While I am greatly appreciative of my supposed securty as an American citizen, I have to acknowledge obvious fault with a certain government organization.
As most everyone is aware, there were some "terrorists" who attempted to smuggle bomb-making materials aboard a UK to US flight. Their attempt was to blow up the planes mid-air. I have to say, though, that even that story is very weak.
It goes on, though. Also issued today was a report from the DHS that there's some critical flaw in Windows that could allow a remote attacker to take control of your computer, execute programs, delete files, gain personal information, and kill your best friend's dog. They advised that this certain flaw be patched right away.
Now, step back and think from a logical perspective for a minute. Let's start with the airplane thing:
If those terrorists were to detonate their bombs mid-flight, what impact would it have on the USA as a whole? Sure, there would be a lot of lost lives and a few airplanes, but the impact on the country as a whole would would be minimal. Granted, they could have done the same thing as they did on September 11th of 2001 and turn the airplaned into ballistic missiles, but they don't need explosives to achieve that.
And what about that security patch? In light of the news this morning, what do you think the general public's reaction will be to a DHS posting of a security flaw in Windows? Sorry, but these flaws are discovered nearly every day, and if a government operation is ordering me to install a specific patch, I think I'll pass.
I could continue this rant for hours, but I think I've established the points rather clearly.
I made it most of the way through the day today without any problem from the rain and such. As the day was winding down, though, I started having problems with performing normal actions with my hands, and now my back is really starting to hurt.
I'm typing with just my middle fingers and thumbs right now because I'm hurting so bad.
So I just got this e-mail from some random individual that I have never met before. It's actually a very worthwhile read, especially if you're any sort of a systems administrator working with DNS entries:
Please note that the following text will not be formatted properly. It's still readable though.
I run DNS servers for a living. I do a lot of DNS research, too. A dig of your domain's NS records is below. See that NS record pointing to 127.0.0.1 ? NS records can only point to host NAMEs not IP addresses. Your NS records essentially tell a name server who is querying for your domain this sort of dialog, "For future look ups for the skudd.com domain, please contact the servers named, "ns1.craftstream.com" and "ns2.craftstream.com", in addition, please contact the server whose host is NAMED "127.0.0.1"". That record is not supposed to be there. People who are using a particular type of name server could have a hard time reaching your domain. Also, you should consider reading RFC 1912. -- the part about having all your name servers in one network block. Since I'm a DNS researcher, and I track down weird DNS stuff, I would like to know if you had a resource that told you to put that 127.0.0.1 record in there, or if you came up with it on your own. If you got it from a resource, could you please share it with me, so I could correct them, too? [pbarber@smap ~]$ dig skudd.com ns @209.51.159.66 ; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> skudd.com ns @209.51.159.66 ; (1 server found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 455 ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 2 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;skudd.com. IN NS ;; ANSWER SECTION: skudd.com. 14400 IN NS 127.0.0.1. skudd.com. 14400 IN NS ns1.craftstream.com. skudd.com. 14400 IN NS ns2.craftstream.com. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns1.craftstream.com. 14400 IN A 209.51.159.66 ns2.craftstream.com. 14400 IN A 209.51.159.67 ;; Query time: 40 msec ;; SERVER: 209.51.159.66#53(209.51.159.66) ;; WHEN: Tue Aug 8 14:33:48 2006 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 130
So, I sent the person a response:
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. My primary concern is who you are in the scheme of things. Not that I find it offensive that you contacted me about this, but that I am simply curious as to who you are. Thanks again.
And I got the following response:
I'm surprised you haven't googled me yet. I had just finished educating somebody as to why nslookup must never be used under any circumstances. On a whim, I googled for "nslookup must die" and google directed me to your site when you were blogging about your DNS problems. Apparently, "Emo must die" and your nslookup from your DNS problems was good enough for google. I do DNS professionally, (for the last 10 years or so) I saw your posting including your NS set, and you included one of my pet peeves, the 127.0.0.1 in the NS records set. I guess if a carpenter saw a piece of wood only glued in place with Elmer's glue and not nailed in place would feel the same way.
