January 31, 2003
It's funny because, oh hell, you know why it's funny.
Our long national nightmare ended.
Publication date of January 18, 2001.
Moonlit observations.
First, 30 degrees is actually quite comfortable after a week near zero. I was just out with the dog for 5 minutes, wearing a light fleece sweater, and out of the wind 30 degrees is nothing. And I suspect most of the Californians that spend their vacations skiing in Montana know it, too.
Also, 13 year old dogs are not real enthusiastic about the "good dog" reward. It's not that it doesn't mean anything to them, it's just they've so heard it before. The hairydale at two years old thinks that good dog is the greatest reward that could possibly be bestowed upon her.
The basenji at 13 thinks the hairydale is giving it away, and as far as she is concerned, "good dog" is a compliment like "nice tie" from that guy in the next cubicle; not bad, but not anything requiring a celebration.
The airedale lives with us; the basenji thinks we live together in our house. "Now open the damn door, I'm from Africa, I don't have a fleece sweater, and 30 degrees is still frigging cold, even if your not as old as I am!"
January 30, 2003
Hat scores.
Boone and Crocket has a scoring system for deer antlers. Want to know how it's done?
Scoring for typical whitetail.
Scoring for non-typical whitetail.
These are all .pdf's.
Verizon can't count.
HB5709, amends the Emergency Telephone System Act changing Sections 2.12(d) and 15.3(c).
Section 2.12 is what we're first interested in.
2.12(a) states;
"network connections" means the number of voice grade communications channels directly between a subscriber and a telecommunications carrier's public switched network
Looks like that means individual phone lines. Any exceptions to this principle of a network connection equals one phone line? Yep, right there in 2.12(d).
2.12(d) states;
Where multiple voice grade communication channels are connected to a telecommunication carrier's public switched network through a private branch exchange service (PBX), there shall be determined to be one network connection for each trunk line capable of transporting either the subscriber's inter-premises traffic to the public switched network or the subscriber's 9-1-1 calls to the public agency. Where multiple voice grade communication channels are connected to a telecommunication carrier's public switched network through centrex type service, the number of network connections shall be equal to the number of PBX trunk equivalents for the subscriber's service, as determined by reference to any generally applicable exchange access service tariff filed by the subscriber's telecommunications carrier with the
Commission.
Looks like an exception for business lines. Connect a PBX and one network connection equals one trunk line. Definition of a trunk line is found in filed tariffs. PBX is define in Section 2.20 of the Emergency Telephone System Act.
Are ISP's equipment PBX's? Can't say from that definition, but it doesn't look like it. There is no definition of trunk line in the Illinois Compiled Statutes. Trunk line has to be defined from the tariffs, and must have a common meaning the way this legislature is written.
This is the first question for the ICC:
Under the exchange access service tariff filed by Verizon North, what is the definition of a trunk line?
This is the second question for the ICC:
Under Section 2.20 of the Emergency Telephone System Act are ISP's equipment defined as PBX's?
If trunk lines are T-1's or T-3's, and ISP equipment are PBX's, then we are defined under the exception listed in 2.12(d). If that is the case, then we have one network connection per T-1, and under Section 15.3(c) would be required to pay five surcharges per network connection, or 5 surcharges per T-1, or $12.50 per T-1.
If we are not listed under the exception in 2.12(d), then the 5 surcharges per network connection under 15.3(c) don't apply to us.
There are three possibilities;
1:) T-1's are trunk lines and ISP equipment are PBX's. Under 12.2(d) trunk lines count as one network connection, and under 15.3(c) pay 5 surcharges for each T-1.
2:) T-1's are not trunk lines and ISP equipment are not PBX's. Under 12.2(a) we would owe one surcharge for each phone line in a T-1, or 24 surcharges per T-1.
3:) T-1's are not trunk lines and ISP equipment are PBX's. Under 12.2(a) we would owe for one network connection for each phone line in a T-1, and under 15.3(c) we would owe 5 surcharges per network connection, or 120 surcharges per T-1.
January 27, 2003
Atrios is a monster.
