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This page secretly redirects to my About page. If you're seeing this, something went wrong and I should probably give the server a kick.....

I used to have an "About Me" page, but with the change to my new site, I've decided to change things up a little and make it a blog entry. The nice thing is that I've got the power of Apache behind me, letting me use a .htaccess file to redirect traffic from the old file to the new one - all dynamic like and such. It's super cool, really. The best part is, you don't even care. Fun.

Father of 4 (as of this writing, 11 years, 8 years and 7 years and 3 years), and married to the love of my life. Computer geek by nature and by trade. I spend too much time in front of displays: tv, monitor, laptop. I enjoy all kinds of stuff, but lately I've been spending too much time with twitter and Facebook.

I am very happily employed. Up until 07/05/02, I was semi-happily employed by the same company that laid me off on 10/5/01. I spent a year being Mr. Mom and trying to do freelance work and such. Then I worked for a computer store/VAR (Value-Added Reseller) in the New Haven area. They were an Apple Authorized resellers/service center, which made me happy - I got to play with newer computers, fix stuff, and just generally do what I like to do. Hardware stuff - fixing computers and such - but I also do software support. I now work full time for a local University that I graduated from (sorry to not actually say it, but you can't be too careful these days....). I have a regular schedule, I get to wander around campus to fix things, and I work with people that I like and respect. Oh, and I don't hate it - in fact, I finally enjoy my work again. Most of the time.

What else do I do? User interface/design/backend stuff for web sites. Tech stuff. Internet stuff (webhosting/config/etc). You could say I'm a jack of all trades.... Email me for my resume for more info. And if you wanna hire me, that'd be cool too.

I used to have a table here with silly stats about myself here, but.... it was a table. That's so 1995. Ugh. I kept my Blogger code: B9 d++ t+ k++ s+ u++ f i+ o+ x-- e+ l+ c. That should keep the geek cred, right?

Here is my social networks "business card"....

Old missile sites hold Cold War mystique

Growing up in good old Westport, CT, I had always know that there were Nike missle sites in town - two to be precise. One of them was next to my high school and was the site of much exploration on the part of the students - and no, I'm not willing to discuss whether or not I participated until such time as any co-conspirators, if any, discuss it openly first. So there.

You know that I myself find the concept of private parties buying said missile sites fascinating (here and here) - especially when they are puchased and turned into such interesting things as a diver's training area or a hotel....

So reading about it in on USA Today made me take a closer look at what happened to those sites - both in Westport and my new hometown, Milford. It turns out that former Nike missle sites are popular with the towns - probably because they get a lot of property that not many folks would be likely to buy....

In Westport, the fight over installing the Nike sites became the basis of the film Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, starring soon to be residents Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The site next to the high school has been on the town property lists for a while, and they have, in the last few years demolished the above ground structures (it's not clear if they filled in the silos and underground structures) and then built over at least part of the area to make a new middle school (which has the name of an old middle school from another part of town, but I don't even want to talk about that arguably stupid naming decision).

The other site in town is now the Rolnick Observatory, which I've been to a number of times and always forget what it was there for in the first place....

In Milford, the sites are even more interesting: one is now apparently owned by the Board of Ed (I think for storage and office/facilities usage) and another is... well, I don't know what it is now. It looks like it's part of an office park, but what I find most interesting is that it's about 1/4 mile from my house - one of my sons classmates lives across the road from it apparently. The things you don't realize are around you....

Anyone else have something like this near them?

So, like many other websites, I've been having a problem with various people trying to hammer my site for various reasons: spammers trying to get email addresses, comment spammers trying to put their garbage ads in my posts, people linking to my images to not have to bother with loading the image into their site... the usual things. Lately, I've been getting "spidered" a lot more than usual - someone's been going through my whole website, copying all the content for some reason. If it was Google or Yahoo!, then it would likely be so they can get an accurate assessment of my site to include it in search results and what not. And if it was them, I'd be fine with it. But it's not them.

