10:47 AM
Internet Links blog updated

Added a bunch of cycling links to my links blog today...

03:41 PM
Internet Sometimes they see the light...

Techdirt: Major Spam ISP Kicks Off Spammers All of this is correct - the "former employee" is on the Spam-L list I'm on and he published the internal memos to the list as well as his whistleblower site. He also worked with Spamhaus' Steve Linford who talked with the Savvis CEO and explained the consequences of hosting spammers, ie., being shut off from the rest of the internet.

So sometimes it does work, sometimes the bad guys who give spammers access to sent out spam can see the light and understand that while the short term money from the spammers looks very nice, the long term money from legitimate customers will disappear because of blocking and then the spammers will disappear too because they're blocked as well. And poof, no more company.

11:46 AM
Internet Oh my, that's reassuring (NOT)

Thursday, email from owner of server host: Open a support ticket and give us your server password, the datacenter is changing IP addresses in six days and we need to add the new IPs to your server.

Okay fine, file support ticket, give them all the info. Hope they get the new IPs in soon as I'll have to change my nameserver IPs too and that takes a day or two to propogate as well.

Friday, reply to support ticket from webhost, "do you want me to assign this ticket to (name of their main admin guy)?"

Eeesh. I was fairly polite in my response but sometimes I really want to take a baseball bat to their stupidities. (And the result of my reply is that they moved the ticket to the Dedicated Server Support department which is a new one they added after they told me to open a ticket to the Migration department.)

12:58 PM
Internet New features in Thunderbird 0.8

Yippee!!! Neil's World - New features in Thunderbird 0.8

The main things that caught my eye:

• Global Inbox - when adding a new POP3 account, you can choose to have mail delivered to Local Folders, as opposed to creating a new set of folders for each account. This was a big gripe among some users with many accounts, and it now means that Thunderbird can more closely imitate OE
• Get All Mail - the Get Messages icon now has a submenu that also lets you get mail from all accounts or select a specific account. This is a feature in Mozilla Mail that was missing in Thunderbird.
• Better quick search - it offers a greater level of control and allows you to use it to search the message body too.
• Ability to import mail and settings from Mozilla Mail

Thank god for the Global Inbox! v0.8 will be the one I'll start recommending that everybody switch to it, that's the thing I've been waiting for - along with the ability to view messages without loading remote images and being able to switch easily between plain text view and html view make Thunderbird the best and safest email program. Plus they'll have RSS feeds which will make it even spiffier! I've been using an extension to get RSS feeds but it's a bit clunky so I'll be looking to see how Thunderbird handles it.

And just remember folks, this is from a DIE-HARD OE user of six years! Took me a few weeks to get comfortable with Thunderbird but it was definitely worth it.

09:44 PM
Internet Zempt for posting to MT blogs

After my post about w.bloggar, Jason pointed me towards Zempt, a multi-platform posting for Movable Type and it is a truly wonderful little program! It's actually easier to post thru Zempt than thru MT's interface, especially if you're using multiple categories, in MT it takes multiple saves to add the extra categories, in Zempt I can choose the extra categories while creating the initial post and that's a huge timesaver. Plus all the other nifty things, editing past posts, preview, html shortcuts and spellcheck, it's really nice. Along with the MT plugin to post new entries to LJ, I'm set, no need for the MT interface or Deepest Sender anymore! Thanks very much to Jason!

09:13 PM
Internet Speaking of blogging...

I installed w.bloggar this afternoon and I like it! I can post to any of my MT blogs and to LJ as well. And it's got more html options than the MT interface and it minimizes to the tray by the clock and it doesn't use much memory either. For those using other types of blogs, like WordPress, Blogger and LJ lookalikes that use the LJ engine (like Slashcity's Journalfen). It has a nice preview feature too and it can connect by ftp as well for uploading stuff. Plus you can save drafts locally as well, comes in handy when LJ is overloaded.

11:16 PM
Internet Microsoft's single patch to fix all the bugs released today

Earlier today, I got a notice from the Windows Critical Update Notification program that there were new critical updates to install. I started up IE and went to the Windows Update site and there were two of them and I selected them and they installed successfully.

Then I went off and did other things, I use Firefox as my primary browser so I didn't start up IE again. Several hours later, I got a spam from Bravenet, I'd already deleted my account there last month when I got their first spam and here it was again a month later. I tried to delete my account again (just to make sure it took last month) in Firefox but Bravenet insisted I didn't accept cookies (stupid Bravenet) so I right-clicked and selected "View in IE".

I get a popup box that says "Unable to locate Internet Explorer".

Huh?

My Computer > C:/ > Program Files > Internet Explorer > well I'll be damned, there is no IEXPLORE.EXE. I refuse to believe what my eyes tell me so I click on the IE link in my Start menu. No luck there, I click on the Windows Update link, same thing. There is no IE anymore.

I furrow my brow, I rack my brain, and I suddenly realize what's happened - Microsoft has come up with the perfect patch to fix ALL their bugs! They removed IE! No IE, no bugs, simple as that and apparently, even Microsoft agrees!

I don't think I'll even try to fix it, I have the standalone versions of 5 and 5.5, I'll just use those. I haven't done the updates on my other computer yet, it'll be interesting to see if IE disappears there too...

07:29 PM
Internet Pick one: MT or LJ

Jason asked: Do you like MT or LJ better? And why?

Weeeeellll...

Movable Type Pros

I love MT because it runs on my domain so I can back it up easily and it's html pages that I can format and style with html and CSS and the amount of MT code that I have to learn is minimal - it also has excellent help documentation so I don't have to remember the MT tags, I can always find them in Help easily.

I'm a picky person, I like being able to give in to a redesign urge, to have my journal pages as wild or sedate as I like them, to try out new HTML/CSS things, play with graphics, make it totally my own. I like being able to tweak there and tweak here and add a links section and a tidbits column and backgrounds on mouseover and underlines and borders and all that. MT satisfies that urge.

Movable Type Cons

Nobody leaves comments. Jason did because I asked and he's a sweetie! But normally it's a very blue moon when someone leaves a comment at my MT blog. And the nasty spammers made me do work to keep them out. Buggers on them.

Live Journal Pros

Comments coming out my ears! People talk, they comment, they reply to comments and not only do I get an email when there's a comment left on my entries (which MT does also), if someone replies to someone else's comment on my entry, that person gets an email so then they reply to the reply and the conversation keeps going.

Live Journal is where I find fandom people, I've run into people I used to know from other parts of fandom but had lost track of and I've gotten to know people in fandom that I wouldn't normally because they hang out in entirely different parts, except for LJ where we cross paths.

I can lock an entry so that only my friends see it or a few of my friends or this other group of my friends or no-one but me can see it. That's nice to have although not terribly critical.

Live Journal Cons

Unless I feel like learning tons about whatever is necessary to really format and layout an LJ, I can't really fix it exactly like I want it. And it's not on my domain, I can't backup everything, I especially can't backup comments which is the more valuable part of an LJ to me.

And it's not on my server, it's on theirs and they get swamped and overloaded and probably 50% of the time I go there, there's some problem - that' not to say that LJ is down 50% of the time - I don't go that frequently, once/twice a week, sometimes less than that and I just tend to hit the bad times. LJ is big and that makes it a target for twerps to try to take them down and that kind of thing doesn't happen on my server since I'm small and inconsequential and I'm careful about who I host and all that.

And there's all that cutesy stuff, what music you're listening to, what your mood is, and the icons (pet peeve - animated icons) and while I've gotten used to all that and I mostly ignore the parts I don't like, it still seems very thirteen year old girlish to me.

With the advent of plug-ins to auto-post from MT to LJ, it's better, I don't have to endure the LJ posting programs or plugins, although I do have the Firefox plugin for LJ in case I need to edit an entry and I can ignore whatever LJ format I've chosen because I don't go there as much. Lately I use Bloglines to read news and other people's blogs. The only thing I miss is LJ because if the entries are friends-locked then there's not much visible in an RSS which is only public entries but otoh, if I tried to read other people's blogs on LJ, I'd have to create a feed for each of them and there's a limit to how many you can do. Bloglines (and any RSS reader) is flexible enough to let me quickly add feed, rearrange them, mix and match them and drop them whenever I like.

So what do I like better? MT or even WordPress - for the main reason that I get control. I probably won't ever completely abandon LJ because I like keeping in touch with friends there but I'll post to MT (or WordPress) first and use a plug-in to get it to LJ.

12:43 AM
Internet For those hapless few still using IE...

..yet another IE exploit, this one specifically aimed at catching banking info and logins. From the Internet Storm Center: New Scam Targets Bank Customers. That page also has a scanning tool to detect the nasty stuff and disable it. (Caveat: I have not tried this program, I can't offer any help with it but it is a trustworthy program since it's recommended by the ISC.)

Links to a variety of non-IE safe, secure browsers can be found here (or here if LJ is still being plagued by 13 year olds who need their hands slapped). There's also a great article at Open for Business on switching from IE and OE to Firefox and Thunderbird, it walks thru the details of how to install both and import your favorites, email and mail settings into the appropriate program.

The BBC and a couple other places are reporting that CERT "recommends using browsers other than Internet Explorer", I don't think anyone has an actual cite of where CERT said that but it's still a good recommendation. :)

And for anyone who had troubles with Firefox v0.9, there is a new version with the worst of the bugs fixed (including the never-ending installing extensions one that Dargie fell afoul of), v0.9.1 is now available (and Dargie, I completely understand if you don't want to mess with it yet! :))

I have a nasty sore throat, please think soothing thoughts for it, it hurts like the devil and my ears ache too.

(and is it just me or is LJ down a whole lot of the time over the last couple weeks??? I know they were having server problems but for the last couple weeks, it takes forever to get in and tonight it gets a bit of the page and then tells me "document has no data". Maybe they should go back to invites and slow down the new user rate increase until they can get stablized on servers and load and all that...)

06:01 PM
Internet How to use Outlook Express safely

I use OE - I have a couple dozen pop email accounts that I monitor and it works best for me. BUT I make it safe thru these steps:

1. Tools > Options > Read tab > check the box for Read All Messages in Plain Text. This prevents html from showing up at all and prevents viruses from auto-executing when I open an email. Since I don't subscribe to a bunch of html newsletters and I prefer lists that use only plain text, this works great for me. None of that hot pink text on a yellow background. :) (Note that this feature is only available in the last version of OE, 6.00.28 - you must upgrade if you see anything less than that. But it's a good idea to upgrade anyway, get the latest and most secure version of OE and IE.)

2. Tools > Options > Security tab > select Restricted Sites zone. This helps protect you from some of the hazards of OE's integration with IE.

3. I use Avast's home edition anti-virus program which is free and automatically checks for updates at various times when I'm online in the background. It integrates with OE as well, running all incoming and outgoing mail thru it and alerts me when there's a virus in an email, flagging the subject line with a warning.

4. I have filters (message rules in OE) set up to automatically delete anything Avast flags as a virus. I also have filters set to put any email with an attachemtn OR that's over 30k in size into a folder labeled "ATTACHMENTS". When I look at that folder, I know to be careful, scan subject lines and if I don't recognize it, then I right click on the subject and select Properties, then click on the Details tab and then on the Message Source button to view the message safely without being infected by the virus. (I do this with spam too, that way any tracking html or images they have in the spam message don't phone home to the spammer.)

5. Tools > Options > Maintenance tab, select Empty Messages from the Deleted Items Folder on Exit. This dumps all viruses (and spam too) everytime I close OE so it's completely gone.

All of this is mostly automated and doesn't disrupt my use of OE or require any time from me on a regular basis. Avast catches most viruses and they go straight to trash which gets dumped at least daily. Occasionally a virus turns up in the ATTACHMENTS folder but since I scan subject lines carefully there and use the Properties option to view the messages, I see the virus safely and then delete it.

It does require paying attention and using the tools given, but OE can be run safely. If these kind of precautions are more hassle than OE is worth, then I recommend using another email program, Eudora, Thunderbird, most any email program other than OE will be safer than OE.

For Outlook users, you can follow some of these steps, I think #1 is only available in recent versions of Outlook tho and I'm not sure if Outlook has ever had #2. Avast however will integrate with Outlook as well and scan all email for viruses (it also works with virtually any pop email program). Steps #4 and #5 can be done in Outlook, although in some versions of Outlook, it's not possible to see the message source and so no way to safely view the message.

I have Outlook on my computer and for businesses, it is a great digital day planner and the ability to access global folders, other employees' schedules and projects is very useful. On a business network where the IT department can take other precautions to keep out viruses, it's a good thing to use. At home, I never use it for email tho, it's never allowed to connect to the internet. I use it only for keeping my Contacts and for synching with my Palm Pilot.

So for Outlook users, I suggest using something else to send and receive email instead of Outlook. If you use OE and set it up to run safely, you can then easily export your email into Outlook if you want to store it there along with Contacts and other stuff.

03:10 PM
Internet Don't use Internet Explorer!

Using Internet Explorer? Going web surfing today? Protect yourself!

If you haven't heard before, there's a virus that's infecting websites run on Windows servers. Alot of large trusted sites do run on Windows servers, some banks use Windows servers as well as online stores and other sites. This virus can transmit itself thru any webpage on the infected server if the user is viewing the webpage in Internet Explorer. The virus works by embedding itself in every webpage hosted on the server and anytime someone using IE visits a site hosted on the infected server, the virus is delivered to the user's computer along with the webpage. There currently is NO patch for Internet Explorer to prevent this. And there's no simple way to know from looking at a website if it's hosted on a Windows or Linux server.

Most anti-virus programs do have updates out today that will detect this virus, so be sure to update your anti-virus program as soon as possible.

