Category: General

Remember the good ol’ days? Tastykakes came in waxed paper … Soda came in bottles … Concert tickets were $7.50 for General Admission … All this before there was shopping online … You used to go out to the stores during the holiday season and try to pick up the things that everyone you knew wanted … If it wasn’t there, you could talk to a shop keeper and possibly arrange for a date and/or time to return to find the product you wanted … That’s not how it is anymore … Now, the hottest selling item is bought up before it hits the shelves and it’s posted on eBay for a ridiculous profit … Friend of mine two years ago made a killing with those little tiny remote control cars … Whenever he traveled, he stopped in every place that sold them and bought them all up and sold them individually on eBay (the only place you could get them nearing the holiday) …

So my son wants this ATM Bank thingamajig that’s sold out everywhere … My wife stresses when she can’t get the boy what he wants for Christmas … so she has everyone checking every store they go to to find out of they have this item which costs a little under $25.00 … Can’t find it, can’t find it, so she starts looking online … Welp, my first solution is Amazon.Com … They’re sold out … So I said to her that it must be pretty popular to be sold out on Amazon … So a day or two goes by, and she continues to look … She’s even using the computer while I’m not around (That’s an incredible feat for her … she doesn’t use computers at all, and you’d think with all the computers around here, well, that’s a topic for another post) … So she informs me that all these sites have the thing, but most of them link to Amazon (I guess with a referring link to make their percentage) or eBay … So I’m like, let’s cut to the chase and go right to eBay …

Yup, there they are, on eBay … averaging $59.99 Buy It Now with $12-15 shipping … There was one on there for $45 but it disappeared while we were looking through the various ads and the locations of where these things were coming from … We have to be concerned on the amount of time it will take to get here … After all, 11 more days? So it looks like the bulk of the hoarders are in Washington State, but I found good ol’ Discount Danny in Massachusetts was offering a $24.99 item for a whopping $59.95 discount … So we ordered it, and are paying $71.90 to have that thing arrive at our door … In the field to add additional comments, I almost entered in: “Not such a discount, huh Danny?” … But the wife was happy I didn’t … She thought they would be vindictive and send the item late …

Remember for Halloween you used to make your own costume and stay out until like 9 or 10pm? Around my house, it’s about an hour long and is done before prime time … You can get your costume online now too … I bet Discount Danny sells them … at a discount …

Made a minute change in the headers here and wondering if that fixes the RSS feed? Some people have said that there are errors in the feed and when I upgraded playing with some of the other aspects of the way this thing runs, I ran across a forum entry about a header that was wrong and I updated it …

… but I play one on the weekends … The new truck I got puts me up high with the other tractors … A lot different than my cab over Isuzu … But one thing you car people need to realize … While a truck may be slower getting started, or slower up hills etc … You feeling you can zig zag and zip around them should be re-thought … There is something you were taught a long time ago before you took that driving test … It was called “stopping distance” … Driving a truck, I use this feature a lot … If you cut in front of me to get ahead at a light or something with a stop coming up, you have just put your life in jeopardy … One thing you need to realize … Even though I might be slow, or you feel that you need to get around me or something, if I actually can’t stop, or you cut it too close, I will crush you like paper box … Not only will this be effortless, I won’t even realize it … I will think I went over a speed bump or something in the road … and another thing … If I’m cruising down the highway at 70 or something, don’t pass me just because I’m a truck … pass me because you’re doing something greater than 70 mph … Again, if you pass me and then resume your 65 mph, I will crush you like a paper box … It’s tough enough to drive a truck, and having idiotic cars out there thinking that we’re a nuisance doesn’t make it any easier … Remember, paper box … effortless … you will die …

Working with the band, I have used my cell phone a lot more … I usually always just left it off and only used it or had it with me in case of emergency or silly little calls home to ask about things like if there’s any food at home or if I should stop at WaWa or a diner … When my wife would go on trips, she would take the cell phone to have it with her in case she ran into car trouble, etc … So, for a while now, she’s been asking that she get a cell phone … So, since AT&T switched to Cingular and we have been getting all these offers in the mail, I figured it was time for me to get a new cell phone and for her to get one as well … There was a little bit of a selection of phones, but they all come in color now … I opted for a more expensive phone that has a camera and video in it with a larger display … It was like $150 with a $50 rebate … She was thinking just to use my old cell phone, but apparently that wasn’t an option … There was a cheaper flip phone that the deal was buy one get one free so she decided on that one … It was $40 … While the guy was in the back getting the phones, we realized that for $10 more she could have one with a camera, so we changed to that one … They’re both Motorola phones, so it almost looks like his & hers phones … I got a V551 and she got a V220 … In making this phone upgrade and basically “switching” to Cingular, I now have my voice mail working, and this has been a complaint in the past … So now if I’m out of reach or have the phone off, I can get messages … Also, we can talk to other Cingular customers for free, so if we talk to each other on the cell phones, it’s free … Why have a home phone? What a world, what a world …

