Now with that out of the way.. I didn’t have much experience with other forms of smokeless tobacco like dip, chew, etc. I always wondered why people used it when there was Swedish Snus. I ran out of my “usual” Thunder Frosted Extra Stark. So guess what? The local tobacco store sells nothing other than that camel and Marlboro garbage. I couldn’t feel that unless I put the entire can in my mouth. It’s designed to keep people smoking.. Anyway I headed over to the dip section because I figured that would take care of my craving. Picked up some Grizzly Long Cut.

First thing I notice when I put it in my mouth, the entire inside of my mouth is covered with brown saliva. Nasty. (swedish snus barely makes any spit and I just swallow any it does create because it’s barely anything and doesn’t bother me at all.) It burns like crazy, and seemed to tear my mouth up A LOT more than swedish snus. I went through only 2 1/2 cans of the stuff, and my bottom lip feels like i’ve been putting swedish snus there for like 6 months or a year. I can’t imagine how it would be if I continued to use this stuff.

The only real advantage I found in dip is that it creates more taste and if you want to have a more “active” experience with a spittoon, it’s not a bad experience. Other than that, it pretty much sucks.

The other problem I have with it is that it’s weaker than my usual Thunder Frosted. I didn’t have direct comparison until today, but I would have to use 1/12+ of the can to get the same amount of nicotine out of Grizzly as I got from Thunder Frosted ES.

Next problem with dip is that it is fire cured. This creates way more cancer causing agents in comparison with swedish snus.

Conclusion on Dip: Only used as a last resort. Not as bad for you as smoking, but not a real pleasant form of tobacco.

Swedish Snus Overview

spitless
not linked to oral cancer
small pouches you just throw in your upper lip.
after using for so long it feels like putting in a mint.
your mouth barely gets torn up at all.
wide variety of flavors.
no mess.
barely stains teeth.
tons of different strengths available.
tons of different types available, such as white portion.
no “looks” from other people because you’re spitting.
looks like you’re using mints.
pancreatic cancer is the only form linked to its use.
98% less dangerous directly compared to smoking. (check out Dr. Rodu, Tobacco Harm Reduction Sites, and some news articles on Swedish Snus.)

Conclusion

If you’re going to use tobacco, you ought to be using Swedish Snus. There’s no doubt in my mind this is the “ultimate” version of tobacco. Smoking is terrible, it destroys your body more than even chew or dip, by a lot. Dip is also annoying and a pain. No one likes seeing people spit all over the place.  Destroys your mouth. Chew rots your teeth. Cigars cause lots of oral cancer. Pipes cause lots of oral cancer.

Which will you chose? The choice seems obvious: Swedish Snus.

A number of things point to e-cigarettes being relatively safe (however there needs to be more research done) and I have used them for months, guess what? My lungs have cleared up, I can finally breathe again. I feel good, generally.

I’ve heard about snus being a pretty healthy alternative to cigarettes as well, and some people combining it with e-cigarettes to finally “lay down” cigarettes completely. One day I had no batteries for my e-cigarette and I was out and about, so instead of buying a pack of cigarettes (which would’ve broke my 3 month long cigarette free streak) I opted to pick up some camel snus. I felt something familiar, a “good feeling” not like when I vape on my ecig to kill withdrawal, that’s a completely different feeling. Then I remembered that there are MAOI’s in tobacco, and that’s what I was probably feeling more than anything. Remember, I didn’t use these MAOI’s for 3 months, however I think they were the problem. I was still holding on to my old cigarettes because I really felt something was missing from my e-cigarette, and it was bothering me.

Later on I decided to try swedish snus, and man is that ever stronger than camel. I had an “MAOI” rush. (I had been puffing on my e-cigarette like normal until the package came, and had just put it down prior to popping in some swedish snus.)

All of a sudden, I feel much better, and feel like I used to when I smoked. This resulted in me throwing away all my cigarettes (finally). I had been holding them because I wanted that MAOI feeling back. I missed it. I was going to ignore it as much as possible and try to get over it, however this makes me feel safer. Now I can say for certain that I don’t have any need to smoke.