This virus is a keystroke logger so it'll capture anything you type, like logins and passwords to anywhere you visit, including your bank, your email, anything you type. All that info is sent to a server in Russia. The people investigating this virus believe it is tied to the Russian Mafia, it's custom written with the resources to handle the server traffic (see this CNet article and there were also articles on CNN and AOL News last night). The virus also opens a port from your computer to the Russian server which can be used for just about any purpose, sending out spam, accessing your hard drive, launching an attack on the internet, whatever. And you may not be aware that any of this is happening, especially if you have a cable or DSL internet connection, it'll happen in the background while you're working or whenever you've left your computer on.

For the best and safest web-surfing, simply don't use IE. Other browsers don't have the vast array of security flaws that IE does - if you pay attention to the news, new security holes are found in IE on a weekly basis, plus there's all the old ones if you haven't kept up with Windows updates to patch the holes that have been found and plugged.

So the best thing to do is use a different browser. It's not hard, there's several FREE options, all of which are easy to install and use.

For IE users, I recommend switching to Firefox, it looks and works like IE so the transition is easier and it will automatically import all your Favorites during the installation process. It's a friendly program too, it won't take up much space on your hard drive or eat up huge amounts of memory. And best of all, once you install it, you never have to mess with it again. You don't have to get updates to patch security holes, you can just use it day after day. The current version is 0.9 which is technically classed as a beta (or technology preview) but don't let that worry you, it's an extremely stable and reliable program and this version has been fully tested. I've been using Firefox since version 0.7 last winter and it's always been very stable.

For Netscape users, I recommend Mozilla, it looks and works like Netscape, in fact Netscape versions 6 + use Mozilla as the base of the program. If you're still using any version 6, especially version 6.0_, I highly recommend upgrading to Mozilla, version 6.0_ had various problems and issues that were fixed in later versions of both Netscape and Mozilla. If you're using Netscape 7.1, you don't have to wait for v7.2, you can switch to Mozilla v1.7 now - that's what Netscape v7.2 will be using.

For Netscape version 4 users, if you don't have a lot of hard drive space or memory (RAM), you may want to switch to Firefox because it is smaller and needs less memory, even tho it will look a bit different to you, for example, Edit > Preferences is Tools > Options or Tools > Themes or Tools > Extensions, depending on what you want. Normally I'd recommend Mozilla because it looks and works like Netscape but Mozilla is about twice the size of Firefox and uses more memory as well.

There's also Opera but one caveat, this one's not free like Firefox and Mozilla. You can pay for it or you can download the "free" version and pay for it by having ads displayed in the menu part of the browser. Other than that, it's a good, safe browser with good features.

While Mac users can't be infected by this virus, if you're using Internet Explorer, it's not really a very good browser. There are all sorts of problems with HTML web standards compliance so you might want to check out better alternatives. For OS X users, there's Safari and there's Camino from the Mozilla people. For Mac users on OS 9 or lower, there's Opera.

06:15 PM
Internet These people just do NOT get IT!

These people just don't get it. The feed from your site is the tease, it's the headline on the paper that makes me dig a couple quarters out and buy out. The feed is the tease that gets me to your site (skip the fricking stupid registrations that are nothing but lies we make up anyway) to see your ads! If you start putting ads in the feeds, I won't ever be visiting your site because I won't be reading the feed anymore, I'll never see the teasers, I'll never see the ads in the feed and I'll never see your site anymore. I take the feeds to see what interesting content is at your site, advertising is not content!

Give me the feed without advertising and go work on better context-sensitive advertising at your site, then you'll not only get me to your site, you might even get me to click on the ads.

Sheesh. People laughed at that scene in Minority Report where the walls talked to Cruise's character, everywhere he looked was advertising all reaching out to grab him. I got shivers - it's not really science fiction.

03:04 PM
Internet Lockergnome article about IE & Mozilla

Lockergnome has an excellent article on switching from IE to Mozilla Firefox and I'll add a note that Firefox 0.9 has just been released and it's got some great improvements in it.

I sort of forced my parents to switch to Firefox about six months ago by installing and changing the IE icons to go to Firefox instead and they've been quite happy with it - my mom really likes the tabbed browsing and I can breathe easier about my stepdad, he's a very un-computer type and he tends to wander into all sorts of sites and click on things so with Firefox at least I don't have to worry about nasty websites secretly installing stuff on his laptop.

Like Lockergnome, I use IE mainly for running Windows Update and the occasional site that I have to see that only works in IE or for testing web design. There's a nifty Firefox extension, called IE View which adds an item to the right-click menu, "Open in IE" so when I run into an IE-only site, it's easy to right-click and choose "Open in IE" to see the site.

And if you're using Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox and you visit my websites, you'll see them the way I intended them. I always make sure my sites work well in IE and look very similar, but there are some subtle differences, things that work better if you're using a standards-compliant browser.

There are other alternatives, Opera and Netscape v7+ are standards compliant, secure and use tabbed browsing too. If you're using Mac OSX, there's Mozilla versions for you, too. (For Opera and Netscape, just Google and you'll find them easily.)

If you've been sticking to Netscape 4 all these years - please do yourself a favor and try out Mozilla - it looks the same and works the same and is up to date. Trust me - I recommended Mozilla to several diehard N4 users and once they tried it, they loved it!

11:49 AM
Internet You can tell...

You can tell you've been doing alot of html and css coding when you write "a freshly made ham sandwidth" and it takes you several days of looking at that to realize it's wrong.

:)

02:44 AM
Internet How to get yourself banned at Vox Populli

How to get yourself banned at Vox Populli in 30 seconds or less:

Report an email from me about your free site at Vox Populli as spam! bzzzzzzzzzt!!!

That'll get every last flipping scrap of your site scraped off in record time and don't ever come back asking for anything ever again.

:pppppppppp

12:18 AM
Internet Moveable Type: RIP, part 2

And as I typed that last entry, MT was busily backtracking and changing their pricing plan. When I first saw the pricing plan an hour ago, it was like this for personal plans:

1 author, 3 weblogs - special $70, normal $100
3 authors, 5 weblogs - special $120, normal $150
5 authors, 10 weblogs - special $150, normal $190

(I'm not totally sure on that last one, I was still in shock from the first two.)

Here's their revised pricing plan (which may have changed by the time I hit "post" on this!) Currently it shows:

Personal:
5 authors, 5 weblogs - special $70, normal $100

Then you pay $10 to get an additional author/weblog combo. For example, if you have 10 authors and 8 weblogs, you'd pay $50 more.

So if I upgraded, it would be $70, still too much for me, get that puppy down to $40, I would think about it - but I'd have to see what new features I was getting, besides the TypeKey thing.

I don't think they changed anything on the commercial plans but --- look at this:

Commercial:
5 authors, 5 weblogs - special $200, normal $300
20 authors, 15 weblogs - special $600, normal $700

What company in their right mind would consider paying $200 for the commercial 5/5 plan when the cheapest personal plan has the same thing??? Now, I realize that legally and ethically anyone using it for commercial purposes is supposed to buy a commercial license but if there's no difference in the software for the personal edition and the commercial edition, that pricing just looks really wonky. if they upped the 5/5 to 10/10, it would look a little better when compared to the personal licenses.

10:50 PM
Internet Moveable Type: RIP

Wow. Guess I won't be upgrading my MT blogs ever again. I'll just make do with v2.6, it works just fine for me and I sure don't need to be forking over hundreds of dollars for something that's not even really an upgrade from what I have now.

Moveable Type's new pricing structure

I don't have a problem with them charging for v3 but the "personal" license fees are a joke, not only in the amount of money they want but also in the number of authors and weblogs allowed. My brother and I run a blog for our comments on TV shows, just for both of us to be able to post on the same blog, I'd have to pay a minimum of $120 ("special" discount price). *coughchokegag* Even the price of the single author/three blogs is more than I'd pay, $70 for the "special" discount and $100 normally? Thank you very much but no thanks.

Here's an excellent post at the Many to Many site. Excellent points made, and I see many of the people in the comments on Mena's blog (see link in the Many to Many post) are in the same boat as me, running personal blogs for themselves, their family and their friends and there's no way they can shell out that much money.

It's just not realistic for Six Apart to expect people to fork ove that much money when there are various alternatives that are *free*. Blogger's just improved their site, added commenting, profiles, they're mainly going after Live Journal but they're also a good alternative to MT. Live Journal is even a good alternative to MT, especially for people with personal blogs, it's designed for that and LJ recently removed the requirement of a sign up code so anyone can join now. WordPress is free GNU open source license and allows for multiple authors, I'd looked at it before and liked it but since I was happy with MT, I didn't do anything with it (but I will be installing it now and trying it out). Textpattern has also been mentioned, I haven't checked it out yet but I definitely will be. There's also SimplePHPBlog which I found yesterday, I see that kewl.us has started up a service offering free blogs using that software (it's free GNU open source license) and free 1 gig webmail accounts too.

I daresay that MT will survive and they may even change their pricing structure (although I don't expect that they will reduce it significantly enough that I would consider it) but they sure have managed to find the perfect way to piss off a whole lot of people all at once in the meantime.

10:33 AM
Internet More strange things from the contact form

I get the weirdest things from my contact forms on my fanfiction archives, other than author questions, it's usually spam of some sort but every so often, it's something from way out in left field...

Name: [deleted]
Message: Iworred about Gizz-Mo my cat's upper
left paw he's not been walking on it
sence the 4 of May by now I'm thinking
could it be broken? I feel like Gizz-Mo is my baby please help.

(I wrote back advising her to take the cat to the vet.)

05:58 PM
Internet Flaming idiots

I see, you think that people who like to top-post also want slavery to be reinstated.

Yep, that makes perfect sense. Those dastardly top-posting villains!

I'm so glad my migraine was gone by the time the flaming idiot posted that, so that I could simply point out that he'd invoked the American version of Godwin's Law and the person who does loses the argument. Hah!

09:35 PM
Internet AOL spam reports

I *heart* the monthly mailing list membership reminders that Mailman sends out. Why do I love them? Because they contain the full email address of the list member and what lists they belong to in the body of the email. Then when some AOLer reports it as spam, AOL includes the reported message and I open it and I remove that person from that list and ban them from joining it again. Voila, no more spam reports from that AOLer!

I just wish Mailman had a global ban option so I could ban these people from all the lists I host in one whack.

*alice hates spam but hates false reports even more*

12:10 PM
Internet Google Email - Not an April Fools joke...

This is one free email service I'd be happy to use:

Google's Gmail

The press release came out last night with an April 1st date and there was some speculation that it might be an April Fools joke, but it looks real. There's more info up on the Gmail page today and there's a link to an About page with more details.

While they will put ads in your email, it's Google's AdSense ads, all plain *text*, no flashy, whirlygig things, and Google does an excellent job, imho, in matching up ads with content on their search engine so it should do well in email too. And Google knows the importance of their reputation so I trust them far more than most free services on the net, they're one of the few that hasn't lost sight of what helped them grow in the first place.

One thing to note on Google's AdSense, because it looks at the content, it won't always pair up an ad with the email. Just as with searches, you don't always get ads on the results page, you won't see them in every email thru GMail either. AdSense looks for particular keywords for its ads and if you discuss a music concert, you might get an ad for online ticket buying but if you're talking about what an ass your boy/girlfriend is, you may not get any ads at all.

That's one reason I like Google's AdSense, it lets your immediate interests drive the ads and not by silly cookie or page tracking (Amazon's recommendations based on their cookie/page tracking are totally off-base for me and thus completely useless), instead AdSense looks at your immediate search terms and if it has related ads, then it displays them, in plain text where you're not distracted totally from what sent you to Google in the first place. If AdSense doesn't have any relevant ads, then it doesn't display any.

That's true consumer-driven advertising and it's the kind that works for all consumers.

05:54 PM
Internet Can someone please kill IE? Please?

Please, really, I mean it's bad enough it's got all those security flaws in it that virus/worm creators and hackors love, but it's got so many CSS bugs, it's just a little old roach factory!

Let me start by saying that I used to love IE and I used it all the time but because of the security issues, I kept looking at other browsers and finally about a year and a half ago, when Mozilla v1.0 came out, I tried it out. Because Mozilla has so many nifty extensions so that you can customize the browser like you want and because tabbed browsing is truly wonderful :), I switched and haven't gone back to IE (well except for the occasional Flash site that I know is safe because I turned Flash off in Mozilla because of Flash advertisements that drain my poor little three year old win98 PC's memory).

I started using Mozilla's Firefox a couple months ago and for IE users, I really recommend it, Firefox is tailored to look and act more like IE's interface but of course, it's more secure and safe for browsing. It's still in beta but Mozilla's betas are very stable and I've been running the latest, v0.8 for about a month and it's great.

Since I've been using Mozilla/Firefox as my primary browser, I tend to preview my html pages in it as I'm building them. Then I'll run them up in IE to see if I need to tweak anything. Most of the time IE's display is very close or exactly the same but as I get more into CSS positioning, I find more and more things I need to tweak, styles I want Mozilla (and Opera and Safari and other standards-compliant browsers) to see but want to hide from IE so I've learned a few of the hacks to hide certain styles from IE or Netscape 4 or whatever. And mostly those hacks have been kept to a minimum and I had to do them more for N4 than for IE.

But just now, I happened to wander to this page:

IE Escaping Floats Bug

where it describes an IE bug with floating text around the page and in describing how you force IE to do what it's supposed to, it says:

IE browsers have an invisible and mysterious wrapper element around 'html'...

and I threw up my hands in frustration! I mean sheesh, THAT'S a broken browser that really needs to be put out of its misery!

Oh well....LOL! subliminal message: use Mozilla, use Firefox, use anything but IE! :) Tell all your friends they must use Mozilla, use Firefox, use anything but IE! (I'd even settle for Opera 7 or Netscape 7!) (But if you're using Opera 5, do yourself a favor and upgrade! Wow, O5 makes a huge mess of perfectly valid CSS!)

