a while back, i mentioned this, and i tried to summarize, but i didn’t do anywhere near as good a job as xydexx did, with fewer words… 😕 oh well, here’s the real deal: 
Tag Archives: malfunctioning people
extremism
i’ve been reading, the past couple of days, about “extremism” on the right, and on the left, as being somehow equal in their “extremism”. i was reading about how alexandria ocasio-cortez had to “stand up” to an interviewer who tried to imply that the two forms of “extremism” are the same, and it reminds me of something my old friend xydexx said about nazis. imagine this:
you and your extended family are having a potluck picnic, and everyone is supposed to provide some food. but when you arrive at the picnic, there, sitting in the middle of the table, is a huge steaming platter of dog shit, surrounded by dishes of actual food, provided by other relatives. do you want to interact with the person who put the dog shit in the middle of the table? and what about the rest of the food… would you be inclined to eat ANYTHING from a table that featured a huge steaming platter of dogshit? would you be inclined to talk kindly and gently with the person who provided that platter, to find out what their story is, to find out what possessed them to bring a huge steaming platter of dog shit to your family picnic? would you be anxious to hear their reasons for messing up your picnic? would you ignore it, hoping that the perpetrator would change, if given a good example?
the probability is very high that you would not do those things, but that you would find out who the perpetrator is, and eject them (forcefully, if necessary) from the picnic area.
that is the difference between “extremism” on the left versus “extremism” on the right: “extremism” on the left is more inclined to help other people, regardless of who they are, whereas “extremism” on the right wants everything their way, and if it’s not exactly the way they lay it out, they’re going to mess up the picnic for everyone.
xydexx has a multi-paragraph statement about this, but that’s basically what it boils down to. in xydexx’s version, the furry fandom is the extended family, and nazis and other fur-haters bring the dog shit, but the argument expands nicely. when people say “there are two sides to every argument” when the discussion is about having a country with universal health care, instead of causing harm to people you don’t like (furries, gays, trans, etc., etc…), you know that whoever is saying it is probably NOT someone you would want to invite to your picnic.
the story of the license plate…
in 2019, shortly after faddlefum died, i was in line to inherit one of his license plates, which said “BREATH”. my recollection is that francie and i discussed it several times, and i was supposed to pick it up (or have it mailed to me) by the end of july, but i got caught up in stuff, and didn’t contact her until october, at which point she said she had given it to someone else.
i was friends with kenyth for decades, but i don’t know francie more than in passing: she worked with kenyth before i met him, but she moved out of town (new york, or something, is my recollection), and came back and got married to him until after i had moved out of bellingham, when kenyth already knew that he had alzheimer’s.
i figured that it was because she didn’t know how much kenyth meant to me, and went on with my life, DRAMATICALLY disappointed in the choices kenyth made about a life-partner, and without much motivation to be in contact with her in the future…
and that was where it stood until a couple of days ago, when i got email from francie, saying that she is getting ready to move and came across kenyth’s license plate, and would i be interested in having it.
and, it turns out, it is a VERY GOOD THING i didn’t say something about the fact that she told me she gave it to someone else, because the process of getting back to her involved discovering that gmail is blocking messages from hybridelephant AGAIN, which had me calling kamala to see if she had a phone number for her, and, in the process of explaining the whole thing to kamala, she mentioned that francie had the license plate on display in her house for the past couple of years. maybe i’ll mention it after i have it in my hands.
i can understand if she’s a grieving widow who doesn’t want to give away something that reminds her of her husband (even if he was her husband for a relatively short period of time, kenyth had that kind of effect on some people, particularly women)… but i DO NOT understand telling me that she had given it to someone else, and then putting it on display in her house.
nevertheless, i’m going to bellingham tomorrow, to retrieve the license plate from her. she says she’s having an “open studio” tomorrow evening, in bay street village (which is where the PHBFH lived when i first moved to seattle to go to the tech school), and it will give me a chance to see ken and kamala’s new place… and i might stop by and say hi to darol, as well.
stupid motherfucking anti-vax republicunts!! 🤬
i SHOULD BE at the oregon country fair, at this very moment… but i am not.
less than 12 hours BEFORE i was supposed to leave, i tested positive for COVID-19. moe tested positive, as well. 😒
i mentioned it on twit-turd™, and some random person responded “your (sic) fully vaccinated? why blame the anti-vaxxers?”
to which i responded “”your” fully vaccinated?” PLONK! 😒”
(if you don’t know, “PLONK!” is the sound that spam messages make when they are shit-canned)
however, here is my reason for blaming the antis/republicunts:
if you recall, way back, two years ago, when this whole pandemic was first starting up, the CDC came out with a statement along the lines of “if we can get EVERYONE to wear a mask for a month, we can defeat this.” this was BEFORE they even had a vaccine…
but there were a whole bunch of anti-mask republicunts who believed #drumpf when he said that it would miraculously disappear, and totally ignored the CDCs recommendations.
and tens of thousands DIED because of it.
then they announced a vaccine, and there were a whole bunch of anti-mask republicunts who said that the vaccine contained aborted fetuses, or some such garbage, and refused to get vaccinated.
literally MILLIONS died, but the antis stood their ground, as millions of THEIR OWN KIND were dying around them…
and, more recently, there has been the “federal” (#drumpf-appointed) judge who decided that the mask mandates for airlines and public transportation were “unconstitutional”, and the rush to re-open businesses, and the rush to “get back to normal” that has totally ignored the CDC recommendations (AND, i might add, COMMON SENSE) which means that millions MORE died…
if we had listened to THE EXPERTS about this, we would have been done with it, or, at the very minimum, be well on our way to recovery by now, but…
now, don’t get me wrong: if a person CLAIMS TO BE an “expert” on something, i ALWAYS take what they say with “a grain of salt”, particularly when they claim to be an “expert” in MY health. but i also know enough history to know that, in 1918, when we had a pandemic of the “spanish flu” (which turned out to be an american phenomenon that was first isolated by spanish doctors), BEFORE the advent of reliable vaccines, the “anti-mask” crowd was the PRIMARY reason (along with world war one) that it lasted for 3 years.
