Month: May 2004

Disconcerting juxtaposition of the day

I’m listening to an audio book right now. It’s P.G.Wodehouse’s “The Cat Burglars”. I’ve never actually read a Jeeves and Wooster book before, and I’m enjoying this one. But the narrator sounds disconcertingly like my ex-mother-in-law, in spite of the difference in genders. It’s a little bit jarring.

Petty annoyance of the day

I’m watching my web server logs scroll by, and every minute, I see the following:

216.239.69.45 - - [10/May/2004:10:04:18 -0400] "GET /getlatest.glh?PV=6.0.5.27&OS=WIN&L=en-US, en, *&LID=1033&ch=120+90+0+0+0&ch=72+53+0+0+0&ch=52+739+0+0+0&ch=33+923+0+0+0&ch=73+166+0+0+0&ch=97+108+0+0+0&ch=118+14+0+0+0 HTTP/1.0" 404 1063 "-" "RMA/1.0 (compatible; RealMedia)"

Now, if Google can be trusted, and believe me, it can, it appears that this bozo somehow has his DNS screwed up so that it thinks I’m channels.real.com.

If only I had some suitably BOFHly way of handling this – like causing his RealPlayer to suddenly scream at him to shut the fucking thing off.

I don’t believe it!

‘I take full responsibility’

Stop the presses, something unprecedented has happened! Somebody from the G.W.Bush White House has not only taken responsibility for something, he’s even apologized!

Now if only Rumsfeld would do the traditional thing after a mistake this major, and resign. The only problem with that is that probably (shudder) Wolfowitz would take over.

Of course the real “taking full responsibility” are the poor innocent soldiers on the ground who are going to face a much bigger and more determined resistance/insurgency/uprising because of the actions of the scum who did this. I hope they make the people who took those pictures visit the families of every solider who dies from now on to say “It might be my fault your son or daughter died”.

And Rush Limbaugh can blow me.

Just Answer the Question, Dammit!

I have a bunch of mailing lists that I maintain, and which operate using Mailman software.

I also have a person on a bunch of my lists whose ISP routinely will stop accepting email for several hours a day. The ISP that this ISP gets its email from sends these “your mail hasn’t been delivered for four hours, I’ll keep trying for 5 days” messages which were common back in the days of UUCP email, but pretty stupid now a days. Unfortunately Mailman treats these messages as bounces, even though they’re not. And if Mailman sees enough bounces, you get bounced off the mailing list.

The person in question doesn’t want to change to an ISP that is more reliable, for reasons that are really none of my business. The ISP that sends the warning adamantly refuses to stop sending them, saying they’re important. And I don’t want this person to drop off the lists – she’s a very positive contributor. So thus my dillemma.
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