March 2005 Archives

Spammers are resorting to anagrams in their mail subjects to try and get round spam filters. While looking through the emails that had been marked as spam at work, I came across this little gem:

use only pfrseosional sfotware, be prsoefsional

This one still got marked as spam. Will they ever give up?

I've been playing around with the set up of my blog a lot over the last week or so. No idea why, I just got into the mood to see what was out there I could bolt on to it. I've added the Blogroll, I've added a hack to save and rebuild templates in one go, and I've added a plugin which should close all comments on posts more than 28 days old. This last one is a further attempt to reduce the ridiculous amounts of comment spam I'm getting.

Unfortunately, instead of getting a dozen or so emails a day asking me to approve spam comments (or not), I'm now getting an email every 15 minutes telling me there's an error somewhere in the code. And for the life of me, I can't find where the error is. So, if anyone else out there uses a Movable Type 3 blog (and there are one or two of you out there, I know) and have a cron daemon set up on your server, and you're also getting this error message:

Subroutine approve_comment redefined at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 1996.

can you please tell me how to fix it? I know a bit about Perl, but not enough to be able to decipher 5000 lines of code in a couple of evenings, so any help would be appreciated. Ta.

My cousin and my dad have spent the last few (several) years compiling our family tree, and augmenting it with lots of pictures. Pictures of people, pictures of headstones, scans of birth, marriage and death certificates..... the only thing we don't have is little audio files of people saying "Hi!" Our family tree photo directory currently stands at 223Mb...... ouch.

However, we also like to share the family tree with other distant relatives. And yes I do mean "distant" in both senses of the word. We've tried emailing photos to people, sending them through Yahoo Messenger and ICQ, setting up FTP servers and so on, all with varying amounts of success. The latest thing we're going to try is a little program called Hello, a picture sharing program that lets you share pictures and chat about them. That's it, nothing else.

I gave it a try earlier tonight and all I can say is "works for me!"

Time to play catch-up with the events of the weekend. It's been fairly quiet all told, and I've managed to relax and recouperate from work for a few days. Phew. Only downside to next week is that there's a bank holiday which means we get paid on Friday instead of Thursday. I'll come back to that later.

Saw my son lots and lots over the weekend. Ex-wife and I took him shopping for a new bike on Saturday. He's has his old bike for nearly three years now, and since he's only five and a half, it's about time he grew out of it! Apparently my ex's dad had promised him a new bike for his birthday, and since the only thing that's happened since his birthday has been winter, now's the time to get him measured for a bike. So we managed to have a civilised day out, shopping. I know lots of married couples can't have a civilised day out shopping with each other, let alone divorced couples, but since I wasn't being asked to pay for absolutely everything it all went fine as far as I'm concerned.

Ex-wife's new boyfriend (and since that's going to be a handful to type in all the time, I'll call him XWNB) is a bit of a Doctor Who fan, inasmuch as he's got videos of some of the old stories. My son has been watching these, not from behind the sofa, but from the edge of his seat. In the car on the way to get his bike he told me all about Davros and the Daleks, so we promised him he could watch the new series if he was well-behaved. Which he was, by and large. We only had one small tantrum and that was when we crossed the road to avoid going into the Disney Store. He spotted it and wanted to go in, and got in a bit of a strop when we wouldn't let him.

There has probably been many column inches (or should that be kilobytes) written about the new series of Doctor Who, and all I'm going to add is this: I was a keen Doctor Who fan when I was a child, watching the Jon Pertwee shows avidly and then losing interest halfway through the Tom Baker years. Either the show was getting cheaper and tackier, or I'd gotten old enough to realise it was cheap and tacky. Whatever. So I wasn't really bothered one way or the other that it was coming back, but I kinda got caught up in all the hype and watched it anyway. I thought it was enjoyable enough hokum and I'll probably watch it next week as well. I hope they turn it into a serial rather than lots of one-off episodes, but the first one of a new series always has to be a scene-setter, so I'll give it a chance.

Back to my son, who was very energetic today. I asked him where he got his energy from, and he replied "Monsters Inc", which is as good an answer as any. He loves to wrestle with me, jumping all over me and using my body as a punchbag, but today he was a bit more enthusiastic. He kept trying to kick and chop me. So, naturally, I asked him where he learned all this kicking stuff. "Dora the Explorer" was his first answer. "What else have you been watching?" I asked, not quite believing that Dora was a karate expert. So he came clean. "Jackie Chan!" he enthused. A-ha, now we're getting somewhere. Now I know what to expect next time.