01:58 PM
Internet Stylin'

I <3 CSS and accessibility, I'm close to being done with redesigning my blog site in all CSS, it W3C validates for XHTML1.1 and CSS! I just have to plug it into MT...then I think I'll see if I can't redo my LJ site to match it.

I completely redid the Glass Onion Archive in CSS and it works in both N4 and current browsers. I used the nifty shadow box thing from A List Apart but I've found a better idea from Tom Gilder's Blog.

The ALA version for paragraphs won't work properly on divs in IE5 but the idea from Tom Gilder's does work on just about anything in IE5+, Opera (hmm, I can't remember if it works in O5 tho), Mozilla, Safari, etc. and I'm using that on my new blog design. In looking at the one on Gilder's site, it's so simple, it does require more images than the ALA version but they're no bigger than the ones that ALA uses. (I am however restraining myself and using it only where it enhances the design, I love shadow boxes so I have to remind myself to not overdo it! :))

11:26 PM
Internet testy, testy

..nothing to see here, move along, move along..

11:59 PM
Internet Conguering CSS Positioning!

While I am an extragavant proponent of CSS for everything, I've had a tough time getting the hang of CSS-P that works in Netscape 4. Because alot of visitors to my archives are still using N4 on computers they can't upgrade, I try to keep everything accessible in N4 and I like it to look mostly the same. So I've ended up mostly using tables, minimal ones, usually just one big two or three column, two or three row tables to do the page layout and then using CSS for everything inside but I know that CSS-P can work in N4 and I'm finally getting the hang of it.

I worked on it today, mostly on two private links pages that I use locally but also on the Emaillist-Managers which is now completely table-free! It's just a two column layout with a banner across the top, but I did it all myself, I didn't copy any templates from anywhere and it looks close enough in N4 that I'm happy with it.

Now I need to go fix the N4 problem I created last night on the Basement when I made a teensy-weensy change to most of the (hundreds of) fic links...oops. :)

11:42 PM
Internet Lost in Translation

People say the darndest things on my archive contact forms...

hello i am searching sex gril pnones

*chuckle*

03:52 PM
Internet FTP Program plug!

About a week ago, someone on a list somewhere (I can't remember where!) recommended FileZilla for ftp, an open source freeware program.

And this is flat out the best FTP program I've used in ages. It's amazingly fast, I'm on a cable modem so downloads/uploads are fast anyway, but this thing goes even faster! I have one free host that is always really slow on upload, it just crawls even tho I'm on a cable modem but with FileZilla, the uploads go noticeably faster and with my other hosts, it just zooms!

I don't normally rave about products but this one is really worth raving about. The layout (screenshot here) is similar to CuteFTP and you can resize everything, turn off various parts of the display. Setting up ftp accounts is easy and it's ready to go in seconds.

I'm not affiliated with the program creators in any way, I'm not getting anything for this endorsement, really I'm not! In fact, when I get paid next week, I'm going to donate some money to them, that's how much I like it and I'm a scrooge when it comes to paying for software. :)

06:15 PM
Internet Woohoo!

testing, testing testytest

ETA: YES!! I did it! I navigated my Linux server to edit a Perl module to customize it so that a nifty little MT to LJ plugin that a friend of a friend created will work properly when including a url in an entry!

I did it! And I didn't destroy the server! :D And I even deleted several old large files left from the conversion to the server last fall. And I think I've figured out how I can transfer free accounts to paid accounts without having to dowload everything and upload it again and reset file permissions. ah, this is nifty.

See, at home I really don't have that much need for Linux, I have to use various Windows programs for my work and that's not going to change any time soon but I need to know what to do when I SSH in to the server so I can do various things there.

Now, if I could figure out how to download a backup file....hmmmm, I could set the WHM to do a weekly backup and then move the backup file to a folder I can ftp to and download it...but it'll be humongous and probably take a week to download so it's probably not worth it. But still, it's neat to finally have a faint understanding of this stuff!

01:47 PM
Internet Sometimes it's good to be poor...

I haven't upgraded to WinXP or even Win2K because I wanted to wait till I could afford a new (much faster) computer and start fresh.

My brother's computer got infected with the Welchia worm that came out about ten days ago. Nasty little thing, it got past Norton and it even survived reformatting the hard drive. It most likely arrived via a toolbar that his wife installed, possibly before Norton got the updates.

But the nice thing in all the info about the virus: "doesn't affect Win98" (among other O/S).

So sometimes it's good to be poor and way behind the curve. While I'm still sitting here on Win98, the upside is that it runs nicely on my P2 450mhz. My mom's spiffy new computer, a P4 2.3ghz with WinXP, doesn't run noticeably faster than mine. The only thing I really envy is the flat panel monitor. *sigh* That thing is gorgeous.

I have her old computer here (also a P2) and I'm thinking that I'll take another whack at Linux. Anyone care to recommend which version to install? Pretend I'm a helpless newbie who needs the simplest one possible that looks the most like Windows to ease the transition.

I want to be able to run a few Windows programs tho, mainly NoteTab which doesn't (yet) have a Linux version and possibly Lotus v5 which is one of their older versions but I know it backwards and forwards and I can make it do tricks, clean the windows, fetch the paper, walk the dog, so I'd feel better having it. And a graphics program but that could be a Linux version of something, there's Gnome? isn't it? That's a graphics program for Linux?

And maybe I'll save my money for a Max with OS X instead of a new PC.... :)

The only thing I miss by not having a newer version of Windows (or a Mac) is being able to access iTunes! But that can wait.

Hey, Dee, what are you using for your own computer these days?

11:24 AM
Internet Vulnerabilities that really are critical!

I adore SourBob!

Now that's a critical vulnerability to get upset about! shit in cookie jar, oh no! :)

09:52 PM
Internet Crap!

I was trying to clean things up, not make them worse! I was deleting broken links in the collective and now for no reason that I can fathom, most of the buttons won't show up. I've checked the code, the image files are there but they won't show up.

Damn. Chocolate chip cookie to anyone who can figure out what's wrong....

Most of the broken images are in the folder archive/0 which I did re-upload and on the off chance that they didn't upload properly, I deleted them and uploaded them again, then uploaded one thru the control panel file manager, nothing worked.

11:20 PM
Internet Testing, testing

1, 2, 3....this is only a test, if this were an actual entry, you'd have something to read.

06:17 PM
Internet Best Laid Plans of Mice and Me

I was all set to post something long and thought-out about this last fall, my temp job, dealing (still) with depression, how that job affected it and me and where I'm at now and then I got home and checked email quickly before writing all that up....

That was my mistake.

Innocous looking email, subject of "stop spam" from Max J. in my inbox. Name seemed familiar, I know it's not a virus, no attachment, (those get filtered to a separate folder), small size, I have images disabled in my email program so I open it.

[ SpamCop V1.3.4 ]
This message is brief for your comfort. Please use links below for details.
Spamvertised website: http://tools.populli.net/

For those not familar, that's SpamCop and that's a report from them saying that a site on my populli.net domain was advertised in an email that was reported as spam. Max J. is the head guy at my webhost and he's passing this on to me to get rid of the spammer. I'm very happy he didn't simply suspend my entire dedicated server, especially since the spam report was totally false, the email reported was NOT spam and my site was NOT spamvertised.

What is http://tools.populli.net/ ?

It's a FAQ about Email Lists that I created about two years ago, I've since moved it and expanded but left in redirects so if you click on that url, you'll see my site that was reported as spam...a perfectly non-spam site meant to help the TOTALLY CLUELESS LIST MEMBER who reported a TOTALLY NON-SPAM LIST MESSAGE as spamming.

SHEESH.

The listowner had put a link to my FAQ in her list footer and SpamCop automatically reports all urls as spamvertising. The message itself was part of a serious discussion about Tarot on a list that's been around almost four years with almost 1,300 members.

TOTALLY NOT SPAM.

So here I am bitching again. *sigh* I really didn't mean to do that but I had to write two nice polite emails back, one to my webhost, pointing out what my site is, why the message wasn't spam and that they could reply back to Spamcop that it wasn't spam and one to the listowner, asking her to remove the link since I don't want anymore false spam reports on my site from her (really stupid) list member. (I also gave her the list member's email address, I hope she bans the little shit.) And so I have to vent somewhere about the sheer stupidity of this person. I mean, the message didn't have a speck of spamminess in it! And reporting thru Spamcop isn't like that big ol' spam button in AOL, you do have to hit a couple more buttons, even just to report it by forwarding.

SHEESH.

Maybe I'll write up that other stuff later.

Now I have a headache again. Dee, how's yours doing? Any better today?

ETA: I get awful worked up over these things, don't I? I've been working on that sort of thing, I get really stressed out when driving too and I've been applying my "It's Not About ME" mantra so I need to start saying that about stoopid people too. :)

11:56 PM
Internet Wretched Spammers!

Some nasty spammer virus has started up today, I'm finding tons of spammed viruses in my server's mail queue, both sent to never-existed email addresses on my domains and domains I host as well as the usual bounce backs from other ISPs who so thoughtfully included the wretched virus! (Except AOL, they did the right thing and sent only the headers of the virus emails they bounced). It's getting caught by my server's anti-virus scanner but then it ends up in the mail queue, trying to bounce it back to the forged, non-existent, From address so I'm deleting them as fast as I see them.

The spammed virus is mostly sending to short common first names @ whatever domain, like Bill, Joe, Mary, Julie and forging from addresses the same way. A warning to everyone! Make sure you've updated your anti-virus software! And if you don't have any, get some! AVG is free with free updates and available here:

AVG by Grisoft

And I blame the spammers for this virus, because of certain email addresses that the virus was spammed to on one of my domains, I am almost certain it's one of those trojan viruses that will take over the infected computer so the spammer can use it to send out spam and not get caught.

07:54 PM
Internet Sheesh

AOL offers a service to domain owners, the ability to get cc'd on all spam complaints (they remove the AOL member email address to preserve the AOLer's privacy). I signed up for it to keep an eye on what was being reported. I only host fans so it's extremely unlikely there'd ever be any real spam from my domains so mainly I'm watching to see what legitimate mail is getting reported as spam.

In the last four days since it was activated, I've gotten two copies of spam reports. One was for a list post to a very large list, okay, well, it happens, perhaps the AOLer thought that "Report this as Spam" button is a magic unsub button or that if s/he reported the list messages s/he doesn't like,that AOL will somehow magically filter those out for them, letting thru the list messages s/he does like. Oh well, it happens.

The seond spam report tho, ...here's the sequence of events (as I deduce from the spam report):

1. An author wrote a story, the author has a website at Populli and a Populli email address and she posted her story on her site or on a list somewhere, using her populli email address.

2. An AOLer read the story and liked it and sent an email to the Populli author, asking for more.

3. The Populli author replied, just a couple lines, saying thanks and that she never knew what plot bunnies might pop in her head.

4. The AOLer received that reply from the Populli author and reported it as spam.

Sheesh.

Step away from the Report Spam button, people, just step slowly away, it's for your own safety.

07:41 PM
Internet Testing...

Testing, testing, testing...1, 2, 3, testing...

11:03 PM
Internet Getting the word out in a timely fashion (NOT)

Email from Zone Alarm received just moments ago:

Dear Valued ZoneAlarm Customer,

You may have heard about the "Defacers Challenge" taking place this
upcoming weekend.

Header line to verify that they just sent this email out tonight:
Received: from sc8-a7-omp4.rsc01.net (10.40.1.117) by SC8-A7-OMP4.rsc01.net (PowerMTA(TM) v1.5); Sun, 6 Jul 2003 22:44:02 -0700 (envelope-from [news@zonelabs.rsc02.com])

Trouble is, they're just a little behind the times. The Defacers Challenge was this weekend, this morning in fact....

05:54 PM
Internet Hackers' contest Sunday July 6 - BACK UP your sites!

There's supposed to be a hackers' contest tomorrow:

CNN: Will hackers attack 6,000 Web sites in 6 hours on July 6?

And even tho it's always a good idea to back up your website, this would be
another reason to back up your websites today!

11:52 PM
Internet All the little codes running round my head...

gah. I'm drowning in the automated archive! :) I've been working on it for a couple different archives for most of the last week and it's running all around my brain now, I'll probably dream about it tonight! Mostly trying to get the automated archive to do what I want and it's been giving me fits (but! I think I just figured out the answer to my problem! Use the boolean setting, 1 for yes, 0 for no...) and I'm starving and it's 11:45 and I'm hot and sweaty and I need to take a shower before I go to bed!

07:03 PM
Internet The return visit of the Dodo

The dodo is back!

dodo: "I know where I created my original group,and I know it is where now,so I do not appreciate being called a liar."

me: "First off, I never called you a liar (I never even said you were an idiot, even tho you are :)), I just pointed out your error. Since you persist in it, you have demonstrated how much of a fool you are as well as being an idiot."

This last time, he included the name of his group so I trotted over to its home page, it was created on January 30, 2000, about eight months before Yahoogroups bought eGroups and oooh, lookie there, his group's message archive is public, so I click on the link, then I click on "First Message" on January 30, 2000 (posted by the idiot of course) and then I click on "View Source" and wow, lookie at all those headers with....you guessed it! EGROUPS! in them! Gee, I wonder where he created his group???? Could it be....EGROUPS????

So I copied all those lovely EGROUPS headers into a reply to him, it's my responsibility as a conscientious researcher to properly document the dodo's intelligence levels as well as their migration habits....

04:44 PM
Internet Bizarro world alice ttlg

But this is absolutely and completely wrong! There's nothing there that's me, not even the number or the color!

04:31 PM
Internet You can write, but you can't read?

Geez. What part of "Slash is generally defined as fan fiction featuring romantic pairings of same-sex characters from TV, movies, or other media" is not understandable?

WARNING: Very adult graphic language ahead.

