Diary of a Wolfeman

Well, SpamAssassin seems to have it’s sights set fairly well right out of the gate, but I have had to teach it a few things. Me being lazy, I developed the following script to automate the process of telling SA to read each of my three inboxes and the Spam folder to catalog the collection.
——————————————————————————————
#!/bin/bash

exit
———————————————————————————————-

To use the script, save it to your home directory as spammy.sh. You will then need to set it as an executable file with this command:chmod 777 spammy.sh, and call it using ./spammy.sh in a terminal window.

I really love it when I get a chance to do a script, since it’s very close to the programming I learned waaaaay back in high school (DOS-based stuff and Pascal). Unfortunately, I don’t do many repetitive tasks that would benefit from being scripted.

Of course, if I did, I’d end up going whole hog and becomming a programmer again. I don’t need that kind of workaholicism :)

You’ve heard me bitch recently about the sudden increase in 419 scam emails I have been receiving, and I finally got tired of deleting them by hand. Definitely time to give a spamkiller of some sort a try.

30 seconds of Googling later for “kmail+spam” gives me the idea that the best method for stemming the tide would be to install SpamAssassin (SA). Since I’m running a version of apt-get designed to work with SuSE, this was simply running Synaptic package manager and clicking a box.

The question then was, how do I get this thing working?

Read on to find out. Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight we had an orientation pot-luck dinner down at Peninsula Park for my daughter’s new school. Having given up completely on the regular public schools’ ability to teach anyone anything, we have enrolled the Pookster at Trillium, a magnate school here in Portland that takes education more seriously. The school is smaller, so each child gets more personal attention from the teachers, allowing them to actually learn something.

The other parents there fit a fairly narrow typeset, in that they are almost 100% Urban Yippies – Yuppies who are trying to be hip, cool, with-it or whatever they call it these days. The kind of people who really want to be like the cool kids in Hawthorne, but can’t give up the Volvo. They don’t eat American food (everyone knows all the good food came from somewhere else), and most of them ascribe to one form or another of herbivorism.

Which means, of course, that there wasn’t a shred of red meat within a three-block radius. Hell, the only meat-like substance I could recognize was a tuna casserole. And just what exactly is in ‘vegan wheat-free pumpkin bread’? I so wish I had had the cash, I would have run down to 7-11 and cleaned out the hot-dog stand just to watch ’em twitch.

Urban Yippie: Those are tofu dogs, right?
Me: Help yourself!
UY: Wait, this doesn’t taste like tofu…is that meat? Oh My God! I have eaten a poor cow!! Aaauuugghh! the horror!
Me: Muahahahaaa!

I understand idealistic people, but don’t have much in common with them, and it’s amazing how differently we see things. Case in point: when it came time for everyone to sort themselves out by grade level (and we’re talking about the parents here), instead of just pointing off to one side and saying “K through 2nd grade please gather over here”, they told us all to make a siren noise, while the 3rd-5ths were to make an “ahem” noise and so forth, and we were supposed to sort out the din and gather by sound.

Yep. Idiocy at it’s finest.

Warning signs that you are dealing with an Urban Yippie:

The man you are talking to is…
Carrying the youngest child of the brood in a front-mounted sling-type whatsihoosits,
Goes on about this great quiche he made the other morning, smiling in that “I’m whipped and I love it!” way,
Is not wearing a beard, but still hasn’t shaved in at least 4 days.

The woman you are talking to…
Has either rimless or black-framed glasses,
Is wearing baggy clothes that look like they may have come from the Gap or L.L. Bean,
Isn’t wearing a bra.

Toss into this mess myself, the EMC and her husband TS. The EMC fits in, as long as you don’t look too closely at her piercings and tats – she wishes they had a Volvo. TS, however, is a tech support geek and a solid introvert. Then there’s me – the guy who’s looking around for a proper branch to use to spit one of these idiots and toss ’em onto a fire.

Hey – the herbivores eat the vegetables and then the carnivores eat the herbivores. It’s the Circle of Life. Deal.