As promised, I mentioned earlier that I get paid weekly. I don't know how many other companies pay weekly, in every other job I've had I've been paid monthly, so it too a bit of getting used to. I've been in my current job over six years now, so I should have gotten used to it by now. The only drawbacks are: we get paid a day late on weeks which contain a bank holiday Monday, and the direct debits go out on particular dates whereas Thursdays fall on different dates each month. So one month the mortgage might go out the day after I get paid, another month it might go out the day before. But on the whole I like getting paid weekly, I only have to budget for seven days, and I'm never skint for that long. Rather than be skint for the last eight days of the month like everyone else, I'm skint for the last two days of every week, heheh.

Is there no end to the levels to which people will snoop in order to sell you things? We have advertising on haordings, in magazines and newspapers, on the sides of buses, on television and in the cinema, on supermarket trolleys, at sporting events, on the radio, on the internet, in your email and now..... by telephone. I keep getting called up by machines which play me recorded messages telling me I've won a holiday, a car or several thousand pounds cash. I wouldn't mind so much if I can remember entering a competition or something, but I don't do that sort of thing.

The only "competition" I take part in is the National Lottery (which reminds me, I should check the last couple of tickets I bought). I'm getting sick of being blasted with advertisements all the time. I know advertising helps keep the cost of magazines and newspapers down, and it helps pay for a lot of other things as well, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I'm half tempted to go and live on a remote island somewhere away from all the hustle and bustle, away from all the fumes and pollution, and just get back to nature. And there are times when, impractical at it sounds, it's a very tempting idea indeed. I wonder if I could get the BBC to sponsor me and make a tv series out of it? Or a commercial channel for that matter. I'd even wear a t-shirt with a slogan on it if it would help.

I've no idea if there's any truth in the following statement, but I thought I'd post it here anyway (it's a "slow news day" here!)

Does the statement,"We've always done it that way" ring any bells?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story. When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.

This blog is going to be a year old in a few weeks time, so I'm thinking of giving it an overhaul. In order to play around with it on my PC, rather than on the main server, I downloaded and installed EasyPHP1.8, which gives me a local web server to play around on. Install Perl as well, backup my site from my ISP, download and install it locally, and I can tweak settings to my hearts content without inconveniencing anyone who happens to look at the site in the meantime. If anyone does, of course.

I've found a plugin for Movable Type which lets me put a quick and simple blogroll on the side, which I'm going to do. Other changes will be losing the links thing on the right, as I hardly ever updated it anyway, and removing the facility for trackback pings, because they only ever generated spam. Every time I look at my stats all I can see is online casinos and porn sites trying to link to me.

Redesigning the site is certainly keeping me busy, I'm using this colour scheme generator to work out how to get it to look cohesive and not like an accident in a paint shop, remember folks, less is more.

Also stumbled across a bloggercode generator on my travels. Apparently my blogger code is:

B4 d+ t+ k-- s- u-- f- i-- o++ x- e- l c+

and if you want to know what that all means, copy and paste it into here and it'll tell you.

A day off isn't a day off unless you doze off in front of the tv for most of the afternoon :-)

I'm beginning to wonder whether putting the word "download" into the title of my little blogette here was a good idea. Of course it's a cool name, why wouldn't it be, but it does mean that every (Peeping) Tom, (Private) Dick and (Dirty) Harry looking to download something off the webnet ends up getting my site in their list of search results. According to my site statistics, here's a sample of what people are looking for. I don't know if an appearance on this list merely means that my site turned up in the search results, or if people actually visited my site as a result of searching, but here goes: (my own comments follow some of these in (brackets) (do I use too many brackets?))

singing in the rain vw advert download (very popular one, this)
brain bullet download (if you want a bullet in your brain, start by visiting a gun shop, not the internet)
squirt babes (I have used both these words in this blog. But not together)
puzzle donkey answers (I got the questions honey, but not the answers)
download classic british comedy
ebay normal brain scan (who wants to buy a normal brain scan? Everyone's got one of those. Give me an abnormal brain scan any day of the week)
how to make bose speakers (only Bose know how to make Bose speakers)
after much deliberation jenson button will begin the 2005 f1 season with (isn't this a bit too specific?)
honda singing in the rain advert download (it's for a VW mate, not a Honda)
download picasso videos (I think he predated the video generation, although I could be wrong)
sex with sheep (again, probably used all these words on here, but in a different order)
sheep brain plates (I'm sorry, I can't think of a comment for this one)
very untidy house pics (how does Google know I live in a very untidy house?)
does isambard have a mum (he must have done at some point in his life)
2005 updated email addresses of uranium manufacturers (Dear Sir, I wish to purchase a small quantity of your product for a little experiment I wish to conduct. Please contact me with a price list and delivery schedule as soon as possible. Yours, Saddam Hussein)
gmail download (is that like a Hotmail download?)
www.latest technic for brain surgery.com (I think you meant to look for www.i want to donate my brain to a kebab shop.com)
westlifes personal address (yeah, like they'll really post their real addresses on the internet)
wicca baby naming ceremony (someone else is interested in this as well??)
eating a spider (mmm, tasty. But not a lot of meat)
kylie minogues bottom pictures (can't fault this one. Looking for pictures of Kylie's bum on the internet is what it was invented for. But why did my site come up in the results?)

