So, I’ve not really blogged in almost a month. I come back to find a fresh crop of blog spam, so I finally plugged in mt-blacklist. That means if you leave a comment it won’t be posted immediately – shouldn’t be much of a problem considering the low volume.
A plague of eagles
Another heartbreaker in South Bend today. We could barely watch – both emotionally and literally, as our TV has been acting up and decided to quit after the final BC touchdown but before Ohliger delivered the coup de grace. We get a two year hiatus, thankfully. I think I’d rather play USC twice this year.
Your delivery’s great but you could work on the timing
We were cleaning up the house this weekend – contrary to appearances, we do clean up from time to time – and couldn’t find all of the vacuum accessories. I had seen Andrew playing with them earlier in the week, so I decided to ask him. It went something like this:
Dad – “Andrew, you know the brush for the vacuum?”
Andrew – “Yes!”
D – “Do you know where it is?”
A – “Yes!”
D – “Where is it?”
A – “I don’t know!”
He also exclaims “That’s John Kewwy!” every time a gray-haired man appears on the TV, and almost had me convinced that JK himself had come to the house on Monday. Toddlers do indeed inhabit their own little worlds.
DO NOT EAT YOUR iPOD
In the spirit of stupid product warnings, here’s an excerpt from the iTunes EULA:
THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.
Maybe a holdover from their OS license, but pretty silly regardless.
Shopping cart noises…bad
Went out on the club ride this morning and had a good, ol’ fashioned two-bike crash with another rider. We had five riders total; I was leading the paceline with one rider to my left. We approached an intersection and we realized a bit late that this was where the route turns right. The rider to my left braked and started turning in; I knew he was coming across my line so I braked and started to turn in as well. That’s when the guy immediately behind me ran over me and sent me over the bars, our bikes making those “shopping cart noises” as they cartwheeled around us. Evidently he had his head turned as I started to brake and couldn’t get out of the way in time.
I’m told that it all looked pretty spectacular, but we were only lightly injured. I sustained some road rash on my right knee and chin, and a nice strawberry on my shoulder – but no clothing rips, and no damage to the bike beyond blips in both wheels that I need to true out. My clubmate fared pretty much the same, and we were able to complete the ride.
This seems like a rookie mistake; experienced riders don’t make any sudden, unannounced moves in the paceline. However, I’m not sure that missing the turn would have been a better option here. If I had done that, the guy on my left probably would have creamed into me as he crossed my line, expecting me to turn with him. Moral of the story: know your route and announce your turns.
Windows Product Activation explained
A friend has had some trouble getting Windows XP reinstalled, and in the course of helping him get things straightened out I ran across this useful link at licenturion.com
The 34 Languages of McDonald’s
This is good for a few minutes’ amusement: The 34 Languages of McDonald’s. Note that if you want to keep score, do it yourself – the quiz doesn’t do it for you. Since I didn’t realize that, I can’t tell you my exact score, but it was in the low 20s.
Where spam comes from, part 379
So maybe there aren’t as many open SMTP relays as there were a couple of years ago, but somehow spam thrives. To get their product out, some spam kings have evidently resorted to hijacking web email-contact pages, or so I’ve concluded from the contents of the jls.cx HTTP logs. Here’s some sample statistics for 404 (page not found) errors:
| URL | Error Hits |
|---|---|
| /cgi-bin/formmail.pl | 42 |
| /cgi-bin/contact.cgi | 26 |
| /cgi-bin/formmail.cgi | 23 |
Straight from the log, here’s evidence of one of the more brain-dead attempts:
198.104.144.39 - - [19/Aug/2004:12:58:53 -0600] "GET /cgi-bin/formmail.pl?email=rockstar@mail.com &subject=www.jls.cx/cgi-bin/formmail.pl&message=rockstar&recipient=blesss@aol.com[...]
Basically, somebody’s out there trolling for a web page that will automatically send email. In this case, the troller was dumb enough to use GET, which logs all of the details of the request and thus leaves fingerprints all over the log. Most of the other attempts use POST, which hides the details from the log.
Anyway, if you’ve got a mail script page that allows unauthenticated sending of mail, take it down please. The Internet isn’t as nice as it used to be.
Marathon Mice and the performance-enhancing bug
Yesterday’s article in Wired about genetically modified mice with superior aerobic exercise capacity sparked a thought from Elise today – could a naturally occuring virus have a similar effect? The link between viruses and some disorders, such as the relationship between HPV and cervical cancer in women, is well established. I suppose it’s also possible that a virus could have a beneficial effect, though such a thing would be rarer than a detrimental effect. I’d expect an essentially random change caused by a virus to have more of a chance disrupting a human system than enhancing it.
Mount Greylock Century 2004
Back in June, when I first heard my clubmate Sean describe the Mt. Greylock Century, I knew I was in trouble. In terms of single-day efforts, it was far beyond anything I’d ever done on a bike. Having spent most of my life in the relatively flat parts of the midwest, I’d never even climbed anything that could reasonably be described as a mountain before this year. I’d only started riding with any intensity in May, after a long winter and spring doing fairly short indoor rides on the trainer. I considered my mileage base barely adequate to even consider doing anything like Greylock, but I was hooked. I had to find out if I could handle the three major climbs and nearly 10,000 feet total climbing that MGC offered.