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/.: ShaunC
Fark: Frigax
NANAS: Canned Ham
...cheers!
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My Comcast internet is actually working for a few moments, so I thought I'd provide an update on the prior post.
Last Wednesday, June 24th, I left work and found my way to Baptist Hospital due to severe problems breathing and swallowing, with light-headedness to the point where I had trouble getting out of my chair. 3 chest X-rays and one EKG later, the verdict was in: the lungs are spotless, but I have an enlarged heart. Yeah, the same thing that just killed Billy Mays.
The hypertension, which was first diagnosed in April, apparently was exacerbated by the pill-of-the-week treatment that a certain doctor's office was giving me. The peaks and valleys in blood pressure that resulted from switching between so many medications so quickly stressed my heart to the point where it weakened, and couldn't provide enough blood to the rest of my organs. When my lungs didn't get enough blood to breathe properly, there wasn't sufficient oxygen getting into my blood, resulting in a vicious cycle. It's no goddamned wonder I kept thinking I was going to pass out.
The good news is that I've had more tests in the past week than in the past ten years; I feel that I've been properly diagnosed, and properly medicated as well. I'm able to drive without trouble, and without having to pull into a gas station every 10 minutes to get up and walk around. And I've found a comfortable spot at work where - for the time being - I don't have any trouble with breathing, swallowing, or staying conscious.
I had an echocardiogram this morning, but I doubt I'll hear the results until I return to the internist next Wednesday. More as I understand it. For now: I'm alive, I'm better, and I value life more than ever before. |
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Something from work must be trying to kill me.
A couple of months ago, I determined that my blood pressure was out of control. 160/110, that's what I read on a Walgreens meter. I went to the doctor to be treated, and was put on Benicar 20mg. I stayed on Benicar 20mg for 5 weeks, at which point I returned to the doctor. She wasn't terribly happy with the results and decided to double the dose, putting me on Benicar 40mg. That brought my blood pressure down, but also caused me to have trouble breathing and swallowing.
I returned to the doctor's office with those symptoms, and was taken off Benicar in favor of Bystolic 10mg. Bystolic joined the party for several weeks, without consequence. I didn't have any adverse effects. It seemed like Bystolic was doing what it needed to do. However, when I returned to the doctor's office, they read me at 150/90. That's not quite where I've been seeing my BP, but it convinced my doctor that Bystolic wasn't doing enough for me. So I was removed from Bystolic and placed on Lisinopril.
On workdays, I continue to experience the shortness of breath, and skipping-a-beat of my heart, and damned near passing out. On weekends, while I'm taking the same pill, I don't have this experience. I worked my ass off on Saturday, cutting the grass, digging up a grass-covered spot around a tree, and planting Impatiens there. No trouble at all.
There's something I'm doing during my average workday that causes me to have unusual respiratory symptoms. I hope I'll figure it out before I totally pass out. |
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I just discovered that here in 2009, people are still requesting return receipts on email. They're probably even relying upon them to determine whether or not someone has viewed their missives. For some reason, this has totally blown my mind.
For at least ten years, I've been using an email client called Becky Mail. Only one other person I know has ever actually used Becky Mail, and he's the one who introduced me to it. I'd make a reasonable guess that five-nines worth of Americans who use email on a daily basis have never heard of Becky Mail. I've evangelized Becky Mail to friends and coworkers, but I doubt any of them ever followed up.
Yet Becky Mail is a full-featured email client that does everything I need: secure IMAP over SSL/TLS, threading, filtering, IMAP folder support that works hand-in-hand with procmail, etc. Plus it's written with security in mind. HTML doesn't render by default, images don't load by default, and when I click a link in an email, a warning dialog pops up to prevent accidental malware launches (these settings can be overridden by the eager and trojan-prone). As far as I'm concerned, this is the perfect email client for the tech-savvy user. It'll do plain old POP and SMTP if that's the only challenge you pose, but it'll handle paranoid geeks' security requirements with equal finesse and integration. Becky Mail, with its default settings, mostly eliminates email as an attack vector for your enterprise.
What prompted this rant is that my Becky Mail settings at home differed from those at work, and I've just now noticed. One of Becky's options is "How to respond to a request for 'read receipt'." The options are "Ask User," "Respond Automatically," and "Ignore." At work, I'm set up to Ignore Disposition-Notification-To headers. At home, I'm set to Ask User. And so, when I happened to load a work-related email from home this evening, a dialog appeared asking whether or not I'd like to send a return receipt.
And I said, "fuck no."