yesterday, i felt “under the weather”, and slept most of the day. towards the end of the day, i transitioned from feeling “under the weather” to feeling truly awful, but (fortunately) moe was there with over-the-counter medicines and common sense, and i actually slept through the night (which is something that i rarely do, under the best of circumstances, these days), and i feel weak, but more-or-less normal today… but i was SUPPOSED TO BE at OCF LAST NIGHT — my panto comrades are going to miss me, there are at least two pieces of music they CAN’T PLAY because there are prevelant tuba parts, and, because of the fact that i tested positive on tuesday night, i can’t even go out in public (even with a mask) until sunday or monday.
and i have ZERO compunction about naming the stupid motherfucking anti-vax republicunts as THE primary cause of this. 🤬
and, despite the fact that boris johnson (the UKs answer to #drumpf) stepped down as the prime minister of the UK, yesterday, i am still not holding my breath that anything is going to change for the better, any time soon.
fortunately, i haven’t seemed to have lost my sense of taste and smell: i’m currently burning incense, which i can smell, and moe made chicken soup, which tastes AWESOME, but both moe and i have commented on the “brain fog”, which will, hopefully, go away over time.
urgh!
from the inside, looking out, life is pretty decent: we’re busking again, there are gigs on the horizon, nothing serious is wrong with the house, i’m getting my art car made… i’ve still got a big, scary thing that hasn’t happened for 2 years, but was pretty much essential to my life for some time before that (which is the oregon country fair)…
but from the outside looking in, 50 years of my life, and most of my identity, has been summarily dismissed by the supreme court, which has indicated its willingness to overturn roe v. wade, despite the fact that there isn’t a single state for which the overturning of roe v. wade commands more than 30% support…
which, of course, is PRIMARILY due to #drumpf, who, despite being impeached TWICE, managed to jam through three supreme court “justices”, two of whom are credibly accused sexual predators, and the other is amy coney barrett, who thinks that a woman’s place is barefoot and pregnant.
and all of that is coming from EXACTLY the same people that gave us matt gaetz, who is under investigation for human trafficking and sex with teenagers, and jim jordan, who is accused of enabling a sexual predator, and roy moore, who is accused of sexually predating teenagers at a mall, and madison cawthorn, who idolises hitler, and films himself fucking his cousin in the ear, and another guy who is a long time republican politician who was convicted of possessing pornographic images of children, and the “jewish space laser lady”, and on, and on, and on, and on, and FUCKING ON!!… 🤬🤬🤬
and the chance that ANY OF THEM are going to face real justice of any kind is vanishingly small. 🤬
and that’s not even to mention the fact that #drumpf, himself, along with ALL his cronies, and partners in crime, are STILL running around free, and having rallies, and spewing misinformation, disinformation, and OUTRIGHT LIES to anybody who will listen, which, apparently, is about 49% of the population of the country…
seriously, politics has gotten so over-the-top, blatantly FASCIST, pretty much ever since #drumpf was elected (but, honestly, i see the first inklings of fascism in the 1970s, when nixon and mcgovern butted heads)… the country, and the world, has gotten so right-wing, “christian”, and “conservative” that it’s beyond merely frightening, and everything i’ve seen seems to indicate that it is going to get orders of magnitude worse before there’s any hope of it getting better…
and, if that wasn’t bad enough on its own, don’t even get me started on climate change… 🤬🤬🤬
🙄
i swear, these people must be a part of my karass (also, karass), because i keep running into them in THE MOST unexpected places, despite my overall desire to separate myself from them as much as possible… 😒
recently i’ve developed an interest in mycology (who am i kidding, i’ve ALWAYS had a very strong interest in a certain kind of mushroom… 😉) particularly because it seems fairly likely that, with a little coercion (from spores which i already have), i can start producing psilocybe cyanescens outside, in my fenced yard, pretty much whenever i choose to do so.
to this end, i recently purchased a book by mushroom expert paul stamets, called “Mycelium Running”, and, on the colophon page for the book, i noticed that the cover design was by two people, one of whom is andrew lenzer…
who is married to my younger younger sister.* 🙄
the one i haven’t spoken to since… i don’t know, 1988? maybe…? probably earlier than that… maybe as early as 1980… when she was 12 years old… 🙄
and, i have to keep reminding myself that members of one’s karass aren’t necessarily one’s “friends”… 😒
* as compared to my older younger sister, who is two years older than my younger younger sister… but they are six, and eight years younger than me, respectively, so i wasn’t around for a lot of their growing up and getting married stuff, and i have never actually met andrew lenzer, my brother-in-law… but, knowing my siblings, i would wager that there have been many unpleasant stories told about me for years. 🙄
bleah…
i’ve been under the attack of anhedonia and depression. my mushrooms have lost their potency: the last time i tried, i took 6 of them and they had, essentially, no effect at all. i connected with a person at SACBO — ranger’s connection — but she is only one step closer to the source… although she did mention that starter kits are available on ebay, and that they practically grow themselves, so that’s worth looking into.
part of the reason i have been so depressed is because of what i call the “political situation”: that is, drumpf and his latest atrocities. it just keeps on getting worse, and, when i think there’s no way he can get any worse, he blows the world away with the magnitude of his atrocities… and his republicon base of supporters get upset about a black disney princess and a pair of nike sneakers, but totally ignore the concentration camps and the gestapo Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, not to mention the totally inept people, including his own children, he’s put in charge of such things as education, housing, healthcare and the environment. it’s literally going to take us 100 years JUST to fix his fuckups, and that’s not taking into account the fact that the world is already in a crisis mode. it’s almost as though everything i’ve ever fought for throughout my entire life has been eliminated by this orange babboon in less than 3 years, and replaced with climate-change deniers, corporate stooges, forced-birth and anti-vax controversies, and so-called “christian” love, which is only for the so-called “christians”.
drumpf spent $92 million, which he appropriated from the national parks department (🤬), on a “military parade” in washington DC, complete with tanks and a flyover by the blue angels and “airforce one” — which, of course, wasn’t “airforce one” because the #SCROTUS was on the ground, observing the flyover… and the tanks were stationary, because, apparently, if they had moving tanks, they would have destroyed the streets and damaged the lincoln memorial… but the only people who could view this were his donors, because everyone else had to pay to get in… and then it rained, HARD and everything was postponed. the photos and videos i’ve seen show a very few thoroughly wet people and drumpf giving a long, boring, confusing speech that one writer i read compared to having been written by artificial intelligence, and a retired admiral said that it was on the level of an 8th grade history lesson… and the live video feeds from the top of the washington memorial, and the lincoln memorial were inexplicably shut down and removed from the whitehouse dot gov address, apparently to cover up how few people actually attended this debacle.