Kevin Drum has a little throw away quote, and Atrios runs with it. Atrios point is a general one, asking conservatives who are liberal on certain issues due to personal experience to consider that maybe a liberal feels the same way, only with one less personal experience.
Atrios is a monster, taking individual points, and using them to jump off to examinations of principle. He/She does this sort of thing day after day, month in and month out now. It's a great service to the entire blogging community, even if the blogging community doesn't think so.
Erin....
If you are reading this thing, make a comment, would you? Test this junk out for real.
Slowly dipping a toe....
Been playing around with Blogrolling. I think this weblog is now out in the mix, although I'm still not pinging out to announce updates, or to throw my weblog onto any of the public update servers. Still hiding back here while we get a little more comfortable with how things actually work.
Also, might need to work on a more public voice for this writing. Or not. Let's see how it goes.
The blogroll on the sidebar there is listing the weblogs that are listed as updated as new in the last 30 minutes, by the way. That will probably need tuning over time.
Word to your moms, I came to drop bombs
J. Bradford Delong is throwing major league curveballs, wicked sliders, screwballs that pop off the table. An American economist, former deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department, and currently professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is stating that we are on the cusp of big changes, and odds are if you are reading this then those changes are not likely to benefit you. The wealthiest in the First World will do great, most of the Third World will improve dramatically, but you, an average schmuck(no matter how much you dislike the idea that you are average) in the developed world, well, you, my friend, are going to have big problems.
See, your lifestyle is not going to be sustainable. Competition for your cushy job is coming, and coming fast, be it from India or China or any number of other places looking to step up to the plate.
So, less middle class in the US and the rest of the developed world.
Less mobility through classes, less chances for you to live a better life than your parents, or your kids to hope to live better than you. Because skilled, educated, and English speaking workers are going to be able to do your job, and willing to do it for less, you are going to either lose your job, or work for less money. Just like factory workers in the Rust Belt in the 70's and 80's, you can be replaced, and you damn well will be replaced.
Globalization, baby, now painting it's laser targets on you, behind your desk.
Time to cultivate those specialty skills, like building custom furniture for wealthy landowners, because bank officers, lawyers, investment advisers, computer programmers, and other desk jobs are about to become commodities.
Good luck. You are going to need it.
January 26, 2003
Super Bowl Ad note.
The ad where the linebacker is brutalizing the office workers? One of the things he is yelling about, while physically stomping a cubicle dweller, is not including the cover to the TSP report.
It's a cult.
Also, a lot of those ads were not just strange, as in "I found that strange, what the hell was that for, I'm now intrigued" but strange, as in "what the hell were they thinking?" strange. A little surplus of aggression and anger in the cloisters of social influence.
And the game sucked. Typical, no? And yet, it will still go on, mostly crappy and bizarre. America's a weird country.
Urbana, Illlinois: Center of the Universe?
If you look around in the town where I live, you start to notice something. There seems to be a confluence of some sort that occurs here. A lot of it is related to the University of Illinois, but still, the influences seem to be particularly strong here. Examples? OK.
Take computers. Or more specifically, computer software. Eudora was written at the U of I. Mosaic, which became Netscape, was written at NCSA at the U of I. Apache is based on NCSA HTTPD server code. Mathematica is located here. Ray Ozzie, who is the man behind Lotus Notes, attended the U of I. One of the coders for Napster lives here. Hell, the man that wrote Flight Simulator lived here when he did it, and now lives in the countryside around here.
Now, what about creative writing? Well, David Foster Wallace grew up in Urbana. I attended high school with him. Richard Powers has lived here for quite a while, extending his original academic stay when he would be able to go anywhere. And Neal Stephenson even lived here when he was a small boy, and still gets membership in the Midwestern Writers Mafia since when his parents moved from here they went to Ames, IA.
Computer Hardware? John Bardeen. End of story. Or beginning of story, but either way, a hell of a story. The inventor of the blue laser attended grad school here, before going on to PARC. Arthur C. Clarke had the HAL9000 computer being built in Urbana.
This is a map of the internet, then arpanet, from Sept. 1971.
Guess where that little dot marked Illinois is located?
