FeralBlog

usually sarcastic and mean, polly esther has a beautiful blog update about how to have a lasting relationship.

update: i have changed the link from “tinylittlepenis.com” to the more work-friendly “rabbitblog.fillerama.com”. you’re welcome.

couple quickies:
—verisign is the biggest bunch of ninnies ever. i get an email reply to my fax yesterday, and then say they need proof of my former address. excuse me?!? what about my huge, blown-up drivers license that i faxed you. i sent them another fax today, and this time i included not only my driver’s license, but a copy of my old car lease statement, my wireless phone bill, and my insurance statement. we’ll see if those pigfuckers can get it right this time. i already looked around for another domain registrar to switch to to get away from the hulking corporation that is verisign. found a nice local one that will only charge me $8 a year to hold my domain for me.—construction for the second section of wall at the co-op was completed last night. excited about that, but it’s tempered by the fact that when i was at the gym the other night, they informed me that my membership had been expired for about a month. so, that’s about $300 that i have to drop, and right around x-mas time, too. i’d love to be able to just do the co-op; but i like the variety of having two different places to climb, plus they’re building a new bouldering-only area at the gym, and i have a feeling they’re going to raise prices, so i’d like to have my membership locked in for the year before that happens.—going with the slf tonight to see the penguins play montreal. haven’t been to a hockey game in awhile, so that should be fun.

friday night went out to tram’s kitchen for dinner; my first time there. it was really tasty, and i saw things on other people’s plates that i really want to go back and try. after food we met up with some people at the sharp edge to help jen celebrate getting old.

saturday was nothing too exciting… went to the gym for a little while, but mostly just lounged around, watched tv and played gta:vc. i also spent a bit of time hunting around for my next bike.

yesterday morning the slf and i went over to courtney’s for a little while to watch the steelers get humiliated. i wasn’t there for long, because i went over to the co-op to help finish building the next section of wall. got all the sheets of plywood up, which means that it’s pretty much done. we ran out of long wood screws, but we’ll be getting more tonight, and tomorrow should be the big cleanup and setting party.

last night i broke my washing machine… i was washing my bathroom mats, and the water just wouldn’t drain out after the wash cycle. i had noticed that the health of my washing machine had been steadily declining for a few weeks now… it was making strange noises on the wash cycle, and sometimes it wouldn’t start the spin cycle unless you opened the lid and shut it again.. otherwise it would just sit there and make sad grinding noises… kinda like it wasn’t quite slipping into gear. so i had to pull all the sopping mats out of the washer and run them (quickly!) over to the sink… whee! called my landlord to see about getting that fixed, and we’ll see how long it takes. he’s usually pretty good about that sort of thing.

those fuckers at verisign seem to have completely lost my authorization fax from about a week ago, so i re-sent it this morning. i want them to hurry up and get me my domain access back, so i can switch to my new host, and people can stop seeing the “server error” message where my geek quote should be.

a few weeks ago, both brian and myself were out of the office one morning. our boss came in, took a look around our department and said “oh, there’s no programmers here today.”, which was especially funny since the other developer was sitting right there, probably with a “what am i, chopped liver?” look on his face. we’ve been breaking his agates about that ever since, and to make him feel more like a “real” programmer, my mgr. and i each kicked in $1 to get him this lovely pin. we were going to try for a “p” letterman jacket or sweater or something, but we want him to do just a weeeee bit more coding first; you know, to prove he’s actually a programmer and all.

so, the latest hot rumor here at work is that they’re going to start (if they haven’t already) monitoring internet usage. i’m not too worried about it, since apart from the occasional aim usage, i don’t really do anything that i wouldn’t want people seeing. i wondered further if it was going to be some sort of terminal services monitoring, where someone could just log in and see everything i was seeing on my machine. that got me thinking about ways i could get around that… i started thinking about the end of cryptonomicon, where our protagonist randy has some data on his machine that bad people really, really want to look at, but they don’t know how to decode the encrypted information, so they have a device set up to do a little bit of van eck phreaking and see the data when it is on his screen. so, he writes a little program to send the contents of the file in question in the form of morse code to his computer’s LED lights, thereby reading the contents without anyone knowing, albeit very slowly. (i guess even that technique wouldn’t be safe nowadays.)

