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Archive for April 2nd, 2005
4/02/05
2:14 pm
Purging!

Laura has been rather sick the past few days, actually vomiting. It’s very scary for a parent… I remember an old boss once told me that, but now it’s really hitting home. Right now, she’s sleeping, and hopefully she’ll kick this bug in the next day or two and get back to her normal bouncy self.

In the meantime, I’m purging too — old papers and rubbish, that is. I’m making a concerted effort to clear out old crap that I’ve kept around due to my pack-rat gene. Some things are interesting, and I twinge a bit when I pass them into the recycling bin, but really, they’re memories past. Like the layoff packet from FizzyLab when that went down… it included the list of people laid off and retained. Some named I haven’t thought of in years. Also went through a ton of old Merrill Lynch and Prudential paperwork that was lying around… I’m no longer a customer of either, so I thought about just recycling the lot. Then I looked… and yes, MK’s and my SSN was on about half the papers. Sigh. So, into the shred / burn pile it goes.

I’m also trying to purge old software… I was going to throw a ton away, such as various copies of Microsoft Anything 97. But it turns out on eBay, people actually buy Office 97 and the ilk for like $35… so, we’ll see if it sells. Otherwise, maybe I can use them for skeet or something.

So… for those who read this (hi Meg!)… any idea where you can go to destroy a bunch of paper? I was thinking of burning it, but that’ll require me to dig a firepit in the yard (not a big deal) but put some kind of ash grate on top (so I’ll have to find one). Or perhaps just dump them in one of Microsoft’s big shredder boxes at work and let the shredder people take care of it. Might work. But I like burning things myself. ;)

4/02/05
2:50 am
Polar Bear Update

BTW, for those keeping track (Hi Meg!)…

I took the Polar Bear to my normal mechanic up in Woodinville. New inner tire ends are needed, maybe some ball joints. $300 parts and labor. Shocks are OK, they’re not springy as they are when they get bad. Probably just an adjustment with the torsion bar.

Hmmm…. so, think I’ll need to let the Quality Auto Care guys stick to the cheap-o oil changes…

4/02/05
2:41 am
WordPress spamming

Just saw that Wordpress is spamming and got banned from Google. I use WordPress for this blog, but was rather surprised to find that they were so blatant about it.

I also noticed that phpnuke.org also appears to be spamming — they have (or at least had) a number of phantom hosts, like insurance4u.phpnuke.org, which were clear spam.

What kinda concerns me here isn’t that some people spammed… there’s lots of people that spam. But it’s that popular open source is seeing spam as a way to make money… I mean, that’s just bad. Effectively, what it does is cause a pretty big side of a community to suddenly shift and kill one of their own.

I’m not sure now what will happen to WordPress…. I’ll be interested to see what happens when a star hacker (as is Matt, the guy who wrote all this software) gets nailed pulling a stunt like this. Maybe people will leave? Or perhaps take out links back to the main site? Or perhaps they’ll do nothing…