Dinesh D’Souza is a bad person, who makes money whipping fear and hatred. He does this under cover of a religiosity more informed by Lonesome Rhodes and Charles Coughlin than Jesus Christ.

Naturally Dinesh has come to scandal, squiring a (much) younger married woman around, introducing her as his fiance, while legally married himself. This is delicious in so may ways, not least because both he and the woman alleged to be involved with him collect fat fees describing the end of marriage if we allow two adult people of the same gender who love each other to get married.

But, as with so much in life, mindless glee is tempered by real humanity. Harold Pollack writes about how, in all of these situations, the impulse to dehumanize the object of our glee causes so much more damage. And that:

We know these stories already… I’ve spent many years working on interventions for individuals trying to avoid or to recover from harmful behaviors that damage their lives and hurt people they love… I think we should resist the ugly pack mentality, which creates a permission structure for gleeful cruelty..

Here’s my comment from that post:

I am so torn about what you wrote.

You see, I do not trust the human beast. We are natural pack animals, far too willing to trot gleefully behind the snarling (perhaps pheromone dripping?) alpha who howls the message that resonates with us. In that mad rush it doesn’t matter who or what gets trampled, savaged, ravaged, or killed in that mad dash. Our weakest, youngest, poorest, oldest, and most vulnerable all get left behind in the surge, lucky if all they end up is hungry. My impulse is to help *these* folks; my charity in time, money, and devotion goes to them.

To see someone who not only was in that pack, but sought to lead it, and profited from it, brought down by the pack? It is so very, very hard to re-humanize someone who so actively sought to de-humanize so many (just sample a little of his Dartmouth Review oeuvre), instead of chanting to push him forward into the maw of public derision and ruin.

Harold Pollack, you are a mensch, a human of the first water. For you, I’ll try.

We recently attended a Cloud Security Alliance Meetup, where Ed Hunter of Hunter Forensics discussed “Intro to eDiscovery and Forensics in the Cloud.”

Say someone sues your company, and your company is required to produce every email, every report, and every other piece of electronic data relating to the topic of the lawsuit. And say your company stores some of its data in the cloud, and perhaps the cloud provider is located in Europe, which has different privacy laws than the US. (Or even another state, which doesn’t feel it needs to comply with orders from a judge in your state.) And perhaps your data is on the same server as a completely different company’s, and that company does not want their server locked down. And perhaps we are talking petabytes of data.

As you can see, it can get very ugly very quickly.

Mr. Hunter pointed out that eDiscovery is not an IT issue; it is a legal process. Your company should have a policy that details how long you store what kinds of data, where you store it, and who is responsible for making sure it got stored. This should be handled by a cross-functional team that includes IT. Obviously, if your company must comply with standards such as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley, some of these issues are spelled out for you.

In effect, eDiscovery is a project management issue. Besides retrieving potentially huge amounts of data, you have to worry about such questions as, how many copies do you need to produce—one per litigant, or more? Stored where? Who will monitor the chain of custody and the record of access, and how? How long is this going to take, and how much will it cost?

We came away from this excellent overview completely humbled by the scope of the challenge, and with a new regard for an industry segment we were only peripherally acquainted with.

For more on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, visit http://www.edrm.net.

http://bondclothes.blogspot.com/

This guy analyzes the suits (and other clothing options) James Bond wears in all the (22 “official” movies, produced by EON productions, 5 others) James Bond movies, with detours into the sartorial selections Sean Connery wears in other movies such as the tweed suit in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”.

This may seem like ultimate nerdism filtered by Tim Gunn, but you end up learning about men’s fashions, the functional needs met by ensembles such as riding outfits, the origins of tweeds, and what the props in various Bond movies sold for at auction. In other words, the Internet was invented to make sure we know the difference between traditional British forward pleated suit pants and plain flat front, or that a semi-formal day wedding in the UK would feature a style called “Black Lounge”, with a jacket Americans call a “stroller” in place of the more traditional (to us) cutaway.

A regular part of The Raging Nerds’ consultancy life has been negotiating our rates with prospective clients. Like most such consultants, we have “usual rates” for our standard areas of work. These rates are derived not only from an evaluation of our skill sets and how they fit the task at hand, but the standard rates in whatever market we’re bidding in.

For most of our careers, the negotiation conversation has gone like this:

Prospective Client: What is your rate for work like this?

Raging Nerd: Our usual rate is Z.

At this point, Prospective Client either says, “Sounds great; sign here,” or “That doesn’t fit our budget. How about Y?”

And we either say, “Sure, sounds good,” or we keep the ball rolling.

In other words, we do this thing we like to call negotiating.

Recently, however, we’ve run into what is for us a new phenomenon. Twice now the conversation has gone like this:

Prospective Client: What is your rate for work like this?

Raging Nerd: Our usual rate is Z.

Prospective Client: That’s not in our budget. Goodbye!

Both times, we have been left rather stunned. Does no one negotiate any more? Do people not realize that “usual” doesn’t mean “always”? We feel as though what Prospective Client actually said was, “You guessed wrong! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go; do not collect $200.”

Has anyone else run into a situation like this? Is this the new normal?

We are thinking that our new approach will look more like this:

Prospective Client: What is your rate for work like this?

Raging Nerd: Well, that depends. What sort of budget constraints are you under? We can work together to make this happen.

Any advice left in Comments would be greatly appreciated! (And meanwhile, in both cases, we were able to contact the prospective clients and work things out. Still, it was very strange.)

I had spent the last three years fighting AT&T for its rotten coverage at my home, so I switched immediately to Verizon, only to get the same or worse coverage, even though I have line of sight to UTC here in San Diego (CDMA should rock that).