so, in short, if they’re “screen eavesdropping” then i’ve got no hope, but if they’re just checking what goes through our proxy server then i think i’m ok. i changed my browser preferences to skip using the proxy and connect right to the net, and they haven’t turned off non-proxy internet access (yet). even if that happens, i’ll probably be ok.

if we step in the wayback machine to my days at my former employer, they deployed a very restrictive internet access policy after i had started. i couldn’t get to a lot of the sites that i read on a regular basis, like suck, among others. what’s a poor web surfer to do? well, i had just gotten dsl from bell atlantic (now verizon), and since i was in early enough to be a beta tester, i had a static ip address for myself. what did that mean? it meant that i could install a copy of pcanywhere at work and at home, log into my home machine and surf out from my home machine! granted, it was 16 colors and fairly slow… but i still felt like a world class hax0r.

will somebody please tell me just what the fuck is going on here?

update 11/16/02 – my link seems to be broken now… it was some crazy flash game; i’m just linking to the site’s homepage now… try and find it yourself.

hey everyone… it’s jen’s birthday today, so be sure to send her a little birthday email, or maybe even an online greeting card or two.

so much stuff to write about, but i can’t seem to find the time to put it all down in a logical fashion. real quick, tho; i had my scariest ride home to date last night; cruising down liberty ave. in the twilight down the double yellow between two busses. dave said “big deal; i used to do that while eating a subway sandwich.” i guess i should have known i couldn’t impress a former bike messenger with that story.

by the time i got home it was full dark, which means i think i need to run to the local bike shop tonight on the way to the wall and pick up a taillight or something.

brief update. good weekend all around. went down to w.v. friday night, and bouldered at hawk’s nest saturday. didn’t think we were going to be able to climb at all, tho. when we first got down there, both the dam’s floodgates were open, and they had released high water, and most of the problems’ landings were underwater,. and the ones that weren’t were all cummy from the spray. the things we were working on were actually dry, however, so everything worked out. it was a good day for everyone; we all sent. i did two really good, hard problems myself. one was a tall, gorgeous one-move problem that had you lunging up and catching a hold with two fingers, backhanded… then step up and get your other hand on it. it was probably the most satisfying boulder problem i’ve done to date. looks like brian enjoyed his send, as well.

yesterday night was the wedding for the slf’s good friend. it was at this historic landmark building in pittsburgh… gorgeous old victorian house, and apparently it’s even haunted. the priest gave a very strange speech during the ceremony… he somehow wound up talking about the virginia snipers and the hostage tragedy in russia. the reception was fun, and interesting. there was a guy there who was probably about my dad’s age with a woman who was so young that she had to be a paid escort. one girl who was manning the video camera for most of the night taped an older couple putting napkins from the reception into the woman’s purse. needless to say, they were less than pleased about having that hallmark moment caught on tape.

quite a productive morning. with brian gone and no longer yack-yack-yacking in my ear all day long, i’m free to turn my attention to other important matters. sent in my money for my high school 10-year reunion, so i feel like i’m locked in now to going. swapping emails around with the two other people besides ryan that i’ve stayed friends with, and we’re all making each other go, so it might almost be fun.

i also decided that i’m a bit fed-up with my current hosting provider’s lack of .net support, so i’ve spent some time this morning looking for other hosts. i’ve found a few that look ok, but i think i’m going to go with alentus. 400mb space, 8gb transfer, email, etc. for $25 a month ($27 if i get the webtrends add-on). i’m more into updating my site than i have been since i started it 4 years ago, and i can’t keep trying to hop back and forth between my brinkster account and this one everytime i want to do something. it would be nice if i could get a site that also did perl so i could host my own Movable Type site, but i think that blogger is just fine for me.

of course, moving a site means moving the domain. i have long since forgotten my network solutions (now verisign) account info, so i went to try and retrieve all that stuff. of course the email address for my admin contact is my defunct forwarding address that those mail.com fuckers changed their pricing policy on after i had paid up that address for 3 years. oh, well… it was a nice side benefit to drop that email, since it was getting a lot of spam. anyway, finally retrieved my account number and got to their “forgot password” page, which gives you a choice of questions, and want you to pick the one you picked when you signed up, along with the correct responses. i had completely forgotten which question i picked, so i started answering them in order. of course you get only 3 tries, and there were 4 questions listed, so my account is now locked. sent an email to them to find out how to get my password back, and we’ll see how long it takes to get that all sorted out.

jim morrison aint’ got nothin’ on me… i’m the twizzler’d king!