so, basically, we, the american people, threw away $92,000,000,000 on an egotistical, childish, boorish, dictator-emulating orange rapist with the IQ of half a rock, instead of addressing the concentration camps, or the homeless issue, or the healthcare issue, or… 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
as can be well imagined, despite my love for exploding things, i take little interest in such activities in celebration of this country, this year… which is, also, at least partially, because of the fact that we now have a dog who is totally terrified of fireworks, AND a next-door neighbour who is prone to setting off a ton of fireworks which ignite their lawn, and other suchlike wonderful things. 😒
OCF is 5 days away, and i’m hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. by this time, we’ve usually had one run through, and have some rough idea of how long the show will be. this year, we’re nowhere close to that, despite the fact that we started out with a working script, which we created 15 years ago, when we did this show (Jack And The Beanstalk) the last time. and we’re still missing two songs, one of which is probably not going to make it into the show for OCF.
and, on top of everything else, MAD magazine is shutting down! PBLFLLT!! 😠
W. T. F??
so, i’ve got a new customer.
he’s from india. he’s a doctor. he wants me to ship him $100 worth of incense that, it is my understanding, is VERY easy to find in india, but which is practically impossible to find in the united states… in fact, as far as i can tell, mine is the only on-line, retail store in the united states which sells it…
here is a guy, who is 150 kilometers away from the manufacturer of this incense, who wants me to ship $100 worth of this exact, same incense to him, from half way around the planet…
W.T.F??!? 😕
ketchup
i isolated 10 “good enough” tracks from the raw files, but none of them were more than 6 minutes, and i wanted at least one that was 10 minutes or more, so i’m going back to fort worden next tuesday to try it all again. i’ve also bought a recording device of my own, which should make things more interesting, if nothing else.
i woke up the other day and tried to log in to my email account and discovered that everything was offline, and when i went to the host provider to determine why, i discovered that my account had been suspended because they received a spam complaint about me… except that, when i looked at the complaint they received, i recognised it immediately as one that i had sent to an upstream provider a couple of days before, and what they had done was forward it to the upstream provider on the “From:” line, instead of reading the headers to determine that they were, in fact, the people responsible… and, because of the fact that i NEVER receive spam complaints, they arbitrarily suspended my accounts, instead of reading the headers to determine who was actually responsible. 😕 since then i have received about 10,000 spam messages, in 1000 message increments, from people whose php servers have been compromised such that, simply by reading the headers and knowing where to click, i can actually see the spammers online interface on the compromised server…
but I was the one whose account was suspended for spamming. if it weren’t for the fact that i’m still recovering from my bout of changing host servers every few months, a few years ago, i would seriously consider switching, but… in spite of everything, the host server i currently use has been better than any of the others that i have found, for the price.
by the way, here is the place to get your email headers analysed, and here is the place to get information about the IP numbers you’ll get from analysing your email headers. basically it’s the same thing that spamcop used to do. i suppose there’s a way to automate it so that i don’t have to go through all the steps to figure out who gets the LARTs, but i like getting my hands dirty, because i know it’s being done correctly this way. 😏
i have a gig next saturday with the fremont philharmonic at “dudefest” and another gig on sunday at the peace arch in blaine with the sousa band. i’m probably going to spend sunday night in bellingham… depending…
perception, friendship and farcebook…
so there’s this guy with whom i’ve been friends since before my injury, that is among the people who have been, until recently my friends on farcebook. i know this guy has “political opinions” that i passionately do not share, that he’s into martial arts and that he used to be a LEO of some sort or another, but when i met him, which was in 2001 (according to my handy-dandy chart of when things happened), he was the press operator at one of the print shops at which i worked… and i’ve maintained friendly contact with him ever since my injury… basically, when carl fired me, he told me that, whenever i needed something printed in one colour, i could get it from him, and, in exchange, he picked my brain about macintosh computers up until what i knew was no longer current. i haven’t needed anything printed in one colour for a few years, and don’t anticipate ever needing anything printed in one colour, basically, ever again, so when i discovered that he had a farcebook presence, i friended him immediately… and, once he realised who i was, he responded “Frank Zappa had better add me to his friends list… Or I might be upset!”
which is why i wondered a little bit when my news feed started being populated with a lot of, to be blunt, bigoted, ignorant, right-wing propaganda which was posted or shared by this guy. i managed to marginally stem the tide for a while, but i noticed, especially when the supreme court decision regarding marriage equality was imminent, the ignorant and bigoted things he was posting reached a fever pitch.
it was at this point that i made some comment about how, if it was supported by a majority of americans, that keeping gay marriages illegal would hurt everyone, regardless of what “god” thought about it, and that i was shocked that he would post such hateful things.
to which he responded that he didn’t know where i was getting my information, but that gay marriage was something that, actually, only a very few people wanted, and that they had somehow managed to force their unwanted opinions upon a mostly disapproving populace… and then he un-friended me.
it doesn’t bother me that a rabid right-wing fanatic no longer wants to be my friend, what bothers me is that i thought he was my friend for as long as i did…
and what bothers me even more is that i am bothered by the fact that i am no longer “friends” with this guy. we were able to overlook the glaring, obvious differences we had, have pleasant conversations about things in which we were both interested, and we maintained that state for years, until farcebook inserted its finger in the pie. there’s a remote possibility that, at some point in the future, he might have been persuaded to consider a different opion, if i had maintained our pre-farcebook acquaintance, but, because of farcebook, that is no longer an option.
and to make matters worse, they changed wordpress so that my custom, hand-made emoticons no longer work, so i can’t say 8P and have the correct, disgusted emoticon show any longer. 8P
which reminds me…
according to the “universal chart of telling when things actually happened” that i made several years ago, in late 1995 i lived in a rooming house in west seattle with a couple of crazy people, one of whom was Regan Fraser, older brother of Brendan Fraser, actor in such movies as “George Of The Jungle” and the Mummy series. at the time (and, to a certain extent, still), i was more or less ignorant of the exploits of brendan, so i wasn’t as “wowed” by my brush with the sibling of a star as i might have been otherwise, but it was pretty memorable anyway.
at the time, i was working as a micro$lut, doing the evil bidding of the great Gates himself. i had lulled myself into a false sense of security, because, even though i was working at microsoft headquarters (i never actually had an office on campus in redmond, but i had several “off campus” offices), i was working in their mac division, and never actually worked with windoesn’t until several years later.
