Category: Revelation

Wasting time.

On Monday my boss issued a directive saying that contractors can’t bill more than 40 hours in a week without prior authorization. So today I was walking out at 2:30, finished for the week, and I met him coming in from his long lunch. Bye Mike.

I’m flying to Oshawa. I phoned for a 18:45 arrival, only to find that Oshawa doesn’t have customs after 16:30. Which is a bit weird because most of the time, “customs” is just a phone call to 1-888-CANPASS. So instead I’m flying to St. Catherines to clear customs, then hopping over the lake from there. But because it’s a short flight and customs requires two hours notice, I’m waiting around at Rochester airport until 18:00. Thank goodness for open wireless nodes. This one is called FLGCAP.

A slight difference in cultural heritage

I was watching the Ken Burns series on the Civil War (thanks to Netflix), and several times I caught myself wondering about the background music. About three times I had to remind myself that wasn’t “God Save the Queen” they were playing. What’s the name of the American song that uses that tune? “America Tis of Thee” or something? The more puzzling one is that a tune that I identified as Billy Bragg’s song “There Is Power In a Union”, which is about labour unions and hardly appropriate to a show about the Civil War. But I got to wondering – the chorus begins “The union forever”, and I wondered if it was originally a song about the Union in a “Union versus Rebels” rather than in a “union versus management” sense. That would make more sense. A little googling showed that I was right, it was “The Battle Cry of Freedom”, and the iTunes Music Store has several versions of it.

Did a spam test

I was interested to see what WordPress did when I attempted to post a comment through a spam proxy – I didn’t know if the option under “Options->Discussion” to block posts from open proxys would catch it silently, or if it would be caught by and presented under the menu on “Options->SpamKarma”.

I did a “grep poker /var/log/httpd/access| tail -1” and grabbed the IP. A quick telnet showed that it was running an open http proxy server on port 80. So I set that as my proxy server, fired up Safari and attempted to comment on my last entry. SpamKarma got it and presented a warning to the comment poster that it was doing so, which meant that I could go to “Manage->Comments” and review it and delete it.

Ok, so it’s nice to know that when the spammers finally figure out where to spam my blog comments, SpamKarma will be on the case. It’s interesting to see that it’s not silently deleting spam now, which means that the spammers still have not figured out how to attempt to blog spam me. That’s just a little weird.

Still spam free…

As I wrote over a month ago, in Rants and Revelations » Hit me, spammers, I haven’t had any comment spam from random comment spammers since switching from MovableType to WordPress. So far it falsely accused a couple of legitimate comments as being spam for various reasons, and I’ve had to remove comments from my ex-wife, but I haven’t seen anything that you could count as spam.

I’ve looked at my web server, and I don’t see any hits on wp-comments-post that I couldn’t account for. Still seeing lots of hits on the non-functional MovableType comment cgi, though.

Either the comment spammers haven’t figured out WordPress 1.5 yet, or the option that says “Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies” is silently preventing the comment spammers from even getting to wp-comments-post.

Now if only the referrer spammers would stop hitting every link in my site in spite of the fact that there is no where anyone can see my referrers so they aren’t getting any benefit from chewing up my bandwidth.

MBNA been very good to me…

Back on March 15th, I ordered a Linksys WRT54G router. I know, I once vowed never to by Linksys products again, but that was before they were bought by Cisco, and before they came out with a router that was actually a small and very cheap Linux computer. There wasn’t much wrong with my old router except every now and then people coming to my web site would instead get the login screen for the router’s web interface (which would correct itself on a refresh). But this one, because it’s Linux and GPL, has many third party patches available to do all sorts of fun things.

Unfortunately, I ordered the router from a company called “BestBargainPC”, which also does business as “US-Depot.com”. They charged my card immediately, and their order status page said “Product will ship within 24 hours”. Unfortunately, it was still saying “…will ship within 24 hours” 15 days later. I attempted to email them, and didn’t get a response for a couple of days. So I attempted to phone them, and they never answered the phone even during their advertised business hours. That’s when I called up MBNA.

I have an MBNA credit card that I use for most of my on-line purchases, for reasons I talked about in What is the matter with this credit card? I’m glad that I’m still using it for on-line purchases, because they’re great. I phoned them up, and they said they’d take care of it, and now, about a week later, I get a letter saying that they’ve reversed the charge and any accumulated interest and late fees.

The router, which I ordered from Amazon the same day I called MBNA about the other company, arrived yesterday and I installed it already. Amazon charged me about a dollar more than the other place did.

I also went to Reseller Ratings to put in my feedback for bestbargainpc, and found that somebody else had the same experience during the month of March, after mostly favourable reviews before then.