The Time Sink

Well, the discretionary time I usually use for posting went to good use last night in another form of communications... So there won't be the usual "Happy Monday to you too" post here.

Hmmm... Someone was looking for this the other day... It's the page with the information on the port of Active Server Pages to Apache. I hope whoever needed it wanders by.

Thinking back, it may have been me trying to find it for the IT gang at the office; Erik's had it up to here with the evil empire and their extortion system.

Sheesh, I don't think I even archived the alternate site this weekend. I'd better get to that; I like to keep the load times on this site low. Not that I think dial-up is a bad thing... Someday I'll move into the high tech arena; for now it's still USR and the 'boing-boing' method.

Sheesh, here I am griping about homework in much the same way I groused about it back in junior high... But I tell you, that session last night sucked all the vital energy right out of me. ...and there's another planned for tonight.

So I dragged myself into work today, just hoping to survive the day. Overload has been the operative word lately and I was expecting more of the same. Sure enough... But in the midst of the of everything, two disparate sets of words on two very different websites coalesced into one glorious moment of escapism! Ah, what a relief; I thought I'd never loosen the grip normalcy had on me...

"You short out motion detectors..." Yeah, that's just one of the examples from "You know your drinking too much coffee" over at Jay D. Dyson's pages. That was the bonus I uncovered while spelunking around a security mirror.

The main catch was The Early Bird, an ISP notifier for Code Red and Nimda exploit attempts. Dyson's code drops a dummy default.ida onto your system; and, when a worm starts nosing around, the source ISP for the worm gets a call from The Early Bird saying it's time to clean up someone's act!

Well, there are one or two people from my distant past (circa 1970) and one or two contemporaries that will understand my total happiness as we finished up Daniel's latest 'theme' report last night. Shelley had mentioned earlier in the week that is was a 'newspaper' report, but I hadn't thought all that much about it; he's done reports from newspaper articles in the past and I thought this was just another. No, it was to be in a newspaper format... Okay, no change in my part of the gig: Daniel and Shelley research the report; Daniel writes it up; Shelley types it in; and I format the raw copy.

Hmmm... Nope; this one is supposed to look like a newspaper article, only on twelve by eighteen paper! Woohooo! Paste up! Just like in the old days! ...and what a royal pain that can be. ...or not: this isn't the seventies. ...and I have WordPerfect on all the machines at the manse! Just let me see the artwork and we're off to the land of kerning and line spacing

At first, Shelley was worried that they had written too much. I hoped not, as I've only enjoyed being an editor once or twice in my life (and both of those with Daynoters); sure enough, they had about thirty-six column-inches and I'd need room for a proper masthead and the one bit of artwork specified in the teacher's notes. Not to worry! A little bit of line spacing adjustment here... And a leettle beeet of paragraph spacing there... And some for you and some for meee... Oops; wrong venue. Ahem...

Anyway, two passes and I had it laid out for the copy person to handle the paste up. Say it with me now: I love WordPerfect! I love WordPerfect!

Well, it's Friday; and in the land of the sysadmins, this is what they have to look forward to on Monday:

• A social engineering virus attempt that purports to be a forwarded email from Microsoft.
• Microsoft pulling a RDP security patch for NT4TS, W2Ks, W2Kas, and W2Kds after reported errors in loading the patch.
• A compromise in Cayman DSL routers installed over a year ago that opens your account name and password to the black hats...

There's likely more, but I think that's enough to send me home to a cold beer and a good football game...

It had to happen sooner or later: this week I received some spam with a "*This message was transferred with a trial version of CommuniGate(tm) Pro*". Oh, what is this world coming to???

...and yeah, what is happening with Maximum PC magazine? This month's rag came with an AOHell CD! Either they're getting ready to follow their sister publication into oblivion and are trying to bail the financial ship or someone in some marketing department somewhere just pulled one of the biggest gaffes in history. I can't wait to see the letters to the editor next month.

I've been trying something new (for me) the last several evenings: I've been getting to bed before midnight. ...and some nights early enough to actually read a little (Burning City <g>) before I fall asleep. That translates to short shrift here and there, but it has allowed me to hit the office with more energy. ...and that's been needed.

Also suffering are any attempts to clean a work area in the 'library' and any attempt to actually rebuild or work on any machines. That's a Grand Bother in some ways and Just Too Bad in others. For now, that's the pattern until things lighten up.

Not lightening up at all is Brian Livingston of InfoWorld. Earlier this week, a writer on Jerry's mail page pointed to Livingston's latest two columns wherein he declines use Windows XP. That also means no "Windows XP Secrets" book. He continues in this week's column, and it doesn't look like he's done...