Note: You have to realize that smoking is the WORST POSSIBLE WAY to get nicotine, period. I know a lot of people are brainwashed into thinking that smokeless tobacco is WORSE for you than cigarettes. That’s completely FALSE. Unfortunately, cigarettes have the highest rate of all cancers. Oral, lung, pancreatic, etc. Yes there are risks to snus, however those risks are very small in comparison with smoking. (90% – 98% safer)

Conclusion

In my opinion, combining e-cigarettes and snus is going to be the absolute best combination for anyone to quit smoking. Some people don’t care about the MAOI’s much, others do. However, I think e-cigarettes and snus are great choices for anyone willing to stop smoking.

Still, I would like to quit nicotine/tobacco completely, but I’m a pretty big addict. The least I can do is try to be healthier with my habit, and it’s so nice that the “powers that be” shield all harm reduction is secrecy.

I’ve been looking around the net to try and find the actual exploit (milw0rm, packetstorm etc.) haven’t been able to find it. I’m guessing it’s private still. Hopefully wordpress fixes this issue soon because from what I’ve read all versions of wordpress are vulnerable right now.

That of course can’t be good can it? Regardless, I’ve went through and upgraded everything possible including plugins, wordpress, and I upgraded some things on my server.In the mean time I’m going to look around for anything else that was messed with and change some things

Anyone else hit with this?

UPDATE: Seems like there was some confusion about which versions of WordPress are effected, it seems you’re safe so long as you’re running 2.8.4. When my blog was attacked, I was running WP 2.8.3. Usually I update right away, this time I didn’t. That’s what I get for slacking off

It’s not to get users started on the wrong foot either, I think these can be compared closely to a DSE901. No matter what, it spreads the word about E-Cigs and I’m all for that. I think more and more people should know about them. Who’s to say InLife E-Cigs aren’t a good product anyway? Surely not me because I haven’t bought one. Maybe I will if I earn enough through them and then give a review. I’ll tell you what, if there was an affiliate program for the Janty Dura-C and every other E-Cig I would be the first to promote them. Guess what? There’s not. So I’m stuck. Either I promote through MLM and get paid, or I promote for free. Promoting for free doesn’t pay the bills Also, PPC costs money to run and if I’m  not getting paid to drive traffic and spread the word then I’m LOSING money.

Anyway, this program is MLM, or multi-level marketing. If I make a sale then I get $30, I would also make money from referrals when they make money. Pretty much like a pyramid scheme, no? The thing to keep in mind is you will get your $30 per sale whether you refer people or not. It only costs $30 to sign up, and if you make one sale you’ll get $30.

Another thing to consider is that if you do get referrals/buys  you’ll be smoking e-cigs for free in a way.

I spoke to someone about this and some do claim InLife E-Cigs are high quality, but I don’t know. I’m just upset there aren’t more affiliate programs for e-cigs I’m familiar with. That’s life, you can’t always “Have it your way” like Burger King

It’s pretty obvious that Google owns a good chunk of the internet. If, suddenly it disappeared, would Yahoo take over again? Or would it be a struggle between Yahoo and MSN? Millions of people wouldn’t have their e-mail anymore. Some might not even know how to find another search engine Where would everyone go that’s currently on YouTube? How about Blogger?

Sure, there’s other places they could go, but would they be able to keep up with the massive new influx of traffic?

I’ve been thinking to myself, is Google a monopoly of sorts? If it is, that can’t be good. A monopoly is never a “good” thing for the users, even if they are free services. Google makes massive amounts through advertisers paying them. There’s very little competition, even from Yahoo and MSN. Everyone uses Google. I’m willing to bet even people that use MSN and Yahoo go to Google occasionally.

Google is everywhere, is it the big brother of the Internet? Google has so much power over anything and everything you see on the Internet, it does become at least somewhat scary.