While walking out to the cars to get Pook’s backpack, TS says to me “whenever we come to these things, I always want to put ‘Hi! I’m TS. I’m a Xenophobe.’ on my nametag. Then when they say ‘what’s a xenophobe?’ I can say ‘it means I want to fucking kill you’ and smile at them in that really-I-was-joking…-or-was-I? kind of way.”

Thank DoC the EMC is the one who has to deal with them the most.

11:30pm, and weather.com says it’s 66F outside. Utter bullshit, I assure you. Well, maybe not bullshit, but the fact that the air is absolutely still means that the warmer air in my house (and it gets warmer by the minute) isn’t moving. At. All.

Who in the bloody blue blazes builds a house so weathertight that they fail to include an exhaust system to remove waste heat?

Yet again, another case of “If they had asked ME first…” It was so hot in my house it woke me up at 4am sweating. It’s almost enough to make a ‘Wolfe shave his head.

Then again, it could just be worse for me considering I spent the larger part of the day tucked into an air-conditioned server closet at precisely 67F. That was nice. The fact that I once again got nothing accomplished was not so nice. It seems the antivirus server has become borked, so it came out to go back to the shop for rebuild – along with the two other “spare” machines I will use to Frankenputer something worthwhile out of.

Really, it is necessary. When it takes a full five minutes to reboot a server, things are screwed. Considering that the server in question is a former domain controller that got demoted to simple antivirus chores, this should allow for some streamlining. Too bad we already bought a Windows-based AV suite – it seems like a perfect time to overhaul them into a Linux solution like Clam or Astaro.

The past two days at work have almost been enough to make me want to quit my job and go back to cutting firewood or pumping gas for a living.

Monday: had to call my 9am in-shop appt to remind him about it. He came in at 9:45 for help getting his wifi card to work – just as our wifi test routers dies. No problem, I’ll ad-hoc with my laptop…(quick flash of BSOD, then spontaneous reboot) What do you mean NO OS FOUND?!?

Later that morning, drive out to cool oldster’s house to tell him his computer (that we built two years ago) needs at the least a nuke-n-pave and maybe a power supply. Wait, what’s this “adblaster” program? It lets you send thousands of emails at once? You’re a SPAMMER?!? AAAUUUUGGGHHHH!!!!

Then I find out a solution I proposed and partially implemented for a new customer isn’t going to cut it – 10 minutes before I was to go finish it up.

Tuesday: Spent 3 hours hammering at a laptop that I later find out may or may not have a networking problem – first, we have to see if the Sonicwall’s stupid 5-user license (on a biz-class firewall? WTF?) may be watching MAC addys and killing me.

Spend the rest of the day at aforementioned Monday site bashing away at a Linksys WRV54G router and VPN connection. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. At least, not until there is more than two positive user reviews on the entire Internet. Great product in theory from one of the top manufacturers – who completely dropped the frelling ball when they built this stylish piece of shit. Spend the money on a more reputable router and hire a specialist to install it.

You have no idea how much that last part hurts me to say. The Great and Powerful Techie From Hell says to get a specialist. Ugh.

It should be illegal to drive a musclecar at anything less than 105% of the posted speed limit in the fast lane. Yes, I am speaking directly to the nitwit in the Mustang 5.0 headed South on I5 Saturday afternoon. (50 in a 65 zone. In a 5-0. What a maroon.)

When you are driving in the right-hand lane (AKA the merge lane), do not speed up in your stupidly oversize truck so that some poor bastard like me can’t get in front of you, when there is plently of room for me to do so. Especially when you have room to change lanes, you fucktard. Will it really slow you down all that much to let me in?

This is why I don’t own a firearm, people: I live in a target-rich environment.

In an attempt to scout things out before installing a new ceiling fan the EMC gave me for my bedroom, I tripped both of the breakers labled ‘lights’ in my switchbox: the only thing that turned off was the alarm system. Then of course there’s the fact that there are two light fixtures in my room running off of the same switch, so I’ll need to re-route some of the wiring to do it right. I just love electricians.

A note to HR recruiters: do not personally correspond with people you do not intend to call up for an interview. Hullo, tact?

