Here is a snap shot of the spam (and real mail) I’ve received since February 1, 2004. On the one hand I’m extremely pleased with SpamSieve and it’s accuracy rate. On the other hand I am somewhat overwhelmed that 95% of the mail I get is spam.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “FebruarySpam.jpg” }}
In the summer of 2000 I noticed that I had a slight protrusion in the upper rim of my belly button. Gradually it grew in size until it was about the size of a dime, and stuck out about half the diameter of a dime. When pushed with a finger it would recede for a time, only to reappear later.
Some internet searching lead me to the realization that I was the proud father of an umbilical hernia. A visit to the local surgeon confirmed my suspicions and within 10 days I had out-patient surgery to repair my outie. Once the swelling went down and the scar healed I was once again an inie.
Fast forward to February this winter. We had significant snow this year which was slow melting off the driveway. When it did melt it revealed a layer of ice. When there was just a small amount left I managed to step on a patch of ice and fell. At the time I seemed okay. My leg was a little sore the next day, but years of break-falling practice during my martial arts career paid off as I didn’t get hurt. Or so I thought.
The last week of February I developed a pain high on the inside of my left leg. It was a dull ache that came and went, sometimes becoming uncomfortably intense. Usually shifting my position or standing eased the pain. Over the course of a day or so it felt as if my left testicle had been bruised. I was more than a little uncomfortable, and starting to get worried about what was causing this pain.
Given my history with the umbilical hernia I immediately thought I must have developed an inguinal hernia. For two or three days I fretted and lost sleep worrying that I would have to have more surgery. I just didn’t want to face this reality. Each day I’d get up and hope that the pain wouldn’t return, and each day for most of a week it did return. Finally I started talking about it to Michele. She was immediately supportive of my seeking out a surgeon and discussing a remedy. Remembering my previous surgical experience I did some internet searching to see what the techniques were for repairing an inguinal hernia.
Imagine my relief when reading the symptoms for inguinal hernias and realizing that I did not have those symptoms. The pain didn’t go away when I laid down, and it was often just as bad in the morning as it was in the evening. Standing for long periods of time didn’t seem to aggravate it either. I was stumped. What was making my groin hurt?
Then the light bulb went off. I had pulled muscles in my groin the day I fell on the ice. The pain I was feeling was a groin pull. The relief I felt at dodging the hernia surgery bullet was immense. Since that time the pain in my leg has abated considerably and now it only faintly twinges when I push off hard in some directions with it.
The moral of the story? Talk about what your fears are so you can get past them and discover their cause. Who knows, the answer might be far easier to deal with than you think.
I took my laptop and went to the park for lunch today. There weren’t any wireless connections I could find from inside the park, but as I was leaving one sounded, so I parked on a side street and tried to connect. Being unsuccessful I went to a spot I know has a connect able, un-encrypted wireless access point and surfed the Internet from there.
Doing this raises an interesting ethical question or three. Is my using a wireless equipped laptop to surf their un-encrypted connection stealing? Is it hurting them in any way? Is it wrong? I can see both sides of the issue. I know that I would be upset if someone were to park in front of our house and use our connection. That’s why I took the time and trouble to secure it. But the geeky, “I’m superior than you are”, voice in my head says that if they didn’t want me to use their connection they’d secure it.
If it were a restaurant or coffee shop that provided free wireless internet then I would have no compunction about using their “service.” And even though my connecting to the net through some homeowners connection isn’t going to cost them any money (it’s already paid for) I feel like I am taking something from them. If nothing else I am acutely aware that I am invading (however virtually) their space and their home.
I guess maybe this isn’t a group ethics question, but rather it’s a question of personal ethics. Can I live with myself knowing that I have electronically invaded someone’s home purely for my internet fix? Or do they lose control, and ownership of, the wireless signal once it leaves their house?
I’ll probably continue to “borrow” connections from time to time, but I think living with the knowledge that I can slip into and out of their homes largely, if not totally, unnoticed will haunt me every time I go on the air.
My wife and I are big Tivo fans. We bought our first unit three years ago and have been avid users ever since. The problem with one Tivo is that it isn’t two Tivos. So we bought a second one, a Series 2, just last month. Due to our viewing habits we have the original one located in our bedroom, for late night viewing of old situation comedy reruns. The Series 2 machine is in our home office area, where we watch the rest of our weekly schedule. The big screen television in the living room is now used for DVD movies and special programs.
In the month that we’ve had both machines the percentage of live television we watch has plunged to zero. Just this past weekend we remarked that it had been a while since we’d watched anything live. And with the Tivo’s fast-forward capabilities we never watch commercials. As close as we come to live television anymore is waiting until 20 minutes after it starts recording to begin viewing so that zipping through the commercials won’t catch us up to the live broadcast.
This past weekend I also remarked that I was looking forward to seeing the Oscars this year, as I wanted to see how the final Lord of the Rings movie installment would fair.
You guessed the rest. Not having seen any live television for a while meant we were totally unaware that the Oscars were on LAST night. Oops. Tivo is pretty slick, pausing live television, recording every episode of a season pass, searching by actors or other keywords, et cetera. But it can’t go back in time to record a show the user was ADD enough to forget to program in the first place.
Sigh.
Over the weekend I picked up the Visual title “Unix for Mac.” I have another Visual series title, and like that book, this one is easy to work with an informative. Although some of the information is very basic, the book as a whole is a great learning tool. Even though I have been poking around in the guts of Mac Unix for the better part of a year now, I picked up several new ideas, tools, and tips.
The area most fascinating to me is X Windows. I only vaguely understand all I know about X; perhaps just enough to get myself seriously off the known map. Following the steps in the book I downloaded and installed fink and Fink Commander. Using fink (a package manager) I was able to easily download and install the latest XDarwin build. The process made me feel a bit like Alice as a simple “fink install” command resulted in an astonishing dump of console messages in my terminal window.