Here’s a cool video on the subject I found through YouTube (AKA Google)

All of a sudden, while I’m browsing the net with FireFox, my computer reboots. Then it says it’s trying to copy the bios from the hard drive or something. Then nothing. Nada. Won’t boot. I cleared the CMOS, I removed all unnecessary components, seated each ram stick separately. It’s dead. So I guess I”m in the market for a new motherboard

Stuff has been dying on me lately like my flash drive shows 0mb for some reason so it’s dead as well. Also all the stuff off my desktop had disappeared not long ago. Did I have a virus? I don’t know, I haven’t heard of any virus being able to destroy the bios completely in a long time. I’m really getting tired of it. Guess I”ll deal with this soon, because I can’t be without my main PC. The laptop is alright, but I really can’t do drops on it or a lot of other things

Before I totally give up on it though I’m going to *try* something I read online about putting the bios on a flash drive and boot it. If it doesn’t work, then I’m just going to buy a new one. Not a real big deal more along the lines of annoying, and I could have spent the money on something else.

Apparently I’m not the only one this has happened to, so it’s not really unheard of. This board must just get unstable for some odd reason. Going to pick up some new ram while I’m at it, I just don’t trust Crucial Ballistix.

The best explanation I can come up with is that I had my FSB running kind of high to make my memory run at 1000MHz and this caused an instability that didn’t rear its head till now, even though I ran prime95 for 24hrs a long time ago.

UPDATE

I’ve purchasesd the following components from NewEgg, the only thing that’s related to the failure is the $60 mobo, however.

MSI P45 Neo3-FR – $60 open box – Bad reviews on Newegg, good reviews elsewhere, go figure. Most seem to be related to Bios 1.3 or they don’t know what they’re doing.   So long as it doesn’t break I don’t care

LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner  – Does dual layer as well. Didn’t really research this one, don’t really care so long as it works.

Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 – Good ram from reviews.

SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ – Good review on Anandtech.

That’s about it.. Really just some other upgrades I wanted. I also bought an OCZ Keyboard because I want something better to type with, but I’m still keeping my current one for FPS games.

I suppose you could say I’m pretty rough on computer hardware, which is why I try to buy “enthusiast” grade equipment but that fails as well.

Yep.

You’ll find that with me, I often take things to an extreme level and I’m not satisfied with people doing things for me. Before I launched this website, I had no previous knowledge of how servers worked. I get curious, and I do things, kind of like a kid. I wanted to know what it was like to manage my own server, without having to pay the high costs associated with dedicated servers.

What have I been doing? I’ve been playing with VPS technology for quite some time now. Now that I have finally set everything up, and learned quite a bit, I would not recommend an unmanaged, no control panel VPS to the average user. Why? Well it’s really not that easy to setup if you don’t know what you’re doing. Especially if you have no Linux knowledge, it might seem downright impossible. I did have past Linux experience, but this did not excuse me from screwing up.

Still, I did not do everything manually. ISPConfig is helping me out with the Bind9 configuration files, FTP, website statistics, e-mail, SSL, etc. ISPConfig isn’t easy to setup in the first place if you’re not familiar with all of the programs it comes with, there is quite a bit of manual configuration that needs to be done *before* you compile ISPConfig. Also, try to not install other control panels before ISPConfig as this WILL cause you problems. Other control panels play with configuration files on all the host essential programs. What’s that mean? Well, when you go in and install ISPConfig after having a previous control panel, some configuration files are messed up, and the program will not work with ISPConfig. My e-mail was screwed up because of this.

Yesterday the site was basically down. Why?

Apache and MySQL seem to think you have unlimited resources, they allocate way more than what you actually need. This caused MySQL to crash, thus causing the database error you may or may not have seen.

If you have a low memory VPS, or any VPS for that matter, you probably need to go in and edit the apache2.conf. It’s not hard to find the values that need to be modified, google it. Next, you’ll want to configure MySQL as well to allocate less resources, it really doesn’t need that much. Again, just google this as well, there are plenty of articles about this. If you’re lazy and don’t know how to use google, here’s an article that basically shows what you need to modify for MySQL and Apache.

These modifications made my server go from crashing constantly, to having plenty of free memory. I don’t know what the default values are for, perhaps sites that are getting an unlimited amount of unique hits per day. I think this is  possibly why people complain about VPS performance being worse than shared – they have yet to properly configure everything.

There you have it. I own my host, I have full control to install whatever software I wish. Something I did not have on my shared host. I have a dedicated IP, I have my own name server. I have my own mail server. All of this for only about $60/year. Amazing, huh?

Of course for regular people I believe shared hosting is the best option Either that or get a managed VPS with a control panel.