So this site must be on someone’s list for receiving high traffic? Reason I say this is because I have gotten comment spammed, and am currently being comment spammed by one of those stupid online casino people … I have changed the comments to be moderated so these comments will not be immediately available … I simply receive an email and click on the link to delete them … If there’s a bunch of them like when I visited my email today, I can list them all at once and bulk delete them … Easy enough … At least this software is better than MovableType in that you don’t have to rebuild the entire site … I think the newer version of MovableType changed that though … I see these sorts of messages showing up everywhere … On guest books, message boards, etc … When will it end? I have even seen them enter into guestbooks that allow HTML and they make their text bigger, etc … Does it really work for them? Bah! I don’t care if it does or not … I just think it’s very rude of them to automate such things and bother me …

Well, nothing much going on, but I figured a post was in order … Last Thursday I acquired a new truck due to the more equipment that Octane has … The truck is pretty much like this one … The one pictured is a 25 footer, but I only opted for a 20 foot truck … Still, way more room than my 14 foot Isuzu … So, if you want to buy a 14 foot Isuzu box truck, send me an email … The truck is huge … almost sitting as high as an 18 wheeler tractor … The grill on this truck is about the height of my head …

Things going well with Octane, but a different thing here and there has made it interesting … From the equipment that is sometimes misplaced to the experiences at the individual clubs … I had new pieces made for scrims that were left at a club and the club said they hadn’t seen them … The next time we went to that club, they were there the whole time … So I wasted time and money custom making the same thing over again …

Sites have come and gone … some are in limbo … others have things done to them from time to time, but noting major to speak of … The network has been stable since the Birthday Bash … I am now working on the paper again … Such as life, it keeps going on and on … Today is election day … let’s see what happens … According to football, Kerry is supposed to win (Redskins game) … La la la …

There are ups and downs to the Internet … One of the major downs is the people who wish to inflict grief on those unsuspecting persons who innocently go about their business on the ‘net … They surf the web, and they send/receive email … But there are those that send out malicious emails containing viruses or simply junk email to fill their email box … Then there are those that are up on all the latest exploits and derive some sort of gratification searching the ‘net for those vulnerable and using that vulnerability to inflict their grief, however lame it may be … In some cases, the people inflicting the grief don’t even see the results … This I truly don’t understand … What’s the pay-off?

Just today I received an IRC message that someone had defaced my Counter-Strike web site … I use PHPNuke for that site and there’s obviously been SQL insertion exploits on PHPNuke before, but I had thought that I was all patched up … This did happen once before and I had set out to fix it back then … The thing is, this was probably anywhere from 6 months to a year ago … So there that site sat, vulnerable for all this time until this grief striker happened by … So, I simply upgraded to the latest and greatest version of PHPNuke, and I hope that they have finally fixed this vulnerability in their code …

The point here is that all these people who run automated programs to sniff around the ‘net for open vulnerabilities is simply crazy … It was one thing when I started hosting to know that I had to protect my computers sitting here on the ‘net, but not until I started running software firewalls did I see the volume of the port scans that actually went on … Because I couldn’t afford the nifty ISP Firewall appliances that cost up into the thousands, I stuck with the software firewalls, even though they weren’t for server usage … The Windows ones especially were bad … They would crash the Windows servers every so often … Having DNS on those servers made all sites hosted here inaccessible … So I moved DNS to FreeBSD Servers … SPAM became ridiculous on the 3rd party Windows Mail Servers, so I went to a FreeBSD solution that did SPAM and Virus filtering, and that took care of a lot of SPAM … I was at the point of receiving 200 SPAM messages per day … I would come to my workstation and become literally depressed about it … I finally had to act, and in researching this, I found that again it would have cost in the thousands to do it with the existing Windows Mail Servers …

Back in June and July, I started looking into building a hardware firewall out of a PC and I accomplished this and it has been in place since July … Those that read the ICUHost.Net News will see when I was vague about the connection being unavailable … It was at these times that I was trying to put that PC/Firewall in between the router and the first switch … It again is running FreeBSD in an IPLess configuration … So I didn’t lose any IPs to the box, it simply packet filters … I see millions of blocks … Before that I had activated ACLs on the Cisco router, and that is logged as well … Millions upon millions of malicious queries 24 hours a day … Again, it’s depressing …