I hope that over the past several years, I've not disappointed anyone at work by neglecting to send return receipts. I hope, as well, that my lack of return receipts - accompanied by my almost immediate response to most emails, proving that I'd read them even without issuing a disposition notification - has helped to condition at least a few fellow enterprise email users that return receipts aren't a guarantee of anything.
Not everyone uses Outlook, and some folks even use mutt. Even in 2009.
* I've been using pirated/cracked versions of Becky Mail until today. I just put forth the $40 to register the client. It's well overdue, and it's sort of ironic: some Outlook user's request for a return receipt prompted my registration of a shareware app. |
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| C'mon, admit it, hearing veteran (and serious) narrator Thom Beers say "Nipples beside his anus connect to a potent chemical mix" made you chuckle, too. For the unenlightened, this phrase was uttered on episode 4 of Pitchmen. |
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Tonight I'm sitting around watching Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel, when on comes a spot for WMC-TV's Action News 5 featuring none other than Joe Birch. I can't recall the last time I saw a local news station purchase ad time on cable to promote their broadcast. Someone's share must be down... Way down. I was at the WKNO studios on Tuesday for the first time in more than a decade, and even they don't have to buy time on cable. Intelligent people who care are already aware of WKNO's programming.
Gee, maybe laying off Donna Davis, Bill Lunn, and Dave Cera wasn't such a great idea after all. I switched to WREG and apparently a lot of others have done the same. |
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Lately I've been receiving a lot of AIM spam for goforfling.com. IM spam is particularly annoying to me, because it's suddenly there in your face. Almost any IM is a productivity-killer (unless it's from a coworker), but they provide something of value, like a quick conversation. Spam IMs give me nothing but hassle, so when I get one I have a tendency to rage.
goforfling.com has sent me spam IMs in the past, last year if memory serves. So having them pop up on my radar again inspired me to track down who's responsible. Whois points to a Michael Evanchik with an email address of evanchik@gmail.com, but as unreliable as whois data can be, I thought I'd try to find some corroborating information.
As it turns out, goforfling.com is just a 302 redirect to an affiliate link to fling.com (an online dating site). The affiliate ID in the URL is mcbain942. That's a fairly unique userid and a quick check on Google brings up all sorts of things. He has a blog on BitComet, where in one of his posts we learn that his alternate email address is mikesecure@hotmail.com.
Looking that up, we can find a few more resources. He plays Halo 3, and has posted on bungie.net indicating that his Yahoo! Messenger account is mre224, and his AOL Instant Messenger account is McBain. There he alludes to mi7clan.com, which is no longer valid. The good McBain is also registered at the HTC Smartphone Wiki, where he gives his name as Michael Evanchik. Things are matching up.
He's also registered at Xiled Gaming, giving a birthdate of 02/24/1976. And he's posted on MSDN, too, providing a link to before0day.com. Whois for before0day.com points to the same registrant as goforfling.com, Michael Evanchik in Stamford, CT, evanchik@gmail.com. before0day.com returns a 503 Service Unavailable error, so if you were looking for some sort of security insight or negative-one day exploits, you're shit out of luck.
Mike has posted at Digital Gangster looking for a business partner. In this post he demonstrates his high ambitions and low spelling capabilities while trolling for someone who wants to "put down your useless proprietry tecnolgoy infomatoin and apply it to a main stream internet business." He defines his ideas and methods as "upmost elite" and his code as "upmost golden style," then goes on to berate readers by suggesting that it's unlikely he'll find a qualified candidate. The redemption is that the thread has an almost eBaums-like reply chain, where three different people have mockingly posted the same response: "if i wasnt so busy, i'd take this up... sounds like a great opportunity."
That's enough. I'm convinced that the goforfling.com AIM spammer is Michael Evanchik, whose personal details I've omitted out of courtesy. I sent him an IM on his AIM McBain account requesting that he remove my screen name from his spambot's target list, but it wound up going to his phone as a text message, and I never heard back*. If I'd received an affirmative response, I may not have posted all of this. Or maybe I would have anyway. I hate IM spam.
Also, a big shout-out to Deputy Ron Taylor, who I ran into while I was shopping tonight. Buckle up and slow it down! And you drink well too, my kind sir.
Update: On Friday, April 24, I began receiving AIM instant messages from the screen name "FBI mcbain" inquiring as to how I knew he was the goforfling.com spammer. I didn't bother to reply. However, "FBI mcbain" brings up further connections, such as another Bungie account and his Myspace page.
* I never heard back until I'd made this initial post. Suddenly, when I became the #1 result on Google for 'goforfling.com', I started getting hit up like cray-zee via IM, by the gentleman "FBI mcbain."
