Daley Ponderings

NEWS BULLETIN: Saying it will improve the education of children who have grown up immersed in computer lingo,
the school board in San Jose, Calif., has officially designated computer English, or "Geekonics," as a second
language. "This entirely reconfigures our parameters," Milton "Floppy" Macintosh, chairman of Geekonics
Unlimited, said after the school board became the first in the nation to recognize Geekonics.

"No longer are we preformatted for failure," Macintosh said during a celebration that saw many Geekonics
backers come dangerously close to smiling.  (More)

I noticed that upromise now allows you to withdraw your money instead of having to wait until your kid goes to college.  Given that our balance is currently $90.74 (thanks Grandma for $16 of that) it'll take a long time before we could even put it in a 529 account, assuming they are going to stick around, and so withdrawing that money now (and spending on our recent Rainbow Resources order for homeschooling stuff) seems like a good use of that money.

PAUL REVERE VIRUS:
This revolutionary virus does not horse around. It warns you of impending hard disk attack: Once, if by LAN; twice if by C.

POLITICALLY CORRECT VIRUS:
Never identifies itself as a "virus," but instead refers to itself as an "electronic micro-organism".

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGAR VIRUS:
Terminates and stays resident. It'll be back.
 (More)

Noah's three year appointment was at the beginning of the month.  He is 42.5 lbs and 41" tall.  They did the hearing and vision tests and the nurse was very impressed.  She said usually at this age, they can hear the sounds but not figure out which ear they're hearing it in, and he did great.  The vision test was very interesting for me, but not the eye part.  His vision is fine, but what they do at that age is show the pictures up close first to see what the child will call each object.  So Noah said "apple" and "house" just fine, and then circle was "round" and square was "round."  She went back and forth on those a couple of times and then said, "are those two shapes the same?"  He started to say yes, and then emphatically said No!  So I told him that that shape was called a square and he repeated it.  Then for the real test, a square was the first object.  He hesitated, and then she reminded him of the name.  After that, he named each object perfectly.  At first, it rather bothered me that Noah didn't know the simple shape names, but it just means we haven't gotten to that part yet.  He knows his colors and lots of other things.  So now he knows the name for a square. (: (More)

I got an email last night from someone who was looking up contact information for one of my customers: Piexx Company. She was wondering if someone was trying to scam her.  The way the scam works is that someone says they are a hiring agency for some company and posts a job offer for a data entry position where you can work at home, and they interview and you get the job.  (More)

Hello.  I often get ThinkGeek gift certificates (I expect they give $10 certificates to anyone who asks them).  And I just got one today for $10 off a $30 purchase.  They have some fun things, but I am not planning on using it.  Let me know if you are interested.

So, I wonder if there is going to be one of those statistics published: "Facebook down for X minutes - office productivity improved 500%"...

I had gotten some rather blank emails in my spam folder recently (and some not in the spam folder), so I thought I'd check into it further.  I couldn't figure out why they were wasting their time, as it just contained a bunch of fairly blank HTML, with some tables, and background colors.  When I opened the email in an email client that understands HTML, it all became clear.

 (More)

 

From disturbed.org

I added a new link on the sidebar, and wanted folks to see it.  If you use gmail's reader, and are a "friend" of mine (defined by using gtalk/chat/email with me), it will show up in your reader automatically.  For the rest of you, (which is most of you, since I don't use gmail all that much) you can check out the link, or subscribe to that RSS feed, which will contain posts of other people that I don't really have much to comment on (and unlike the rest of the blogging world, don't feel the need to make my own post about it...) but think they are worth reading.

As long as you can turn off the sound, it looks pretty neat! 

(From GeekDad) 

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather than an external machine. (More)

Someone on the postgrey list (Matthew, who apparently likes drinking coffee, as that is part of his email address) sent a script that he uses to report on his mail/spam. 

I modified it to work on my systems (and included it below), and here is the output for the last five days:

Rejected by RBL: 21147
Rejected by greylisting: 9917
Rejected by bad sender/receiver information: 959
Tagged as spam: 1457
Real email: 6278

So, ~4000 (50%) are rejected every day simply by being on a known blacklist, ~2000 (25%) are slowed down by greylisting (maybe are retried, maybe aren't), ~200 (2%) due to the spammers faking from or to addresses (or real people mistyping addresses), ~300 (4%) ending up in spam folders, and ~1200 (16%) actually ending up in inboxes.

Taking the inverse of the inbox mail, that means that 84% of email coming into my server is being thrown away one way or another.  I'm glad I have lots of filters to block almost all of it. (More)

For some reason, Verizon thought it would be a good idea to reconfigure their network early morning Christmas Eve (or late the night before, I am not sure which).  Unfortunately, they transferred me to a broken gateway, which has 3 minutes outages every fifteen minutes or so. (More)

I somehow missed when Street View (and for that matter - Terrain) showed up on Google Maps.  I am not sure when that happened.  Actually, now that I look at the demo video, I did see the demo before, but I hadn't seen when it came to our house.  You can't quite see how ripe our hot peppers are.  Pretty nifty!  If you go down the street along Liberty Avenue, it is pretty interesting to watch the traffic, and wonder if the folks knew they were getting photographed.