this was back in the dark ages, when you could actually telnet to different servers, and, for the most part, there was no email spam, in part because it was before the discovery of the Word Concept Virus, which was capable of being sent over email. prior to the word concept virus, you actually had to have physical access to the computer, and install viruses from a disk, for them to be able to propagate… in other words, computer security was light-years away from where we are now.
when regan heard that i was working with networked computers, he came to me with a bold plan to get both of us filthy rich — or something — a prominent part of which involved me gaining access to his “rich brother’s” bank accounts over internet.
fortunately for me, i was just at the beginning of my realisation that i was, deep down, a computer geek, and also i was a rank newbie when it came to internet — i had survived perfectly well up until that time using a sneaker-net when i had to share documents, and i was just beginning to imagine why i would ever want anything more than that…
so i “tactfully” told him that, while what he proposed was likely possible, he was talking to the wrong guy when it came to actually cracking a computer and stealing stuff.
later, after i had moved into my own apartment, i heard, third-hand, that he had actually been arrested when it was discovered that he had broken into his “rich brother’s” house, stolen some credit cards, and had actually gone to a bank with those cards, claiming to be his “rich brother”… i never actually confirmed any of this, but reading through the tale of master foo reminded me of my experience with regan fraser…
who?
who the hell is kim kardashian anyway?
i mean, i’ve heard of her, but who is she? what has she done that i should have heard about?
and being the subject of a “reality” television show, and marrying kanye west are not among the things she has done that i should have heard about… 😐
also, being the subject of a sex video is something nobody should have heard about, except the people involved in making it, so that doesn’t count either… 😐
what i’m talking about is what wikipedia refers to as “notability”… what has she done “of note” that i should have heard about?
ETA: now that i come to think about it, i had similar questions about arsenio hall… who?
smb
i figured out stumbled across the method of making my mac accessible to my linux box that doesn’t include sftp, but does include smb. theoretically, i’ve got smb running on my linux box, as well (thus the ability to access my mac), but for some reason, my linux box doesn’t show up on my mac.
it’s nothing new. my mac has always shown up on my linux box, and my linux box has never shown up on my mac. the fact that i stumbled across the method of making my mac visible on my linux box indicates to me that it should be fairly easy to make the linux box visible from the mac…
but, so far, it hasn’t happened yet… 😐
woo…
i got my new laptop. it says it’s going to take 30 hours to transfer all the data. i don’t know whether this is good or bad.
why is this happening?
several of my web hosting clients have been having trouble with their email not getting through, recently. i went through a frighteningly similar situation last year, which ended up with my moving my web sites, lock stock and CGI scripts, to another server with a different IP address… same host provider, just a different IP address. the reason was that, for some unexplained reason, the IP address kept getting listed in the CBL… which means that someone using that shared-hosting machine (not me, or any of my clients) was using it to sent spam.
the same thing has happened again. i complained, they suspended someone, it didn’t fix the problem, they told me that it takes time to propagate, i waited, it didn’t fix the problem, i complained again, they told me that it was an exim misconfiguration, that didn’t fix the problem, i complained again, they told me that they had written to the CBL to get answers…
well, guess what?
copied from the CBL home page: “There is no supporting data or “evidence” file available for any given listing, and no mechanism to ask why any given listing took place.”
so i wrote back to them, and said “whatever is causing the IP to be relisted hasn’t gone away, and won’t go away with you guys waiting for a response that won’t come.”
whereupon they closed the ticket with no further response.
maybe it’s time to start looking for a cheap VPS… 😐
the email fiasco is mostly resolved…
i hate these things, and they appear to come in batches, so i’m hoping that i won’t have to deal with them for a while…
spamcop is up and running. there’s still a significant amount of mail from the past few days that has yet to be delivered, and there’s a good bet that, even when it is delivered, it’s not going to be all of it, but hopefully it will be enough that i get caught up again.
also, my “alternate” email address, which i was using during the time spamcop was down, now POPs the way it’s supposed to, which means that i don’t have to keep a browser open on my mac in order to reply to emails. what i’m hoping is that the technique i used to fix my POP problem will be the same as my clients whose POP mail accounts at sedentarysousa and kosherredhots need, but, unfortunately, i won’t find out for a couple of days. i’m fairly confident that it will work, though…
the only remaining snag is that qwest/centurylink’s SMTP server is STILL on a couple of blacklists, and there’s no telling how long they’ll be there, because qwest has its head so far up its ass that it can see daylight out the other end*… and there’s a very good chance that, despite the fact that i’ve had “someone with more authority” (i.e. my host provider is going to try to contact their real postmaster, and not just some phone-flunky) attempt to communicate with them, they’re going to ignore it anyway, which is why i don’t really expect anything to change in that regard.
oh my GAWD what have i gotten myself in to?
spamcop is working, however…
when i send email from me at salamandir dot info to a friend of mine, whose email address i provide (spreznib at hybridelephant dot com) it bounces with the following message:
ERROR: Your message could not be delivered. The mail server generated the following error message: This message was created automatically by the mail system (ecelerity). A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed [email protected] (reading confirmation): 550 High probability of spam Arrival-Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:10:45 -0400 Reporting-MTA: dns; smtp.centurylink.net Action: failed Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected] Last-Attempt-Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:10:45 -0400 Remote-MTA: dns; mx1.thewebhostserver.com Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 High probability of spam Status: 5.0.0
when i check mxtoolbox dot com, it tells me that 208.47.184.3 (the IP address for smtp.centurylink.net) is on a couple of blacklists, because SOMEBODY has been sending spam from smtp.centurylink.net without encountering the HAMMER…
however, when i call qwest/centurylink, they say that it’s not 100% sure that their server is on a blacklist, and i should investigate “other problems” because of the fact that they don’t show anything wrong, they can’t do anything…
this is the sound of me, repeatedly faceplanting on the desk… 😛
the rapture!!
so far, the rapture hasn’t happened… i’m preparing to have a big ol’ laugh at harold camping’s expense when the day is over… 8)
in other news, i got a new unauthorised authorisation dialogue, like the one i got back in august of last year, but it’s for a different site… the site, LEAP.cc, is the site for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which i have visited a while back, but there currently is no site there, and, instead, it asks for an authorisation (which i have NEVER provided), so i’m thinking that either they’re not in business any longer (not very likely) or someone has hacked their site. needless to say, i didn’t enter anything into the fields, and it’s acting pretty much the same way as the twitter dialogue that was coming up last year, so i’m going to guess that it’ll go away eventually.