I'm thinking that just happens. Random idiots, and whatnot. |
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Snowy night + Laser pointer + Beer = Cool
It's not worth trying to take any photos, but I've finally had a chance to screw around with my laser pointer on a snowy night. The effects are pretty awesome, with random sparkles showing up way off into the woods as flakes cross the beam. Who, me, easy to amuse?? |
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I've been using a great utility called darkstat to monitor my bandwidth usage on my home firewall. darkstat keeps track of every host that the monitored machine has contacted or been contacted from, inbound or outbound. It speaks TCP, UDP, and ICMP. For each host, it will tell you the number of packets and bytes exchanged in and out, and on which ports. darkstat also draws some nice graphs of your network traffic over the last minute, hour, day, and month; the graphs can be animated in realtime. It's a lovely way to track your bandwidth.
I had no problem getting darkstat up and running on my FreeBSD 6.4 firewall machine at home. I thought it would be interesting to install it here, on my dedicated server which runs FreeBSD 4.11, but I ran into some trouble:
[root@shaunc darkstat]# make
===> Building for darkstat-3.0.712
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c acct.c -o acct.o
In file included from daylog.h:7,
from acct.c:22:
graph_db.h:7: stdint.h: No such file or directory
*** Error code 1
Stop in /usr/ports/net-mgmt/darkstat/work/darkstat-3.0.712.
*** Error code 1
Oops. It seems that my gcc is too outdated to have stdint.h. Upgrading the compiler is a huge proposition: will it continue to properly build the kernel? Are newer versions of gcc backwards-compatible with my machine, or my OS? The operational ability of everything on a unix machine is dependent upon having a working compiler. It's the one thing that you don't want to touch unless you're absolutely confident that your changes won't cause any problems.
After several hours of searching, I found a viable workaround. Apparently, on FreeBSD 4.x, inttypes.h is forward-compatible to later gcc's stdint.h. All that's required is to create a link from inttypes.h that masquerades as the missing stdint.h:
[root@shaunc darkstat]# ln -s /usr/include/inttypes.h /usr/include/stdint.h
[root@shaunc darkstat]# make
===> Building for darkstat-3.0.712
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c acct.c -o acct.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c cap.c -o cap.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c conv.c -o conv.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c darkstat.c -o darkstat.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c daylog.c -o daylog.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c db.c -o db.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c decode.c -o decode.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c dns.c -o dns.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c err.c -o err.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c graph_db.c -o graph_db.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c hosts_db.c -o hosts_db.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c hosts_sort.c -o hosts_sort.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe static/c-ify.c -o c-ify
./c-ify style_css stylecss.h
./c-ify graph_js graphjs.h
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c http.c -o http.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c localip.c -o localip.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c ncache.c -o ncache.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c pidfile.c -o pidfile.o
cc -pipe -O -pipe -c str.c -o str.o
Linking darkstat
cc -pipe -O -pipe acct.o cap.o conv.o darkstat.o daylog.o db.o decode.o dns.o err.o graph_db.o hosts_db.o hosts_sort.o http.o localip.o ncache.o pidfile.o str.o -lpcap -lz -o darkstat
And there it is, darkstat is compiled.
With sincere thanks to Emil Mikulic. |
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Certainly after posting such a foreboding prediction of Big Orange's fate, I owe it to that feline to provide an update. Big Orange has made it through what passed for an "ice storm" in Memphis, and is still happily eating Friskies' Seafood Sensations out of aluminum pie tins on my back porch.
It's been below freezing many nights lately, so I'm not sure where Big Orange gets water. It's no use putting it out myself, as it would freeze. I believe there's a creek in the woods just a few yards south of me, though; so I'm not too worried. |
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JobName 2/3/2009 6:00:02 PM 2/3/2009 9:43:28 PM 223.42 minutes 128.77 minutes MEM_DTS1 -2147220440 Error Source: Microsoft Data Transformation Services (DTS) Package Error Description:Package failed because Step 'ProcessPhotos' failed. Error code: 80040428 Error Help File:sqldts80.hlp Error Help
Context ID:700
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Step Error Source: Microsoft Data Transformation Services (DTS) Package Step Error Description:Error Code: 0 Error Source= Microsoft VBScript runtime error Error Description: File already exists Error on Line 84 Step Error code: 800403FE Step Error Help File:sqldts80.hlp Step Error Help Context ID:4500 2/3/2009 6:00:03 PM
Okay, let's find line 84.
if not fso.FolderExists(destinationFolder) then
fso.CreateFolder(destinationFolder) ' <-- LINE 84
end if
So, let's see. The test for the destination folder not existing is passed. The attempt to create the destination folder fails, because "File already exists Error on Line 84."
Suicide's the best opt^W^W^W^WI love you Microsoft! |
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