Mike Beirne's personal site

Hello,

I used to do UNIX system administration in the Chicago area, but have moved to Santa Clara, California by way of Los Angeles. I like to read Science Fiction, but most of my books are in storage near Chicago. I may get them shipped out here someday.

The "Clout Project" was set up to allow people who did not work for a large company or were not a student at an Internet connected university to have access to Internet email. I am one of the registrars of the chi.il.us domain that was set up to support it. Since anyone can now get a free Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo account and access it from almost any library, the Clout Project is pretty much just a DNS registry now. Although Jon Postel forbade us from charging any money when we were first delegated the chi.il.us domain, Neustar, the current owner of the .us registry is definitely trying to make money off of it. Since we allied ourselves with Uniforum Chicago, a non-profit group, early on, we cannot charge for registrations and thus have no money.

I think that Netflix is a wonderful service. My actual cost per movie watched is down to about $1.17 per movie. Despite the Qwikster and price change gaffs, I still think that they are great! Netflix and Redbox have forced Blockbuster into bankruptcy. Blockbuster's long slow lines and late fees are a thing of the past for me.