I wonder where the money went (Retirement song)

Chamorro comedian Mona Conception (not for the prudish)

At Mel's Old Village Pub in Washington State.

Sharktopus

Angelo Villagomez has come out and confessed to being Sharktopus.







This revelation compels some kind of reaction or response. And I've found it!

Cloud Computing

Legitimate cloud computing is the trillion dollar wave of the future. Where's your email? Hotmail? Yahoo? Gmail? If it's not on your hard drive, it's in the cloud.

Google Docs? The cloud. Google Calendar? The cloud. Use a web-based backup service? You are backed up to the cloud.

If your data is stored on some server out there in cyberspace and accessed via the Internet using any computer, you are already working in the cloud.

Even Windows Live, the blogosphere, enhanced web bookmarking and clipping services such as DiggIt! StumbleUpon, de.lic.i.ous, and EverNote, and social networking services like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are essentially extensions, or faces, of the cloud.

The beginnings of this were once called Web 2.0.

There is a shadowy side to this leviathan that will surprise you and, once grasped, deepen your understanding of just what the cloud is.

For the largest cloud in the world is actually proprietary to a criminal enterprise. It is the botnet cloud based on the Conficker worm. As explained by Spectre Group:

Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries at 230 top level domains globally, more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth, said Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at the infrastructure services firm Neustar. The biggest cloud on the planet is controlled by a vast criminal enterprise that uses that botnet to send spam, hack computers, spread malware and steal personal information and money, Joffe said.

All that bandwith is fodder for a conversation about "net neutrality," but that is another topic.

This huge "botnet cloud is available for rent and and is just about anywhere in the world. It can be used for a variety of purposes, be [it] a denial-of-service attack, spam distribution or data exfiltration," according to Spectre (emphasis added). Note "available for rent" -- by criminal enterprise. Illicit computing run on hijacked computers around the world (the cloud) without the owner's knowledge or consent.

Consider legitimate and illegitimate cloud computing:

Provider	Computers	CPUs	Bandwith
Conficker	6.4 million	18 million	28 terabits/second
Google	500,000	1 million	1,500 Gps
Amazon	160,000	320,000	300 Gps

A terabit, incidentally, is one trillion bits -- or 1,000 gigabits. So Confiker consumes almost 19 times as much bandwith as Google's cloud computing services.

Now you know how all the spam gets to you . . . .

Awesome

This is not to be missed.

Hop on over to the Unity Movement blog.

God bless American soldiers

This goes out to all our boys and girls in harm's way.

Well, well ... dispelling life's frustrating challenges

All you need is to understand the algorithims ....



And in the ego calibration category (< as if you came here for ego deflation >) 2:28!

Luddite profanity for the masses

So ... what does this say to you about the state of the world and the people who made the video?

Facebook Fever!

This is great:


Yes, I'm on Facebook too ....

Web notebooks

I recently began using Evernote and am likely to become a fan. Now Google has announced it is discontinuing Google Notebook and other projects. Cnet has come up with a list of "Seven worthy Google Notebook replacements" (including Evernote). All this points to the wave of the future, cloud computing.

Dates . . . and time

Here on Saipan, it is now 11:30 a.m. New Year's Day, January 1, 2009. I posted "A whole year ... !" a little over two hours ago. So it wasn't really posted on New Year's Eve even though it looks that way.

Thanks to time zones on the fact that the Google server that hosts this blog apparently is located on the West Coast of the U.S. -- PDT (Pacific Daylight Time), I guess a blogger really can have his cake and eat it too. End the year and open it too with a single post ....

Have a great year everybody!

A whole year . . . !

Gosh, my last post in this blog was nine months ago, and the one before it all the back to last January! I need to do something about that.

Happy New Year everybody! Welcome to 2009.

In December, it seemed as if New Year's Day 2008 had been just a couple of months back. To me, 2008 seemed like the shortest year on record -- but nothing to cheer about.

So 2008 wasn't a very good year. Now that we have said goodbye to 2008, we can look forward to a great year in 2009. Let's make it so!

Rocking for Obama

Okay, these guys aren't Jake Shimabukuro or Jimi Hendrix, but they're pretty good. This is fun, and I like it -- probably you will too.

De-Lurking

It's the Great CNMI De-Lurk, Jan. 14-18, 2008. I didn't make a banner, but I cribbed one from Majic. Here it is ...

Here's a smaller copy.

Fotten Gaga

Okay, Angelo, I'll do it. I'll post one of your pictures of the Fotten Gaga models and link it to everything in your blog with a fotten gaga label. Here goes . . .



There you go, I'm driving traffic to your blog. Maybe I'll get some blowback . . . positive blowback for my blogs.

And, people, in case you don't know, Angelo is "the Saipan Blogger." At least he says so. Says he has been so "ever since." He's on MySpace too.

Now then, there's the Saipan Blog, not to be confused with Angelo. That's Ed Stephen's compilation of columns for the Saipan Tribune. See, Ed beat Angelo to the domain name www.saipanblog.com. That's okay, tho', somebody (okay, Walt Goodridge of Side Orders and PassionProfit and Saipanpreneur and others) got www.thesaipanblogger.com domain for Angelo. These guys are the We Love Saipan Network.

Well, Angelo says Ed Stephen's blog is "Four Ex-pats bitch about Life in Paradise", but actually Ed is a pretty good writer -- sometimes informative, sometimes funny, sometimes off the wall, sometimes something else. Talking about Ed makes me think of somebody else that's been writing about Saipan for longer than most and was one of the first to make her columns available on the Net: Ruth Tighe with "On My Mind . . ."

Bovine

Just came across an interesting site out of Australia called bovination.com. It's dedicated to discussions of . . . those things we all learned from our mothers are not discussed in polite company . . . sex . . . religion . . . politics. According to their masthead, they have been "provoking the herd since 2002," and warn, "Your sacred cow is in mortal danger."

Amazing what serendipitous stuff one encounters via a Google search. Anyway, here's a tidbit about the travails of a schoolteacher in Sudan who allowed her students to name a teddy bear "Mohammed." Seems she was supposed to be publicly flogged and jailed for a year but they are letting her off with 15 days and deportation.

Its all about the morals being taught to the children, you understand. As a Sudanese local said, "She is a teacher and should be teaching her pupils to be respectful and have morals but instead she is doing the opposite."

Brings to mind Ron Hodges, Rep. Stanley Torres, and the members of the House of Representatives who supported the resolution. See! This is actually important. It is imperative keep our standards up to those of the Sudan!

First Post

I'm creating this blog as a place to collect interesting things as I surf the web from Saipan -- hence the name Sai-Treking Web Adventure (the simple blog address "webadventure" not being available).

This first now is a YouTube video of Van Morrison. Today I surfed through a site that had this as its "song of the day," so I googled it up and selected this video from the results. I was introduced to Van Morrison's music by a young lady more than 30 years ago during my college years. I still have a very fine album -- on vinyl -- but unfortunately no turntable to play it on. Over the years, I have not followed his music, but I am delighted now to see that he is one of these enduring performers. Like me, he has aged, but he is still at it -- plugging away, living life for love and doing what he does best. Or as Walt Goodridge would say, following his passion.