Trygve.Com > Diary > JournalWeblogDiaryWhatsis - August, 2003
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World Conquest
August, 2003
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because ... well ... why the hell not ...?

it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Friday, August 29th

23:56PM

Late-night links:

Not a lot of excitement out here at the moment, unless you count taking a jeweler's saw to an AMI MegaRAID Elite 1500 and modifying it to work in a 64-bit slot of a SuperMicro 370DLR mainboard. I figured it was worth a try--it's the same PCB as the Enterprise version, just one fewer SCSI controller chip and the necessary slot in the PCI connector has been left uncut.

Running diagnostics on the newely modified card does leave open some time to experience a little web weirdness, so here's a few choice spots worth a visit:

  • Home Despot ("Shop, Destroy, Rule") the superstore for all your world domination needs. (With thanks to Doug Peterson for the link.)
  • Extreme Ironing - taking ironing to the edge: the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt.
  • KillFrog - had to take a look when I found out that he'd also done a series of "Little Susie Experiments"; not quite the same as mine, but absolutely worth watching.
  • Giant Microbes - Why get another ordinary stuffed animal when you can get your favorite bacteria, fungi, and viruses in colorful, cuddly, plush form? I'm sure they would make the perfect present for somebody on your gift list, and they're reasonably priced, too.
  • Crash Bonzai - Another fabulous gift idea, bringing new life to the age-old art of bonsai.
  • Monkey Ninjas - Now featuring episode 3! (Though episode 2 is still my favorite.) I have to give them extra points for putting up the cartoon outtakes, too.
  • Primate Programming™, Inc. - Why outsource your IT staff to India when you can outsource to a whole different species?
    (I wonder how they manage to keep bonobos focused on the development tasks you want them to be working on.)
  • Random Personal Image Finder - one of those simple but brilliant ideas: generate random filenames in the formats used by popular digital cameras and feed them into Google's image search. A new way to take a random peek at what's going on in the rest of the world.

Well, looks like the night's experiment with a MegaRAID and a stack of Seagate Cheetah drives hasn't blown up yet. Not bad for the first time I've ever taken a sawblade to a 64-bit PCI card.



Wednesday, August 13th

23:49PM

Boom!

Some days, when I'm wearing a red clerical shirt and a suit, driving down the street with a thirty-two foot ladder tied to the roof of my car and a prominently marked crate of explosives in the back, I can't help but think to myself, "hmmmm...you know, I really hope I don't get pulled over right now."

Oh, sure, I have all the appropriate paperwork and licenses from the BATF, but, still, I worry that someone might get the wrong idea.

...even if I was very careful to have the legally required old red shirt tied to the end of the ladder.

Whenever I get moments of feeling self-conscious, I remind myself that everybody else is much too busy feeling self-conscious themselves to even notice whatever I'm feeling self-conscious about, no matter how absurd it might seem. Most of the time, I think people only notice you if you look like you're not sure about what you're doing; as long as you seem confident (or are at least carrying a clipboard), you can get away with anything and nobody will notice at all.

Except maybe the time I was standing in the middle of a busy street, carefully placing candy corn on the median. Some of the drivers did notice that, but that's probably because I didn't have a clipboard with me at the time.

Sara Salazar in the doorway

(this is not me)

At one point, after I'd gotten to the day's shooting location and whited out one of my eyes, I ended up making a quick run to a nearby fast-food joint with Justin "Lucky" McQueede. While I was waiting for him to re-emerge from said joint, an enthusiastic eight-year-old spotted the ladder (still attached to the top of the car) and started jumping up and down, pointing it out to her mommy. I'm guessing she was saying something like, "look, Mommy! A big ladder!"

Either that, or, "Mommy, Mommy! Do you think that the imposition of significant import tariffs on Korean-made dynamic memory chips could have a negative impact on manufacturers of budget videocards!" I'm not very good at reading lips when someone's jumping up and down like that.

Naturally, I thought, "aww...a cute kid. Why not scar her emotionally for life?" So I took off my sunglasses and waved back, but she didn't notice. At least I think she enjoyed the ladder. Hard to compete with something that's thirty-two feet long.

Sara Salazar leaps just in time

(Sara Salazar escapes unscathed
...or so she thinks....)

Sara had to work extra hard today; she was in almost every scene. I was in only a couple of setups and those ended up being moved to the very end of the shoot, so my job consisted mostly of standing around in an unventilated 100-degree warehouse wearing a suit while continuously being ready to be on camera and not look like I'd been standing around in a 100-degree unventilated warehouse wearing a suit all day.

And then Kurt Bauman's chest exploded.

On most days, this would probably be a bad thing. In fact, as I understand it, a lot of people don't like it when that happens.

In this case, it was all part of the plan...except that the output reached a little farther than expected.

And I happened to be standing off-camera, ready for my first scene which was about to be shot, things were running behind schedule, and I end up getting sprayed head-to-toe with stage blood.

Ooops. So much for my day-long effort to remain in ready-to-be-shot form despite the heat.

Sara Salazar and I see eye-to-eye

(making sure we see eye-to-eye)

But after a bit of frenzied running around to locate suitable cleaning supplies and get myself unbloodied, at least everything else went off without a hitch, even if we were pushing the shots to make time. All ended well...except for the terrible fate that the heroes were facing at the end, but, then, you have to expect that sort of thing.



Monday, August 11th

20:17PM

Grrrr:

In case any of you didn't know already, I hate Spamcop. It's not just because it's run by a bunch of toadstool-smoking dimwits who couldn't read a header if their lives depended on it *and* they magically received an extra fifty IQ points for the evening. My real reason for hating Spamcop is that they're a bunch of toadstool-smoking dimwits who keep flooding my mailbox with obviously bogus complaints for no apparent reason other than to waste my time and, further, they make a point of munging the headers contained in such complaints in an ongoing and determined effort to waste even *more* of my time by making it harder for me to track down what's actually going on and verifying that, yes, once again, the complaint is yet another unfounded waste of time.

Most of the time, the "complaint" turns out to be from an actual spammer filing a "retaliatory complaint" against a Nyx user who had the temerity to complain to their ISP about their dumping unsolicited commercial spew onto the net. The rest of the time, the complaints are about some piece of junk mail that never passed anywhere near Nyx, but that had an obviously forged field in the header claiming that it was from a Nyx user (most spam these days picks one of the recipients and forges the "From:" field to claim it's from that individual).

So, today I get a couple of pages worth of such complaints, once again with the headers deliberately munged for no reason other than to make it more difficult to determine the actual cause of said complaints. Turns out that a Nyx user (who will remain unnamed) had a .forward file that was sending all email to a Spamcop email address...which proceeded to determine on this basis that Nyx was operating as an open relay.

It's not, and it hasn't been. I disabled the offending .forward file, but I don't know whether Spamcop just does this automatically or whether it requires some added input from the recipient to spur Spamcop's toadstool-smoking dimwit brigade into action. Spamcop is now listing Nyx as being a formerly open relay. Grrrr...that's still not an acceptable response on their part, considering that it's their complaint system that screwed up, not Nyx.



Saturday, August 9th

23:54PM

Lunation:

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day feature is always an entertaining page to check out, but today's entry, August 10, 2003: Lunation, jumps out as being especially cool. I have to admit that I'd never noticed the moon wobbling like that over the month...but I guess these things are a little harder to see real-time.



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