Friday: Forgot what we did, probably had take out for dinner or something.

Saturday: Up to my mothers to help her with her PC and deliver a new printer. It is a Brother fax/copy/print/scan thing (color and all) and I’m tempted to get another for myself ($99 refurbished). Mom seems to be doing fine. Driving home from 10:30 to 1:30 sucks since I was totally afraid I would fall asleep at the wheel… I stopped once for food and again for coffee.

Sunday: Laundry and a bit of dishes. Chevy’s take out. Not much else.

Monday: Work trip to Sac.

World according to Verisign (thanks to bryant for the idea)

Thanks to Sitefinder the following people found their way to my server who otherwise would not have.

from www.14159754614.com to 14159.com
from search:”sex cartoos” to b5mush.nekodojo.org/events.txt
from www.thesoundlord.com to soundlord.com
from soundlworld.com to soundlord.com
from www.throghdreams.com to throg.com

I’m thinking this is a *really* helpful service. Completely worth all the hassle to admins and computer professionals world-wide. Or else I’m not thinking that… one or the other.

Having meetings to talk about best practices is actually quite fun. It would be more fun if Sacramento were not 2 hours away.

That is all.

I was not supposed to be on call this week, but the guy who is on call has an unreliable phone, so it’s the next best thing. But at least I don’t get paid. </cynical> There was index-push related foo so roughly half of that I wouldn’t have gotten out of anyway, but, well.

However, despite a few rollover calls, I am feeling quite good about my job right now. I am like a lighthouse on the Sea of Uncertain Merger. Well, maybe not a lighthouse, but at least I am keeping myself focused.

Anyway, there were exercise bike workouts both Saturday and Sunday. Sunday on leaving for the North Bay we found out our storage locker was broken into, and my bike had been stolen. Crap. I don’t expect I will see it back, but I am tempted to report it anyway so that the police can come take my statement (and there is a witness that saw kids going into the storage who would probably love to talk to the police about it.)

We got to see C on Saturday. I am happy about that.

This Wired article says that BIND (named) software should have a patch available quite soon to make it ignore Verisign’s *.com and *.net “typo redirect” DNS entries.

ObPersonal: The article quotes Paul Vixie who I used to work with briefly at DEC. He is good people. Go Paul! Go ISC!

I just sent this to ICANN-

To: comments@icann.org
Subject: Complaint: Verisign wildcards

Verisign’s recent addition of wildcards in the com and net TLD’s:
* is a blatant abuse of their “custodianship” of these domains
* will cause numerous headaches and lost productivity for network admins
* will also cause a *huge* amount of spam to flow unhindered, which would otherwise be stopped as an obvious fake domain

They claim this is intended to “help users” — but it is clear that their motives are selfish and commercial. *.com is intended to cause advertising dollars to flow to Verisign and to cause Verisign to have an unfair advantage in securing new .com registrations.

Verisign abuses their stewardship of this domain at MY expense — as a network administrator, I am the one who has to explain to users why a huge amount of spam that was being blocked now cannot be.

ICANN, it is up to you to answer their abuse, which they have thinly-veiled as “best practices” with some REAL best practices and requirements, or else give the .com and .net contract to someone a bit more responsible.

Thanks for your time.

Saturday: Went to Fry’s and got a printer for my mom. I also got a scsi card so I could hook up the old tape drive, and a mini sheet scanner. The first one had no instructions or software disk so I had to go back. The second one didn’t seem to work (got huge black lines all through) but after rerunning the calibrate option it seemed to work OK. Had Chevy’s mexican food for dinner.

Sunday: Domestic stuff day! Vacuumed the house while M swept. The vacuum stopped twice, probably from overheating, which might be because I wasn’t stopping to empty the cannister as much as I should have. I also did laundry.

While not being domestic, I scanned copies of about a hundred pages of bills, statements, various important papers, etc. I think this should cut down on the amount of filing I need to do, which is good because I have like 6 mo worth of bills I haven’t filed.

cos reports that Howard Dean will be in the Boston area Tuesday and Wednesday… FYI

How well do you know me? It’s possible that some of you know me better than I know myself.

I have made a list of the 3-4 principles or ideas that I am most passionate about. See if your impression of me matches my idea of myself. Poll attached

Chapter 23 of Managing Your Manager (by Greg Connor)
(posted as a comment elsewhere but I wanted to save it here too) Continue reading →