It's weird little place. I remember an article published in the San Jose Mercury News about a guy just getting his public financing to start his new company, and how as a kid growing up in Urbana he used to disassemble phones all the time. I wrote a note to the author, relating all the other tales of beginnings from Urbana. He wrote me back, to relate that he himself was a graduate of the University of Illinois.
I have no idea what it is about the place, but something is almost always starting here, to be delivered to the outside world. Like I said, a weird confluence of some sort.
January 25, 2003
Hopeless.
From Saturday's NYT:
" The administration acknowledges that it has a major uphill effort to convince Americans — not to mention the Europeans — of the reasons for going to war, but says much of their case comes down to asking Americans to place blind faith in the administration.
"It really comes down to whether or not the country trusts President Bush's judgment, knowing that he knows a lot more than the country knows," a senior administration official told reporters on Air Force One this week."
Why would anyone trust this administration? They've been willing to lie consistently, and don't seem to think it should ever do any damage to their goals. Now they need people to trust them? This is another indication that the current administration's primary defining element will be remembered as incompetence. They just screw up everything they touch.
Is this your bank?
If so, you might want to ask them about this.
More worm info.
eEye's report. "This worm has been dubbed the "Sapphire Worm" by eEye due to the fact that several engineers had to be pulled away from local bars to begin the investigation/dissection process."
CERTŪ Advisory CA-2003-04 MS-SQL Server Worm
Cisco access control list to block traffic on port 1433 and 1434.
****
access-list 115 deny udp any any eq 1433 log
access-list 115 deny udp any any eq 1434 log
access-list 115 permit ip any any
int
ip access-group 115 in
ip access-group 115 out
****
New worm?
Apparently, something on the internet wet the bed last night. Suspected attacks include this Microsoft SQL server exploit.
Lots of people saw their traffic graphs peg about 23:30 CST. Like this.
January 24, 2003
Frankel's "mansion".
I used to work in the trades(as we in the construction business in Illinois called it). Made me aware of the actual construction of buildings. Gives one a certain insight.
So, I just saw a news story on the auction of Martin Frankel's "mansions" in Greenwich, CT. Seems they got $5.2 million for the two "mansions".
The interesting thing I noticed was from the pictures they showed. This is the best I could find on Google.
Notice anything about the house? It was really obvious on the news footage I saw today. See how the snow is all melting on the roof? On TV they showed a melting roof, and snow still all over the ground That means that it was a crap job of insulating the house. That's what we used to call "under-built". Means that someone cut corners, and pocketed the difference. Means the buyer got stiffed. Means the house was not built well, in the most fundamental ways.
And since I assume these aren't new houses, it also means that every single owner that's lived there over the years has never even bothered to look at their roof in the winter, or paid someone to take a look around at the place. This "mansion" is like so many other things, just a facade, siding and roofing shingles covering stick lumber, drywall, and lots of crappy construction decisions.
So, you have a crappy construction job, that most people would never even notice, because they don't know any better. And they got $5.2 million at auction for these glorified tract homes. Pathetic.
Revenge of the Euro-weenies.
Looks like the Euro has started to pile on the dollar in international currency markets.
This does not portend well for anyone ostensibly in charge of American financial policies. Money is fleeing American financial markets for European markets just as fast as it can. This is a tipping point for all financial conversations for the next year, and may very well signal a tipping point for longer term events.
Europe just might be better off financially than the US over the short term. This is likely to produce great gales of comparisons stating a doctor in Sweden is worse off financially than a sharecropper in Mississippi, and those arguments will effectively be just storms of denial about the now precarious position of the US economy.
The US is seriously flirting with Japanese style financial disorders(which were compounded by Japanese denial, by the way).
And theose damn Euro-weenies still have universal health care. And money is flowing towards those markets? That's interesting.
Whoops, just realized the post below means I'm now also a Euro-weenie, as well as an American citizen. What an odd feeling.
Kiss me.
Dear Mr. Glynn,
We are pleased to inform you that your name has now been entered in the Foreign Births Entry Book held at the Consulate. Enclosed are any outstanding original documents held by us as well as the Certificate of Entry, which should be retained as evidence of Irish citizenship.
