fine whine

I cannot be sure of this, of course, but I think I may have been a victim of outsourced customer service today. All I have to go on are a couple of names that don't sound like typical white folk (yeah, we're treading in ethnic waters now, but I'm nothing more than a insensitive American): Govardhana Chakrapani and Savitha Kumari. I can only suspect that I'm either dealing with India or a strange place without the letter 'e'.

So what? As long as they can help me, I don't care who or where they are. But have they helped me? It's difficult to say. I'm in something of an odd position, as I am asking them for help with something to which I have no claim: somebody else's website. Admittedly I am supposed to be making some improvements to it (and I am, really) but my name in no way is connected to the account. So that's a minor hurdle. Might I also mention that this is the third migration these people (the actual site owners) have had since signing up with Dell hosting oh so long ago? Moreover might I mention that this time around the new hosts didn't have copies from even the previous week to start from?

Oh, and that they changed the passwords, perhaps? I'd like to know, in general, why they can't use something less esoteric for the logins for these "professional" hosting services. Why must it be what seems to be a random smattering of letters and numbers? That's what passwords should be made of, not usernames. I get to use plain English for my login on my three-bucks-a-month box, so why not one that costs seven or seventy times that? Where's the user friendliness here? Or is it over on the other side of the planet? This frustrates me, even when I know that I could probably bill the hours spent sitting on the 24x7 customer support line (it's one guy in Bangalore, I'd wager). I just don't want the hassle.

It would seem that I have joined some sort of elite cadre of website operators, those attacked by a certain blasterattacko@aol.com (I'll call him/her/it/them BA henceforth just because it's a silly name). This BA is very prolific, defiling forums, guestbooks and formmail contact pages all over the web, presumably searching for open mail relays that can be exploited for spamming. The fact that BA shows up on so many guestbooks and bulletin boards would seem to imply that the attacks are in fact automated, probably with some sort of malicious robot searching for common form elements.

Within two days of adding my own contact form I too was hit, but I am not a victim. I'm not using the normal, insecure and easily exploited version of the formmail script but instead a better version from the nms people, primarily because it enabled me to use a hash key for a recipient instead of my email address.

Call me paranoid, but I don't like having my email address in plaintext splashed all over the web, not in this day and age of email harvesting and five dollar CDs of addresses available on eBay. No, I've been there and done that (had my address harvested, not vice versa) and I'm not going to make the same mistake again. I had stupid virus messages (you know, the one with a password-protected zipfile) show up in several boxes, but not all of them, and I'd like to think that means I'm doing something right.

So anyway, go ahead and contact me, but don't expect to do anything else with that page. That means you, BA.

You know what really gets my goat? The fragrance of Palmolive original. I just don't like it.

Make of that what you will.

Also annoying is the fact that I still cannot hibernate my win2k system despite finally having bought a video card supporting hibernation. Why is this? I made the mistake of having 512 megabytes of memory. Hibernating 512 megabytes of memory uses 512 megabytes of hard drive space, and nearest I can tell I cannot change the drive upon which my hibernation file is allocated. This should not be a problem, me with my massive twenty gigabyte hard drive, except that my system is unable to boot to said behemoth and can only operate if I use a one gig drive for the system. One gig isn't nearly enough for win2k and its various system files and drivers if I'm to take out a 512 megabyte chunk for the occasional naptime. So I still can't hibernate the damn thing. This too I do not like.

So what is all the hullabaloo about this "phishing" that I have been hearing in the last month or so? Scammers sending fake pages to steal personal information isn't exactly a new phenomenon, though a recently revealed Internet Explorer bug that allows bogus information in the address bar certainly helps things along, seeing as it takes away one more way to spot a fake.

I weep.

Seriously, though, I have to wonder what Mr. Anastasio and company would think of this appropriation of their band's name for such actions. Any more than Hormel would take offense at their canned meat product's fame of the last decade or so. But "spam" I have long been familiar with, and I don't just mean the can of it that has traveled with me since college. I'd heard of it and used it long before it fell into common usage, let alone on the network news. But "phishing"? I'd never heard of it until getting an email several weeks ago about the supposedly well-known problem. I feel somehow left out.

I guess it's just like me and the whole "wi-fi" debacle. But "wi-fi" popped up in those free computer magazines that still haunt everybody who's left the computer industry. "Phishing" just came out of left field, nearest I can tell. Who's making this stuff up?

Ah, how I miss the wry humor of Rocky and Bullwinkle "episode" title pairs. There was a formula to it: generally the first was funny by itself and the second a pun upon the first, like "Pottsylvania 6-5000, or, This episode title sucks" which I will not stoop to explaining.

Anyway, my yearnings for my childhood don't stop at Moose und Squirrel. I've been messing with LEGO bricks, as I have mentioned. I had picked up some assorted Technic parts and sets on eBay, and the last of them ended today. I'd really just been looking for some nice big wheels, and it had four huge ones, and the price was under ten pounds (GBP, that is). What was cool, though, is what amuses me about the auctions I actively take a role in winning: the way that I win. Most people know now about the programs people use to get bids in just at the very last possible moment (called sniping) but I nevertheless can beat people using these programs. The auction I speak of now saw several separate bids from me, one at $2, another at $4.86 and a final, winning one at $5.67 (I usually account for over half of the bids in a a given auction). What matters isn't the odd amounts so much as the exact moment they were cast. The last one I managed to get in with mere milliseconds to go and I managed to beat the other guy's bid by fourteen hundredths of a second and five pence.

Anyway, I thought it was cool. And I had nothing better to write.

mdl42( 88)

$5.67

26-Jan-04 21:22:27 GMT

b.r.florio( 202)

$5.62

26-Jan-04 21:22:41 GMT

mdl42( 88)

$4.86

26-Jan-04 21:20:36 GMT

mdl42( 88)

$2.50

26-Jan-04 19:05:48 GMT

pinkoconnell4( 18)

$2.20

26-Jan-04 18:17:57 GMT

mdl42( 88)

$2.00

26-Jan-04 16:55:10 GMT

It is not without a little sadness that I report that my original web presence, the "Page of Original Content" has disappeared from the web. ACORN has taken down its personal accounts server and with it my pages from the mid to late 1990s. Somehow I never got around to archiving them, and unfortunately neither did Google or the Internet Archive. So, barring some other massive cache of bits and bytes appearing, it would seem that what was there is lost forever. It almost brings a tear to my eye.

Except that it isn't really gone, per se. All of the content that mattered (that is, the stupid jokes and bad poems) has long since been assimilated into this very site, and all that is really gone is the address and the original layout, complete with its hand-drawn two color background image. So why cry? I no longer have my bragging rights. I cannot say, "Look, I was here; I did this." and moreover I cannot show anybody how I once had a horrible eye for layout just like the rest of the early webmasters. Really, it was awful. I even had the little icons of the Netscape and Microsoft banner boxing with (gasp!) an animated gif.

What it really means, though, is that I have failed in my quest to archive everything digital I have ever done. My packratting instincts have failed me, and I won't have those pages to kick around any more. After all, I have a copy of every single image that has graced my desktops at home and at work (I think) as well as ever paper I've ever typed (including those done in DOS Q&A) and so on and so forth. If it were anybody else's work, it'd be an obsession, but somehow being only mine it just seems a shame. I miss my page.

I think there might even have been an "under construction" image there too.

Now that you have all commiserated with me, go out and find what "Free Steve Chung" means. Now, and stop that damn sniffling.