Category: Rant

Boxing days

I feel like my life for the last few weeks revolved around packing boxes, and for the next few months or years it’s going to revolve around unpacking boxes.

Tuesday was moving day. I guess the movers did an adequate job, except it seems that they were hampered by the fact that the guy who was supposed to pack us up the day before did about 1/4 of what he was supposed to do and buggered off at 11:30am when we had stepped out to do other stuff. But over all I’m not impressed with how much work we had to do before, during and after. I thought paying movers meant that muscular young men would do all the work while Vicki and I could sit around sipping our mai tais saying “oh, put that in that room, and be sure not to scratch it.” The reality was a lot sweatier, and a lot less satisfactory in terms of collatoral damage to furniture, door frames, plaster, etc.

For the last two days, I’ve been stuggling to get my office set up. It’s the most complicated, because of course I have to keep downtime on my server (this very server that hosts this blog) up and running as much as possible. Plus I’m trying (and not succeeding very well) to avoid having a rats nest of wires like I kept having at the old place, and also I’m trying to set aside an area for bill paying and other important papers, and another area for aviation stuff (charts and passenger headsets etc) so I can find it all when I want to plan a trip or leave for one. I’m slightly hampered in this by the fact that I can’t find one of my desks, one I took apart and now I can’t find where the movers put the bits.

Two days of work, and all I have to show for it are four empty boxes and a bunch of full shelves. Only about 6 billion more boxes to empty.

Another problem hampering this whole process is the fact that in many ways this house seems more cramped than the old house. This isn’t totally crazy, because this house is bigger, but most of that bigger-ness is in the living room, the dining room and the master bed room , and the hallways. The biggest problem is that we don’t have an equivalent to the finished basement in the old house. That was one large room that acted as library, computer room and entertainment center, and sometimes a bird room. In this house, we’ve got separate bird room, library, office/computer room, and the TV/TiVo/DVD/Stereo are going into the living room.

Oh well, back to the boxes.

Ok, I’m a bastard.

Recently, I noticed that a significant percentage of my web site traffic was for a single image of Blobby the Blue Lobster, all with referrer strings indicating a particular web board. Sure enough, I went there and found that one functional illiterate was using this picture as his avatar in his conversations with a bunch of other functional illiterates.

If you don’t believe me about the functional illiteracy, here is word for word one of his posts to that forum:

OMFG that was so fucking funny i cant belive that people belive that shit haah…john malm wow im so happy hes gone again after reading this.

But i msut say between reading all of that and the XMF interview the romm is freaking spinning ive read alot today including a bunch of video games ahah well tt you all alter

Anyway, I don’t like picture leeches much, and I especially don’t like illiterate ones. So I put the following in my /etc/http/conf/http.conf:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.echoingthesound.org/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*blobby.*\.jpg http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/pork.gif [R,L]

Which directed every request for his avatar to a much smaller picture. But he didn't get the message, even after I wrote to him telling him he should check his avatar. So I took more drastic measures, and yesterday I changed the redirect to an even smaller picture that makes it more explicit.

Today I see on that web board a post from him saying

Ok so i look at my avatar and some guy must have hacked it and it said "I'm a PIcture LEech I suck" and someone ahd contacked me before adn tlaked somethign about my icon that i needed ot refresh it or somethign but it made no sence to me so whats up?>

Amazingly enough, he's changed his avatar, but he's still leeching - the image he's using is on somebody else's site.

Water heater

The night before last I slept in the new house, and with Vicki away there hasn’t been any cooking or dish washing going on, so this morning’s shower was probably the first time anybody but Laura has used the hot water since the engineer’s inspection on Tuesday. And this morning I discovered that the water in the tank was stone cold – the pilot light was out. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pilot light went out because of something the inspector did. I don’t know if Laura had had any hot water during the last couple of days – this wouldn’t be the first time where something wasn’t working right but she never bothered to tell anybody in a position to fix it – or if the tank just cooled down overnight.

I’ve got to say, though, that crawling around on my hands and knees lighting the pilot light, and then taking a sponge bath with tepid water, is not my favourite way to start the day.

Linksys ruins my plans for the evening.

Regular readers of my blog remember that back in April I bought a Linksys WRT54G wireless router to replace my Belkin router, which had this annoying habit of sometimes showing you the configuration interface on the external port 80 even though it’s supposed to be forwarding the external port 80 to my Linux router’s port 80 and even though it’s configured to not allow external access to the configuration interface. That was a dismal failure because every now and then, at first every couple of days and later several times a day (and definitely more likely to fail if you were doing a large file transfer), it would stop allowing wireless clients to access the outside world, even though wired clients (like my Linux box) were still working fine. Often the only cure was to power cycle, because a soft reboot from the web interface wouldn’t do it.

Because of all that, I continued to use the Belkin at home, in spite of that annoyance. But when they installed cable at the new house, I dug out the Linksys and brought it over, figured that even if it needs to be power cycled once in a while, it would still allow us to use the net when we were over at the house.

So that was my plan for this evening – come home from work, cart out the 7 or 8 bags full of garbage that Vicki and I filled over the weekend, tend to the dog, watch a bit of the Tour de France on TV, then come over to the new house and take care of the birds and keep them company while surfing the net wirelessly down in the bird room. But it didn’t work out that way, because when I got to the new house, I found the Linksys unable to get a DHCP address from the cable modem, even after power cycling both of them. The Linksys actually smells a bit “cooked”, so it’s probably completely ruined now. So now I’m sitting in my office in the new house, on an uncomfortable wicker rocker, connected to the cable modem with a patch cord, and wishing I could be down with the birds on the comfy sofa.

Oh well, it’s cooling down now, soon it will be time to go to bed and not get the sheets too sweaty. (Vicki warned me not to get them sweaty, because they’re new and expensive.)

Ok, Brain, Stop That!

You know how your brain will suddenly dredge out of nowhere a memory that you would prefer if you never remembered ever again? (I only have the courage to admit that this happens to me because Dave Barry mentioned it, so I know I’m not the only one.)

I was just sitting there minding my own business when the following memory popped into my head. As explanaton, I should mention that I’m not the best person with faces in the world. I see strong resemblances between people who everybody else says don’t resemble each other at all, and I’ll not recognize people after they’ve changed “their look”.

It was back when I worked at GeoVision, so some time before 1993. I was cutting through the conference room that sat squarely between the front entrace and my desk, and I usually did. The lights in the room were quite dim. Coming in the other direction were a man and a woman I worked with, he a sales person and the woman a developer who spent most of her time in (what was then) recent years working at customer sites and training. The woman was normally attractive, but had the most boring hair style in the world. Today, it appeared she’d done a complete 180 in style, and she was looking really good. So as I blew past them at a fast pace, I said “I really like your hair”. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I saw Allison with her normal straight hair. And then it hit me, that the woman whose hair I’d complemented was a complete stranger, and probably a customer or potential customer. I bet she was baffled. I tried very hard to avoid the conference room and training areas for the rest of the day.