Instead, it's an IP address - a location on the internet. 195.225.178.15. Not that big a deal, until you start digging. As the screenshot I posted attests, they were responsible for almost 40% of the traffic to my website in the month of June. In July, it's only 3% of the traffic - but I have no doubt that's going to 0% in a matter of minutes from now on.

A while back, when blog spamming first became a big deal, I coped with it in various ways - moving files so that they weren't in the expected locations, disabling them entirely, and generally doing anything I could to keep one step ahead. The MovableType plugin community kept pace with many of the developments in the area, and developed a couple of really useful tools - one was MTBlackList, written by Jay Allen - which has, to my understanding, evolved repeatedly and was probably the basis, in some form or another, for the TypePad Anti-Spam service we have today. Another was AutoBan, which would update an .htaccess file based on people visiting your site to comment too frequently. The idea of my weblog acting as it's own gatekeeper appealed to me, and I implemented this as soon as I could. And it was a good thing to have around.

But it didn't really stop them from coming in the first place - it merely made it harder for them to get in the door and spam after the first few comments. I wanted to make it very hard for them. A little poking around and I discovered Junk Slowdown, written by the same person who wrote AutoBan (who's name eludes me, and will surely come back to me soon). It's job is to literally waste the spammers time. In my case, I have it tied into AutoBan, so that if they get on the blacklist, they end up wasting their time.

The way it works is that it sends most of a web page to their spider bot, which happily sucks down content. Notice I said "most of a web page." When it comes to the last, final bit of the web page - the closing body tag - it inserts a wait command that pauses any output from the script for 30 seconds. This means that for everytime that the spider is accessing my site, trying to post fake comments, it's stuck waiting 30 seconds. And since comment spammers like to shotgun their spam, they tend to send a lot of comments the way of the same blog at once. This works to my advantage, because it means that every time they make a request, their spider spends another 30 seconds waiting for my script to finish it's job. Something that doesn't do much to my server - after all, it's a small little script (866 bytes), and it only outputs text - so it would, without the pause, barely cause a blip in the amount of traffic that the server generates. But with the pause, it barely causes two blips - one at the start, and then another 30 seconds later.

Is it working? I suppose. Is it effective? It's hard to say. One of the reasons that spam - and comment spam - is effective is that it really doesn't cost that much. You can buy a list of email addresses online for probably not that much. You can generate that list yourself if you have time to write a little program that will run through the alphabet and generate random email addresses. You could even just take the dictionary and generate email addresses based on that - antelope@, anteater@, aardvark@, and so on. Not that hard to do with a little time and thought. Then you just sign up for a dialup account (spammers are notorious for doing that since it's cheaper than a high speed connection, which would also usually require the normal utility credit check and whatnot) and just start broadcasting the spam. For website comments, it's pretty similar - you can do a Google search for web addresses containing certain words - like mt-comment.cgi, for example - and get a list of thousands or millions of sites using certain software. Figure out the format for a comment post - which can be pretty easy in some cases - and then set your spider loose on the sites, shotgunning your comments all over the web.

Granted, some of the sites will have setup anti-spam measures like I have - or will have upgraded to software that doesn't have some of the security holes that allow things like this to happen - but just like the email spam, they don't need it to work for everyone - they just need a small percentage to get through. The comment spammers work best when they get through because then their URL is a part of the internet for all to see - especially the normal spider engines, the ones that work for Google and Yahoo!. Once the spammers content is out there, they become part of the index of the web - one where many links to your website can be a good thing, and can cause you to become the top result for certain search phrases - which is what the spammers are hoping for.

Does that work? Less and less. Yahoo!, Google, and all the other search engines do what they can to keep the actual criteria for how a site gets ranked higher both confidential and changing - once people figure out how to game the system, the usually tweak the system to stop that from working - so it's a continual game of cat and mouse. Eventually both sides may reach a stalemate, but I don't think that will be any time soon. In the mean time, I'll continue to use any tool at my disposal to keep the spammers at bay - and you should too.

