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.