I bought the VPS for one month, thinking that it would be somewhat difficult to setup. I did not even know that you log into servers via SSH. I’m familiar with SSH, but I thought people used VNC’s or similar to do host management. I could have installed VNC, but GUI etc would just take up too much resources. Everything had to be done through the command prompt. By reading my last entries, you can also get a more full idea of what I had to go through.

I got root access to the server, connected via SSH and attempted to install EHCP. It didn’t go well. Someone must have had this box before me and mucked it up. For one, the server is running Ubuntu, and EHCP uses Apt-Get to install everything. Hmm… What happens when the sources.list file is missing? You guessed it, apt-get doesn’t work at all. Neither does apt-get update. After a lot of screwing around I found that I needed to get the sources.list file for Ubuntu 6.06. So, I surfed around the internet and found it. Another issue: how do you transfer files through ssh? Well, putty has a program called psftp. This is not difficult to use. Just cd into the correct directory, type put and drag the file into the command prompt. Easy. Now with that done, I could finally do apt-get update.

I attempted to re-run the ehcp script. Still, errors, all over the place. For some reason it was not asking me for my root MySQL password? I got fed up with ehcp, and attempted to install ISPConfig. That did not go smoothly either. I have a feeling that a lot of my problems were due to the box running 6.06, and someone before me screwing with settings that were not fixed before I got it. I never had such problems installing software on Ubuntu. I went back to ehcp, since that seemed like a little less to configure. I had fixed a quite a few issues manually, so I re-ran the EHCP script, and wallah, things worked.

The next thing I tried to do was play with my technologyinsanity.com domain by moving it over to the new host. That did not go well. It took forever for the DNS Server to update, and I got fed up and just switched it back.

I began searching for a cheap/free domain to use to continue my project. I ended up finding .co.cc domains. They’re free, you have full control over DNS. I was able to setup my own nameservers with it, very easily. How?  I set a Zone Record in the “A” group for one domain. I made the “name” ns1.domain, ns2.domain, and for “value” I put in my 2 IP addresses I have for my host. I was not allowed to then point this domain to the newly created nameservers, so I created another domain, technologyinsanity.co.cc, and pointed it to those 2 name servers. I then went in and edited a file for custom DNS on my ehcp control panel. I waited till the next day and ran “sync dns” and “sync domains” wallah, it worked.

I then installed phpBB on the domain “technologyinsanity.co.cc” and that was it. That’s all I’ve done with it. Quite simple, really. Nothing that was too complex, most of my issues came from the fact someone screwed up the installation of Ubuntu.

I was a little surprised at how easy it was to setup an unmanaged server with no control panel, and setting up name servers was really no big deal. Granted, I do have prior Linux and server knowledge, just never set one up before.

So…

If you sign up, you just point your domain to the name servers I’ve created with your domain, and setup the MySQL and php stuff and you’re good to go. I’ve already tested the mail server, FTP, etc it’s all good. The install scripts for some programs work fine through EHCP as well. Pretty much everything you see through EHCP works fine. If people sign up, I may keep the host active for the next month, just realize that it will be $5/month after the first month. It costs $35/mo for me to have this host.

Sign up details

Visit: technologyinsanity.co.cc for more details I’m only accepting 2 users to start out, because offering free hosting seems like it could be risky.

If no one signs up..

I will discontinue the host after this month, that’s all.

This is my last post about my VPS, I’ve dived into my INSANITY category again.

Anyway, I figure that since I have this host I might as well try and get some use out of it.. There’s no way I could use that much bandwidth/resources. I thought about the $5/month deal, and I came to the conclusion that people would probably not sign up, and I want to at least try and use the resources available.  No Warez, No Crazy Scripts, Nothing Illegal. I think that’s about it. I will monitor accounts to a degree.

This is all just a possibility, I really don’t know if I can finish up the setup Probably 10 users max, and it still should be better than shared, because shared hosts pack em in pretty tight. (They wouldn’t really make a profit otherwise) I’m using a free control panel for Debian based machines called ehcp, so I don’t *think* offering webhosting breaks any rules.

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It means that I have part of a dedicated server, with root access.

Disregard the *may* everything is setup, and appears to be working, so I will be accepting sign ups.