I am even better at interpretting Microsoft verbage than I thought I was. I took the extended job-placement test at a recruiter’s the other day, and one of the tests was on MS Server 2003, an area I have very little training in. The test seemed to be simply phrases extracted from the manual re-phrased as questions, and I was able to correctly guess the answer far more often than I thought I would. Often enough, in fact, to score 10% higher than a large portion of other test-takers.

The other test they had me take was on MS Office support, and the only place I did badly was on the Access portion – a product that Microsoft has yet to realize that nobody uses. (Anyone wanting an actual database uses SQL or D-Base.) I nearly aced the rest of the test. I really need to take some certification tests so people will listen when I say I’m the Techie From Hell.

Graumagus at Frizzen Sparks brought to my attention that the town of New London, who petitioned to use the Eminent Domain laws to oust a large number of people from their homes so that Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, could build a conference center and hotel, has not only won their case in SCOTUS, they have decided to charge the ousted for back rent for the time they continued to live in their homes while the case was being decided.

Read the full article here.

I am at a loss for words, so I will just quote Grau and ask all of my fellows to permanently boycott the Pfizer company and all of their products. See the entire list in the extended entry.

Should you wish to write a letter to Pfizer yourself, here is their contact information:

Pfizer Inc
235 East 42nd Street
New York, NY 10017
USA
1-212-733-2323

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe the folks from the last post should be reading this…

Unshelved

Read the full story here.

Florida Librarian Suspended over Porn Incident
The director of the Valparaiso (Fla.) Community Library was suspended without pay in early August after city officials found that a registered sex offender had used library computers to access pornographic websites.

This pisses me off on so many levels I can’t believe it. Aauugghh!!

1.) It is unbelievable that a county library system would be asked to censor patron’s use of the facilities. Maybe Oregon libraries are just liberal about these things, but the libraries here do not censor anything, whether it be print, audio or video. They even carry a selection of erotic magazines, such as Playboy. You have to prove you’re over 18 to check one out, but they are there. Oregonian kids can at least go to the library to learn about sex when their parents won’t talk to them. A library should be a repository for all data, not just what some jerk in office deems appropriate. It is the parent’s job to monitor what their children see and hear, not the government’s. Get your head out of your ass and stop trying to nanny the nation.

2.) It pisses me off that an elected official is so amazingly ignorant about the realities of the Internet that they belive it is possible to completely filter out pornography from the terminals in the library. This is IMPOSSIBLE. Period. Sure, you can filter out the lion’s share of it, but we’re talking about a world-wide system with very little supervision. I simply cannot tolerate that kind of ignorance in an elected official of any stripe – whoever was involved in passing that particular policy needs to be whipped.

3.) The article mentions that the patron was a registered sex offender. I don’t recall being asked about my criminal history when I signed up for a library card, so just how the fuck were the librarians supposed to know? Do you want them to memorize the names and faces of all sex offenders so they can keep them away form the porn? And why the hell is he a registered sex offender and not a lifer in the first place – who let this asshat out of jail?

Just too pissed to write more.

I have been sitting here reading the news releases regarding the Shuttle program and the changes you have planned for our Space Program, and I just have to ask: were you not paying attention?

Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites were able to produce, launch and successfully recover a vehicle to LEO for a very mere fraction of the cost of a traditional Shuttle flight last October, and here you are going back to the Apollo configuration of a capsule at the tip of a rocket. What gives?

SpaceShipOne would require merely some scaling-up to handle the Shuttle’s current role, and in fact Scaled Composites has plans already laid for such a vehicle designed to be able to dock with the ISS. Why are you not bringing them into this project?

Currently, the Shuttle is utilised for launching payloads into space, personnel transfers to the ISS, and a microgravity test lab. In my opinion, we should leave the heavy lifting to unmanned rockets for larger satellites – a proven technology. The ISS was designed to take over the Shuttle’s microgravity labs, and we should allow it to do so.

Scaled Composites’ Tier Two program, however, is specifically designed to handle the personnel transfer duties to the ISS and should be used – the cost savings over the current Shuttle program would be significant, allowing us to do more for our NASA tax dollars.

Wake up, people.