Monday, October 02, 2000
Resumés
My roommate, Rob, had mentioned a job openening for third shift (midnight to 8:00 am) at the company he works for, The Company (that's not the real name of the company, and in no way refers to The Company from Alien, but I wish to refrain from actually naming the company, in tradition of other online journalists doing the same. Primarily it's to protect themselves (and myself) from possible retribution from The Company). I whipped up a resumé (which is fairly plain I admit). I told Rob about it last night and he said he would mention it to E, the head of the department with the job opening.
Human Resources from The Company called me this morning at like 9:30 am to give me an initial interview. I managed to talk my way through it and they said they'd get back to me in a few days.
One hour later they called back, wanting to schedule an interview Wednesday at 9:00 am.
I manged to get it pushed back to 10:00 am.
Why such insane hours, I don't know.
Wanted Man
When I talked to Rob about HR calling me and I already had a job interview he was somewhat amazed. Rob thought I was way over-qualified for the job in question and that I might not get hired, but that E, the manager of the department, said he didn't care. He wants me for the position.
I have the feeling I have the job already.
Microsoft Secondary? Yea, right …
I set up my client Chris with DNS on his server so he can handle DNS himself and went through the trouble of re-registering his domains to use his server for primary, and his hosting company for secondary.
But it seems that his hosting company, being a Microsoft Solutions Company that it is, uses Microsoft for everything, including DNS.
And the Microsoft DNS server can't (or won't, which amounts to the same thing really) do secondary DNS. And of course they add primary records with the wrong IP address for his domains.
That kind of defeats the purpose of them handing secondary DNS if they can't query my client's DNS server for the info.
Sigh.
Tuesday, October 02, 2001
Medicated
Spring finally convinced me to take some OTC medicine for my congestion and while the first few hours where really bad, I've generally been feeling much better as time goes on.
My relunctance for using OTC medication is that as a kid, it never really seemed to work as advertised, and as I've gotten older, I've learned that it's best to listen to my body and actually rest when I get sick, as apposed to loading up on drugs and carrying on with my day like nothing is wrong (which, to me, is wrong).
But I suppose that in certain cases (like what I have now) it's sometimes best to both listen to your body (“Sleeeeeep! I need sleeeeeep!”) and help it along with medication.
Lost Wages
Dad called tonight to see how I was doing (better) and to relate his tales of being in Lost Wages (Las Vegas). Even though it would have cost him the price of dinner to fly there—round trip to/from Los Angeles is now US$25, but he decided to spend a few hours driving in the back deserts of California, hitting such places of high culture as Amboy.
Then again, since he's been living in California, I've never know him to actually fly to Lost Wages, preferring to drive the Californian back desert, so that's actually nothing new.
But Dad said that Lost Wages is pretty dead since the 11th of September and officials of Lost Wages are doing their utmost to get people there, including ridiculous airrates. I think the most expensive I've seen is US$75 round trip, and that from New York City.
So, that got me thinking. Hoade and I have been meaning to head to Lost Wages for some time now. Lost Wages is a Hoade type of town—or rather, it used to be a Hoade type of town in the 50s and 60s with the Rat Pack swinging in town, Martini in hand at the craps table and Vinni waiting patiently to knee cap the poor looser who attempts to welch his debts.
Not that Hoade gambles.
Anyway, I figure this might be as good a time as any to head on out there, seeing how cheap it is. As if it wasn't cheap before.
Thursday, October 02, 2003
On the Internet, no one knows you aren't a Wall Street analyst
“People who trade stocks, trade based on what they feel will move and they can trade for profit. Nobody makes investment decisions based on reading financial filings. Whether a company is making millions or losing millions, it has no impact on the price of the stock. Whether it is analysts, brokers, advisors, Internet traders, or the companies, everybody is manipulating the market. If it wasn't for everybody manipulating the market, there wouldn't be a stock market at all.…”
Via TechDirt, Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis—and 15
If you read the article, it's not exactly clear what Jonathan Lebed did that wasn't any different than anyone on Wall Street would do, other than not being a part of Wall Street (and maybe being a 15 year old kid—that's kind of hard on the ego to be sure). Jonathan also states that the stock market isn't really based on anything rational (like that's anything new—my Dad considers the stock market a form of legalized gambling for instance) and he was able to buy quite low, hype then sell high and make nearly $800,000 in about six months or so (during the Internet Bubble).
