Tired of that old Guy Lombardo version?
Try the vintage sound of the Nevermores, taking a whack at the deere oulde Scotsman’s wirk. Best played at midnite.
(Tip o ye tam to DJ Matty, natch.)
New Earth Time
New Earth Time … 360 degrees of internet time.
Reminds me, sorta, of WRLDtime. One’s decimal, one’s duodecimal. Go figger.
A New Year
I awakened, this morning, to a shitstorm of comment spam. My initial plans for the day were to troubleshoot the connectivity issues on my LAN, but that priority receded when I noted that the spammer had evaded Jay Allen’s excellent MT spamfighter, MT-Blacklist, by entity-encoding their URLs.
From 8 until 11 or so I fought the demon on the mountain and in the pit. Once I defeated it, I began to look for a solution. Allen is not updating the MT 2.x versions of MT-Blacklist; so I thought, OK, maybe this is the day I finally upgrade to MT3.
I bought the app and initiated the installation process. All went well.
Until I tried to log in, realized I had forgotten my password, and pressed the helpful-seeming link, ‘Forgot your password?’
Ages later, the dialog helpfully informed me that the password had been reset, and that the new password had been emailed to me. I refreshed my gmail screen. Nothing.
Still nothing.
I ssh’ed into my server and checked the mail logs. There was a record noting that the mail had been queued, but it did not make it to gmail. I tried a wide variety of means to access my mail; but alas, it was jammed up tighter than [insert favorite relative here]’s colon the day after Thanksgiving.
So now it’s 5pm. The logjam has been cleared, but it’s still unclear what the problem was – the symptoms were verrrrry sloooow processing times for certain sorts of I/O on the server. Peculiarly, the CPU monitor on the box was not even close to being hammered – the slowdown was something else. I deleted some lock-tracking files, which may have had something to do with it; or the server may have molassessed by a comment-spam assault. I really don’t know at this point.
But that email problem just confirms what I already know – I have to farm out email. Why the hell are all the 3rd party email providers so sucky in terms of features/pricing?
I believe I sense a business opportunity.
UPDATE:
Wow, the spambots are still hammering away. It’s war, apparently.
Checking the Flop
On the other hand, obviously my actions had removed playing poker from the entertainment category and put it into the work category, with the result being that at times it was as unpleasant as any job. Playing tight can actually be pretty boring, and I found myself doing strange things to mix it up a little, like checking the bottom right corner of the card first (checking for the telltale border of a face card, or the blankness that meant either an ace or a 2/3) or checking flops without my glasses.
Ken Goldstein, professional gambler. You know, it really says something about Ken that he utterly fails to mention the late-night coke-fueled slapfights with his stripper girlfriend, the several Mercedes won and lost, and the huge mansion down the coast that he’ll forever return to, standing wan and forlorn on the sidewalk, staring.
At least he managed to hang on to the clothes.
Seriously, Ken mentioned to me that he was playing poker for expenses, but it almost seems as though he didn’t self-identify as a bound-for–greatness pro. I find this interesting, because Ken is clearly a gifted person in many things.
Wall
How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly: epic survey of how the tsunami news broke, or failed to. For some reason, right about when the quake had been first reported I adjourned from our Christmas gathering for a moment and walked back in to the living room to announce the quake news. Earlier that day I had IMed with my friend and ex-bandmate Karl, who had been in Phuket earlier in December and was planning on heading back. He was in Saigon when we chatted.
Staples
pf.org: Part Man, Part Machine, wherein pf details the wonders of contemporary laparoscopic surgery.
May I also belatedly call your attention to Danelope’s fine Christmas roundup, allegedly assembled while frantically scouring the darknet for childhood-memory holiday music and simultaneously burning a btach of holiday cookies. Only via the good offices of the Suicide Girls was disaster averted, as I have it. The elusive creature (like the zebra mussel, a non-native Floridian species) swears that he will attend the impending January 3rd mini-mefi-meetup at PNW North Intl Mefi/Mofi HQ.
Barring unspeakable pain.
Waves
Historical tsunamis off the coast of Peru.
Historical tsunami databases (Unesco).
I looked, but found no documentation of tsunamis contributing directly to large-scale human migration.
Viddy
Cheese and Crackers: Tsunami Video roundup. Don’t watch it all at once.
plagued
So, given the climbing death toll in the tsunami and the probable development of widespread disease as a result of sanitation problems, here’s a scary thought: the bird flu that we hear annual alarums about gets some sort of foothold in the affected populace.
Just a little nugget of positive thinking to kick off the New Year! How are those resolutions coming?
Plam
I actually meant to mention this in yesterday’s entry: we were able to locate my missing PDA in the lost-and-found at Virginia Mason.
That’s a mixed blessing, but on the whole a good thing. I had been looking at 8mb and 16mb Vx’s on eBay (the newly-returned PDA is an IBM-branded 8mb Palm Vx, also an ebay purchase) and while 8mb models can be obtained from $20 to $40, the 16mb model starts at about $80. A brand new Tungsten C, the only current Palm that includes wifi, is about $200 on ebay.
If they had only left that butt-ugly thumb-board off the damn thing.
Anyway, it means one fewer set of technocrap to wrangle in my house.
I am gonna dump a bunch of my old computer gear in January – anubody have any wants? All my stuff is Mac-oriented, so unless you know the ropes or really want to learn, you’re not interested. Trust me.
I might post a detailed manifest here. Items will include a Cisco 675 DSL router, two bootable but dead-screen Wallstreets with various accessories, and a g3 upgraded 9500 with firewire, an 18 gb internal SCSI drive, and a ton of ram.