If anyone is wondering why the localhost entry was there in the first place, I can't answer it. I have no idea where it came from, but I've asked Jason (my hosting provider) to revert the DNS zone to what cPanel and WHM are expecting, then setup the CNAME records for the Wildebeest and my home server. While he works on that, various sites based on the skudd.com DNS zone may be inaccessible for a little while.
But back to the topic: "nslookup" is a piece of crap. It doesn't provide any worthwhile information, whereas "dig" will. Anyone still using nslookup should cease using it and replace it with dig.
That is all.
My day off has officially begun! Time for bed!
Hours I typically work in a week: 46 Hours I worked this week: 66.5 Hours I worked in the last 2 days: 23 Hours I work before I get a day off: 11ish How long before I will see he pay for the overtime this week: 2 weeks Hours before I go to bed: 0.01
I just got home about an hour ago from work. I went in to work yesterday at 7:45AM.
Saturday morning, I was out getting breakfast for the guys at the shop. While I was gone, Boss Lady was talking to them on MSN (we use it between the shops and the office). She was talking to the guys about how she was quite happy that we were all to the shop on time, and that I was to do a cash disbursement for $20 and split it between the 4 of us. They told her that I was out getting doughnuts, and she said that I was to add $20 to the receipt and do a cash disbursement for the total amount.
When I got back to the shop, I told her that I was buying breakfast. We argued a little about it, but finally she just gave up and let me buy. So I ended up doing the $20 disbursement and everyone was happy.
She then went on to tell me that they were thinking about taking everyone to Indiana Beach, and asked when I thought would be good. As the morning went on, she called me to tell me that we were to put up "CLOSED JULY 26TH" on the reader board, and that we would all be going then.
Monday, she faxed a memo to the shop for everyone to read. In a nutshell, it said that we would be going to Indiana Beach at their expense, they would take us to the fancy restaurant there, and that they would pay us for 6 hours of work.
If I were to have to define the word "fun", I think I would be unable to. The old addage, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," seems to be holding true. When friends want me to go do something, I usually pass because I'm so unmotived to do anything, or because I'm so worn out from working that I have no physical energy to do even the simplest things, or it could be that I just keep stacking the work up, thus making no room for "free time" for myself.
Well, as a result of my lack of a social life, I've resorted to video games for fun. I am now to a point, about a year in the making, where I can no longer have fun with video games. What opened my eyes to this was something that happened this weekend...
I downloaded "Battlefield 2" from an illegitimate source last week, and last Friday I decided I wanted to play it. I was astounded by the quality of gameplay, just after 1 round, so I went out and bought the game. After I got home and got it installed, I decided I wanted to play the main part of the game, which is done online with other people.
Anyone who has played a "First Person Shooter" on the internet knows what happened to me. I logged in, selected my spawn point, spawned, and almost immediately died. "It's just a glitch," I said to myself: BAM! Dead! "...okay... Maybe I'll try a different spawn point... Yay! I can m...BAM! DEAD!"
I tried about 10 different servers and realized it was just my lack of skill. So what did I do? I played singleplayer mode...or at least tried to. I was able to win the rounds I played in singleplayer mode, and finish with the gold medal, but I knew I wasn't that good. I tried a different map, and found that the AI in this second installment of the Battlefield series is just as dumb as the first. My ENTIRE TEAM, consisting of about 15 bots, captured a post and camped there. Even taking over the commander's role, I was unable to get them to move. Heck, I even tried killing my own team members, and they would respawn and camp this one post.
Needless to say, I got very frustrated with the game. I realized that I wasted $50 on the stupid thing, and I don't even want it now. This happened once before with a game called "Guild Wars". I now have over $100 worth of games that I have put, overall, less than an hour into, and that I will never play again.
Most everyone that reads this is aware that I play another game called World of Warcraft. This game started out to be very enjoyable, and I have logged well over 100 hours of overall gameplay time. I'm on my second character that has exceeded the "Level 40" mark, and I've made a lot of friends. However, there's these two element to the game that have kept me from having fun with it any further. It's the highly skewed economy and the extremely unbalanced player-versus-player ability. The first point is pretty much self explanitory, but the second point is not.
In most PvP battles, opponents are matched in terms of skill, armor, and weapons, and battles are done in a controlled environment. Blizzard has handled this by grouping players in their "tens-group" (20-29, 30-39, etc.) in a zone known as a "Battleground". The flaw in their system lies in having a queue for battlegrounds -- The queue must reach a certain point before the battle begins.