the rapture still hasn’t happened… i’ll let you know something else comes up… 8)
Scientists confirm Extraterrestrial genes in Human DNA – for some reason i thought this was appropriate, despite the fact that it was originally posted in 2007…
Family Radio, which is harold camping’s “ministry” is offline… it’s the end of the world as they know it…
i recognise that…
“For some reason I am not able to attach the 3’x8’ signs to the email, to send it off to be printed. Is there any way that you can change it to be ‘KB’, instead of ‘MB’? The ‘KB’ ones always seem to work better for me.”
another week closer to the eschaton…
i don’t use facebook for a large number of reasons. primary among these is that, despite the fact that a lot of my current friends are facebook members, there are certain people from my past that might want to get in touch with me, and i would prefer it a great deal if they did not know how to get in touch with me. not being a member of facebook is a good way to accomplish that. among the other reasons, in no particular order, are these: Facebook users ‘are insecure, narcissistic and have low self-esteem’, Understanding the latest Facebook privacy train wreck, Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook, More Reasons Why You Should Still Quit Facebook and Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook? i’m not going to rant about this, despite the fact that i could rant for quite some time about facebook, because whatever i say, people are going to do what people are going to do, and one of those things is to use facebook in spite of it’s obvious and blatant flaws.
reminder: THIS is the reason why i am no longer using LiveJournal for anything remotely blog-related. i know enough about how these things work to realise that there’s probably a lot going on that i don’t understand, and that i don’t know about, but there’s one distinct advantage to having a blog located on a server over which you have exclusive control, and that is that you don’t have perverts sysadmins stalking poking their noses in where they’re not supposed to be. if you’re looking for an alternative, i can host your domain and you can run your own version of wordpress there, and i promise i won’t comment on flocked entries. contact me for more details.
Death by iPod – this is directly related to last week’s link detailing people still falling for scams, despite the fact that they’ve been running essentially the same scams for at least ten years… society needs a collective brain upgrade. examples: Google squirrels into human brains with Scribe experiment and Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent
Windows malware dwarfs other viral threats – “The vast majority of malware – more than 99 per cent – targets Windows PCs”. another very good reason to use linux.
50 Mind Blowing Facts About America That Our Founding Fathers Never Would Have Believed – Sheriffs want lists of patients using painkillers – for example…
Stuffed Pony Blown Up By Bomb Squad Suspicious ‘FurReal’ pony blown up near elementary school – it was a battery powered, stuffed pony, in the vicinity of an elementary school… because the clowns at clownland security didn’t have anything better to do…
‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Unconstitutional – this actually happened a few days ago, but i haven’t seen it in any of the regular news at all. the “christians” will say that it’s further evidence that they are a “persecuted minority”. meanwhile Self-Described ‘Christian Counterpart To Osama Bin Laden’ Arrested In Plot To Bomb Abortion Clinic and Self-labeled ‘Christian counterpart of Osama bin Laden’ allegedly planned clinic bombing – “christians” are the real terrorists.
What does it take to be happy? About $75,000 – money can’t buy happiness, but apparently $75k a year will get you pretty close…
New research restores psychedelics’ medical respectability – first they were used as medicine for thousands of years, then they decided that they have no medicinal value, now they’re saying that they might have medicinial value after all… i wish they’d just make up their minds and stop decieving us. sign The Vienna Declaration to advocate for evidence based drug policy and strengthen the call for policies driven by evidence. join the movement to end the failed war on drugs!
Cannabis Yoga – to help you come down from your stressful life. this is not a joke.
Noam Chomsky to become new X-Factor judge – this is a joke.
oy… 8/
so the host provider that i finally settled with in january, after leaving them for someone else, because they wanted to raise my rates by 300%, but decided not to after i switched to the host provider that decided i couldn’t have a mailing list after helping me set up a mailing list, so i switched back… and, surprisingly, has been doing a more or less outstanding job ever since…
that same host provider is apparently going out of business for “personal reasons”. the “personal reasons”?
the owner is 16 years old, and is the president of his high school’s linux club, and doesn’t have time for it any longer… 8/
damn, damn, DAMN!! 😡
somebody grafittied my car!
someone grafittied my car!
i was at Hale’s Palladium this evening for the last performance of Aladdin and The Magic Lamp. i parked there and went in around 1:30 pm, and when i walked out of the palladium at around 6:00 pm, there it was. the paint was dry, which, in my mind, means that the guy must have done it around between the time that i left it, and 4:00 or thereabouts.
i asked around and i learned that the guy who tags things with “SEEDR1” is around 30 years old, and was a student at cornish until he was expelled because of a conflict with one of the instructors (big surprise). he is known for his “photo-realistic” grafitti art, but he also tags (which is likely one of the sources for the conflict with the instructors at cornish), and he was probably drunk when he did it (big surprise).
i don’t know who he is — yet — but i’m already closing in on his identity, and it hasn’t even been 6 hours yet. i’m pissed at this guy, because his drunken tag is going to cost me time and money to cover up, but also because tagging a car — any car — is really a lame, juvenile thing to do. if i ever find him, i don’t know what i would do, but i do know that i’m probably going to file a police report regarding it whether i find out his identity, or not, and if it’s possible to get reimbursed for it, by whatever means, from him, it would be an awesome thing.
i’m going to get better pictures in the morning, when the light is better, but i really don’t understand why he did it… to my car doesn’t matter, i would wonder the same thing about such a tag on any car. the guy must have known that it wouldn’t last long, nobody would see it, and — especially because of the fact that it was on an art car to begin with — it is going to be covered up immediately, before i drive anywhere other than directly home.
and if the guy is an artist himself, what was going through his mind as he spray-painted his tag on my piece of artwork? how would he feel if i spray-painted a tag on one of his pieces of artwork? maybe, because of the fact that his artwork is mostly grafitti to begin with, he wouldn’t mind so much, but i would be willing to bet that if he created a work of art that wasn’t grafitti, and someone spray-painted on it, he would be offended at the very least, so why would he expect any less from me?
i’m not really surprised that someone grafittied my car, but what i am surprised about is why it has taken this long. i’ve been driving ganesha the car for 5 years, and this is the first time anyone has done anything nasty to it… and really, thinking about it, it isn’t really that nasty, except in a vile, putrid, disgusting sort of way. and the guy managed to paint on one of the few places on the car where i won’t have to repaint the actual artwork on the car in order to cover it up, so apart from being really lame and annoying, it’s not that bad.