# block stuff that's been spidering my site too much
ErrorDocument 403 /sand-trap.php
deny from 195.225.176.0/22

I was stopped at a stop light - 2nd in line. The car in front of me put their car into reverse - I didn't do anything. A second later, they were still in reverse - so I got ready to honk the horn in case they started to move backwards. Then they did start to reverse - so I laid into the horn. The woman driving started to look around - left, right - but still kept coming. The results are above.

She got out and apologized, explaining that she's lost and trying to get to the hospital to get her mother or something. Not really my concern, but whatever. I told her to turn the corner and pull over, since we were blocking the lane we were in. I got her info, and she was very emphatic about going to get her mother and dealing with this later. I told her we would talk later, and as she drove off, I called the police. A few minutes later, they were there, listened to my tale of woe, and took my and her info.

Since we had exchanged phone numbers, she called me twice - once to make sure she hadn't erased it, and the second time to find out why I had "lied" to her - by calling the police, I apparently broke some sort of promise between us. I don't remember that - I remember telling her that we would talk later. She was very upset and doing lots of yelling, so I didn't really understand what she was saying - except that she was apparently coming back to the scene.

When she did arrive, she came from down the road, and I didn't recall seeing her pull up. She glared at me as she walked by, and then went to the police officers. After a minute or two, the responding officer brought my paperwork and notes back, gave me my case number, and told me that she hadn't wanted to hang around because she was..... driving with a suspended license. At this point, I drove off - cranky, but able to move still, so happy for that - the last accident I had resulted in a car that I didn't really feel safe driving in.

Fast forward to today - four days later. After making a few calls, getting the insurance company's estimate, getting my own estimate, and making more calls, I got a voicemail this afternoon from my insurance agent. Their auto-accident person was calling me back - I had asked for help figuring out which of the many companies with the same name she was actually using for her insurance. It turns out she doesn't have insurance. Of course.

Now, look, I'm not saying that she didn't have to go get her mother or whatever. But if you're license is suspended, and you don't have insurance, DON'T DRIVE YOUR CAR. Simple, straightforward, and easy. With my last incident, I'm waiting for the insurance company to "subrogate" the claim - meaning that if they ever manage to get money from him, and we all know it will take more than a couple of weeks - then I'll eventually get my deductible back. Maybe.

AWESOME.

Daylight savings sucks. First of all, why start it on Saturday night/Sunday morning? It takes a week or so to get used to it - just start it on Friday night/Saturday morning so we have a fighting chance come Monday. Seriously.

I realize that the concept of DST is quite useful - we get up earlier, so there is a bigger "useful" part of the day. Really - it's pretty clear to me. (The US Navy has a write up of some of the details here) But we are no longer an agrarian society. Well, we still farm, but it's a smaller percentage of the population that does it. Not that I mind getting up at "0 dark thirty" to get ready for my day - I'm used to that from the fall and winter months. And while having the daylight on the front end of the day is useful, I was just getting used to the idea of the sun still being up on my ride home.

There is some argument among scholars, economists, and who knows who else that the change to and from DST costs the economy money (Google search on "daylight savings time money"). I would argue that it does, but only in lost productivity - and that's mostly because of the fact that the change happens on Sunday, not Saturday. It may not seem like much, but I think that the extra day would be very useful.

My experience is always the same: I wake up one hour late on Monday morning. This year the problem was compounded by not feeling well (chest cold that makes me sound like I should be looking out for the Grim Reaper) and being up late the night before. If Jen hadn't come home early today, there's a good chance I would have been asleep until about 9:00 - possibly later. Since I was supposed to have the kids at school at 8:00, that would have been a bit of a problem. In the end, they got where they needed to be and I did what I needed to, but it seems to me that there's a solution to this problem:

Don't use Daylight Savings Time.