So courtesy of +Kevin Kelly ’s CoolTools (http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/005370.php), I heard about Wilson Electronic’s cell phone booster. First day of use, 0 dropped calls. Normal probability of dropped calls, >50%.

According to the product lit, I am right at the edge of max radiated power (30dbi) but then it’s up to the CDMA network to tell the phone to turn it down (which it does quite nicely).

Thanks +Kevin Kelly . You’ve always been a great asset to the tech community, and this is just another example.

Please excuse our nearly three-month absence from posting, O Vast Readership! No good excuses; just busy and perhaps feeling a bit under-inspired.

But this week we experienced two major nerdgasms!

The first one involves Google+ (G+ among the cognoscenti). Jon was not only invited early in the process, he was able to log on pretty much immediately. On the other hand, it took most of the week for Marian to first successfully receive an invitation, and then once that arrived, to get G+ to let her in.

We are enjoying exploring the new paradigm. It seems a better solution for us, at least so far, than Facebook. But who knows? Perhaps sometime in the unknowable future we will be dissing it with ironic commentary, too.

The second exciting news of the week was of course that the San Diego Comic-Con has released its event schedules for the four days of the Con. Preview night is Wednesday, July 20. We will be there picking up our passes and registering for next year, and then we will be back bright and early Thursday, July 21, to savor one of our favorite alternate realities.

We can usually be found attending various TV show panels, but will also be cruising the convention floor looking for oddities and inspirations. Give us a shout out if you will be there, too!

We started using NameCheap as our registrar at about the time it was implied that even women who excel at their fields (race car driving, personal training, etc), need their breast ogled by nerds. As proud nerds we would like to make it clear, breasts can be many things, many of them delightful, but decision criteria for domain registration ain’t one of them.

Now there comes news that the CEO of GoDaddy has gone from standard middle-aged compensation methods (fast cars, objectifying women, Viagra) to more extreme methods. He shoots elephants because they really really deserve it.

So we are moving every active domain, including those that won’t renew for years. As we do it, we realized that there are many opaque parts of the process. Here are some explanation we hope help others:

• Where are my domains?

When you start the checkout process at Name Cheap and type on all the domains you want to change, you may not see all the domains you expect. That’s because the domains may be “locked” at godaddy (it’s the default). Log in to GoDaddy go to the domain screen (https://dcc.godaddy.com/Default.aspx?activeview=domain&reset=0&filtertype=1) and hit the icon that looks like a lock. Click on that to unlock the account. Do this for all the domains you want to transfer.

• What’s an EPP code?

Once you get all your domains unlocked, you’ll go to the invoice screen, and you’ll probably be asked for an EPP code. That’s a code that your current domain registrar gives you to prove that you’re the owner of the domain. There’s a good explanation of how to get your EPP code from godaddy here: http://reviewboss.com/finding-epp-code-on-godaddy-com.html

• Is there a discount code I can use?

There sure is. Use BYEBYEGD and right now you’ll take the price from $8.99/site to $5.99/site. While it ticks me off to pay to transfer a domain I’ve already paid to transfer, and that I will eventually pay to re-register, at least for now, $1 per transfer goes to help elephant populations.

There is a real problem with some rogue elephants in Africa. As elephant habitats shrink due to encroachment, global climate change, and natural migration there will have to be some solutions found. Maybe allowing middle-aged white guys from the US to play out their fantasies of White Man’s Burden is one way. We are willing to pay to see if there are other ways, and to do that in part by changing our domain registrar

Nerds do what now?

Last night, we attended a NoSQL meetup here in San Diego. It has been explained to me that “NoSQL” is not really an anti-SQL movement; more a burgeoning understanding that not all large data sets need SQL—and some of them don’t even need a “database” in the strictest sense of the word.

The speakers were Matt Ingenthron of Membase (http://membase.org) and Jason Sirota of The Knot (http://theknot.com), a Membase/Memcached user. Excellent presentations, and Membase looks like an interesting and useful product.

Perhaps Jon will be inspired to say a few words on the subject. And perhaps not

The Raging Nerds were sad that we didn’t have a chance to wish you a happy 10-10-10. But we can wish you a happy 1-1-11…

…even though we missed saying it at 1:11 am, 11:11 am, and 1:11 pm. Still, maybe you’re reading this at 11:11 pm. If so, we’re sure it will bring you massive amounts of good luck, good health, and prosperity, which is what we wish for everyone!

Stay tuned for when we wish you a lively 1-11-11, a merry 9-10-11 (perhaps at 12:13), a felicitous 11-1-11, and a joyous 11-11-11.

Until then, please have a most excellent 2011!

On a recent trip to a health foods grocery store, I spied a bin of large plastic onions. Wondering how healthy a plastic onion could possibly be, I picked one up, and realized it was an onion container–shaped like an onion!

For some reason, this ridiculous object tickled my fancy, and I bought one. Besides, it promised that my onion would Stay Fresh Longer and that the container would Reduce Odors. How could I resist?

At home, I gleefully showed off my new purchase to Jon. He raised an eyebrow, but very nicely made us a dinner that night that included onion, so I could try out my toy. I’m not sure that odors were reduced or that the onion stayed fresh longer, but I certainly knew how to locate my onion in the refrigerator.

I grew curious, and looked at the container’s tag. My onion-shaped onion container was made by the Hutzler Manufacturing Company of Canaan, Connecticut. And wonder of wonders, they sell other food-shaped food containers! You can get a pepper keeper in the shape of a pepper, a tomato keeper in the shape of a tomato, and more. (See http://www.hutzlerco.com/products/c/2/ )

The obvious next question is why aren’t all objects kept in containers that are their same shape? We could keep coffee mugs in mug-shaped containers, cars in car-shaped garages, and perhaps people should live in person-shaped dwellings!

What do you think? This may all be getting a bit too meta for me…