Same-sex = two men or two women, I don't want to hear about his dick in her pussy, I want to hear about his dick in a guy's ass. And the "characters from TV, movies..." part, that means fictional characters, TV, you know, that big box in your living room with sound and pictures, and the movies, you know that big dark room you go sit in and whack off in the last row while watching 40 foot tall actors on the big screen at the other end of the room?

That's a slash fanfiction archive I run. So don't send me crap about some horny guy and a hot babe, I ain't interested. And go take some classes in writing, it reads like some really bad Red Shoe Diaries.

(grin) I just felt like being obnoxious without actually being obnoxious to that particular person!

11:36 PM
Internet Mucking out the forms

What did I do today? I mucked about with PHP formmail. Since some nasty spammer was trying to abuse cgi formmail on my domains and I couldn't figure out if it was my formmail scripts or the one the webhost has set up on the server for all customers, I took my cgi formmail scripts down. I happened across a link to a PHP formmail and so I've set that up on four forms on two of my sites, we'll see how that goes, although I'm still not sure why PHP forms are supposed to be more secure than cgi forms, seems like they have the same problems with referrers and recipients as cgi forms do, but what the heck. At least it'll take the spammers awhile to find the new ones.

Had another weird dream last night, this one featured Madonna but I can't remember any details except that she wasn't obnoxious or annoying like she is in real life. :)

11:21 AM
Internet Running screaming from the computer

Gahhhhhhhhhhh! I hate webhosts. I am so tired of dealing with server crashes and endless intermittent problems that never get fixed, domains that disappear, webhosts who promise something and then never do it...I just want to stick my head in the sand and work on something FUN!

09:51 PM
Internet Sur-prize!

Weird....never had anyone copy anything I created, not even a little bit and it's really strange to read someone's post on a help list, click on the link to their site to see more detail on the problem and have my own design staring back at me. Not exactly, the pic is different, the site is for a different fandom and the colors are different but the layout is the same, all the pieces in the same places, the background image follows the same design as mine.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not upset, I'm not mad, I've said frequently that people are welcome to stuff on my sites to help them figure out their problems and no-one's ever even remotely copied anything I've done so I'm actually flattered that someone liked my design enough to imitate it. It's not a hugely complex design, I didn't spend hours on it. It's fairly basic, I probably ought to package it up as a template and stick it in a zip file for anyone to download because it's pretty easy to use and navigate. It's just that it took me so unawares, caught me off guard. So it's weird, that's all.

02:28 PM
Internet CSS resources

Couple of css/stylesheet resources:

House of Style

Guides, tutorials, layouts, etc. They also sell various CSS and web design software but there's free stuff there too.

And a CSS list they started, CSS-Foundations, a basics list, a place for beginners to intermediate, tips, tricks, working out problems, suggestions. I'd been on the css-discuss list for awhile but it's very advanced, way over my head and this one looks to have more usable info and be more interesting.

It's not fan-oriented, more general web design but it's open to anyone.

09:43 PM
Internet Spam Arrest Redux

From Spam Arrest's website today:

Recently we have received some inquiries regarding a mailing we delivered to some verified users of Spam Arrest.

While this contact was completely covered by our privacy policy, our customers concerns come first.

Because of this, Spam Arrest has ceased sending such solicitation and will not send unsolicited bulk email again. Spam Arrest apologies for any inconvenience this action may have caused anyone.

Biggest problem with this statement is: a mailing we delivered to some verified users of Spam Arrest. The people who received the mailing are not Spam Arrest users, they are people who were sent verification notices by Spam Arrest's service or were whitelisted by Spam Arrest users. The people who received the mailing never entered into any agreement with Spam Arrest, never agreed to the Privacy policy (or Terms of Service) on Spam Arrest's website since they were never Spam Arrest users.

As for ceasing to send spam, that's nice, but they aren't admitting that they spammed! This is a company selling an anti-spam service and they don't know what spam is. The arguments they made for their spamming are the same arguments that spammers make, especially the "just opt-out" argument. If anyone else had sent this sort of spam to the Spam Arrest users, Spam Arrest would have blocked it because it's spam! But when it comes from Spam Arrest, it's okay because spam is "what everyone else does".

A company that makes money off this kind of hypocrisy is ludicrous and isn't allowed anywhere near the mailboxes on my domains.

09:37 PM
Internet Just say No to Spam Arrest's spam!

If you're using Spam Arrest, don't. The company has joined the ranks of spammers themselves and they are actively harvesting the email addresses you place in your whitelist and the addresses of anyone who emails you and then spamming them with advertising for Spam Arrest, offering only an opt-out link. This is called spam. People who emailed you or that you happen to know did not ask for and don't necessarily want to get unsolicited commercial email (aka spam) from Spam Arrest.

This has been verified in emails from Spam Arrest staff to ISP network admins, I've seen the emails and you can read them yourself, Spam Arrest response.

Spam Arrest openly states that they will spam anyone you whitelist and anyone who emails you. So you may not get spam, but everyone else will, your mom, your Aunt Ida, your cousin Bob, your boss, your best friend.

That's not ethical or acceptable behavior and therefore I've blocked them on Populli.net. It won't stop the software on anyone's computer but it will block the Spam Arrest verifications and the Spam Arrest spamvertising as well from reaching me or anyone using a Populli.net or Brillig.net email address or any other domain I own.

If you know someone using Spam Arrest, please pass on the info, tell them to take the Boulder Pledge, don't use the products of spammers! Tell Spam Arrest that their behavior is unethical and not acceptable on the internet and you're not using their products as long as they continue to spam people.

12:16 PM
Internet Limits, Life and LJ

I've seen one user who posted 350, 250, 150, and 50 times on the 11th through 14th of September 2001 (from a comment on the LJ_News thread about posting limits)

Wow. How do you even actually post 350 in a 24 hour period??? One word per post? I mean, you'd have to sit at the computer and make a new LJ entry every four minutes, assuming you never left the computer for food or sleep or to pee. If you do any of those things, you'd have to post more often to make 350 in one day.

Wow.

In case anyone hasn't heard, LJ is going to impose posting limits. They apparently tried it yesterday (evening?) when I was busy running around in the real world but the reaction was a bit more than they wanted to deal with, especially on Brad's birthday (over 2800 comments on the LJ_News post alone). But the posting limits will come back. Here's the LJ_News post about it. While 20 is wayyyyy more than I'd ever post in one day (if I really wanted to post 20 times in one day, I hope someone would whack me with a 2x4!), three is wayyyy too low. I'm not a frequent poster but there have been some days where I posted 4 or 5 times on completely different topics. If I hadn't already paid for my account, I'd go back to my Moveable Type blog and just keep the account here to read other people's LJ. So I hope they raise it to at least five whenever they start imposing the limit again.

And while they aren't imposing limits on comments atm, it looks like that is coming, the news post says:

"We haven't limited...number of comments per post, comment posting frequency..."

and later on says:

"The first limit to be going live is..." (my emphasis on first)

which tells me that later on there will most likely be limits on the number of comments per post and/or comment posting frequency per user.

While I can understand the need to set limits, LJ isn't a bottomless bucket of money, they don't run any ads (which truly amazes me), I do hope they take into account that the comments is the heart of LJ. I haven't been here long but it didn't take much time at all to see why people love it, the friends page is cool, but it's the interactivity of commenting that makes it really connect people. Being able to talk back, to see other comments, to click and see the other person's LJ, to wander back and forth and around thru comments and LJs is the key to making it a community. And since the majority of users are free accounts, to limit them severely on commenting, either thru the number of comments on a post or comment posting by user, would really put a dent in that feeling of connection and community. And it would really make it more of a Haves and Have-nots thing, it's one thing to say, "you pay, you get more features", it's another thing to say, "you don't pay, you're a second class citizen and maybe we'll let you talk some of the time".

I can go post in my blog anytime. The main reason I'm posting in my LJ is because of the comments. The main reason I'm reading my friends page is because of the comments. Because not only can I say what I think, people can reply and tell me what they think and not only can I read what other people think, I can reply and tell them what I think and I read what other people replied. That just doesn't happen as much with blogs that I've ever seen.

That'll be two cents, please. :)

09:46 AM
Internet How I love the smell of smoke in the morning (NOT)

Turn on computer, monitor kicks on automatically...computer boots, windows starts loading, screen starts going wonky, squishing in and out and something smells funny....eeeeek! There's smoke coming out of the top of my monitor! Hit off switch, unplug monitor. My beautiful 19 inch sparkling color monitor.

Crap. Now I really need a job. ;)

So my choice is really old 15 inch monitor (never throw anything that works away) which is *really* fuzzy and blurry cause it's like SIX years old, maybe more. Or 17 inch monitor that blew out something relating to the yellow spectrum awhile ago so everything is really dark and webpages with dark backgrounds are really hard to read.

But, on the bright side, at least I have two choices, it's not like I have no monitor at all and it wasn't my *computer* that was smoking, that really would have been a disaster especially since I've been a bit lax in backing up lately.

12:03 PM
Internet Senfic list back up again! and SXF too!

Senfic, mailing list for the posting and discussion of The Sentinel gen fanfic, rated G to R has a new home!
 
http://www.brillig.net/mailman/listinfo/senfic_brillig.net

Since the member list was lost when Trickster crashed, please pass the word on to any interested parties.

Edit: And I should add that SXF is also up again, here:
 
http://www.brillig.net/mailman/listinfo/sxf_brillig.net

10:38 AM
Internet Properly coded html makes the cyberworld so much better!

I love Mailman, really I do. But I sure wish the creators of the program would clean up their scuzzy html code! The dang thing's default html code for the list sign up pages is missing some closing table td's and tr's which just kills Netscape 4. Yeah, the browser is going on six years old and it's really ancient and buggy but having properly closed table tags is also very basic standard html and it's such a simple thing which would make the page display completely in N4.
 

10:04 AM
Internet Internet worms affecting Populli and DitB

There is currently a massive worm attack on the internet. While the worm is aimed primarily at Microsoft SQL servers, as it distributes itself, it checks all servers to see if it can attack them, thus affecting all servers. And the additional traffic that the worm generates affects everyone else's access.

CNN has a story but it kind of minimizes what's happening. The webhost for my Ditb.org domain has more details.

Your access of Populli or Ditb websites may depend on where you are, for example, I can access Populli.net/org just fine, its servers are on the east coast, I'm in Texas. But I'm having lots of problems accessing Ditb.org which is on the west coast. If you're on the west coast, you may have trouble accessing Populli but not Ditb. And this may change as the worm moves around, as different internet backbone providers figure out ways to block it.

There's nothing any webhost can do, the problem lies with the worm running its course or if the internet backbone providers can find a way to block it. All of my webhosts are Linux, not Microsoft so they can't be infected by the worm, all websites, lists and email are intact, they can only be affected by the increase in internet traffic from the worm blocking valid requests for webpages. It is possible that some email may bounce if the sender's ISP or mailing list can't access Populli because of the traffic caused by the worm.

So be patient, the attack will diminish as time goes on and should settle down in a day or two as the worm runs its course.

04:03 PM
Internet Alphabet Soup

ETA! I finally figured it out! Edited To Add! See, ETA has always been Estimated Time of Arrival to me and then I got on LJ and people were putting "ETA" and some additional note and I figured it had to do with adding that note but I couldn't quite figure out the words for ETA since it's always been about time of arrival to me. But it finally popped into my head just now!
 
And yeah, I know I could have looked it up in Google or any number of acronym guides but I just never got to doing that...

12:06 PM
Internet Nothing to see here, move along...

Arrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!

02:27 PM
Internet That 100 things meme

Nuh-uh, no way. That 100 things meme that's going around? You won't catch me doing it, no way. First off, you don't want to know 100 things about me, just trust me on that. Second off, I got too many other things to do! Ten things, I could handle that, but 100? You people are crazy! (but I love you anyway! :))

1. I haven't taken a shower yet today, will later tho, taking my mom's computer back to her, new and improved, well, improved anyway.

2. I like white foods, didn't do it on purpose, it's just that all the things I like are white or beige or yellow. My aunt pointed this out to my mother who passed it on to me.

3. I like to sit down front in movies. A crazy Czech friend of the stepbear said it's because I want to see the movie first, before anyone else in the theatre. :)

4. I love books, although I don't read as much these days and I miss that.

5. I hate hot weather! Cause there's only so many clothes that you can take off before the police start making arresting motions. I love snow and cold and coats and boots and sweaters and being able to see my breath!

6. I hate roaches, I totally freak out over them, scream and jump on top of things. Then I kill them, stomp on them with my Dr. Scholls hard wood sandals or drown them in bug spray or both. And I should specify, it's the big roaches that freak me out, the itty bitty ones you get in kitchen cabinets, them I can squash and get rid of easy but the big ones can *fly*, nothing worse than a roach *flying* at your face.

7. My father died when I was four, it's given me a lifelong obsession over the Kennedys (he died about a year before JFK, I remember being five and watching his funeral on TV and I'm about the same age as his kids), men in uniform (my dad was a Navy pilot until about a year before his death and most of the pictures I have of him are in uniform or flight jacket) and male parental figures along with a large inability to relate to or even talk to men, even tho I'm firmly heterosexual.

8. I'm pro gun control, pro choice, pro death penalty and a moderate Democrat. None of that has ever seemed like a contradiction in terms to me.

9. I love to fly. In airplanes I mean, my grandfather flew small planes and owned a charter service, I love big and small planes, both for the experience of being up there and for the promise of going somewhere *other than here*.

10. I love Scotland. No, that's not really right. When I went there, I felt completely and totally at home in a way I never have anywhere else in the world. I *belong* there.

There ya go, that's all you need to know about me! :)

03:17 PM
Internet Pest Control

Okay, this just cracks me up! Everything, but everything goes around the internet at least twice. This little article about Yahoo's web beacons first circulated over a year ago when Yahoo first published the notice. Now it's going around again (I've gotten it a dozen times on all the lists I'm on) like it's something new! And I have to laugh because, believe me, Yahoo's little web beacons are the least of the privacy intrusions on the net, I'd worry more about spy software that you can get without realizing it from unscrupulous websites, like Gator/Gain and Kazaa (although Kazaa is much more open about their spy/distributed networking thing these days) and all the other nifty free programs everyone downloads.
 
TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
 
corollary:
TANSTAPOTN - There Ain't No Such Thing As Privacy On The Net.
 
(Mine's not as catchy as Heinlein's, but it's just as true.)

02:46 PM
Internet A blow for politeness!

Wow, fandom_wank is suspended....I don't read it so I have no idea what they might have done that was so offensive (other than being wanking bitches but that's fairly normal for some).

That subject line up there is really meant as a joke. If people want to go bitch and rant and rave and whine and moan, that's fine with me, as long as they don't insist on doing it in my face. So fandom_wank was fine with me, they did it all over *there* and I'm fine and happy over *here*.

But I'm not surprised that someone complained, I mean if you insist on pointing and laughing at people, well hey, some people are not going to like you pointing and laughing at them and they'll complain. That's life.

07:10 PM
Internet Live Feeds on LJ, part 2

After touting the live feeds on LJ, I was kindly reminded that they can only be friended by paid accounts. So I created a special friends page with a bunch of live feeds, thanks to Chris for the nifty idea. You can bookmark this page and then check it whenever. The live feeds on it are:
 
Daily Comic Strips:
Boondocks
Dilbert
Doonesbury
Dork Tower
Foxtrot
 
Miscellaneous stuff, blogs...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Illuminatio
The Big Screen
The Idiot Box
Wil Wheaton
(Yes, Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: TNG, he's a really good writer, tells good stories and a hopeless romantic too! :)
 
And the Syndication Promotion community, info on new feeds is posted here:
Syn Promo
Check out the user info, there's a list of all the known live feeds and I can add more here if anyone has any requests.

08:39 PM
Internet Mercury retrograde

Gahhhh. Sometimes I have this huge urge to just whap people about the head and shoulders and beat some sense into their tiny brains! Gee, you think if you tell people they need a history lesson, they'll just bow and scrape and fall all over you apologizing for offending you??? Whapwhapwhap! You just declared a thread off topic? Gee, I must have missed that announcement where I abdicated and made you listowner, must be my Alzheimers kicking in... Whapwhapwhap!

Sheesh. Definitely mercury retrograde. Maybe I'll just set the entire list to NoPost, that'll fix them. :) (and no, this is not on any fandom lists so don't go looking, fandom_wank knows nothing.)

04:51 PM
Internet Puffing out my chest

Mary Ellen's BNFhood and LJdom Post
2. What do I think makes someone a BNF? Power. Control or perceived control of fannish resources is the clearest and most obvious measure of BNFhood: running an archive, mailing list, bulletin board, website; organizing cons; editing/publishing zines.

Hey, look at that! I'm a BNF! I run (several) archives, mailing lists and websites and I'm running a fic awards this year, so I qualify! Cool, now how can I abuse my power? ;)

Thing is, you mention my name in XF (where my largest archive is and the awards I'm running are) and a bunch of people would go, "alice who?" Cause I lurk alot, I work on sites, I upload stories, etc., but I lurk. Every so often, I post announcements of updates and all that, but mostly I lurk.

It's weird cause I'm really talkative in real life with people I know, I'll talk their heads off! But online, I've always been quieter, I read alot, I am fascinated by discussions of shows and discussions of fandom but by the time I think of posting, either the discussion has been over for days (cause I'm slow on catching up on list mail) or someone else has already said it and all I have to add is "me too!" So I lurk.

On the other hand, I think because I'm fairly quiet, I get less grief than other people in control of archives, lists, awards, etc. I have had perhaps a handful of obnoxious emails over three and a half years. So that's good, my biggest hassle in taking on all that I do is feeling guilty when I get behind.

09:35 AM
Internet Syndicated feeds on LJ

Since I've been talking about live feeds for my other blogs, I figured I ought to post a clue as well. Live feeds, syndicated feeds, it's pulling entries from other blogs outside LJ and from news websites and daily comics like Doonesbury, Foxtrot, etc. You can find a listing of all the known, public syndicated feeds on the syn_promo community, click on User Info and there's a list of all of them under "About". And people post new ones in the community as they find them or create them.

Every LJ user gets an allowance of how many syndicated feeds they can friend, the more LJers who friend a syndicated feed, the cheaper it gets for everyone, plus you get your daily news and laughs, too! :) You can check out your syndication allowance here and some of the popular syndicated feeds are listed there too.

From what I've read, it looks like syndicated feeds is fairly new and they're not listed in the interests or any general place for LJers to find them so I figured I'd spread the word a bit. :)

11:01 PM
Internet Live is good

The live feeds at LJ are updating! Got the comics, it seems to be working it's way from most popular to least popular, Zeldman's done, that's close to my two feeds for idiotbox and bigscreen, so almost there! Yeah! Live is good.

And I'm going to bed, I'm tired, I'm drained, I'm up to my eyeballs in teeny text on graphics and repetitive html coding, I'll do the other two pages tomorrow, along with defragging my mom's computer and pricing out a new one for her.

11:03 PM
Internet This is your brain on LJ

This should be interesting. There was a discussion on LJ and some lists awhile back, about fan sites and archives with "donate" buttons on them. I only caught the tail end of it from Maygra's blog. It just came up again on Zorrorojo's House of Snark LJ, she mentioned boycotting The AlphaGate Archive and I asked why. Turns out they have a Donate button on their site and she boycotts any site with one of those.

So I very kindly gave her my four domains, populli.net/org, ditb.net/org so she wouldn't fall into the evilness that is my sites since all the webhosting fees are paid by donations. I went on to voice my opinion about the Donate buttons, too....

Read all about it on the House of Snark.

I don't think I'll crosspost this entry to LJ either. :)

06:42 PM
Internet Light dawns...

Now I understand why people occasionally make comments about the unreliability of Live Journal. No posting, no comments for a bunch of folks for three to four hours, when people could post, everything posted twice, trying to delete one was a frustrating deal as LJ kept saying "read-only status". And now it's refusing to bring up pages, when I'm trying to make some changes to the style. I can edit the styles, I just can't get LJ to display the *page* so I can see how it looks!

Arrrggggghhhh! And I feel crappy and I don't feel like reposting this in LJ cause that will probably take hours.

Bah. Bah on people who won't answer emails. Bah on people who wank on and on about feedbacking feedback, silliest damn thing I ever saw, like Maygra said, poking a rattlesnake with a stick. Bah on people who insist on being offended where there is no offense. Bah, Bah, BAH!

I sound like sheep! cause that brings up memories of driving thru Scotland, crying out "sheep! sheep!" at every turn cause I was so used to seeing crops or cows or horses, never sheep like Scottish sheep and my Scottish companions were laughing at me (and thankfully not annoyed at me acting so silly :))

07:36 PM
Internet Fun with journals

I've added the live feed for the Big Screen to Live Journal too, the movie review blog my brother and I do and don't forget to sign up for the Idiot Box, sparkling witticisms from my brother and me about TV shows. I added a rant about Enterprise a few minutes ago (a nitpick really, cause I like the show otherwise).

Now if my migraine medicine will just kick in completely, I'll feel a whole lot better...

09:21 AM
Internet Job placement services thru the Basement slash archive

The weirdest thing I ever got thru the contact form on one of my websites...well maybe not the weirdest, I get *lots* of weird stuff, but definitely up there in the top five!

  source: the Basement at DitB [my ginormous X-Files slash archive] SentBy: [identity hidden to protect the stupid] ReplyEmail: [removed] Message: Happy New Year.   Im a Diploma holder in Archival Studies and Records Management, and currently working In an insurance firm as Records Personnel. I love my career so much than most people, particulary my work-mate have stressed me by telling me to change the same. The major problem that's been faced particulary in Kenya(Iam A Kenyan)is to sensitize people the importance or preserving Records.Like in my place of work, my professionality is treated like "unknown" and hence they (My employers)belittle once profession.I would like very much if I get free journals,newsletters etc on my career, and also, I would like also very much to further my career to Degree even to P.hd level but I don't know the best colleges that offers the same. Please assist. I would like to be abreasted on the same so that I can sensitize people of the same.

I guess he just googled on "archives" or something, wow, that's going to find him some really *interesting* places on the net! LOL!

09:47 PM
Internet Fun with feeds

Yes! Wow, this is cool, I got the syndicated feed set up for the Idiot Box blog that I share with my brother so now I can see the posts there on my friends page (and everyone else can friend it too, theIdiotBox) and I got my friend aefen's blog, Daily Illuminations, set up and added to my friends list, too!

bouncebouncebounce!

But bah on LiveLizard, it made a complete hash of the LJ user links above, I guess because in order to get it to work with Mozilla 1.2, you have to turn off the html option. So I'm back to the LJ for Windows client that I was using. Although it spit at me just now when I tried to edit this entry.

03:54 PM
Internet Grrrrrrrr Arrrrrgghh!

Okay, you run a webhosting business. A customer has a script that creates a problem. You shut down the account but you don't bother to tell them (hell, they not only have an email address for me thru another domain/webhost, they also have my cellphone!) Then when the customer asks publicly if the server is down, you tell them to email you but you don't turn on their account so they can delete the script and you don't delete it yourself.

What part of this makes any sense at all? Especially given that the customer (me) had absolutely no way of knowing that there was an out of control script (there is nothing available to the customer about this) and the customer (me) hasn't uploaded any new scripts but suddenly your server is objecting to the ones that have been running for (literally) months.

Sheesh.

This happened before, last June after my account was moved to a different (and apparently more limited) server, only I was never told that the servers were different and didn't have a clue that there might be a problem. I have since removed the one script that their server objected to from public access and set it up as a nightly cron job instead. So I don't know what the deal is this time. I did make some changes on Friday evening and Saturday to one site, that's the only thing I can think of. But of course I can't get in and they won't tell me which one it is so I can delete it and get the rest of the site back up.

Double sheesh.

The only reason I have sites there is that I paid for a whole year and their refund policy is screwy (slanted in their benefit) and I would get virtually nothing if I cancelled now. Come June, I'll move those sites elsewhere but for the moment, I can't afford to lose that money.

Addendum: He did reply and tell me the name of the script file but can't tell me which folder it's in (I have several archives on that site) so I'll have to delete that file in all of them and try to figure out what I can do with it. Personally I think it's really a server problem, that their server had some glitch and locked in a loop with the script. But this guy listens to no-one so I groveled and said I'd delete it as soon as he turned on ftp access. (Kind of difficult to do if I don't have ftp access tho, sheesh.)

Addendum2: All deleted, all restored now. And I should add that he didn't yell and scream this time, he was reasonable and quick to respond. When this happened last June, he wouldn't reply to emails (even after they told me why my site was suspended) and then he lectured me about it and said it was "punishment" for causing the problem, like I had deliberately done it.

Addendum3: And after looking at the error logs, I can see that it was the Basement archive and the script is one that converts the stories into a .txt file for people who want to print out stories or save them to their hard drive so it's not critical. I set the Basement and ScullySlash to use the one at Squidge instead (Squidge never objects to the automated archive :)) and removed the option at the Spookys. But I really do think this was a glitch in the webhost's server, that it stumbled and locked into a loop with one file. Their servers are really puny and stuff happens every so often with them.

09:05 PM
Internet Cyber-People

On the other hand, people I meet in cyber space are some of the best there is, both in fandom and elsewhere. I've been managing a couple lists for a woman I met on a technical help list almost two years ago, I originally volunteered to do it, she insisted on paying me (the lists are free but relate to her business) and she is the dearest, sweetest person. She's a stereotypical grandmother who does consultant work for businesses for team building and she publishes these new age-y affirmations and she really does live them, she's always so positive and warm and friendly even when we were having terrible problems with the list host. So between all the nice people in fandom and this lovely lady, my day is a bit better.

I'm not addicted to the Internet, it's just that all the really nice people hang out there! :)

12:29 PM
Internet Who am I?

A meme on online nicks, from rhiannonhero....

I am alice ttlg. That's all lowercase (I hate it when I fill out some online form and it capitalizes the first letter) and the ttlg part is an acronym for through the looking glass. When I started out on the net about five years ago, I used my real name but it never felt that comfortable, I never cared for my full first name and my nickname is mainly for family, feels weird when non-family people use it. And I felt kind of like I was looking thru a mirror on the newsgroups and lists, partly feeling removed and partly feeling, wow, there's all these people like me! :) And so I was alice in wonderland, alice through the looking glass. A friend also called me "pinafore girl", so I'll answer to that too.

Coda came from the need to set up a new primary email address since my alice one was getting spammed :-( and I wanted something short, less typing, easy to remember. I like the word, I like the meaning, a musical ending, music is my savior, rock and roll saved my soul and got me thru adolescence. Plus it reminds me of Kodiak bears, I love bears, a friend sent me this hilarious card a couple years ago with a white bear lying on his back on the snow, touching his nose with his hind feet, I still have it on my refrigerator and it cheers me up every time I see it.

But I haven't changed from alice ttlg to coda so much as added it to alice ttlg, mainly for email address and website title/url, I'm not coda, I'm still alice ttlg. But, the nicks are only for online, if I meet someone in person and they say my online nick, it doesn't sound like me at all! But typed on a computer, it is me completely.

I'm also texas critter, a nickname from the same friend who gave me pinafore girl, I was setting up a new email address for joining some non-fan technical lists and so I used that and it stuck. A fun side effect of the nick is that most people assume I'm a guy and some get really apologetic when they find out I'm a woman. It never bothered me, if I choose a non-gender-specific nick, I don't expect people to somehow divine my sex!