I occasionally get spam hyping some penny stock, something like:
From: Tom Schser <me6cafeet@mail.pf>
To: (bogus addresses)
Subject: OTC Stock Play
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 12:40:45 -0700
OTC Stock Alert's Last Two Picks:
CPLY from $.08 to $.53 in 12 days fro a GAIN OF OVER 500%!!!
YPNT from $.22 to $1.25 in 18 days for a GAIN OF OVER 400%!!!HERE IS OUR NEXT EXPLOSIVE STOCK PICK:
C.E.C. Industries Corp. (OTC: CECC)
BUY AT $.19
SELL TARGET $.85 = DIAMOND PLAY!URGENT HOT NEWS: CECC Secures $20,000,000 Equity Financing for the Completion of Revenue Producing and Profitable Acquisition Targets.
And so on. And if you check the history of CECC you'll definitely see the spike around June/July 2003, although it never did get anywhere close to 85¢ a share; it looks like it peaked around 45¢ a share. But Tom there probably never expected it to reach 85¢ a share—he probably dumped it once he doubled his money.
Even funnier, one money later, I got the exact same spam (only this time, from a Dave Schasrger—se1nsei@free.efes.net.tr), only this time, the buy price was 25¢ and if you check the history, it went up, but not like the first time. Possibly someone saw the past history, bought into it, and dumped it before Dave could.
Pure speculation on my part.
Now, it might be interesting to see how the next one of these plays out.
Monday, October 02, 2006
“We're afraid of getting blown up.”
“That's where we kind of agree with some of the people who've criticized our show,” Stone says. “Because it really is open season on Jesus. We can do whatever we want to Jesus, and we have. We've had him say bad words. We've had him shoot a gun. We've had him kill people. We can do whatever we want. But Mohammed, we couldn't just show a simple image.”
During the part of the show where Mohammed was to be depicted—benignly, Stone and Parker say—the show ran a black screen that read: “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.”
Other networks took a similar course, refusing to air images of Mohammed even when reporting on the Denmark cartoon riots—claiming they were refraining because they're religiously tolerant, the South Park creators say.
“No you're not,” Stone retorts. “You're afraid of getting blown up. That's what you're afraid of. Comedy Central copped to that, you know: ‘We're afraid of getting blown up.’”
Via Instapundit, ABC News: Secrets of ‘South Park’
Another problem with writing entries after the fact, even with notes, is forgetting about the notes. I had ment to blog this last week.
Sigh.
Anyway, I have respect for the creators of South Park—they go after everybody eventually, even if it means loosing a cast member (and they were aware that it was a possible outcome).
It also doesn't hurt that the show is uproariously funny.
And yes, they do have a point—criticise Islam and deal with death threats (even The Last Temptation of Christ never garnered its author or filmmakers a governmental and religiously sanctioned death threat).
Damage. Censorship. What's the difference?
The Net sees censorship as damage and routes around it.
One of the services we offer is a manged firewall, and of course we have a few customers that have taken us up on this offer. Smirk called (Friday? Saturday? I forgot to take notes) saying that one of our customers wanted us to block access to MySpace. At the time I told Smirk I'd have to think about how to go about doing that, and when he called today asking for an update, I had to go ahead and do it.
The problem is though, that this is a stopgag measure. As it was, I just
blocked access to MySpace IP
addresses (found courtesy of host and whois) but
what of the future, if (or when) they change IP addresses? Okay, we can fix that, but that's a
reactionary response, not proactive.
Well, I could extend the fix through DNS—they use our DNS servers and I'm sure it's possible to put in a zone
file such that anything at MySpace resolves to nothing (or say, to 127.0.0.1) such that if
MySpace does change IP
addresses it's still inaccessible unless you happen to know the new IP address.