i am writing in I, Anonymous about it, though, because i know a lot of people read it, and very likely the guy who did it will either find out about it personally, or from one of his friends.
and, by the way… the guy who tags SEEDR1 is an worse than an asshole. he’s an anal polyp and he deserves to be removed from society’s colon immediately. the guy i caught in the act of trying to rip a bumper sticker off of my car apologised and admitted that he was being an asshole, and he got forgiven by me, because he stood up, admitted what he was doing, and that he was an asshole. this guy is worse, and he is not getting forgiven. die in hell, scum!
oy… 8/
i’m having a tough time, and i can’t even blog about it! 🙁
i’ve selected a new host provider and begun the process of switching, but because of the fact that new host provider doesn’t feel comfortable allowing me ssh access, i’m forced to do everything the slow way, one file at a time, and “ask” for help, then wait up to 24 hours for a response, every time i find something that i can’t do with a GUI that i could do in 5 seconds with ssh access. as a result, i haven’t actually switched the DNS settings and now i’m going to have to export my wordpress database and upload it to the new server again because of this post… and there’s a problem with the blog on the new host server, which i could fix in 5 seconds using ssl, but because of the fact that he’s nervous about offering ssl, even if i do hit the “submit” button on this post, download the database from the old server, and reupload the database on the new server, it won’t show up at the new server… all you can see at this point is
Warning: fopen(/home/hybridel/public_html/przxqgl/wp-content/cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/hybridel/public_html/przxqgl/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 96
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/hybridel/public_html/przxqgl/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache.php:2) in /home/hybridel/public_html/przxqgl/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 868
i got email about my Tengwar Sindarinwa font from the guy who plagiarised it (taking out some of the spacing characters that he didn’t understand, reversing some characters, etc., etc.) saying that i was the one who ripped him off, in spite of the fact that i have original artwork from the ’70s that proves otherwise. what he doesn’t realise is that you can’t “copyright” a letter shape, all you can do is copyright a font name, and my “Tengwar Sindarinwa” and his “Tengwar Gandalf” have different names. there’s nothing that he can do except be annoying, but he’s choosing a very difficult time to do it.
moe applied to be an animal behaviour specialist, which meant that she had to put together almost 1000 printed pages of records, logs, articles and so forth that she has been working on for the past 7 years. she was working on the last of it the other night and one of the dogs spilled a cup of water all over her laptop. we managed to get it shut down without obviously shorting out something, removed the battery and dried it off as well as we could, including leaving it upside down on a towel over a heat register overnight, and blowing it out thoroughly with compressed air, but when i tried to boot it up it gave me the “i can’t find the operating system” icon. i called apple care and explained the situation to them, and they said that if i took it in to the mac store that they had software that could look at the contents of the disk, and even made an appointment for me – the last one of the day – at the mac store in southcenter. i drove 20 miles to southcenter and waited almost an hour before someone finally talked to me (it was after closing time). he wouldn’t take my case ID number and wouldn’t even look at the computer. he told me that, in fact, they do have the software that apple care told me about, but that their policy was to “use it for our own purposes, and not to retrieve customer data”. when i said that apple care had told me differently, he said he would give them “feedback”, but there was nothing he could do. 😮
to make matters worse, i called apple care again this morning, because at least there i can give them my case ID number so that at least they will know what i’m talking about, but the first support goon i talked to said exactly the same thing as the one i talked to last night. when i told him that he was wrong and that the mac store wouldn’t help me, he passed me along to his supervisor who told me there was nothing he could do. 😯
i used to be a macintosh afficianado. i was a mac-head before most of the “geniuses” at the “genius bar” were even born. the first mac i used was a Lisa. but the customer service i received from apple, and from the mac store yesterday is enough to make me never want to see another apple product again in my entire life. i currently own, and am running a dual-core intel macbook pro, and the next time i have difficulties with it, it’s going to lose it’s apple operating system all together, and gain a new linux operating system. 😡
then there was the fact that i left my linux computer running when i went to bed last night, and this morning when i got up, it was not running and i couldn’t start it up. according to the people that i took it to (it, fortunately, is still under warranty), the power supply was laden with dust, and they speculated that it stopped working when it overheated. fortunately, because of the fact that it is still under warranty, i didn’t have to pay to get it fixed, but i drove all the way there and back twice before i had breakfast this morning.
it’s almost 4:00 already and i’ve gotten exactly NOTHING done for the past THREE DAYS. i’ve got a performance this evening at the rialto theatre in tacoma, a real, authentic, old-time vaudeville stage where i’ll be opening for Pearl Django, and i’m in such a bad mood that i’m not even excited about it. 😛
AAAARRRGGGHHH!
that’s A4R3G3H3 for those of you who are keeping score…
you may or may not have noticed that my web sites have been down for the past 24 hours. this was because at 4:00 friday afternoon, i got an email from my “new” host provider that he was going down for “4 to 5 hours (maximum 10 hours) for upgrades” and wanted to know if it was “okay with you if we start them this evening”… and then proceded to start the upgrades without even making sure that it was okay with me or not.
also, he informed me that my rates would be increasing by almost 300% because he is having trouble breaking even. 😯
needless to say, i have – once again – embarked on the task of finding yet another host service provider – my fourth switch in less than a year… 🙄 i will probably be switching in january, after the panto is over.
more stuff after the panto.
“Exclusive indexing goes against the Web’s inherent openness. Companies that try to curtail that openness don’t last long on the Web.”
i have always been suspicious of bing (no, i am not going to link to them). part of it is because i’m suspicious about microsoft (not going to link to them, either), generally, which has turned out to be a good thing more often than not. but part of it is because microsoft has weasled their way into an unholy allience with rupert murdoch, who also owns myspace (not going to link to them, either), fox news (ditto) and several other large media outlets. however, apparently microsoft and murdoch have been dealing recently with the idea of paying web sites to remove themselves from google indexes…
what?!?
now google isn’t much better than microsoft, and google has it’s fingers in a lot of peoples’ pies, frequently without those people having the first clue that they’re feeding information to the CIA’s data mining team, but paying people not to be in google indexes is the first step towards requiring people to pay for material that would ordinarily be available for free on the internet.
my understanding is that the internet is supposed to make information freely available to those that would otherwise not have access to it because of cost. what they’re proposing is not only not in the public interest, but it is in the specific interests of murdoch and, to a lesser extent, microsoft.
therefore, i have taken it upon myself to block bing from indexing my sites. i have done this by adding the following to my robots.txt file.