As an Irish citizen, you are now eligible to apply for an Irish passport. Should you wish to do so, an application form is enclosed herewith.
Yours sincerely,
Consulate General of Ireland
Chicago
Geek stuff.
Sidebar now contains links to some geek stuff that I use quite a bit lately.
Our transition from an NT based ISP to a partially FreeBSD based ISP hasn't gone too bad. It's only taken a year, and I've only had to throw my entire life down this hole to get it done, but we are starting to see some positive results.
Our mail server seems stable, our RADIUS server has been working reliably for about 6 months, and strapping all this stuff to MySQL hasn't caused us to pull all our hair out. The interface for managing this system is slowly coming together, thanks to Erin and PHP. The main reason it's been so slow is that we are trying to get all this stuff generalized enough so it will remain independent of where it is placed, and not rely on which servers are doing what work. So interface development is the last step in a process that requires us to watch out for traps that would make our code so specific that it will not retain it's usefulness as a general system.
We'll get there, but we will have to slay some dragons along the way.
Everything old is new again.
Wampumblog shows us that those who forget the past are apparently doomed to repeat it. Whether you want to or not.
Details, details.
Persistent links would be nice(I type Squirrelmail. MT searches for links I've made for Squirrelmail previously, if unlinked this time it links as it was previously). I think Radio did a bunch of things like that. Seemed interesting.
And I don't see no spell check. I spell OK, but type like crap. Spell check would be very handy, indeed.
Also, how am I going to add a tab to entries, when it just jumps to the next item on the page? I suspect there are control characters involved.
More sideblog stuff.
Kevin Drum is the CalPundit. He's entirely too reasonable. I was going to buy out his ad on Blogspot, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. That's changed since I bought out Atrios'.
Wish I could get the weather thingy I have in SquirrelMail on the sidebar. It's pretty nice. So is Squrrelmail.
Something new.
First entry in the Postfix category. Let's make a link to my copy of the Postfix online documentation. Might come in handy.
I'm not up to speed on Postfix by any stretch of the imagination, even though there are roughly 2000 people using my mail server. My standards for up to speed might be different than yours.
Well, that sucked.
Just had to drop this
width: 400px;
into the content portion of the stylesheet, and it looks like crap unless I set IE to use View|Text Size|Smallest off the main bar. I really hate IE. This is version 5.50, SP1.
I hate this sort of stuff, Let's call it good for now, and move on, bemoaning the injustices of day to day life as we walk.
Going to have to reign in the width here.
I'm fat enough without having my yapping falling off the edge of the page. Now, where's the entry width default portion of the templates. Hunting again.
Mozilla vs. Internet Explorer
Damn it, there are auto link buttons when I use IE, as opposed to Mozilla. Damndamndamndamndamn. I like Mozilla. I don't like IE. I have become addicted to tabs, mainly because I leave things like my Big Brother monitoring page up 24/7. And now I'm thinking that if I was doing this in IE I could quick link to BB. Damn.
So now I'm going to add the link to the above BB in IE. Yes it was easier.
But I went back to Mozilla to get the link.
January 23, 2003
Blogroll figured out.
I had to enter HTML by hand in the Index template. Not great, but I got it going. Yo, Atrios, don't let it go to your head.
More questions.
Also, how do I edit the blogroll over there? Seems like it would be just laying around, but I can't find it very quickly. Again, I feel like I'm missing a tab or button somewhere.
Simple questions.
How am I supposed to make a link in Movable Type? I mean, I know I can make one with HTML code, but everything else has a button. I think I'm missing part of the editing interface. Maybe it's the same place the metafiilter link buttons are in Mozilla.
Let's see what we can do.
I wonder what it is exactly that requires people to state that where they are is better than someplace they have never been? How could a reasonable person assume they were making an informed judgement without any data to go on?
Test Post
The inevitable test post, with a link to someplace, hopefully.
Things that don't work
Seems that I can't get ascending and descending to work, in posting order. Also, I can't seem to get the rebuild to change that typo in the title of the previous entry.
Second post
This is where we try links. http://www.metafilter.com is a site that I read frequently.