Matt Rae

Random stuff.
May 01
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Apr 06
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"Yahoo Search Marketing Review" or "How My Debit Card Was Reported Lost, But Not By Me"

I was excited to try Yahoo Search Marketing so I could better understand the product my team supports. Well Yahoo did all they claim to do and more.. I put $50 in an account and created a couple ads that brought people to this blog. Yup, I definitely got clicks.. about 20 per day or so. Yay!

 The issue came when I got a note from Yahoo saying that another $50 had automatically been deducted from my checking account when my search marketing funds got low. Well, this wasn’t what I expected specifically since the I had my account set to “prepaid”.

 So, I emailed Yahoo and asked for a refund since the deducted amount hadn’t already been used for ads. Yahoo happily refunded my money and set my account to something like “prepaid -pay as you go” which shouldn’t automatically add more funds.

No big deal yet.. My money was refunded and all was well. I thought I got a good test drive of Search Marketing. I was surprised come a few days later when my debit card stopped working. I called Wamu and they said that my card had been “reported lost”! I told them I had the card and never reported lost.  Unfortunately they couldn’t reactivate my card or give me a replacement with the same number.

After four annoyed calls to Wamu I was finally told that somehow the money Yahoo deducted from checking account and later refunded was considered an “unauthorized transation”.

What a mess. I can’t seem to get straight answers out of anybody at Wamu.. they just shift the conversation toward sending me a new card. Well I’ll be getting the card soon.. I just wish Wamu were a little more interested in figuring out what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again.

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Mar 25
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Thanks Arnold for the advice.
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Mar 21
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Testing yahoo search marketing

Hey, so if you showed up here via yahoo search, its likely you clicked on my ad. Since I’m working for Yahoo! sponsered search now, I figured I’d try out the product! Stay tuned for my review :)
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Feb 29
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Yahoo Job

I’m moving down to Sunnyvale next week! I’ll be working for Yahoo Production Engineering.
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Feb 15
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Jan 08
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How many people do you think had embarrassing information about them disclosed yesterday because of some cookie? Zero. It never happens.
— Sergey Brin
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Jan 03
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Nov 28
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Easy copying of SSH keys with ssh-copy-id

Quit manually adding keys to authorized_keys, checking permissions on .ssh and user’s home directories. http://www.openssh.org/faq.html#3.14

‘ssh-copy-id’ comes with openssh to make this simple. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I didn’t know about it until today.. Anyway, I figured somebody might be in the same boat, so listen to how easy it is to add your key to an account.

 $ ssh-copy-id hostname

It should be that easy.

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Nov 27
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225 Megawatt Data Center in Chicago

Data Center Knowledge posted this morning about a 225 Megawatt data center being built in Chicago. Considering the data centers announced recently average about 10-20 Mw, this seems huge. It makes one wonder what kind of data centers aren’t announced. Governments surely have their own secret data centers that dwarf most.

Apparently 1 Megawatt is enough to power 10,000 homes.. Buying flourecent bulbs hardly seems significant. I’d like to know how the carbon footprint of one of these data centers compares to that of a comparable number of homes.

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