So, yeah … I saved a lot of money using FreeBSD to solve a lot of the problems that existed on my Internet … The Firewall, Mail Server and DNS Servers (MS Servers were easily spoofed) … This discussion isn’t about Windows vs. FreeBSD or anything … It is simply the solution that I found that saved me a lot of money, and in the long run has saved me a lot of grief … SPAM, Viruses and exploits have certainly decreased … But this is a peek into the “downs” I am talking about, and even through all this protection that I put in place, some idiot went and exploited my game server’s web site … Oh well … The other annoying thing that seems to be going on is people spamming guestbooks and forums with their get rich quick web sites … TV sites, gambling sites … etc … Such a waste …

The “ups” are simple … You have access to people that you would never have met … I experienced this way back in the BBS days … Conversing with people from all over the country who did the same thing I did … Ran a Public Bulletin Board System … I even wrote utilities that supported this BBS Software (Spitfire) and I had registrations from all over the world … I will never forget when one of the registrations said Guam … Neat! but the ‘net killed the BBS world … I’d say around 1995 or 96 … But we were very inventive until then … I participated in FidoNet which shipped messages all over the world for free … I remember a guy in Germany giving me the advice that I needed to get something to work properly on my DOS based machine … Today with the ‘net, it’s so commonplace …

There are many sites like mine here … I just spew off what’s on my mind … Sometimes I’m vague about what I am talking about cause it will only pertain to people “in the know” who may or may not know what’s going on with me … But those that aren’t “in the know” can still retrieve meaning from it I think … Recently I stopped by the site of Rob Rohe … I have played Counter-Strike with this guy for probably 3 or 4 years, but he finally got a site up and asked people to check it out … sorta … but anyway, here was my peek into this guy I have only known as Augustus for this time … He has written several short stories and poems … Because of this Internet, I was able to be exposed to this quite simply … The pages of an aspiring writer from Illinois …

Not only are there all of these malicious people constantly searching the ‘net for exploits, there are also these “robots” that surf the web and archive data … Data, data and more data … This becomes data for search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc … So now when someone goes to one of these search engines, they may happen on Rob Rohe, or David Pierron because of some of the words used in the text of these postings … Whether it be a thought out story such as Rob’s, or just thoughts as they pour from the fingers such as my posts here … I believe this is an “up” … I believe this is a good thing … I believe that it will bring people together … Which brings me to another point that I always relished …

I don’t think I have a picture of myself posted here anywhere … Not that I don’t want to post it or anything, but my fascination with the online world was/is this … Most people don’t know the age of someone nor what they look like, so there is no discrimination … I have seen 15 year olds have intelligent conversations with 50 year olds … and they relate very well … I had the priviledge of knowing this information being I ran the BBS and one of the sign-up questions was your birthday … When you were logged on, this information was displayed at the top of the screen for the duration of your logon … I still think the same thing applies on the ‘net … In any textual exchange, the discriminations that would keep people apart in the physical world don’t exist … While I no longer know the ages of people, I do know that they are vast and that this exchange of information still breaks the age and physical barrier … People tend to shy away from the handicapped in the physical world … Online, there is no boundary … If you type it, they will come … (heh) … Some younger people would probably shy away from someone looking like Albert Einstein playing with change in their pocket and having fun with their unsecured dentures … But online, the theory of relativity comes from the mind, not the appearance …

This message was spawned in my brain from looking at the mail server stats and seeing thousands of queries at a certain time of day, and me thinking to myself why on earth someone would check for mail every minute … Is email that important? Is something going to happen if you don’t receive an email within a 2 minute period? I don’t know? I have my mail client set to check for mail every 10 minutes … I am using POP-SSL so I can see my activity easily on the mail server graphs … I hang low on the graph while the other activity runs wild … I don’t understand the urgency … I also don’t understand why people receive a bunch of messages they don’t even need … Mailing lists, etc … Messages that never get read, or simply the redundancy of sending copies of messages to multiple email accounts … It just doesn’t seem to me that there’s time in the day to sift through all of it as well as enjoy the physical world as it applies to yourself … I looked out a window today … The sky was blue, it looked sunny, but a little chilly today … I thought, it would be nice to go outside and take a look around … See what was going on … But I didn’t … I went back to sleep …

And the last thing on my plate today? I get frustrated when I don’t know the answer to something … Specifically, why I would get an email from someone who I have been hosting a couple years that goes pretty much like this: We have decided to move our domain to another host. Please remove the DNS entry for us and please stop billing of our account in the next billing cycle. Thank you for your services to date. … Actually that is the exact text of the message with the domain name removed … Why this frustrates me? Because I don’t know the “Why?” … Why are they moving? I hadn’t had any communication with these people in months if not years … In other words, everything was fine … It’s not like there were many complaints and this was the result of it … There was no word … good nor bad about this, just this message showing up one fine day in my email box … There were never any questions or communications prior to this message … I don’t know if it’s my nature, but if I were cruising along with something, and something else came up, I would contact the current situation and say something like “Hey! I have been cruising along with you for x amount of time, and this other opportunity came up. This other opportunity has this, this, that and this. What do you think? Is this a good deal, something you could match, or what?” … Least that’s how I would do it …