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /
i have also heard that running iptables -A INPUT -s 65.55.0.0/16 -j DROP makes it so that any incoming request from bing will automatically be dropped before it even gets to robots.txt, but i don’t currently have access to iptables on my server.
and i’m not the only one. there is a growing movement to block bing – some have even suggested registering blockbing.org so there would be a convenient place to post and update information that would be available to everyone. i may do it…
the end(?) of a holiday weekend
i just got done dropping my mother in law off at the train station for her trip back to portland. she got here on thursday and it’s been a little tough to handle her actually staying at our house for longer than a few hours, because she’s… well… my mother in law. it’s a lot better than having my parents stay at our house, in fact i would probably draw the line well before my parents actually were able to come to our house, but at the same time, i had to be really discrete about, for example, smoking pot in the privacy of my own house for fear of “offending” her – despite the fact that she used to smoke pot herself (as claimed by moe). it’s okay, though, because i get the very strong impression that if it weren’t for the sake of “keeping up appearances” there is a very strong probability that i would be getting my mother in law stoned – which, itself, is something that i am almost tempted to try (just once) to see what it is like.
another thing that i found really bizarre is that, once moe had gone to bed last night, my mother in law pigeon-holed me and forced me to talk about “spiritual” things for a couple of hours last night. usually this wouldn’t be a problem for me, but i had to choose some of my words a little more carefully than i would otherwise have had to, because i didn’t want to say anything that would either be misinterpreted – which, with her, is fairly likely under the best of circumstances – or offensive to her, which i probably wouldn’t hear about directly from her, but indirectly through moe, at a later time, when the offense had had the chance to sink in and become a lot more permanent than it would be if she just spoke up about it at the time. i ended up making reference to The Looby from The Book of Lies, and 777, neither of which i could find (although they were right in front of my nose all the time, which is probably a message of some sort) to a person who believes in a weird combination of catholicism, “spirits and angels” and “native american stuff”, without mentioning that the author of said books was pretty much the exact antithesis of the beliefs she holds. basically i tried to keep it as “light” as possible, but even then it was really difficult not to laugh when she told me about the “psychic” she knows, who has apparently been engaged by the local police department, or the other person she knows who teaches “crystal gazing” and how she has taken her class and has a couple of “crystal balls”. i know that truth is relative, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and that anything is possible, but at the same time, the idea of my mother-in-law getting spiritual inspiration from gazing at a crystal ball is sort of amusing.
in the midst of entertaining my mother in law (which was actually moe’s responsibility most of the time) i created www dot twankey dot com – laundry online – for the widow twankey (email address widow@twankey.com), as a part of Alad’din and The Magic Lamp show coming up in a couple of weeks, and Fremont Players dot com which is currently a mirror of twankey dot com, but will eventually be an easier-to-remember and more colourful version of this page. it was actually kind of interesting to actually buy the new domain – which had never existed before – and then create web space for it, design a new page, post it and have the page show up at the new domain which had never been there before. it’s something, i suppose, that people have been doing to the web for a while, but it’s something new and different for me, and it was really interesting to actually do the whole process and watch the non-domain name suddenly and magically turn into an actual, real-live domain.
Windoesn’t 7
so there’s a new commercial on TV, just in time for xmas, advertising the new HP laptop/netbook/desktop combination with Windows 7, which is “networked together by GeekSquad™”…
i have three computers, two laptops and a desktop, and all three of them are networked together, and we didn’t have anything like geek squad. in fact, they didn’t require any networking at all, we just started them up and they worked; two different operating systems – Mac and Kubuntu – the way that computers are supposed to work.
it’s my considered impression is that the only reason you would need GeekSquad™ is if you use Windoesn’t, and if you use Windoesn’t, ultimately, no GeekSquad™ in the world will be able to help you.
THEY are terrorists! 8D
Obama’s Hate Crime Laws are ‘Hate Christian’ Laws – if you want to look at it that way, that’s fine with me, but if you are saying that crimes carried out because of homophobia are “christian”, then i have two things to say: 1) your perception of what Christ says about love is perverted, and 2) stay away from me. i may not be homosexual, but i can guarantee you that i am your worst nightmare and i won’t wait until you’re asleep before i will make your life a living hell simply by existing! 😐
wait… what?
Congress passes ‘Pedophile Protection Act’ – umm.. no. this is wrong. being a homosexual is not the same as being a pedophile. not only that, but the law will not get in the way of free speech, regardless of how hateful or divisive, and illegal behaviour will still be treated as illegal behaviour, but now “we, the people” will be afforded slightly more equal protection than before.
and not only that, but i seriously question america’s “judeo-christian” heritage. my understanding is that “we the people” was specifically meant to include those for whom the “judeo-christian” part doesn’t apply.
the fact that people think this way disgusts me. this is one of the main reasons i believe that i am an alien, because this way of thinking is totally the opposite of the way i think by nature.
oy…
so i have this problem: a customer makes an order from my web site. he puts products in his shopping cart and clicks checkout. he is taken to a page where he puts in his name and address, and chooses a shipping method, and clicks confirm. he is then taken to a secure paypal page, which allegedly confirms his order, and points him in the right direction for payment.
i say allegedly, because the past couple of orders i have received have had the right amount for the product that was ordered, but have had no shipping information… which means that i have had to write to my customers and convince them to send me more money before i send their order out… which is awkward, to say the least.
as far as i’ve been able to tell, after having read the oscommerce forums for a few months, i’ve got everything set up the way it’s supposed to be on my end, which makes me suspect that it’s a problem on paypal’s end. this suspicion has been strengthened by the fact that i’ve had no less than two different paypal tech support geeks confirm that they’ve been having a problem with shipping to oscommerce sites. their immediate solution is to change the way it’s integrated, which, in my case, requires a scrapping of my entire product line and starting again from scratch. obviously not an option in my case.
however, i just got off the phone with a paypal tech support geek who basically said ‘yeah, it’s our fault, but we’re not going to do anything about it, so you should really talk your oscommerce friends into changing their software to match what we’re doing now.”
