Entries in Life

I’m 31 now. My birthday was this past Sunday. Which isn’t signifigant in itself.

Except that I visited the town where I went to high school. The school that I attended is a small, semi-rural public school just north of the Arkansas-Louisiana border. (I was in a class of 33 people.) Since I was there Saturday night and Sunday morning, I went to church at my parents church — the same one we went to while I was in school there.

Driving into town is surreal in itself. On entering the town I saw a billboard with a picture of a classmate. She has her own insurance business now and so there she is, smiling as we ride into town. Without meaning to, I drove by her place of business. It was immediately recognisable — he name was plastered on the building in large block print.

Sunday, I went to church. More surrealism. The guy giving the sermon was someone who graduated just a year or two ahead of me. Boy, was he full of energy. And, I learned that if I voted for someone who supported abortion rights or homosexual marriage, I’ve sinned. Geez, do I sin if I vote for someone who wrecklessly lies and endangers innocent lives?

Then there was the old classmate I met when picking up my daughter from Sunday School. She recognised me first, which is kinda surprising since I didn’t have any facial hair in high school.

The only thing that could’ve made it stranger would have been running into my old high school buddy and one-time college roomate. After college, he moved back to work at his fathers funeral home.

He wasn’t in town, though. His father’s funeral home has changed hands. I hear its because he got snookered by some Nigerian Scammers.

People don’t bring Starbucks to work in New Orleans.

That bit of discontinuity was the first thing to strike me. That and there aren’t (to my knowledge) any Starbucks in the French Quarter. CC’s, yes. Rue, yes. Starbucks, no. In fact, Starbucks didn’t show up anywhere in New Orleans until Y2K or later.

Still, I’m sure the rest of the movie will be good.

Update: And the civil courthouse isn’t in the Quarter.

Did I ever tell you that Emacs is where I live? planner.el and emacs-wiki.el make life here even more pleasant.

As an example, I used to mark emails as important if I wanted to remember what was in them or respond to them. No more. Now I just create a small Wiki page and put a note in my Planner. No more month’s old messages sitting there.

Of course, marking the email was probably the wrong way to do it in the first place, but, like Kai Grossjohann, I was using my INBOX as my TODO list. Using an emacs-based Wiki, I actually have a somewhat disorganised place to put things.

Since I’m using monologue to publish ClarkAlumni, I’m learning a little about C# and Mono.

For instance, I learned pretty quickly that Mono’s support for timezones in its date-parsing code is pretty much non-existant and this messes up RSS.NET since it’ll “disappear” any entries for which it can’t grok the date. Kluged my way around that by hacking off the timezone completely.

Then there were some fun crashes when it didn’t understand (among other things) that Leonard was using <guid>’s instead of <link>’s.

Lots of sites have bans on executable attachments. If you send them an .exe or .scr file, for example, the attachment will be removed from the email or the intended recipient won’t even get your email. Generally, they allowed you to send executables in .zip files. Or, put a password on the .zip file so that the virus scanner doesn’t even bother to look at it.

Of course, this is a hole. Just have your virus send out a passworded .zip file and include the password in the body of the email. Some users will still open the attachment and your virus will spread. That was my thought, anyway. The solution is to not allow any executables anywhere. You can still see filenames inside of an encrypted .zip file, so your email scanner can just look at the filenames and drop or block any executables even in the .zip file.

It seems that virus writers have finally gotten around to exploiting this. Some people are gullible enough to open anything. Evidently I’m in the addressbook of one of the most well-connected gullible people there is. Every time a new virus crops up, I get a few copies “from” well-known Perl hackers. I say “from” because, of course, the from address has been forged. Yesterday, I started getting emails that went something like this. This one is particularly clever:

  Dear  user of "Everybody.org" mailing system,    Our main mailing  server will be temporary  unavaible  for next two days,   to  continue receiving mail in these days you  have  to configure our  free  auto-forwarding service.    Advanced details  can  be found  in  attached file.    In order to read the attach you have to use the  following password: 33803.    Sincerely,     The  Everybody.org team                             http://www.everybody.org  [2. application/octet-stream; MoreInfo.zip]...