So I could check the IP address periodically (say, every hour or so) which would probably work well.
But that still leaves the Google cache—I certainly can't block Google now, can I?
Okay, just blocking the IP address will probably suffice for this customer, and it takes someone with enough technical savvy to avoid these tactics, but you get an idea of just how hard it is to block a site.
Then there's the whole issue of companies treating employees like children but I won't get into that right now.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Next time, I should stick around long enough to find out the name, the scam, and how much money it'll cost me to make money
“Hello? Hello?”
“Hey there Sean.”
“Hello.”
“You signed for information on becoming financially independant and I'm wondering if you are interested in making money.”
“I'm sorry, but I'm not interested at this time.”
“What? You don't want to make more money? Everybody wants to make more money.”
“I'm sorry, I'm not interested at this time. Especially when it's on my cell phone.”
“But Sean, this is the number you gave me.”
“Be that as it may, I'm not interested at this time.”
“So, you'd rather be a loser?”
“Yes, I'm a loser who is not interested in your meth—” Click.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Nostalgia is caustic, but gosh darn it, I need some optimism right now
Update on Monday, May 1st, 2023
Fifteen years on, and I have no idea what this was about. Nor do I know what the video is, because it simply doesn't exist anymore on YouTube. Que será, será.
Friday, October 02, 2015
With infinite resources one can even make pigs fly. It's still not a good idea.
Well the good news is that the test scores of New York City public- school students are up this year from last. The bad news is that still barely a third of them passed math or reading tests.
And that’s despite the fact that a number of teachers have been accused of tampering with test scores.
So what should we do? Teach everyone computer science!
Via Instapundit, The folly of teaching computer science to high school kids | New York Post
Strange as it may appear, I agree that teaching computer science to high school students is folly. Computers are (still) expensive (compared to books, paper, pens and pencils) and fragile. There's too much to fully understand (even I, who have been using computers for something like thirty years, still can't troubleshoot a Microsoft Windows issue, much to the dismay of my father who occasionally asks) and much of what is hot now goes out of fashion in a few years (over the past thirty years, I've seen the rise and fall of both Java and Perl, and Microsoft go from a juggernaut controlling the industry to a now mostly irrelevant bank with a quaint hobby in software, for example).
While I was in college, I saw the the first programming language taught in the computer science department change no less than three times! Back in high school, I took the programming course in Pascal (which is pretty much a dead language these days) on an obsolete computer (the Apple II back in the late 80s) and I was lucky in that I was able to use the only computer with two floppy drives! (which meant I could compile my code nearly twice as fast as other people in the class). And I can count on one finger the number of people who went on in life as a programmer.
And the sad thing is, computer science doesn't need computers to be taught. It's mostly math-centric theory. It's software engineering that requires the use of computers. Teaching “programming” is going to be expensive if you want to include all students. And I'm not alone in this view (link via Reddit).
Tuesday, October 02, 2018
Extreme white squirrels, Brevard edition
Bunny and I were walking along Main Street in Brevard when we came across one of its famous white squirrels:
![[That squirrel sure has some large ... acorns.]](/2018/10/02/Squirrel.jpg "That squirrel sure has some large ... acorns.")
Wednesday, October 02, 2019
“Night of the Lepus” was based on a book‽
I'm going to lunch with a few cow-orkers and ST is driving. While driving, we're subject to his music listening choices, which tend towards movie and video game scores. As a joke, I mention that he's playing the score to “Night of the Lepus” and to my total surprise, no one else in the vehicle had ever heard of the movie.
So of course I start reading off the plot synopsis from Wikipedia and I'm amazed to learn that it's based on a book! “Night of the Lepus” was originally a book! I then switch to reading the plot synopsis of The Year of the Angry Rabbit and … it sounds amazing! An attempt to eradicate rabbits in Australia leads to world peace through an inadvertant doomsday weapon with occasional outbreaks of killer rabbits.
Wow!
Why wasn't that movie made?
![[Self-portrait with my new glasses]](https://www.conman.org/people/spc/about/2025/0925.t.jpg "Glasses. Titanium, not steel.")