concerns, I would ask that you please oppose the Sullivan nomination, and instead work with Gun Owners of America and the NRA to find a nominee who will protect the rights of innocent gun owners.

Senator Robert Bennett (R, UT) did not reply.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R, UT) replied that he thinks the "most important criteria is the nominee's qualifications for the specific post [and in] general [he does] not believe that nominees for any position should be held up for purely political reasons."

In other words, someone's blatant disregard for one of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America is a "political reason" and shouldn't sway his or her nomination and/or appointment to any position within the Executive Branch.

Shame on you, Senator Hatch, for not upholding the oath that you swore to "protect and defend the Constitution" by doing everything in your power to block this nomination.

And shame on you, Senator Bennett, for not caring enough to reply.

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I keep getting phone calls from 702-520-1355 and 954-692-7602. The first time I answered the female caller identified herself as calling from an "auto warranty center." I asked if she was making a telemarketing call to which she replied in the affirmative. I asked her to place my number on their do not call list, she said she would and thanked me for my time.

Almost every weekday since I've gotten another call from the same number; I let them all ring to voicemail -- no message is left.

When I return the call the number rings several times before a computer picks up and gives me options to have my number removed from their call list, which I've done, and it obviously doesn't work.

There are two "loopholes" that prevent me from taking them to court and claiming my damages:

1. My wife and I just bought a new (previously owned) van, I assume the company that we bought it from sold our information to this company, which might be construed as "doing business with" them (probably not, but it could be argued). If you do business with a company (i.e., your local telco) you cannot sue them under the telemarketing statues because they do business with you, even if the call is advertising a product or service that they offer.
2. They call me at work, on my work line (not at home, or on my personal cell line). I don't own this line, so it could be argued that I'm not the damaged party, and my employer would have to take action against them -- which I doubt they'd do.

So, I'll call the company that sold us the van and tell them to discontinue selling/trading/giving away our information, and to track down whomever they've sold/traded/given our information to and get them to stop. If they don't or are unwilling to do so I'll let all ya'll know who it is so you can have that information available before you do business with them.

I'll send them a copy of this before I "out them" so I can get their official comment as well... Stay tuned.

--- 

They called again, it's an auto-dialer, so I had to listen to their message and press "1" (I think) to get to a service representative, which took about a minute of being on hold. When I finally got through a female asked me if she could get the make, model, and year of my vehicle; I told her "no, but you can tell me how I can get off your call-list." I was stern, but polite and professional.

Without a word, she hung up.

---

Update:

I just got a call from 954-692-7602, same recording which says basically "Your automotive warranty has expired, it's not too late to extend coverage. This is your last followup notice and you will not be called again. Press #1 to talk with a representative, press #2 to have your name permanently removed from our call-back list."

This time (since I've already gone through the "take me off your list" option previously, I opted to talk with a rep again (last time I asked them to remove me from their list and she hung up), this time when asked (by a male) what the year make and model of my car were I responded that it's a 2008 Tesla Roadster. He said, "okay, let just a moment [clack clack clack -- busy signal]." They'd hung up yet again, apparently a 2008 is too new a vehicle to worry about (or they couldn't find the Tesla Roadster in their database). In any event, there's another call that I got and was hung up on. Total time wasted on the phone and to document it: 5 minutes.

--- 

On a related note, as a way to set up a legal defense (if need be), by way of public notice any person, entity, company, or dialer related to and/or affiliated with the aforementioned phone numbers and/or solicitations of automotive warranty products/services is hereby given notice to cease and desist any and all contact with me via any means or methods of contact (including, but not limited to) my work phone number.

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One of the objectives of MIX (as evidenced by its name) is to allow business decision makers, designers, and developers to meet up and come together for a common objective: improving the current web.

This year I did a much better job of meeting up than at last MIX. Here's who I met up with:

• Scott "Brolo" Benner, Programmer-at-Arms, www.Jinx.com (clothing company)
• Tor Langlo, Chief Architect, www.KodaSoftware.com (software design & architecture)
• Geoffrey Emery, ASP.NET guru, Blog.GeoffreyEmery.com
• David Koopman, Technology Architecture and R&D Architect, www.GoDaddy.com
• Tamir Melamed, VP of Technology, www.WeatherBug.com
• Alec Bryte, Actor, www.AlecBryte.com
• Pureum Kim, Assistant Director of Business Development, www.MotionCloud.net
• Joshua Jacobson, Y! Messenger Product Manager, www.Yahoo.com
• Eron W., www.Microsoft.com

Did I miss anyone?

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I use Feedburner to host my RSS feed, which helps off-load some of the server demand from my shared host, and seems to make things a bit faster, and also exposes some additional tools and features to both myself any my readers (that would be you).

Here's the latest nugget I've uncovered with Feedburner: Subscribe via email.

Using a form or an email link, you can enable your audience to subscribe to your blog via email (rather than the typical RSS aggregator approach).

For example, here's the JoeLevi.com email subscription link, give it a try and let me know how it works for you!

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

 

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I almost forgot to mention, MIX09 will be held at The Venetian in Las Vegas Nevada (same as always) March 18th-20th, 2009.

(Hat tip to Laurent Duveau for this nugget of information!)

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1. Two ASP.NET server controls
   1. Both ship in SDK: System.Web. Silverlight.dll
   2. Deploys to /bin folder
   3. Available at design-time within Visual Studio 2008
2. MediaPlayer control
   1. E-commerce sites are going more and more to media right inline inside the store
   2. No more need for RealPlayer or other (proprietary) players
   3. Training on an intranet becomes much easier with rich media
3. Client customizations
   1. hook various media events
      1. embedded media markers
      2. media start/stop
      3. chapter events
   2. javascript type provides access to "VCR" (should that say "DVR") - style controls

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Using Windows Live Services and Astoria-style syntax, you can easily authenticate a user to their Live Spaces and allow direct interaction into and out of it.

This demo showed authentication, displaying folders in a dropdownlist, creating a new folder, displaying a list of images in the folder, and how to create a datasource that you can then bind a gridview (or other bindable control) to interact with the stuff in Live Spaces (edit, delete, etc. directly from an asynchronous gridview)

The demo provided ways to do all this using string building as well as LINQ. Very cool stuff.

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(This was a hands-on session, so not much time to blog.)

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Scott Dickens, Lead Program Manager, MS

1. MSIE8 will render in most standard mode by default; goal is predictability across browsers.
2. Trident (MSHTML) is Microsoft's rendering engine.
1. better platform for typography
2. designed with CSS 2.1 spec in-hand
3. deprecation of hasLayout
1. blocks had layout, other stuff didn't
2. it's gone now
3. Tenets
1. Better support for web standards
1. css2.1
2. Javascript
3. OM improvements

To make your page render in IE7 Standards mode you need to add a meta tag to your header"

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

Common Name    Compatibility mode value

Quirks                 IE=5

IE& Standards     IE=7

IE8Standards       IE=8

Always Use Latest Mode IE=edge

How to check what mode a given page is using

<script type="text/javascript">

document.write ("This page is using ");

document.documentMode + " compatibility mode");

</script>

User Agent Strings

Make sure your UA sniffer strings are written correctly (MSIE8 >= MSIE 7).

Conditional Comments

CCs have been revved to include MSIE8 <!-- [if gte IE 7] > ...

JavaScript Fixes

Fixes now in GetElementByID, so if your JS is using that, it might be broken for you, too.

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