Looking for a live feed from Egypt?

Here’s a link to al Jazeera’s live English feed.

You’re sure to find actual facts and much more relevance by watching their feed. Oh, and it’s uninterrupted by commercial breaks. Furthermore, the feed has actual commentators that make sense and are knowledgeable about the country and its current situation.

You won’t find that on the challenged U.S. domestic networks. CNN prefers to break to commercials to sell nothing in particular and promote their American feeds. I guess if it there’s no Tea Partier screaming from a resort balcony in Egypt, there won’t be much relevant coverage in CNN’s effort to continue to kiss U.S. government ass. If the best CNN can come up with is a commentator who has been in Egypt last year, I don’t hold out much hope for the remainder of the day’s coverage by them.

Tanks and APCs are rolling through the streets, demonstrators are on their way to the interior ministry and many tens of thousands throughout Egypt’s cities are demonstrating and rioting.

CNN makes no mention of Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship. How strange. I wonder if CNN will show images of Egyptian troops who have been called out to quell the demonstrators shaking hands with them instead.

The stupidity never ceases to amaze me. CNN is continuing to stream completely unreadable tweets. Jesus, is there no end to ignorance and stupidity of this network? Are they not aware that none of the tweets are actually from Egypt? The internet and wireless phone system has been completely and entirely shut down in Egypt.

CNN continues to capitalize on the situation by showing yet more commercials. Good for them. A money-making opportunity shouldn’t be squandered on actual events happening in the Middle East that are critical to U.S. interests.

A CNN commentator continues to call it a peaceful protest.

>>> uncontrollable laughter <<<

Perhaps CNN could throw up some tweets about the gunfire coming from around key government buildings in the capital. Which begs the question, does anyone at CNN knows what city is the capital?

Now al Jazeera is highlighting that Mubarak may no longer be in control. CNN? Your reaction to that? Knock knock. Hello? Are you awake? Is anyone there?

CNN, in its constant quest for broadcast integrity, continues to show an Egyptian State TV feed. Morons, all of them.

I watched in embarrassment as stuttering, stumbling, fumbling and bumbling White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tried to explain to Americans corporate media reporters shills what the hell is going on in Egypt. Obviously, he wasn’t watching al Jazeera. Let’s hope he wasn’t getting his information from American media.

Meanwhile, Egypt’s military chief has cut short his visit to the U.S. I think he’s a tad late with that.

The 20$ trick

20$ trickNo, not that kind of trick.

Have you heard about it? Supposedly, when you check in to a Vega$ hotel

  • you present your credit card wrapped in a twenty;
  • you then ask if there are upgrades available;
  • if there are, you get the upgrade and the clerk will keep the twenty;
  • if not, you get your twenty back.

Apparently, it also works for car rental upgrades.

If you try it, and it works, let me know in the comments.

Here’s the site.

There’s a FAQ too.

feedbooks.com is down

Update January 4, 2011: It appears as though the feedbooks site is now up and running as it should.

Update January 3, 2011: The current feedbook.com backup that has been installed is one made very late yesterday, prior to edits that I made online at the site. That leaves me wondering if feedbooks was using a RAID array, thinking that backups weren’t necessary because of the redundancy of RAID. If that’s the case, they must have received a huge shock.

There has been a total lack of communications from feedbooks.com regarding this debacle. One tweet saying they were having datacenter power outages, followed by a second a day later telling us that everything was back to normal when in fact it wasn’t, is not good business practice. In fact, nothing has been back to normal for two days since that last tweet, as evidenced by the partial backup installation now running, and the partial backups installed multiple times yesterday.

If you’ve done any online editing of your work over there in the last three days, you’d better download a copy to determine if it’s a current version. I’m thinking it won’t be. I shut down my two publications yesterday. I’ll be uploading fresh copies to replace the incorrect versions today. We’ll see how it goes from there.

It’s now 1500, January 3 in Paris and feedbooks is unavailable yet again. I wonder which backup they’re restoring this time.

It’s 0100 January 4 Paris time. Feedbooks is back up, but experiencing some outages so far, as it has done all day today. Still nothing on twitter, the book of faces or the blog about a major outage. I find that inconceivable, given Feedbooks huge audience. Absolutely ridiculous, and thumbing one’s nose at one’s lifeblood – customers. Free or not.

Second update January 2: They must have some serious problems going on beyond power failures. A completed book I had uploaded an  hour ago has been replaced in it’s entirety by a copy from early this morning, and is now unpublished. I’d say there’s more going on than servers with power failures if they’re restoring old backups this late in the game.

Yes, serious problems. Another work I had published has also been restored as a backup, and is minus the edits I made to it today. I can leave it up as is, but I’m wondering how many others there are in the same predicament but don’t know it because of the lack of communications from feedbooks.com.

When they’re resorting to restoring outdated backups there’s something very wrong going on.

If you’ve got work published there, I hope you all have current backups on your own computers.

The most recent tweet, now some hours old, says everything is fixed. That is so not true.

Yet another backup has been restored, and it too is out of date. Serious problems, folks.

I took my publications offline because of the unreliability of this outfit.

smashwords.com is starting to look pretty good.

Update January 2, 2011: It appears to be up (for now), but it’s virtually unusable for doing anything should you want to attempt any editing. I tried doing some last night, but it looks as though a backup has been installed, since all of the edits were gone this morning. Now I can’t do anything. At this time I wouldn’t recommend trying to edit, because the site keeps going down.

At best, editing remains spotty and unreliable, although it could be because of increased demand since the outage.

*     *     *

All we get is a single tweet yesterday(December 31) morning saying feedbooks had power problems with their servers? Nothing on their blog. Nada. Rien.

Nothing on their book of faces page since December 28, when someone remarks that the online editor isn’t working and that feedbooks will fix it next week.

Next week?

WTF is with this place?

Is it a one-man operation running out of a basement in Paris or what?

When might it be back up? Tomorrow? Next week? Next year?

So much for communication in this age of enlightenment.