<head desk><head desk><head desk><head desk><head desk><head desk><head desk>
ooh… sneaky!
i finally got access to cshelpdesk.net (at 4:30 pm zac wrote to inform me that “Your IP was blocked by the servers firewall. This has been unblocked and you can now access the server again” – after the last time, when nathan assured me that “this happens on rare occasions”), but my roster of support tickets is mysteriously missing… there are two “presales questions” that i posted before i signed up, but 5 or 6 tickets titled “my domains are missing” are nowhere to be seen, as are the tickets titled “network timeout” and “where are my domains” and several others like that…
verrrrrrry interesting…
or very geek-like on my part… the email address i logged in with is different than the one i logged all of my support tickets with… no wonder i couldn’t find them… 😐
so…
there has been a lot of kerfuffle recently about two things that aren’t necessarily related in the obvious sense, but basically come down to the same thing, when you think about it. the first is universal health care or the lack thereof, and the other one is gay marriage.
the declaration of independance says that all <citizens of the united states> men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
i’ve always wondered about the part that says “among these…” because usually people say that it doesn’t guarantee you anything other than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but that’s beside the point.
the first right mentioned is “life”, but what does that mean, really? if you’re alive, you don’t have any choice in the matter, but technically, anyway, if you try to kill yourself you can be arrested for the crime of attempted suicide, so it’s obvious that the government has an interest in keeping those people who are currently alive in a living state. but if you’re sick, that’s when the kerfuffle starts. these days, if you’re one of those many americans who don’t have health insurance, there’s the very strong possibility that you will die, and there’s nothing that the government will do to stop it. on the other hand, if you are taken to a hospital with a life-threatening illness, the probability that you’ll get emergency treatment is very high, even if you’re not a citizen.
i see a dichotomy here: the republicretins are all up in arms because obama’s public health care plan would potentially provide medical treatment for illegal aliens, and potentially determine when a critically ill patient is no longer eligible for treatment.
but currently, if a critically ill patient is taken to a hospital, they’ll get treatment whether they are a citizen or not. if one of the rights guaranteed by the declaration of independance is a right to life, then what would the government gain by having “death panels” to determine when a certain patient is no longer eligible for health care?
but the republicretins rail on as if it were the end of the world when obama suggests that providing health care for everyone is something that should be seriously considered. crazy people… malfunctioning people… 8/
and the gay marriage thing… fine. if you don’t like homosexuals getting married, then don’t marry a homosexual. by all means, don’t deny that they exist, or are immoral (that’s where “liberty” comes in to play). don’t equate them with pedophiles or other “deviants” – what does that word, “deviant” mean anyway? is the republican assemblyman from california, who is married with two children, and who was an outspoken supporter for proposition 8, but recently revealed to the world over a microphone that he didn’t know was turned on, that he was having an extramarital affair (in rather graphic terms) more or less a “deviant” than the gay couple down the street who have been together for 25 years, are good neighbours and keep to themselves? by the way, the republican assemblyman, mike duvall, has since resigned, but he is steadfastly refusing to admit that he was carrying on an extramarital affair… my guess is that he will admit it sooner or later, but claim the forgiveness of jeezis for his transgression.
it would seem to me that the declaration guarantees the right of any citizen to do whatever the hell he damn well pleases as long as it doesn’t kill someone or cause a riot. the declaration of independance guarantees the right for homosexuals to get married, regardless of what the neighbours might think. as long as they’re – what’s the right term? “monogamous” isn’t right for gay males… “monoandrous”? – faithful to each other and don’t go out and rape people, whatever it’s called, they have as much right to get married as a man and a woman.
it’s not a matter of “redefining” marriage, because, ultimately, marriage is a religious insitution before anything else, and, as we all know, mixing religion and matters of state is strictly prohibited by the same constitution that defines our rights. but if two gay people want to make a commitment to each other, there are certain rights that marriage provides, which are denied to people who are not married, which is not fair to gay people, who currently are prohibited from getting married. there has to be a way to provide those rights to all people, regardless of their sexuality.
much as i hate to use this phrase, i wish that the republicretins would simply get over it, because we are going to have public health care, and we are going to allow gay marriage…
or there will be riots…
which are what the constitution does not protect.
sigh…
my recent conversation with zac o. at cshelpdesk.net went something like this:
me: my account has been hacked
zac: it’s your fault
me: no, it’s not, see? evidence…
zac: you don’t understand. it’s still your fault
me: yes i do, and no, it’s not. see? more, different evidence…
zac: <IP block my access> (that’ll shut him up)
yeah, it will shut me up temporarily (my most recent communication with zac was yesterday at 2:00 pm, my most recent communication with nathan was at 9:57 am this morning, and now, at 3:00 pm, i still can’t access cshelpdesk.net), but in the long run, you’re going to be the one that suffers because of your interaction with me.
at least they’re not demanding more money from me… 8/
aargh…
that’s <A2RGH> for you purists out there…
but yes, aargh. i discovered that my entire site had the .php files appended with the code i discovered the other day, not just my wordpress installation.
furthermore, although tech support has no evidence of a hack and says it was that way when i uploaded it, i checked my backup from last month and there were no modifications to any of the files a month ago.
aargh… 8/
[EDIT] after having been confronted with evidence (the backup that wasn’t modified) they claim to have found evidence of an account breach on 23 august, and recommended that i change my password… duh… 8/
[FURTHER EDIT] it turns out that the “evidence” was a known (to me) IP address, logging in to check their mail. however, i did find another IP address from renton logged in as root on the 20th and 21st of august, and when i suggested that someone had the root password, suddenly all the servers wend down and just recently came back up… all of them except the tech support site… very interesting…
so…
i actually was IP blocked from cshelpdesk dot net!
in spite of the fact that [email protected] (who is undoubtedly nathan oulman, or one of his minions) said “we dont block anyone from anything” (his exact words), according to tech support goon “Zac O.”, “Your IP was blocked by the servers firewall. This has been unblocked and you can now access the server again.” apparently their server is set to block the IP address of a customer attempting to log in “incorrectly” (whatever that means, nobody has told me yet). it’s very definitely not an using an incorrect username or password, because i allow the browser to remember all of that stuff because i know how clumsy my fingers are, but nobody has seen fit to tell me what it is, other than “incorrect login attempts”.
not only that, but i’ve had to reprimand the tech support goon no less than three times this morning, for closing my issue without answering my question. the little weasel is not going to get out of this without giving me some answers. 8/
at this point, it’s not anywhere near as bad as it was yesterday, but still, i’m thinking very strongly about switching host providers again when my contract expires.