I have a couple other nicks, Kenzie, but that one has never felt like me, it feels really odd to sign it to a message, and Lizzany, that one is me but it's mainly for signing up at sites where I might get spammed. It comes from early on when I discovered mailing lists on the net and joined a whole bunch of them and a friend (different one than pinafore girl and texas critter) called me a list-zany, I ran it all together real fast and it was Lizzany. I use Borden for a last name with it, like Lizzie Borden (gave her mother 40 whacks, gave her father 41 :-)), I was always fascinated by her, one of the best books I've read presented a very compelling case that she didn't do it, but was covering up for someone else (and the book reveals who and why). And it works as a realistic made up name for website signups, it could be short for Elizabeth and Borden is common enough that it looks real.

Mostly I ended up with different nicks for different parts of my online life, alice ttlg and coda is fan stuff, texas critter is technical, computer, non-fan stuff and Lizzany signs up at websites.

Wow, that's kind of boring.

09:52 PM
Internet Scruffy Men

What Lord of the Rings Male and Mood Do You Desire? brought to you by Quizilla

I expected that, tho, I know enough to be able to slant my answers for my favorite hero! And I do like him Kingly, my favorite parts of the books with him are in Book 3, at Helm's Deep and then off to rally the Army of the Dead and sailing in to save the day at the last battle!

11:42 AM
Internet Junkie

Hmmm, this is addictive, now I've posted comments in THREE LJs. And I'm into the "just one more click and then I'll stop" mode! :)

10:27 AM
Internet Swish

I have been sucked into the swirling drain pool of Live Journal! Someone save me! I actually posted a comment in someone's LJ! And I have almost 20 people on my friends list! And two people friended me! They like me, they really like me! LOL!

So I guess I've done it, I've protested and avoided and said never, no, not me but there I am.

Still posting here tho, I still love Moveable Type too much. :)

10:54 PM
Internet A non-hassle-free hour or two later...

So there's an LJ over there, although it's main purpose is the friends list so there's no talking by me over there, it'll stay here.

It's a like a minefield tho, I mean, I added a bunch of people to the friends list but it's purely for ease of reading LJs, some of those people probably don't even know me from adam. And it's kind of like AOL's "buddy" list, I'm not real fond of this "friends" label or the AOL "buddy" label either.

I'm flower child of the Sixties, man. Peace, love and rock 'n roll, man. :)

09:00 PM
Internet Color Unchanged

Addendum to LJ saga:

Finally heard back from LJ Support, some sort of Paypal to LJ glitch, they'd fixed it and the backlog of payments would take a few hours to process thru. Ten hours after my payment, I finally get the account creation code. I open the email, I click on the link....it crashes my computer.
 
(sigh) It's a sign, isn't it? I'm really not supposed to do this LJ thing, aren't I?

03:15 PM
Internet· Rants & Whines Color Me Not Impressed

Color Me Not Impressed. I wandered across a friend's LJ which is fully friends-locked to keep out her family and I figured what the heck, I'll break down and get an LJ, if only to read hers. And since I like to customize things, I figure I'll pop for five bucks for two months of a paid account, it's a small amount, I get some perks, if I don't end up using it, I can let it lapse to a free account after two months and still be able to access her LJ.

I give them my money. I get a confirmation from Paypal and an LJ page that says Thank You! Your account creation code will be sent within a minute.

I check my mail. No code. I wait. I check my mail. No code. I wait some more. I check my mail. No code.

After 30 minutes, I click on an LJ email address from the Paypal receipt and from the thank you page and send off an email with the Paypal verification stuff and that I didn't get an account creation code. I get back an autoreply with a link to my ticket in the support area at LJ.

That was four hours ago. No code, no reply to my ticket. Color Me Not Impressed. Yeah, it's only five bucks and yeah sometimes internet stuff isn't immediate but don't tell me it is if it's not and I know it's only been four hours, but their site also makes a big deal about how their paid customers get such faster access and all that. I checked their status page and their news page, no reports of any problems on their end, my mail is all coming thru fine.

So :-ppppppppp Not Impressed.

05:10 PM
Internet Being Bill the Cat, part 3

Sigh. Someone give me a hammer please, I want to bash my head in.
 
Me in my original post to tech support: In Create a New Account, there's about 50-60 IPs shown, not just the 10 IPs I paid for.
Latest response from techs: The 10 IPs shown there are yours.

So I asked them if all 50 some IPs that are shown there are mine, stupid question, I know, but asking intelligent ones doesn't get me anywhere.

I tortured small children in some past life, didn't I? That's why I'm paying now, bad Karma, right?

01:25 PM
Internet Being Bill the Cat, part 2

I know I whine about stupid techs alot but I tell you, all this stuff is true! Here's the latest:
 
Me: I signed up for second account and a block of IPs. I got no info on the block of IPs (but was charged for them), what are my IPs? (included detailed account info as well)
Tech: Did you get confirmation with what are the IPs assigned to you? Lots IPs can be seen but you can only use which we assigned.
Me: That's what I'm asking! What are my IPs???

Sigh. That feels so much better. Now they'll come back and tell me I didn't pay for an IP block because they'll only look at my first account or they'll come back and ask what account did I pay for the IP block on....

This is how it goes most times, I ask a question, provide as much detail as I can, they come back with a stupid answer or a stupid question, I answer that and then they ask for the info I already provided at the beginning. Somewhere on the net there's a not-so-hilarious-anymore movie of techs sitting in cubicles playing mind games like this with customers, I'm beginning to think that's what happens at this webhost, they a) don't read anything I write, b) grab one thing and repeat it back or say it doesn't exist, c) ask for all the same info again and then d) sit back and laugh as I run in circles like a chicken with its head cut off. Sigh.

07:40 PM
Internet Being Bill the Cat

Ack, to use a favorite phrase of Bill the Cat.
 
me filing trouble ticket with webhost: Can't receive any mail on any email account on domains pointed to the subdomains of (primary account domain).
tech: There are no email accounts that point to subdomains on that account.
me: (big silent sigh at stupid tech) Yes there are. Here's a list of them and you can log in on the control panel and see for yourself. Of course, you can't see that there's any subdomains on that domain or any domains pointed to the subdomains because of the bug in the control panel that I reported in trouble ticket (#) last week but they do exist, you can log in on my reseller panel and see them.

So my choices are either to deal with the nasty angry webhost who's rude and obnoxious and takes days to fix things and disappears for two months each year or deal with the stupid techs at the other webhost who tend to break stuff and have no idea how to fix it and won't even admit it's broken until I write pages and pages of detailed info and repeat the same info at least twice.

Ack.

06:55 PM
Internet The Internet is falling, the Internet is falling!

Ring, ring....(no caller id on the cell phone display)...
Marketroid: Hi, can I speak to the administrator for (my brother's domain that I set up)?
Me: Who is this?
Marketroid: (some marketspeak company name) can I speak to the administrator or is there a fax number where I can fax the administrator?
(yeah right, like I'd give them a fax number even if I did have one.)
Me: You got this phone number off the domain records, you are prohibited from doing that in order to sell me something.
(and they are, the ICANN agreement specifically prohibits using the public whois information to market anything to any domain owner.)
Marketroid: I'm not trying to sell you something, there's been important developments on the Internet...
(oh my! Important Developments on the Internet! And I might have missed them! I'm so thankful you took the time to call me! Let me send you a fruitcake!)
Me: Who do you work for again?
Marketroid (getting huffy now): (more marketspeak, Domain Support Group, I think)
Me: Take me off your list and do not call me again.
Marketroid (now downright snippy): We'll inform your provider.
Me: (rolls eyes, yeah right, guess I'm just out of luck on those Important Developments on the Internet, my life is ruined!)

Sigh. And a waste of my cellphone minutes, I think I'm going to change my approach, start asking them for a credit card number to charge for the cost of my cellphone minutes. If they'll pay for them, I'll be happy to let them drone on.

Spam, spam, spam, SPAM!

03:29 PM
Internet I have a stalker...

I have a stalker and really bizarre one too.

I have this Tom Cruise website (my guilty secret :)), it's just pics scarfed off the net, and stuff that my co-mod collected on the Tom Cruise list I run (someone else set up and then abandoned it and I offered to take it over).

There's a contact form on the site (although I may take it down after all this), yesterday I got five emails from the contact form in about 40 minutes time, all very similar, no email address in the email field (it's optional) but with a snail mail address in town in NY state and a whole bunch of barely coherent stuff about Tom and wanting "stuffy" from him (mention of posters and autographs so I think that's what "stuffy" is) and meandering off into some fantasy about being with him (not pornographic, just kisses on the beach or having dinner, near as I can make it anyway) with each email.

By pure chance, last week I had added the field to the formmail script I use to show the IP address on the email I get from the contact form and it was the same on all five emails so I dug out my instructions on how to block a specific IP thru the htaccess file and put it in and uploaded that. Emails stopped, problem solved, I figure and go on about other stuff.

I noted that it was an AOL IP but figured it's some kid with a crush on Tom. I figured I might have to change the block to the group of IPs if it's an AOL dial up account but no big deal.

Today, I get an email directly from this person (it's the email address on the contact page for people who have trouble with the form), same snail mail address, same meandering barely coherent message about "stuffy" and "drianner" (dinner, I think) and I think a phone number and directions to this person's house!

I sent back a reply telling them to stop emailing me and that I'd report them to AOL abuse if they did it again. Hopefully that takes care of it. If it's a kid, I'm sorry if it scares them but they really need some adult supervision on their use of the computer!

My brother uses AOL and he's a alpha tester for them too, so he knows a few people there, I'm going to tell him this whole thing and if this person/kid persists, I'll see if he can get it stopped. I may also see about calling that phone number and see what's going on....although that would have to be one of the weirdest phone calls I'd ever make, "hi, you don't know me, I have a Tom Cruise website and someone in your house sent me your address and phone number and is harrassing me for stuff from Tom Cruise, please tell them to stop it". LOL!

And here's a sample of the emails for your amusement:

source: Open Your Eyes SentBy: nancy Message: (snail mail address here omitted) nancy cruise she is look 4 you som cuh and she wantwhant to keep you as a friend she need you so much and she does not know all the word some same of the letter not that much but you can send me a letter she a all your stuffy bout she wantwhant mores of your stuffy too she as the poster 3 of tham one is miss viallan sky by your self see if i sp it wright send me more of your stuffyshe is going to by the new moive so much and she is going to see it too she wnatwhant to eat tom cruise4 drianner to by hime 4 drianner kiss him in hte pool kiss hime in the lacke in the water kiss in the dark to kiss in the moon to kiss in the room to kiss in the grass to kiss in the house to kiss in the bed to kiss she sp in the bed to tom cruise she go to the camp comp to the house in the wood to by tom cruise she by the boat to tom to go see the wood she wake tom walke tom in the wood we stay in the wood all day week days

And then she(?) got into a western theme:

see if you can read my letter so much in the winter we kiss too the dim wagon track went nofarther on the drames prairie amd tom stopped the horse we kiss tom and is friend walked slowly jerry ocallan away toward the stable th stable was small and it was not mad of log grass grew on its wall and its roof was covered wite growing grasses blowing in the wind withe whithe oute your shiret she is it the atuographan no shirt on you she as all of thma one is miss she is going to keep you no shirt on

Bizarro land....

03:06 PM
Internet Tell me again why I want to surf the web?

Gahhhhhhhhhh! I do one little thing that's NOT even related to the software on my computer, that's not related to the browser, I install a firmware update on my router and suddenly Mozilla won't work with any forms, including the contact pages on my websites and the cpanel logins. Yeesh. So I'm getting really good at removing Mozilla and reinstalling it, let's see, that makes about six or seven times in the last 20 hours, I think.

Otoh, this time I figured out where to turn off the text on the icons and turn on Diggler. So now, if I can just keep it from getting screwed up again, I think I have it all working the way I want it *again*.

11:52 AM
Animals· Internet· Weather It's a glorious day!

In spite of various problems and hassles last night and this morning, the cat starting to barf on the bed in the middle of the night (nothing else wakes one up quite so quickly as that! and it's amazing how fast my leg comes out to boot said cat off the bed :)), the slight headache I've got, the hassles with Mozilla Mail (love the browser, not so fond of the mail part), DNS problems with Yahoogroups on a domain for someone I host, it's really quite a gorgeous day. Sunny but nice and windy! I love wind almost as much as rain and I love the sound of it in the trees outside my open window. The cats are sleeping peacefully around me and it's about 70 degrees, not cold, not hot, just right!

12:35 AM
Internet· Rants & Whines Rules, schmules...

Rule #1: If it's fucking working, don't fuck with it.

Rule #2: If it's fucking working, don't fuck with it.

Rule #3: If it's fucking working, don't fuck with it.

After two hours of much frustration, I finally have Mozilla working again with the right theme, Multizilla installed and my bookmarks back in place. I've lost all my website logins but I can redo most of those (mostly) fairly easily.

Next time someone asks me how to do something in a particular program, if I'm not already using that program or that feature in the program, I'm not mucking about with it! They can go figure it out themselves.

11:30 AM
Internet· Weather Cats, the internet and everything

Two very frustrating days of trying to get net access, seven hours of frustration on Friday and another five hours yesterday, all during the afternoon/evening time when I'm usually working on websites and have to have net access to upload changes, view pages, test uploading and searching on the archives, plus I was trying to do the weekly backups of the websites. Arrrgggghhhh!

It's been loverly cool tho, plus rain, really nice days although my cats would disagree, Garfield described it perfectly:

I have such wimpy cats! They spent yesterday all cuddled up to me, demanding that I put the big down comforter over me so they could lay next to me and really wanting me to turn on the space heater and point it straight at them.