SI.com - Writers - Richard Deitsch: Q&A with Drew Carey:
Q&A: Drew Carey
Posted: Tuesday June 14, 2005 1:08PM; Updated: Tuesday June 14, 2005 4:58PM
Last week, Sports Illustrated associate editor Richard Deitsch interviewed Drew Carey for the magazine's Q&A. The actor-comedian has been following the U.S. men's national soccer  team -- and moonlighting as a photographer. Here are some of Carey's photographs and excerpts from the interview. It's very interesting that he goes to such lengths to get "the good seats," but at the same time he's apparently quite a decent photographer.

This might be boring, tedious, or both. If you don't have Cablevision for your internet/tv, or if you don't live in an area where they are located, or you just don't care, then move along. The rest of you can read more by clicking the link....

Todays drive into work was pretty atypical for several reasons. One was that I left the house when I meant to - since Jen was long gone when this happened, and the kids weren't actually fighting me (for a change), this was a pleasant surprise. Drop off went well, so that was good. A left, a right, a left, another left, and one more right and I'm on the highway - but the iPod is coming up with nothing but things I just don't want to hear. I had yesterday off so the family could visit my Aunt and Uncle who are visiting from Australia, so today is my Monday. I needed a little something to pick me up and get me going. It was a long hard road to finding something - I was 3/4 of the way to work when it finally happened: "Hot for Teacher", from Van Halen's "1984".

That song is only about 3 or 4 minutes long, so I had to find something else to fit into the remaining 5 minutes of my drive. What to do, what to do? The iPod was picking out more stuff I didn't want to hear - including several passages from an audio book that really, really needs to come off there - when suddenly I heard "Angry People" by Barenaked Ladies, off of "Are Me & Are Men Deluxe Edition". It's a double CD set that I got off of the iTunes Music Store, and it's chock full of BNL good-ness. Keep in mind that it's called "Are Me", but it's supposed to be read like "Barenaked Ladies Are Me" - or, as they put it on their podcast, "Barenaked Ladies Army" since their fans are so very loyal. Just a fun little tidbit for you there. Anyway, "Angry People" is kind of a happy, upbeat song, despite the name, and it helped continue the momentum built by "Hot for Teacher" to get me into a mindset that I'd be able to tackle the day.

Of course, when I remembered that today isn't Monday, and that I still have a piece of go-suh work cell phone and I have no idea when or if a replacement is coming. It works, but the battery won't hold a charge anymore - I need to charge it about once a day, and I don't use it to make more than two or three calls a day. BAD CELL PHONE!

But then I get to the office and there's good news! The new phone - a nice, shiny new phone - has arrived. A phone call, some idle chatter w/ the Verizon rep, and an activation later, and I'm playing with my new RAZR V3m phone. So far, it's working quite well - I've managed to get around to updating my address book with all the important phone numbers and email addresses, and then sync the phone to the work computer via BlueTooth. The biggest downside: Verizon crippled the phone. They don't let you do OBEX data transfers from the phone - which means if I take a photo with the camera, I either have to "PIX" the photo to myself (and use up messages that I think we pay extra for) or use the Micro SD card that the phone has - only you have to dis-assemble the phone to get at the card. OBEX, on the other hand, allows you to take and put data right from your computer to the phone and vice versa. Most other carriers offer it, but Verizon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that you don't want that - they know what you want, and instead of being able to take your photos right off your cell phone, or play YOUR MP3 files on your phone, you really want to pay them to let you do it.

I don't want this to turn into a giant "Verizon is evil" rant, so I'm going to stop here, but point out that it's my phone, and I think I know what I want better than they do. Well, ok, it's the State of Connecticuts phone, but I have the same issues with my personal phone. Anyway, that's enough of that.

define: defenestration - Google Search

the act of throwing someone or something out of a window