All posts by rbowen

Harvest and Winery festival

Yesterday we went to the Chrisman Mill Harvest and Winery Festival, held at the beautiful Chrisman Mill Winery near Nicholasville. If you haven’t been out there, you really should go. It’s gorgeous this time of year.

The event was sponsored by Lexus of Lexington, 94.5, and a variety of other businesses. There were a dozen or so local artisans displaying their wares. And, since Chris and Denise have an adorable 4-year-old boy, there was also a lot of stuff for the kids.

We jumped in an inflatable castle, which was amazingly dangerous, and a ton of fun. And we painted a t-shirt with grape juice. There were also some of those fabric paints, and Sarah, somehow, managed to give it a good squeeze right when the wind gusted, and painted some shirts 2 tables away. The people wearing them were quite surprised. Sarah was certain that she had had no part in the event, so I took her side. 😉 I, for one, thought the purple looked quite attactive on their shirts. They seemed to think differently.

Oh, and the Chrisman Mill blackberry wine is out. I really should write about that over on my other journal, where I haven’t written anything for entirely too long.

Yeah. I’ll do that. A little later.

Network Solutions

I’d like to tell you a little story about my other favorite registrar. Network Solutions. Or, as we like to call them, Network Problems.

I have a customer. Let’s call him Bob. He has a domain name. Let’s call it example.com. This domain name was part of the Verisign hosted services program. (For those of you joining late, Verisign and Network Problems are the same company.) This means that the dns, email, and web site are all hosted at Verisign. And it means that if they wanted to add an email address, they pay an additional $n a month. I don’t know what that number is. It doesn’t matter.

So, Bob wanted to move his email hosting to our mail server, so that he could have 20 email accounts rather than 1. Easy, right? You just change the MX record. 5 minutes, tops.

Or, not.

I got on the Verisign management interface, and there’s no place to manage MX records. You can add and remove email accounts, but you can’t point the record elsewhere. I called Verisign Websites and tried to find out what needed to be done to fix this. They said that nothing could be changed on the domain. It is hosted by them, and, technically, they own the domain. If you don’t want it hosted with them, then go get another domain. Nyeah, nyeah. I replied that this was a really amazingly dumb policy, and that I would be transferring my domain to another registrar immediately.

Clearly, in retrospect, I should have done just that.

The manager that I got on the phone after a few minutes of hold time said that I should cancel the hosted account, which would automatically transfer the domain over to a regular NetSol registrar account, and I could manage the DNS servers there.

So, I still can’t change the MX record, and now I have to host not only the email server, but the DNS server, and the web site. All in the name of adding a few email accounts. Fine, I say, and agree to this.

A mere 5 days later, I’m able to manage the domain on the NetProb web site. I can log in (oops, they changed the username. Didn’t we mention that?) and edit the DNS records on the domain.

And, for a glorious 2 days, everything worked.

Then Bob called. We can’t see our web site. And we’re not getting mail.

I checked everything. Everything was working.

I checked the whois record. It lists no DNS servers. Not the wrong ones. Just none at all. And, of course, since Verisign/Network Solutions are flaming morons, requests for the web site go to the Verisign sitefinder “service”. (To quote someone on Slashdot, can I punch you in the face, and call that a service too?)

I went back to the web site, and added the DNS servers back on, and was promised speedy results in 48-72 hours. But, 3 days later, there were still no DNS servers listed. Repeat that process twice, and I’m starting to get rather steamed, and Bob is running out of patience.

I called NetProb, and they made the edit for me while I was on the phone. Except that it didn’t work.

I called them again this morning, and the customer service dude tried to make the edit, and told me that it wasn’t working, and that he’d escalate this to the engineering staff to find out why it was not working.

So, here we are, 2 MONTHS later, and the 5 minute task of changing an MX record has turned into a multi-thousand-dollar process (in time and frustration) that threatens to lose us a customer.

I think I’ll be transferring this domain elsewhere in the very near future.

Stupid remarks on NPR

Today seems to be The Day for stupid remarks on NPR. I feel I’m forgetting one, but here are two that struck my fancy.

As I become more and more baffled about the US role in Iraq, and why we want to dump 87 BILLION dollars there this gem came up. They were talking to a political scholar in Iraq – someone who understands the Iraqi people and their politics in a way that we never will, and he said the following: “If the new constitution is written under the gaze of the United States, the Iraqi people will not accept it.” Meaning that, even if one accepts the notion that we freed them from tyrany, we don’t think like they do, and so a constitution that we write will not mesh with their beliefs and needs. A very reasonable thing to say, I would think. But, in response to this, NPR commented “This is the sort of sentiment that will have to be overcome in order for the process to move forward.”

Overcome.

As though they are wrong, we are right, and we must persuade them of this before any progress can be made.

Here’s an analogy, for those of you who like analogies. The French helped us (the United States of America) to overcome the British in our struggle for independence. That was very nice of them. Should they have written our constitution? No, of course not. This is no different. These people have the right to create their own form of government, and we have the responsibility to give good advice, but then to get out of the way.

OK, here was another stupid remark.

The prime minister of (somewhere – I actually missed where) is making his daughter go to work at McDonalds. Seems a very reasonable thing to do, even if it wasn’t politically motivated. But he said that he was protesting a news story of a 13-year-old who had turned to prostitution in order to pay for her party life and dance clubs. So, he wanted his daughter to work for an income, even though he is one of the richest people in the country. All sounds very reasonable.