07:27 PM
Internet Inanities from people who should know better

I get worried when the guy who runs a webhosting company I use, the guy who builds and maintains the servers and is the primary tech, says things like this:

You cant customize a perl script,

Bad punctuation aside, this was his reply to my post on their customer forums which discussed customizing the results page from FormMail.pl directly in the FormMail.pl file. I don't even know how to program in Perl but I sure as heck can customize a Perl script. I do it all the time, I run probably a dozen (secure) FormMails on my various websites and every site has the results page directly customized within the FormMail file to look like the rest of the individual website, with the same nav menus, logos, title graphics, text links, etc., so that it blends seamlessly with the site. And I customize the automated archive pages within the Perl scripts too. It's not hard, it's just opening up the file in a text editor and adding/changing the part that prints the html page, simple as pie. The most difficult thing is knowing what characters/symbols have to be escaped, like @ signs and quote marks.

It's very scary when the webhost is this ignorant of such basic things. I dropped it there, I don't want to push since the guy is particularly vindictive and he's planning on suspending anyone running older versions of Formmail when he checks all sites in 24 hours, I don't want him getting pissed at me and suspending mine.

And the suspension thing is rather stupid, he posted this notice only on their forums so only a small group of their customers will see it and no-one else. Once an account is suspended, the websiter owner can't access it to remove the offending script.

02:28 PM
Internet Brevity is the keyword

I saw this article a while back and just came across it again. Since I've started really doing this blogging thing regularly, I figured I'd check it out and well, I guess I'm the amateur. :) So I'll try for the professional touch:

A List Apart is magnificent any time.

07:00 PM
Internet Murphy's Law

A few years ago, I opened up four email accounts at Flashmail.com. I used them for signing up at questionable sites and also for hardware/software registrations cause those can generate spam from the maker.

Now most of these accounts get spam and I had quit using all but one of them which I used fairly regularly for non-essential stuff like daily weather emails and email from pop music websites and such. I also used MailWasher to bounce the spam and had mostly gotten rid of it on this one account I still used. On the other accounts, there was nothing but spam.

Last week, I started having trouble popping mail on the one account I used. This had happened before and usually went away in a few hours or a day. But this time it's gone on for days now. I thought perhaps they'd stopped providing pop access but no, even if I login at the Flashmail.com website, it gives me an error on checking for new mail and I can pop my other accounts (with all that spam) just fine. It's just the one account that I actually use that's not working.

Murphy's Law.

Oh well, a few months ago, I'd (luckily) moved most of my software registrations that did send upgrade notices that I want to another email address on my domain. And I signed up for the weather emails with an address on my domain so I'm getting most of the stuff. I'm sure there's something I want that I've missed switching over but I'll figure it out eventually or else I'll never really miss it.

04:21 PM
Internet You're in a plane outside my window

Well, it's been a whole 11 days since I filed my last trouble ticket with my webhost so it was about time for me to complain again, wouldn't want darling Max to think I didn't like him. :)

Me: (detailed account of valid mail being bounced including urls and text files with full headers
Max: the default address setting in cpanel is set to ___ and it's working fine. (do you think he even clicked on the url I gave him? much less looked at the text files with the emails and headers? nahhh, why bother when he can give a completely wrong answer without that! You'd think I was hosting my sites at Microsoft because they give such completely correct and totally useless answers....)
Me: (after bashing my head on a brick wall cause it's less painful) the point is that mail to valid addresses is NOT being delivered to the valid address!

Sigh. I wonder what brilliance I'll get now....

03:17 PM
Internet Sharpen your pencils!

I mentioned to someone that I was beginning to hate Quizilla almost as much as I hate LJs but then I found the perfect quiz for me! And the results said:

You are highly annoying! Perhaps you ramble or write awful poetry. You should try to stop that.

Which, of course, I already knew, because I know EVERYTHING! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

And no, I will NOT post the link to that stupid picture from the results, that's just ugly.

08:05 PM
Internet It's Sunday, what are you watching?

It's Sunday evening and the internet has slowed to a crawl. Either Roadrunner's having problems again or everyone in the neighborhood is surfing the web and it's taking forever for sites to come up...

And it's warm. Even tho it's only 73, it just feels warm, warm enough that I have to turn on the A/C but that makes it too cold and I hate the cold air blowing across me, but if I turn if off, I get too hot. ick.

11:28 AM
Internet So Linux is supposed to be better, right?

Linux is supposed to be better, right? More stable, more reliable? So why does it get so screwed up all the time? My webhosts (both of them and both running Linux) have problems of one kind or another on a regular basis. Today, Mailman is screwed up at WHN, it's creating lists with the domain as part of the name (in front of the @ sign) so all the admin notices are going to a non-existent address so I never get them. So even tho mail goes thru to the proper list address, I can't use the new lists I created because WHN will probably tell me I have to delete them and recreate them.

10:43 AM
Internet Jaguars and Fords and Chevys

Ahh the religion of Apple! We lowly Windows users just can't possibly understand unless we've actually tried one and then, of course, we'll be saved and we'll never go back to the heathenish world of Windows! Hallelujah, brother!

But it's like that Jaguar in the showroom window down the street, and those "I WILL own a Jaguar one day" commercials, I think it's a beautiful car, it's exactly what I want but if I don't have the money in my pocket for it, then it's on down the street to the Ford or Chevy dealership.

And yes, I do see all of Window's faults and I wish that it did work better, I wish that Microsoft would work on quality for a little bit instead of quantity and lawsuits but that still doesn't make that Apple Jaguar any more accessible to my checkbook. Sorry, brother, guess I don't have enough money for the collection plate to get saved today.

Did you hear the one about the SCSI port?

02:32 PM
Internet It's 2pm, which keyboard are you using?

Some days it's just not a good idea to hit the delete key. Especially when you have two computers and two keyboards (color-coded even!) and you're using the keyboard for the 2nd computer while staring at the monitor for the 1st computer. Wow, look at that, you just deleted the ten scheduled ftp jobs that you spent all morning getting set up right....

11:32 AM
Internet· Politico God 1.0, God 2.0 and God 3.0

An excellent blog entry about Tom Friedman's Commonwealth Club speech from September 25, I have no idea who the guy is and I didn't hear the speech but apparently he said some very intelligent things:

...[Friedman] didn't breathe a word about 9/11 being caused by American imperialistic arrogance or support for Israel. In fact, he said quite the contrary-- al Qaeda is driven by cognitive dissonance arising from a "deficit of dignity", and as Friedman noted, dignity is at the heart of most of what really makes people mad.

And this which rings true for me:

[Friedman] mentioned that his travels have indicated that the "70% in favor of war" poll numbers don't appear to have any basis in reality-- but neither would the opposite be true; instead, most Americans are ambivalent and nervous about this war, because right or wrong, imperative or long overdue, this war is seen as one of choice, whereas Afghanistan was a clear-and-present-danger kind of thing.

And on an unrelated note, this entry was just plain funny, absolutely Microsoft, completely correct and totally useless!

09:37 AM
Internet Conundrums

The thing I hate most about not being able to get online is that I can't get online to complain about not being able to get online.

And the thing I hate second most is clueless techs at the ISP who don't tell me that it's an entire block that's down (and then I would have just waited till it was fixed) and instead lie and tell me it'll come back up in 15 minutes (probably when his shift ended).

01:09 PM
Internet Taking back grump

Arrrggghhhhhh! I hate when I screw up. I take back what I said about WHN locking me out, it turns out that my old login still worked, I had screwed it up, added .net after the user name and that was wrong. So it was all my fault. So all this hassle and delay and frustration was my own fault. I hate not being perfect. And I can put a smiley face there and mean it as a joke, but it's still true too, I hate it when I screw up.

Of course, if the first time I asked for the new login two days ago, Gary had just said that it hadn't changed, none of this mess would have happened. So it's really all his fault. ;)

10:43 AM
Internet· Observatorium· Rants & Whines Grump

I am in such a bad mood this morning. I just want to sit here and cry. I'm so tired of dealing with jerks and so frustrated. And I'm probably PMSing which doesn't help any. And it's a gorgeous day! (My definition of gorgeous, overcast, breezy and getting cooler as the front blows in!) Which makes me even more pissed off and frustrated because all these jerks around me are distracting me so I can't really enjoy it.

Something did cross my mind last night, about why I like websites and hosting so much, it's the instant gratification. At least once an account is all set up and it's working, it's fairly instant. Once can change something, add an email address, a subdomain, a forward, a spam block, or delete them in a flash. The frustration comes when they break down or when a change has to be made by the people at the webhost, then it can become a time-consuming venture occupying days. But otherwise, when things are running (and webhosts aren't upgrading/breaking things), it's instant gratification.

And I am so tired of talking to techs. I'm sure they're all heartily sick of me too, I'd be more than happy to leave them alone but it's their servers that break or they do upgrades that break other stuff so I end up talking to them. I just want them to fix it and then leave the damn servers alone!

If stupid WHN would just give me the access info for the new domain, I'd be off their backs in a flash and go work on my new website and leave their lazy asses alone. But since they've decided to be jerks and basically lock me out of my account, I'm going to pester them because I can't make any announcements about the new email or site until they give me access and then I'll still have to wait three or four days for the DNS to settle.

Xeran, otoh, my original and current webhost for my first domain, I haven't talked to them in literally over a year, except to change my billing my annual to monthly which they did promptly. I haven't filed a trouble ticket in 18 months or more. The drawback is that they don't offer as many features or as much webspace as the other two webhosts but they also have less problems because they don't offer all that extra stuff and they don't do upgrades every week so things just work and work and work and work...which is why I keep hanging on to them, because it *works*.

And there's nothing on TV! (humming 57 channels and nothing on...)

06:40 PM
Internet Nice people

Because of all the various hassles with NetAtlantic and a couple lists I run for someone else there, I've not been real fond of Spamcop's block list but I have to say here and now that they are really nice people. :)

My main domain has its own IP but all my other domains at the same webhost share an IP with other virtual hosting customers of the webhost. On Tuesday, a customer of a reseller of the webhost spammed a bunch of people and got our shared IP listed. I found out Wednesday and promptly complained to my webhost (they assured me before I signed up that they didn't host spammers and their nana* record was not terrible). They emailed back later that they'd terminated the spammer. Thursday we're still in Spamcop. Friday we're still in Spamcop.

On a whim, I check the spammer's site and run traceroutes from three or four places on the net, it's live and still up at the same shared IP!

So I fire off another complaint, hey, you said you terminated these guys, what's going on? I get back the answer that it was a reseller of theirs who hosted the spammer and the reseller had simply reset up the account but they'd terminated it again (and hopefully applied a cluestick forcefully to the reseller's head). (And the webhost obviously needs some way to block resellers from resetting up a domain that's been TOSsed.)

I happen to mention on Spam-L that I'm on day three of a blacklisting at Spamcop for the shared IP and today I get a lovely email from a very nice Spamcop admin that he's removed the listing! So virtual hugs from me, these are good guys cause they're willing to make the system work. The spammer's gone, no point in blocking other innocent people, that's the way to run it.

Nice people and especially nice after a day of hassling with the webhost about Mailman problems that turned out to be an upgrade that was done and that changed the urls on the settings for 30-some lists of mine. Now if I can just get WHN to give me the access info for my domain there or else I'm off to complain about fraud to the Alaskan attorney general.

03:50 PM
Internet· Rants & Whines Being anal

I guess it's a good thing I'm so anal and that I keep *everything*. After signing up a mere four months ago at WHN, now when I want to change the domain on my account there, they're unable to find my account including my payment for a full year of hosting even tho I'm talking to the OWNER of the company and he's the one WHO SET UP MY ACCOUNT and handled the Paypal payment four months ago.

Sheesh.

This would be yet another reason why my primary domains are not hosted there anymore. I'm only trying to get a secondary domain set up there so I can at least use the gig of space and 30 gig of bandwidth for the remaining 8 months that are already paid for.

Sheesh. These people really piss me off. Screw up email, dismiss the problem as being all in my head (I finally determined on my own that it was a cpanel bug), screw up other stuff, days later ask what the problem was again? Disappear for two months, leaving their paying customers with broken sites and email and all they can say is tough luck, we're going moose hunting. And then the owner has the nerve to accuse other people of being unprofessional. The man doesn't know how to run a garbage dump in a civilized manner.

01:50 PM
Internet· Observatorium· Rants & Whines Who is that blob and why should I care?

A continuation of yesterday's rant on LiveJournals...

All those icons on the LJ pages and especially the comments pages is really distracting, half the time, I'm trying to figure out who the heck is in the icon cause it's big enough to notice but not big enough to really make out anything and half the time it's some original or anime character that I wouldn't know anyway. Oh yeah, what was that you were saying?

Which is the point of the LJ or blog, right? To talk? But there's all this gunk all over and I can't get to the words.

LJ starts off with a black mark from me anyway because you have to *know* someone, you have toget a code to get in and that kind of exclusivity on the net, which is all about inclusiveness, about being open and available to all, just really bugs the hell out of me. It's not that I can't get a code, I've had various opportunities to get one but I refuse, I don't care if everyone in the world gets an LJ and makes everything private, I refuse, it reminds me of all the worst things of high schools, the cliques and so on. I refuse to perpetuate that kind of idea, that kind of segregation, of mean-spiritedness, of "I'm in and you're out, nyah-nyah-nyah". And it is perpetuated at LJ, thru the codes and the "friends" list and it matters to people if they're on someone's friends list and if they're taken off, they get all these hurt feelings. Why do people deliberately do this? This is high school junk, judging ourselves as good or worthless based on whose friends list we're on. It was dumb back then and it's even dumber now when we're mostly older and should know better.

And then there's the really boring templates, so many of the sites are exactly the same, slightly different colors but all the same bland layout. Apparently you can't change the template without upgrading to the pay version of LJ so it's all this conformity thing like the Pep Squad uniforms. Yeesh.

I'm just generally grumpy today, so you should just generally never mind me. The weather sucks, stupid stuff from the gulf chock full of humidity has kept us in a sauna and pushed that promised cool front to the north and so it's just icky. And this kind of weather really affects me, especially since I hold my breath all summer and try not to bitch too much and wait for the fall and it's freaking October and there's no fucking fall.