I really like the fact that I can bring my laptop to The Whiskey Tango and do things from there … I can see that these people who have moved or whatever .. I can see where they have gone … In some cases when I do get inquiries, I can do these things prior to someone changing and settle all their concerns … I also use outside web sites to do my bidding as well … Uninterested parties who have no idea their assistance in me preparing a case for someone … So, I can ping from The Whiskey Tango (which is on a local Comcast Cable connection) and I can ping from all over the country … So I ping my network from the Whiskey Tango and I get a 20ms response … From Socket.Net I get about 40-45ms … (I think Socket.Net is in MO) … Almost all of the time, I seem to get about an 80ms response from the places that these people show me that have these great deals … They’re also usually in TX for whatever reason (computers and connections must be cheap there, especially being that they’re 4 times slower) … Why you would want to host a Philly web site somewhere so far from Philly with a slower response time, etc is beyond me … I just don’t understand it … So, for anyone that happens on this bit of text, and they do hosting with me … Please, ask questions … I am very good at researching other hosting companies and being able to tell you what sort of network they run, etc … I can tell if it’s a colo or an independent network, and I can tell you how their response time compares …

One person switched to someone else because they didn’t understand me … and I guess that sort of defeats my “ask questions” mentality … She said that whenever she asked me a question, although I responded to her, whatever I wrote her was all “gobbledy-gook” (I think that’s in this here bLog somewhere) … I don’t attempt to try to confuse people or belittle them with information that I may know more about … I think that if something isn’t clear then you don’t know what you’re doing, and you should ask more questions … It’s not like I make things up … Whatever I say can be confirmed with any source … It just depends on how honest the people you’re talking to are … I think I am one of the most honest people I know … and I say that from just experiencing exisitng in this physical world, outside the Internet … I learned a long time ago what being dishonest would get you … and this relates to any situation, whether business or personal … Your character speaks volumes … Anyway, I think that should do it for today …

It’s been a while since an entry … There have been several things going on … For the most part, I am keeping very busy …

Octane: The first weekend with the band went well I suppose … Me over analyzing everything, and everyone else cruising through … Thursday at The Ridge was a slow night as far as people and was the first night I set up the PA, Lights and band gear … I didn’t get my new boards so we went with the Mackie 24 and the Peavey 16 … The only snag in it was the acoustic set and having inputs for the djimbae … We decided on swapping out the electric guitar channels to use for the acoustic set … There were two major glitches … one being a dirty insert on the spare mic so nothing came through when Bob was attempting to address the audience … It took me longer than it should have to realize this and pull the insert … The other was me boosting an effect to get some sound out of it and not realizing I was sending the effect back through the effect itself so when I got to a certain point, guess what … SCREECH! through the PA for a split second until I swiped the fader down … So, those were the two major screw ups that I was responsible for … We got out of there pretty quick … Friday at Bootleggers went well I think … There were a couple people there who I asked to tell me how the mix was … One went as far as to say that it’s the best they’ve ever sounded at Bootleggers … hmm … There were no problems to speak of that night, and I think I could hear them a lot better than I could The Interns just two weeks prior when I did a favor for The Interns when they couldn’t find sound for that night … Strange the way that worked out … Then Saturday night at Crocodile Rock up in Allentown was the easiest by far … Using the house system, we had plenty of channels and plenty of options to choose from … While the mix was fine according to everyone, the third set was much louder cause the owner expressed that he paid a lot of money for the PA in that room, he thought I should use more of it … “more gas” was the comment … So, the second night in a row with an encore, Brian Bortnick shouted over the PA “C’mon Dave … you’re driving this thing … Give it the gas!” and Sicklike ended my first weekend with Octane … Not too bad a start, and not too many bruises … It will only get better …

Monday: My boards arrived … So going into this weekend I will have all the channels I need for the band and the ability to give them what they want …

I’m not sure what else to put in here, but I have looked into another truck … While everything fits in my 14′ truck, I would like not to have to stack as much stuff as we are right now … I don’t know if a 16′ would make that much of a difference or not … Probably it would … But the truck guy asked me how much weight I was putting in there now … I honestly don’t know … I haven’t been into the truck to re-wire anything because I simply don’t feel like going through the hassle of trying to load and stack the thing by myself and I am not sure who I could ask for help to do this for free … I don’t think any of the crew would want to do this, so I am going to try to do everything I can Thursday (today) …