Later that same day I decided I wanted to try the KDE desktop package for XDarwin. There was a bundle entry in the list of packages through fink that, when installed, would collect all the necessary bits and put it all together for me. This process started with the same seemingly simple command “fink install bundle-kde-ssl”. I did that more than 12 hours ago and it is still churning along.
To be fair, my computer has gone to sleep in this time period. But for a single command to result in hundreds of thousands of lines of output is rather astounding. It’s like the Energizer Bunny, going and going and going. All of this just to see what it would look like. Wow.
Update: The build of all the KDE packages spanned 36 wall-clock hours. Twice my PowerBook locked up completely (due to other factors) and twice Fink resumed the build when I restarted it. I am very impressed with Fink, and even more wowed by being able to run KDE 3.1.4 on my Mac.
For the past year or so I have enjoyed having my PowerBook at work, especially since I was able to plug it into the LAN there and have full internet access. Through the magic of DHCP it was assigned an IP address, and thanks to my knowledge of an open HTTP proxy, I was able to surf the web, exchange chat messages, and generally enjoy the Internet.
The open proxy existed to allow a federally funded group to have access to the Internet through the State’s network infrastructure without resorting to creating IDs on the LAN for them. Apparently the agency has finally gotten around to addressing this hole in the network. Either they are filtering access to the proxy by IP address (unlikely given the randomness inherit in DHCP managed networks) or they are doing it by network login ID. Either way the result is the same, I’ve been cut off.
Now I do have Internet access via my agency assigned ID, but that access is highly monitored for “appropriateness” and people have been terminated for inappropriate usage. So other than a few technical sites directly related to my assignment here, I tend not to use that access path. I dislike and resent the whole “big brother” approach but I don’t want to lose my job through civil disobedience. Knowing about the open proxy allowed me to expand the list of sites and services available to myself without exposure to the draconian access policy in effect.
I have mixed feelings about the new tighter network at work. On the one hand, as someone who is concerned about network security, I appreciate their attention to detail and desire to protect their infrastructure. On the other hand, as a strong advocate of individual freedom and responsibility I don’t appreciate the punitive and restrictive approach to Internet access taken by this agency. In my opinion, taking a “father knows best, big brother is watching” approach places the employees in the role of errant child. People will rise to the level they are allowed, treat them like children and you’ll get children. Allow them to be responsible adults and you’ll get responsible adults.
Eight years ago today, February 20, 1996, the domain registration for zanshin.net was completed for the first time. Neither I or my fledgling ISP really understood all we were doing so I ended up with a .net domain. At the time I thought I wasn’t a commercial enterprise, and I wasn’t a non-profit organization, so by process of elimination I asked for and received a .net domain. (A short five days (5 days!) later zanshin.com was registered. If I had only known then what I know now.
There have been some 12 iterations of the sites look and feel. Roughly seven or eight of these made it out into the wild. Structurally it began with simple HTML tags and lots of non-blank spaces. Then I discovered tables, and frames, and the magic one-pixel spacing GIF. Today zanshin relies on CSS and XHTML. I’m inching closer and closer to being fully standards compliant.
Initially zanshin.net was my own mini-portal, a collection of links that I used frequently and wanted to share. Gradually over time it evolved into a weblog. There are nearly 400 entries here now, spanning back to late 1999. The transition to MovableType in 2002 freed me from the drudgery of hand coding each entry and the output here increased dramatically.
I don’t know how many people have visited the site in the past eight years. There have been various counters but no one continuous count. The current counter, started in September 2001, has nearly 4400 visits and nearly 6000 page views. I’d like to think that the six years prior to this counter equaled that number giving me about 9000 individual visits. Not a lot, barely three a day on average over the life of my site. For me it isn’t how many people have visited, rather it is that people can and do visit. Once I post it here, anyone in the world can read it. Self publishing is rather mind bending in that regard.
Having a weblog has been, at times, a profound catalyst in my life. Designing and building the site itself has been a wonderful creative outlet. Capturing my thoughts, ideas, opinions, and feelings to share with the world at large has been invaluable. I rather like the whole experience, and I am eagerly looking forward to the next eight years.
It has been over a year since I blew the dust off my resume, so I took an hour or so today and gutted the old one mining the juicier bits for a new and improved view of my professional self.
For the most part I am pleased with the new format and presentation. I’m sure it’ll get tweaked a time or two in the next few days. For now however, for your reading pleasure, I present my resume.
(The link has been updated to point to my current resume. The 2004 edition no longer exists online.)
Almost three years ago my wife and I acquired a Tivo. It changed the way we watched television, but only in the living room. Elsewhere in the house we were still watching the old fashioned way. And it seems we were watching more TV elsewhere and less with the Tivo.
After talking about it a few times recently we pulled the trigger yesterday on getting a second Tivo. The new one will reside on our office, and is already plugged into the home network. The original one is going to move from the living room to our bedroom for late evening use.
Later today I’m going to visit the local Barnes and Noble bookstore to peruse the Tivo hacking books to see about extracting video from the Series 2 to Michele’s iMac where it can be burned to DVD for posterity.
For some time now I have been using the excellent referer logging tool, Refer from Textism. It’s pure vanity and ego gratification served up in HTML.
It is also, it appears, a new place for the scum that are spam purveyors to ply their, ah, trade. I have been getting increasing amounts of “referrals” from adult sites that point only to my referer log. And today I got a couple of dozens hits from John Kerry’s blog.
Enough is enough. I edited the logfunctions.php file and added a line to not record any referers to the referer index page itself. Spot testing from various search engines shows it appears to be working. Now I’ll have to wait a few days to see if my fix actually eliminates the unwanted parasites from my site.