So never mind me.

10:20 PM
Internet· Rants & Whines Who is Lance Bass and why should I care?

I guess I'm just old. Or just too much of a 60's rock n' roll baby. I wander thru various LiveJournals of people I know from the net, mostly fanfic authors, and they're cluttered with all these teen pop guys for icons. And it just really colors my impression of the LJ before I've even read a word. I dunno, I don't really have anything much against pop, it's just that it's, well, it's pop. By definition, it's fluff, it's lightweight, it's cutesy, like the bands that make it. It's good music for a club, to dance to but otherwise, I need *real* music, the kind that saved my soul and helped me survive adolescence and still helps me survive life every day.

And it's weird to find authors and other fen that I know from their stories that are serious and strong and so incredibly good and they're listening to something I classify as so lightweight. It's just kind of freaky...

12:31 PM
Internet Random lines

From a sig on Spam-L:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. UPS's on fire off in the corner cubicle. I've watched monitors flicker in the dark near the front-end gateways. All these files will be lost in time like email during a spam storm. Time to shutdown.

06:08 PM
Internet· Rants & Whines Blinkity-blink-blink

Whinemoanrant. Everyone knows the html attribute is bad, right? So why would someone make the site nav menu BLINK????

There oughta be a law...

11:02 AM
Internet· Rants & Whines· Weather Take two and call me in the morning

While everything is now fixed at the webhost (thank god!), all that stress got my back all tense again and I have to help my brother move tomorrow. And we apparently aren't going to get a speck of rain from that hurricane, dang it, my yard and plants really need it. I've managed to avoid watering all summer, every time it got really dry, some rain would come along just in the nick of time but it looks like I'm going to have to give in and drag out the hoses and sprinklers after all.

04:56 PM
Internet· Rants & Whines SCREAMMMMMMM!

Arrrgghhhhh! After hours of going back and forth with tech support, now they seem to be telling me it's that I need to pay for an optional feature! But if that's the case why did it work just fine until yesterday???? Why did it work at all? Or did you (webhost) make a change in your hosting packages to existing customers and reduce the service they signed up for? Uh-huh, big fat no-no. I don't care about $5/month but you don't pull a bait and switch.

Yeesh. I need to go out and run around the block or something, too much stress, first they won't believe that there is a problem, so I spend HOURS testing and sending them info which then they ask for again since apparently they haven't paid any attention to the fact that I've already given them that info THREE times, then they tell me it's cause I need to pay for an extra feature.

Yeesh. I had a migraine yesterday, I really don't need another one today.

Addendum: Thankfully, they've shown themselves to be a good company, they were wrong in what they told me and it does appear to be a CPanel problem which they are looking into. So now it's back to waiting and testing and waiting...

07:45 PM
Internet Spiffy new toys!

I have my sig file randomizer back! See the random sig generator takes up memory so I run it on my second computer and have it write to a file on my primary computer. At least that's what I used to do, back when I had a hub/router. But then the hub/router bit the dust and I hooked up just a plain old hub I had and it worked okay for awhile, although transferring stuff was slower than molasses, stuff that used to take two minutes with the hub/router would take 30 minutes with the hub. And I guess that was dying too, it stopped letting me access files between the two computers (but I still had net access, weird).

So I got paid yesterday, had a bit extra and I got me a new hub/router, got it all hooked up and now I have networking between the two computers back again!

And I broke my keyboard! My favorite keyboard that I was so used to and all the keys were in the right place and everything! Wahhhhh! I accidentally dumped coke on it (and all over, I found splashes four feet away!) That didn't break it but I had to take it apart so I could wash off the top part, it's practically waterproof inside, nothing got in there but it was all over the keys and apparently I didn't put it back together right, the computer would see a keyboard connected and the numlock would light up but none of the keys worked. It has these two clear sheets inside which connect the keys to a tiny board in one corner and I tried every combination of tiny board and sheets, both on top of board, one under and one on top, both under and nothing worked. :( So I guess it's just screwed.

Oh well, at least keyboards are super cheap these days, $10 for this new one and it's lighter than my old one, the only funky thing which I didn't notice in the store is that they moved the pad of keys between the letters and numbers (home, end, delete, insert, page up and down) closer to the arrow keys so I have to get used to that, I use Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert alot to copy and paste and now I'm hitting Print Screen instead of Insert. But I like that it's black and it's really light (I put the keyboard in my lap).

And I love the router/hub, it's so nice and it blocks all those stupid nimda and code red thingies plus all the probes from Roadrunner too.

12:51 PM
Internet· Rants & Whines Speaking my mind

So I'm wandering around some blogs and I happen on Globe of Blogs and I register my two blogs and then wander into the webrings page. I open a bunch of rings in different tabs and one of them is Brutally Honest for bloggers that speak their mind and I'm about to speak my mind about this asinine page.

I read this small dense paragraph which the author has deliberately set the line height below the norm so the lines are all scrunched together, making it hard for the reader to decipher it. What is this obsession with scrunching lines of text together??? I saw this a couple months ago on a bunch of Lord of the Rings fansites but I figured it was just an LotR phenomenom but here it is again. THE POINT OF A BLOG OR WEBSITE IS COMMUNICATION, PEOPLE. If you're going to make it deliberately difficult for people to read your blog or site, why bother to put it on the net???? (Afterthought: Upon wandering thru the top level domain site, it appears the author is an LotR fan so I guess that's where she got the line scrunching from but it's still a stupid thing.)

But anyway, I decipher the thing, it says in bold, "read the rules," so I look for a link to the rules, I look for ANY links on the page and can only find one invisible one after "This site is part of (blank area)" that leads to the main domain. So I view source and discover that the idiot author is using PNGs for all the images which are not viewable in Mozilla, only in IE. And for the icing on the cake, the author has set all links to WHITE (the page has a WHITE background) with some sort of "glow" filter which is black. Only this filter thing isn't standard or else it's not working because there's no DocType on the page at all. So in Mozilla, all the links are white on white, rendering them utterly invisible.

SHEESH.

Some people should not be allowed near an html editor or an ftp program or even Notepad!

Some of the rules on this ridiculous site:
- you need to know some sense of webdesign
- i will read through your logs to see what you write
- no typing like ThIs AnD cRaP <== it's annoying!!
- need to know a little HTML

SHEESH and SHEESH.

I'll be brutally honest and say this author's design is ANNOYING and he/she needs to learn a little MORE html, including something about standards compliance and accessibility in ALL browsers. And that "i will read through your logs to see what you write", what, is she going to grade what I say? Is she going to tell me I'm not being brutally honest?

More oddities, the title on the page has rows and rows of non-breaking spaces at the end of it. Also from the site:

      Do not take any edited graphics, HTML or ideas from this site without written consent.

Take her ideas??? Don't worry, honey, the only idea I'm taking from your site is what NOT to do when designing a page.

I'm outa here.

10:48 AM
Internet· Observatorium Googly-oogly

Google has a news page now! http://news.google.com/

A wonderful assortment of headlines from all over, linked to the various places they came from. I clicked on one last night and ended up spending an hour or two deliciously wandering the BBC site. I miss England! Specifically London and Scotland, I love London, it's my kind of city, wonderful for walking and great public transport (the Tube!) and all those lovely romantic big black cabs. The restaurants, the theatre, the small bedsits, the winding streets, the HISTORY of it all, the sense that people walked there five hundred, six hundred years or more before me.

And Scotland...not the cities, but the highlands, I never felt like that before, closest was Wisconsin, walking into the highlands, it was home, something I felt in my heart that I never expected. It was the beginning of winter, the grass was all brown and the trees bare and some would say summer or fall would be better but it didn't matter, this was home. Caught me off guard, still does.

I started out talking about Google, didn't I? The beauty of their news page is that they draw from news sources all over the world, so it's a much more balanced view of things than any single source can provide. I can read an article in the BBC about American politics or an article in the Times of India about British politics and I can read about the UN Iraq resolution in Reuters or the Washington Post or the Iraq Daily. It's all done by computers so there's no human bias involved. It's quite amazing!

01:10 AM
Fandom· Internet· Movies· Rants & Whines The Movies! and jerks

We're going to the movies! My brother and me, to see Signs tomorrow, well today now. I haven't been in a few months and I wanted to see this one when it came out in August. I love the movies, something about sitting in a big dark theatre with the big screen and faces 30 feet tall, there's nothing like it at home.

Change of topic: Whaddya wanna bet that I get flamed by the idiot who keeps posting pics to a listowner technical help list? He started doing these massive crosspostings on 9/11. I let three of them (with large multiple attachments) go past and finally I asked the listowner on list *politely* if this was acceptable. The listowner said it really wasn't, that the list was for technical stuff, announcements about problems with the mailing lists or questions about them, not general chat. The idiot replied to my post that he sent them by mistake (three times? yeah right) and that maybe *I* really needed them.

Now he's started again, posting another pic to the list tonight along with another bunch of lists and I *politely* asked him not to do that again, pointing out that it is off topic and not appropriate and that some list members have problems with attachments and asking that he be considerate of them. I'm sure he'll flame me, he probably figures I'm some prude who doesn't like pics of naked men (which is what he posted). Hah! He probably doesn't know that I run slash archives all over the place.

12:43 AM
Internet· Rants & Whines Ick

I hate spammers. It just punches all my buttons to see a spam pop up in one of my primary addresses, it's like vandals coming in my house and spray painting profanity on the walls. I know I shouldn't take it that seriously but it just bugs the piss out of me.

12:47 AM
Internet· Observatorium Where's that little check box?

Ow. My eyes hurt! Staring at browser windows side by side, copying and pasting info from one window to the other, checking tiny little boxes on one side to match the settings on the other....eep. My eyes hurt.

And then there's the tax accountant who can't understand the idea of an adjustment entry, yes, I took it out of that account and I put it where it belongs, look in the other account. My ears hurt.

02:55 AM
Internet Sometimes...

Sometimes I find myself sitting here at 3 am or 4 am when I meant to go to bed hours ago, but I get caught up in a new design, sometimes the graphics work flows well or the coding is just flying off my fingers...

Now I can't think straight and I'm leaning forward, squinting at the screen, trying to remember what words are.

10:55 AM
Internet· Observatorium· Rants & Whines Wake with caffeine

And then I woke up, I lay there listening to the Bee Gees sing 'More than a Woman' till the cat turned it off (rubbing her face on the clock, she hits the button to turn off the alarm) and I realized it was rather dark for so late in the morning and I realized I had a headache. I have a theory that the incoming rain storm brings on a headache, change in the pressure or something. It's nice that it's cloudy and it won't be so hot today but give me that caffeine pill and some coca-cola to get rid of the aches and pains!

And the damn email filters that I set up on my new domain didn't work right, didn't block the stupid "I have visited your website and we can increase your traffic!" spam.

12:33 AM
Internet Bytes and bits and dots and slashes

Bytes and bits and dots and slashes, urls and home paths and database names and cron jobs and...it's all swirling around in my brain and I dreamt about it last night and I'll dream about it again tonight!

But I like my new webhost, it's working out well so far, I can even host all those domains I've been parking for years and never used! Now I just have to design websites for them. :)

I'm still sorting out the details, I have only moved over two sites, this one and the Basement archive, but it's so nice to have the archive back on my populli domain again. Now I just need to update the mirror site, rename 3,000 files to shtml, add includes for the header and footer menus to each one, re-upload them all at both sites...and then transfer the rest of my sites from .net to .org and then move the other 50 sites I host over to the new host and then fight with the old webhost about a refund!

Just a few minor details, that's all. :) and about 60 or 70 stories to archive!

12:19 PM
Internet New Toys!

New Toys! A new domain, a new webhost, nifty new features, I love new toys!

11:55 PM
Internet· Rants & Whines Things to do

Things to do today
too damn depressing that I didn't get any of it done, instead I spent most of the day wrangling with listhosts in spam blacklists and an email blockage on one of my domains.

Webhost tech: okay, it's fixed now. Me, 15 minutes later: I ran four tests, *one* email got thru, I would really like something better than a 25% delivery rate, please. (webhost tech hasn't responded yet, maybe they went to bed )

Things to do tomorrow or Friday
all the damn crap I didn't get done today.

05:04 PM
Internet Mozilla and MT redux

Okay, okay, I'm sorry! I was totally wrong about the MT developers sabotaging it for Mozilla! It was my dumb mistake, I didn't put the MT stylesheet file in the right directory and so it wasn't reading it. Now that I figured it out, the display is correct now in MT, I just need to tweak the styles cause the text is a bit on the small side for me.

02:44 PM
Internet Weird Things

Another weird thing with MT is these titles for blog entries. I know that I can turn them off or just leave them blank or something, but there's that box and I end up putting something there, trying to figure out if what I have to say has any kind of title. So the titles you see are kinda strange. :)

And categories. I've set them up but haven't made them public so far because I keep putting everything in one category that I called Observatorium. (I like making up words.) Maybe if I ever use any of the other categories, I'll make them public.

(reminder to self: never hit "close" button)

02:17 AM
Internet· Rants & Whines Mozilla and MT

Stupid frigging people who created Movable Type and then set it to deliberately show all textareas as three characters wide in Mozilla, rendering them absolutely useless and forcing me to use IE until I got so frustrated that I dug around their config templates and fixed the stupid bug.

11:50 AM
Internet· Movies Black & White

Spam, spam, spam, I hate spam! But anti-spam people who see only black and white in all things, not just spam are just as difficult to deal with.

I'm watching an old 1940's movie with Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray, what an unlikely couple of newlyweds but it works pretty well. The whole plot is rather thin and of course they'll make it out of Nazi Germany but it's not bad, nice fluff in places and Joan Crawford before she became nothing but those eyebrows is really quite good and pretty.