Outside of the battlegrounds, Blizzard has created "contested" zones, where players of opposing faction may attack each other. This is known as "World PvP". The problem here is that there is no level-matching, so a highly skilled, well-equipped, heavily armored level 60 can attack a basic level 20, and kill them in one attempt. Further, there is no punishment for the 60 to repeatedly attack the 20, preventing them from even moving to a different area. The only lines of defense in this case are to resurrect at the "spirit healer", use your "hearthstone", or log out.
So let's add to this $100 stack a $50 game that I pay $10 per month to play. I've wasted a LOT of money here. And what for? It sure hasn't been fun.
I suppose I've spent a lot less money on these attempts at entertaining myself. But then again, I have absolutely nothing to show for it. I've made a couple of in-game friends, but that's where it stops. Had I spent the money on gas, food, etc., to go hang out with friends in the physical realm, I would have acquired more friends, and most probably had other doors open that otherwise would not.
I'm just completely lost here now. I need fun in my life, and I really doubt I'm going to find it in front of this pile of glass, metal, plastic, and silicone.
I decided that I would take today to run a full backup of my 3 hard drives and my 1 network share. I had imagined it to be a simple task, but I was grossly mistaken.
You might ask why I don't just use the Windows backup tool. First off, it's a piece of crap. Second, it's proprietary. Instead, I decided to give "Nero BackItUp" a shot. Well, unfortunately I found that it too is a piece of crap.
The software did what I needed, allowing me to select directories and files to backup, then creating a disk "set" and burning the set to the various DVD/CD-R/RW's I threw at it. A few minutes after the burning process started, it was ready for the next blank disk. Not even a minute after the second disk was inserted, I saw this. I thought maybe it was just an issue with the new DVD-RW's I gave it, so I erased the disks and started over. Again, same thing.
Frustrated, I decided to see what SourceForge had to offer. I searched for backup projects for the Win32 platform and with a keyword search of "DVD". A simple and what would appear to be common task, and there were no projects that matched it. Off to Linux...
I rebooted into Ubuntu "Breezy", and found nothing really that would do what I needed. So I decided to upgrade to "Dapper" via apt-get, hoping that with the new build there might be some new packages. Nope. All that I could find were the usual backup apps, such as AMANDA, which are far from what I would need.
So now, I'm back in Windows, getting ready to start up just plain ol' Nero and burn the files directly. It's going to suck trying to keep the disk sizes <= 4.7GB, but I really have no choice.
Edit: Did I forget to mention that I have approximately 70GB of data to archive?
I just watched a couple videos on YouTube that sucked 15 valuable minutes of my life away.
First, the video I watched was this dude talking about how he had to quit doing his YouTube video blog because he can't afford yogurt (I know I spelled that wrong). The second was a whiney chick responding to him, in tears because he was leaving.
WTF?!
I mean, don't get me wrong, but I would be a little emotional if I had to cut off the blog here, and I'm sure some of you would be as well, but this is just pitiful. The guy can't feed himself, but he's skipping work to play with YouTube. There's something wrong there. Then the fact that someone else is crying about... The crying people need to be yelling at this idiot, giving him the direction he needs to get his financial problems solved.
If I were to do some reply video to this guy leaving, here's what I would say.
Dude, I'm glad you're taking time off. The fact that you spent your time playing on the computer to make a couple people laugh, rather than earning a buck to support yourself, take care of yourself, and get out and socialize with other people makes me sad. You should have dealt with this sooner, before the "whole heap of financial issues" came about. Go, take care of your money problems. Have your internet shut down, pay your bills, and get some food.
Now, for a different rant: Emo needs to die. The "gothic" look being merged with the "my dad glared at me so I want to kill myself" genere must be eradicated!
There are bigger problems in the world. You spend your time crying because the color of your tofu packaging is that of a blood-red rose, and because it's made of recycled polystyrene rather than an organic and biodegradable substance. You listen to Blink 182. You think you're fat when you weigh 130lbs., soaking wet. You pierce yourself because you're a slave to society... Stop right there.
