The Net Monkey

This past Thursday — the day before Christmas Eve — the city received, in the wee hours of the morning, approximately 9 inches of snow throughout the entire metropolitan area. Later that morning, I ended up making it to the office, and then decided to leave after lunchtime, but not without getting my car out of the snow drift in to which I drove it.

After I came home I noticed that it was chilly in the house. I looked at the thermostat and it read 65 degrees. “Wonderful,” I thought. The guy who worked on it earlier this month warned me that it may not be able to keep up when the temperature outside dips below freezing. Well, he was right. I’m going to need a whole new furnace, so I scheduled the installation for today (Monday).

Since it was too cold to stay here comfortably, I ended up going to my parents house and sleeping there from Thursday through last night (Sunday). I’ve learned, unfortunately, that I can’t ever get a complete night’s rest while there. Too many things are happening, and too many people get up before dawn. Is this what I’ll end up doing when I reach my 50’s?

Anyway, the furnace was installed this afternoon, and it took about four hours to get the temperature inside the condo from 55 to 72 degrees. I’m quite happy with the new unit, and now this will be a non-issue when I decide to sell the place.

I completed all of my Christmas shopping yesterday. It is nice to actually have it finished before the day of Christmas Eve. Every year since I have been buying Christmas presents for my family, I have had to finish it up at the last minute. Not this year! I finally stopped being a slack-ass and got off my butt to finish it a week ahead of schedule. I’m patting myself on my back as we speak.

Now all I need to do is wrap this stuff, and it is going to take at least a few days for me to buy gift wrap. So maybe everything will be done at the last minute anyway?

I was checking my RSS feeds this morning and found this one via SecurityFocus.

http://www.sophos.com/spaminfo/articles/spamradio.html

A public radio reporter over in Philadelphia left a nasty-gram in a voicemail box belonging to a company she believed was spamming her.

“Hi, my name is Rachel, and my telephone number is [number]. I wanted to tell you that you’re evil, horrible people. You’re awful people. You represent horrible ideas. God hates you and he wants to kill your children. You should all burn in hell. Bye.”

While I do share some of her sentiment, especially the part about God wanting to kill their babies, I would have just reported the e-mail to Spamcop and fed it to SpamAssassin; or, I would have just hit the delete key and got on with my life. It’s only e-mail, after all.

Unfortunately, Rachel made the critical mistake of leaving her work telephone number, and subsequently got shit-canned for it. Not the smartest thing to do.

I fucking hate spam.

As the systems administrator at work, I have spent a significant amount of time throughout my tenure working on ways to keep spam out of our customers’ mailboxes. I’ve spent hours and hours configuring, tweaking, looking at graphs, staring at logs, and reading reports. Lets not forget all of the customer support involved because you just know that someone actually wants to get those stupid newsletters.

I’m actually quite proud of the system I’ve built. I enjoy building systems and making things work, and coming up with elegant solutions to problems, but no system can perfectly fight the spam pandemic. In the end, you’re only able to block most of the shit that enters the system.

Here are some interesting statistics from our mail server for the last 24 hours.

• Rejected by Blacklists & Content Filter: 9,286
• Rejected by Virus Scanner: 159
• Rejections for Other Policy Reasons: 2,313
• Mail Actually Delivered to Customers: 7,832

As you can see, the majority of e-mail hitting our mail server, approximately 66 percent, never actually gets delivered to our customers. I think that’s fucking sad. Don’t you?

I went to the Bellflower Clinic today for a round of STD testing. In the past, I went to Bellflower for regular HIV screening; however, this is the first time I’ve been tested for everything else. (In case you are wondering, nothing prompted me to get tested besides simply being overdue for it.)

It wasn’t entirely as I expected. I wasn’t thrilled having to drop trow in front of the nurse so she could test for gonorrhea and chlamydia, but she was really nice and made the whole experience easy. I think she is the first female to touch my junk since I was a kid (and even then it was my pediatrician).

I know that I don’t have syphilis, and the preliminary tests for gonorrhea and chlamydia were negative. I need to wait about 10 to 14 days for the final results to arrive, especially for HIV. I’m not nervous about it, to be honest, because I haven’t necessarily put myself at exceptional risk to have me worried. I will post my results when I know them.

I also started a series of vaccinations against hepatitis A and B. I’m specifically concerned about hepatitis B because it is very easily transmitted sexually — more so than HIV. Most people who are exposed to HBV eventually acquire immunity, but there is a chance that a person could become a chronic carrier and eventually develop liver problems. Since infection rates among gay men are apparently on the rise, I decided that I needed to get this done. It is free, after all.

If you need to get tested for any sexually transmitted dieases and live in the Indianapolis area, I highly recommend the Bellflower Clinic over on 10th Street, on the IUPUI campus. They charge $10 for their services and are extremely nice, patient, and professional.

After having listened to the “Saturdays” single for quite some time now, I finally bought the rest of the album by Cut Copy called Bright Like Neon Love. It is one of the few albums I encounter every year which causes me to listen to it over and over. It’s a good thing that I’m single because I would probably annoy the fuck out of my boyfriend, if I had one.

They have a sound which casually reminds me of New Order, but much more contemporary. I do hear what reminds me of the White Stripes or the Coachwhips in the “Bright Neon Payphone” track, but without the expected l0-fi quality. It is the only song which departs drastically from their normal sound. Overall, Cut Copy reminds me of Daft Punk or Felix da Housecat, but sounding much closer to synthpop. If that is the kind of music you like, you should most definitely enjoy Cut Copy. I sure do.

My friend Jason over in Boston wrote a great and funny post to his LiveJournal last night that I thought I would share.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sax1frage/1704.html