What the hell?
Not even kidding. It really exists. Don’t get me wrong… I like bacon. But it belongs in ice cream just like steak belongs in a milkshake. Seriously, wtf.
So I was setting up a spam filter/tarpit on my firewall, and came across this snippet from an example in the manual for the program:
For example, if spamd.alloweddomains contains: @humpingforjesus.com The following destination addresses would not cause the sending host to be trapped: beardedclams@humpingforjesus.com However the following addresses would cause the sending host to be trapped: peter@apostles.humpingforjesus.com bigbutts@bofh.ucs.ualberta.ca
I checked, and the domain is actually registered. Gotta give it to nerds, they manage to keep a sense of humor about dry things like filtering spam.
This weekend was good times. Saw Transformers. Go see it. If you don’t like it, there’s something very very wrong with you. Check your brain for worms.
Erica had picked me up tickets to see the American Le Mans Series at Limerock in CT. Apparently the crowd was among their record largest. I can’t say I’m surprised, it was packed. The race was good times. It’s always cool to see something other than NASCAR in America. The Audi TDI cars were eerily quiet, almost like a normal car going by on the highway. The Corvettes were so loud they literally made my pants shake. Not even kidding. While the race was going on we walked around the circuit. Erica took some sweet pics:
Clicky
Please don’t hotlink these, or it will hurt my server’s soul.
We were in position to see one of the spectacles of the race. One of the Audis crashed coming around the last turn (see pix). It took them what seemed like forever to clean the car up. They must have done 7 laps or so under the caution flag.
Sunday was good times too. We were at an auto-x most of the day, and there was actually shade for once. After watching all the racing this weekend it makes me wish I still had a beater to play with. But until I have a garage to maintain such a thing, I won’t miss having one all that much.
Also, go see Transformers.
So I put down a bid today for some new firewall hardware (the one I found is used and about $13,750 cheaper). The Pipboy has served me well, but it has some shortcomings. Mostly this concerns the age of the its hardware. It’s not that it is flaky or failing (aside from the screen starting to get too dim to read, but I rarely administer locally), it’s that the PCI revision is too old for modern communications hardware. It has uses PCI 2.1, which has 5v signaling. Any wireless ethernet or gigabit ethernet cards pretty much all use PCI 2.2, which has 3.3v signaling. So poor pipboy is stuck in the dark ages of wire-only, 100-speed ethernet. It’s not that I want to use wireless heavily or that I have devices with gig-E interfaces… it’s that I’d like the option. I can fit 2 ethernet and one wireless, and still have room to spare. Reading up on the specs at the first link on this post, it seems to be very well geared towards robustnesswhich greatly interests me in a device that I need to remain on 24/7. The current pipboy is this thing’s older brother, and I’ve been very happy with the Dolch brand so far. BTW if any of you bid on that, Igg will become a sad panda.
Eventually I’d like to get myself a Soekris net5501. These portable-desktop type machines I’m using and looking into are a great flexible solution but are also overkill. the net5501 was built specifically for BSD operating systems for the purpose of being a router/firewall. They are solid state, silent, and operate at very low power levels (~20 watts). It also comes in a nice slim case that’s only slightly larger than a consumer linksys router and is easily hidden, unlike Pipboy. Note that in the pic it’s a rear-facing open box sitting on top of a front facing closed one. The empty space in the box is room for a PCI card, typically wireless networking. For something as small and simple as it is, it’s a very sophisticated machine. But for the board and box it’d run upwards of $400. The one I found is slightly (read: a lot) cheaper than that. So for now I’m going to stick with what’s free/cheap. but when I’m doing less tinkering and I want something to run silently and cheaply for extended periods with little interaction needed, I’ll be looking into a net5501. With 4 ethernet ports, wireless, optional hardware encryption acceleration (via mini-pci), and running openbsd it’s pretty much all the hardware I’d ever need for firewall/routing purposes.
Ok, done nerding for the time. carry on.
I finally got summer tires onto the mighty civic. Well, they’re all-season tires… but they’re GOOD all-seasons, and they’re summer tires for me since I have snows. They were a birthday present from the parents. Tires are given more often for birthday/xmas than you’d think, but typically I genuinely need them so it’s much appreciated. The gift of not skidding off the road and dying a flaming death is always a good one. I was on RE-92s for a long time, then snow tires till just now. I’d pretty much forgotten what it’s like to be able to point my car where I want it to go, and have it go there with little or no protest. Also now wind noise is louder than road noise, something else I’m not used to. New tires = good times.
My boss was telling me about an interesting incident with HR a while back
HR: “There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of African Americans working here”
Joe: “Sure there are. Those 3 over there are all from South Africa” *
HR: “That’s not what I mean, I mean like-”
Joe: “Ooooh, you mean black people”
HR: “No no, I don’t mean that… You know, African Americans”
Joe: “Yeah, those guys are from Africa and they are living in America. I don’t see how they don’t count as African American”.
HR: “But they’re-”
Joe: “-white? I see. So you think we need more black people then?”
HR: “NO! I’m talking about Afric… … Nevermind, I don’t think I can talk about this anymore right now.”
Although Joe’s default mode is “antagonize”, I think he was making a valid point. If you insist on referring to a group of people as “African Americans” and using that as more or less the only qualifier for politidcal correctness reasons, be prepared to include everyone who is “African American”. Even if their skintone is white. After all, you’re attempting to be all happy-stars-and-rainbows politically correct and “colorblind”.
*For those not familiar, it’s typical for people from South Africa to be Caucasian in skintone with British sounding accents.
I don’t normally do publilc service announcement type stuff, but when people mess with my precious internets I’m typically not silent about it. Yesterday a great many internet radio stations observed a day of silence protesting protesting the bump in music royalty rates for internet radio. from the article, “U.S. Copyright Royalty Board last March that raises royalty payments by 300 to 1,200 per cent, retroactive to June 2006.” If this holds, many stations will go bankrupt. Internet radio is one of those online gems I personally don’t want to see go away. I’ve barked up all the proper trees, and I strongly suggest you do too. Even if you don’t listen to internet radio, it’s supporting “the little guy” online. Or at least to stick it to the RIAA and associated assholes. Most of these stations are free and have no ads in the music streams, so they don’t have a whole lot of income aside from donations. So this kind of monetary hit isn’t something they can handle.
Yeah.
PS – Updated post, had unclear info.
I swear I must have pissed off someone at the RMV. Someone in there is clearly having a very big laugh at my expense. At this point, I’m positive that I am their favorite hobby. Hey Adam, how’s the weather in Poland?
I’m informed I’m a year older today. I’m currently disputing the charges and hoping to get it reversed.
For those of you who find the nerdy crap I post here interesting, you can check out the stuff I’m working on and the crappy little pages I’ve made and am making at http://www.iggdawg.com (listed as my homepage link here). The main page is boring and ugly, that’s not what I’m working on currently. All the links there with descriptions are what I’m in the middle of and are marginally more interesting. I’ll just throw that out here so I can keep my nerd-spew to a minumum here, because I’m sure the majority of would rather not be bombarded by it. Feel free to email/IM me with questions/comments/wisecracks if you are by some strange coincidence working on, or interested in, something similar.
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