You live in a world where AIDS and Cancer rule. You put a ban on blender pitchers because some guy in a movie killed another guy with one, and you're afraid a terrorist is going to do the same. You think that guns kill people, when in fact people kill people (with other "weapons", including baseball bats, fists, cars, shoelaces, knives...)...
Get your priorities straight.
I'm not trying to say I know exactly what I'm doing, or that I live a perfect life. I'm far from that! I don't spend 5 hours each night compiling a video that depicts me crying because I got banned from a forum, or because I ran over a ladybug on my way home from a tree-hugging seminar.
I'm rambling, so I'll stop there. Just to summarize:
EMO MUST DIE!
That is all.
If you want to submit some ideas to help me out, feel free to do so. I prefer to see such examples in 800x600 format, but meh. Do what you want.
I spent a good portion of 4 hours this evening in a futile attempt to redesign the Stormchaser Technologies website.
My biggest issue is that I want to have a site that looks appealing to my (potential) customers, doesn't look like it was expensive, but also is functional.
I looked at some of the OSWD templates, which is where the current SCTech layout originated from, and nothing really fit what I'm looking for. I want something original, but it's extremely hard to do "original" while maintaining the "flare" that people notice.
My layouts have been under heavy attack by many critics for the last few years. The biggest complaint is that I don't stray from the grays. This is something I'm not gifted in. I've done a couple good looking layouts in various colors, but they have not been functional. (Example 1, 2 (former SCSoft layout)) Everything else I have done has been monochromatic.
I see sites like this, this, and these, and I feel like I'm about to go insane. These people take web design to a level beyond what I am even capable of. I mean, look at this site. It's clean, multi-colored, not gray, and functional. That's the kind of look I'm going for! What have I been able to accomplish? This ugly thing that I got pissed at and gave up on. Then there's this horrid abomination that started as an OSWD template and drew closer and closer to one of my dumbed-down 2 color, mainly gray layouts. I gave up after I saw how crappy the logo and everything turned out.
I'm starving for a new look, as are my customers. They see what I've done and think, "That's his site? That plain, sterile looking thing? Pfft. Moving on to the next freelancer..."
I've been losing business because of this problem, I know it. I have nothing to show in my portfolio besides the usual basic gray layouts. My own site is very "blah". What do I have to draw customers?
It has been suggested in the past that I work in conjunction with a graphic designer. You know what's bad about that? They want money. No offense to any of you graphics guys or gals, but you all think that if you fire up Photoshop or Illustrator, you should get $100 for it. Sorry, but I don't have that kind of money. Also, you all seem to think that the customer can wait until the very last minute of the project to see their site all themed up. Sorry, there's some of your features that have to be coded in.
This is ultimately a "Catch-22". If I refer any of my (prospective) customers to another individual for the layout work, chances are they will want to take my coding work away as well.
This crap is getting old. I'm not creative in the sense of visual or audible works. I'm creative in the technical sense. It's virtually impossible to sell a client on technical creativity unless they know what I'm talking about. Nobody would buy a rotted out Ford Escort with a nice suspension kit and a blown 5.0L under the hood.
Oh, and don't get me started on my business logo... That'd be enough to make me cry.
Stay tuned over the next few days for a rather decent change.
Be warned, Internet Explorer users, you'll see a rather nasty mess because you use an inferior web browser. Maybe you should upgrade your browser before hand.
.DAYS TWO THROUGH SEVEN... MONDAY THROUGH SATURDAY THE EXCESSIVE HEAT WARNING FOR CHICAGO AND COOK COUNTY ILLINOIS WILL REMAIN IN EFFECT THROUGH 7 PM MONDAY EVENING. TEMPERATURES WILL AGAIN REACH THE MIDDLE TO UPPER 90S MONDAY AFTERNOON...WHICH AGAIN... COMBINED WITH HIGH HUMIDITY LEVELS...WILL RESULT IN DANGEROUSLY HIGH HEAT INDEX VALUES OF 100 TO 105 DURING THE PEAK HEATING HOURS...FROM AROUND NOON THROUGH EARLY EVENING.
Thank you, NWS.
Things are going to be very uncomfortable at the shop these next few days, thanks to the heat and humidity. This last week it was very warm as well, and we felt every bit of it at the shop.
Hopefully we'll have a breeze to accompany these high temperatures.