OK, so here comes NPR’s brilliant comment. “The report did not include comments from the daughter.” What annoys me about this remark is that it seems designed to disparage the prime minister, imply that this was done against the wishes of the dughter, and was a cruel thing to do to her. All without actually saying this, or presenting any real data to support it.

There were some other really stupid moments this morning, and most of them were in Mandalit del Barco’s remarks about voting machines in the pre-election electronic voting going on in California. She talked about the easy-to-use voting machines as though they were the most complicated thing she’d ever encountered. When she was talking with an election official about voting early, she actually said “you are encouring people to vote early and vote often.” And she generally went out of her way to act as though she was shocked at seeing 135 options for the position of governor.

The entire story could be summarized as “California is encouraging voters to vote early, technically as Absentee Voters, in order to reduce congestion on election day.” But, they made it into a 10 minute discussion of Mandalit del Barco’s inability figure out a touch-screen voting machine.

I tell you, if she didn’t have such a cool name, I’d tune to a different channel when she starts talking, but I just love to hear her say her name.

Snooze

When the alarm starts in the morning, most folks have to reach out and press the snooze button. Many people can do this without even waking up or being aware of it happening. For this effort, they are rewarded with 9 more minutes of slumber.

Not I.

I have to get out of bed, turn on the monitor, wait for it to warm up, log in (username, password), and type ‘snooze’ at the command line. For this effort, I get only 5 more minutes of napping. Most days, it’s hardly worth the effort, and I just stay out of bed. Which is, of course, the point.

This morning I woke up about 30 minutes late, to discover that crond had died at some point, for some unknown reason. The disconcerting thing was that I would still wake up at such an unpleasantly early hour, even without the alarm.

Installfest

The LPLUG had an installfest today. It ran from 10 to 6, and by the time I left at 1, nobody had showed up to do an install. It was just folks who already had Linux installed, sitting around with tons of free stuff (contributed by various sponsors) and food, watching movies.

I hope that someone showed up before the end of the day. But, what with the rain, and the UK/Florida gain, I guess it was looking pretty grim. Kinda disappointing, but still it was a lot of fun, and I indoctrinated a few more people into GPG, so it wasn’t a loss.

Expired ticket

I just discovered that i allowed my free plane ticket, acquired by giving up my seat on an overbooked flight, expire. I’m really bummed about this, since I had about a dozen places in mind to go with it, and never got around to it. This sucks, tremendously.

Public service announcement

The following is intended as a public service announcement only. I am not looking for comments, condolances or wisecracks. However, large cash gifts are always appropriate. This is intended primarily for my remote friends – that is, those folks with whom I am not in frequent enough contact, or who don’t live close enough, that they would already know this. In other words, this is intended to prevent awkward moments at parties, conferences, and on IRC.

As of last Friday, according to the court of the state of Kentucky, I am no longer married.

Further discussion of related issues will have to wait for another time, since it’s a little hard to be objective. Or, to quote Stevie Nicks (which, of course, I try to do as often as possible) “It’s hard to be civil, and it’s real hard to be nice.”

Flying moose ears

Yesterday on the way home, I drove behind a car with a license plate “500 ERR”, and wondered if it was intentional.

Which reminded me of something I saw a few weeks ago, and even took a picture of, because it amused me. But I suspect that only Ken, and perhaps other regular residents of #apache, will see the humor in it.

Note, it’s a pretty bad picture, and it may be a little hard to even pick out what I was taking the picture of, let alone why it’s funny.

Tribes and political correctness

I am, once again, having the discussion with some well-intentioned (I assume) person intent of persuading me that the term “tribe” is necessarily pejorative. That it necessarily refers to Africans, and implies “primitive”.

I find political correctness to be abhorent for this very reason. It strives to take things that are in the common usage and cast them as offensive. Thus, we can’t use the word Chairman (gender-specific), patient (should be “person receiving treatment” – patient implies someone is sick, which is offensive), or black hat (racial bias). We are reduced to grunting, because any use of specific terms will offend someone.

I’m not having any of this. Words mean things. If ignorant people find words offensive, then they will just have to get over it. I refuse to cripple my communication skills just because someone is intent on being a victim.

For the record, the people of Africa refer to themselves by what tribe they are a member of. This has been my experience my entire life. The government of Kenya uses the term tribe when referring to the 42 ethnic/social/religious/family groups that live in Kenya. The term tribe is descriptive and precise. It does not imply anything other than what the dictionary says it implies – a group of people who are joined by ancestry, language, history, geography, religion, and various other social and ethnic factors. The word “tribe” prevents me from having to say that every time.

People that try to shoe-horn offence into every nook and cranny reduce us to uncommunicative morons. We’re always walking on eggs about what we say, in case someone take offence.

And of course it’s not just about whether someone is offended. I don’t much care whether people are offended. What’s frightening is that they can sue because they are offended. They can call it discrimination. They can call it “creating a hostile workplace.” They can call it hate speech. And they can sue. That’s bizarre, wrong, and violates my constitutional rights.

All, of course, IMHO, and I’m probably wrong, and I apologize if I offended anyone.