This may or may not turn out to be the first in a series. Depends on what sort of mood I'm in when I look at my web stats.

The expected deluge of spam emails didn't quite arrive. It was more like a mild flood than a tidal wave. During Friday I got about 1500 of the blighters, over the weekend about 600 more. During the day today, about 6. So I didn't quite have the major clean-up operation I expected. Good job, really, as everything else seemed to happen at once. Ever felt like you've done a week's work in one day?

Then, on the way home, my car decided it was going to have a sick day. I'd just got to the top of the motorway, about 10 miles from home, when the "exhaust control indicator" started flashing on the dashboard and the car lost power. Not all power, but enough to be noticeable. I managed to stagger home and thanks to my dad lending me his car (thanks Dad!) I'll be able to get to work tomorrow. Although if tomorrow is anything like today, I'll be joining my car in coughing and spluttering by the roadside.

The sun is shining, the air is warm (for a change), the lambs are jumping about like little Zebedees, and all is well in my version of the world. I got all active today, cycling nearly 7 miles this morning and walking a couple of miles this afternoon, before going to get my parents from the airport. I sooooooooo hope we're going to have a good summer this year...

Must be a new one, because all of a sudden I (as postmaster and general IT dogsbody in the office) am getting hundreds, if not thousands, of "returned mail: user unknown" emails from non-existent people. However, all these are addressed to non-existent people at one of our domains, so they all come back to me. They started arriving about 11am and bty 5pm our anti-spam software has caught 729 of these so far, but it has missed another 1485. I'm going to be snowed under with spam when I get in to work on Monday morning...... oh joy.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back onto eBay...

Here's the text from the page:
"You are bidding on my daughter's monster. The monster only likes to come out when my daughter goes to bed. When he does, boy does he scare her! She can hear him growling, eating the toys, and whatever else he can get his claws into under her bed. I've spent many hours with her trying to help her fall asleep and when she finally does, it's normally not long before he's got her up again. My sleepy little angel tells me all about how he woke her up and made a big mess in her room. And she'll refuse to go back in there. But who can blame her, I've never personally seen hi, but from what she's told me, he's scary! I promised her that I would catch him and my trap would get him out of our home forever! My daughter being as sweet as she is, didn't want him going out in the cold all alone, so we decided together, after he was caught, to find him a good home to go to. Well, we finally did it! After many nights of trying to trick him ( and believe me it was hard), we caught him in this bag. My daughter wanted him to have this nice soft cloth to sleep in (how great is she? After everything this monster's done to her, she still wants him to be comfortable). Btw, I caught him using a trail of breadcrumbs leading him right into the bag with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich inside. I snatched up the bag and zipped it closed. Now that he's full (I don't believe there's any sandwich left, sorry) and has no one to terrorize in there, he's fast asleep. My daughter drew a picture of him so you have the best idea of what he looks like. Whoever wins this auction will receive the bag, the cloth he's sleeping in, and my daughter's personal drawing of him. This way if you don't want to let him out, you don't have to. Please, I've warned you about the problems this monster causes (extra messes, missing clothes/toys, and more than enough "bumps in the night" to keep you awake). Thank you in advance for taking this monster off our hands and out of my little girl's room."

Apparently eBay pulled the auction. Spoilsports.

Today my parents celebrated 40 years of marriage - most of it, as far as I am aware, wonderful years. I wish them many more years of happiness together. They've had a busy weekend, inviting friends and family over in small groups so they could spend enough time with people to make it worthwhile. There's nothing worse than being invited to a celebration and not having the chance to wish your host congratulations or whatever because they are too busy talking to everyone else all night. So they partied from Saturday lunchtime pretty much all the way to tonight - they're off to Nice tomorrow for a few days well-earned break!

I went into a bit of a panic a couple of weeks ago when I suddenly thought "hang on, it's my parents ruby wedding anniversary coming up in 11 days time. Maybe I should think about getting them a present." I reminded my brother, and his (almost) immediate response was "Gah! I knew they had an anniversay coming up, I'd forgotten it was their 40th though!"

Cue many hours of frantic searching on the internet for the "perfect" gift, plus a few more hours spent traipsing round every jeweller i could find, both in town and in the Trafford Centre. Plus more traipsing with my brother in tow, to show him some potential gift ideas and ask his opinion. Eventually we decided on a couple of ruby anniversary rose bushes, a gift only slightly tainted by the fact that a friend of theirs had also bought them an identical rose bush and given it to them the previous day. We also bought them a couple of ruby red white wine glasses (if you follow) which were slightly tainted by the fact they hadn't arrived on time (bloody internet shopping!)

I promise I'll remember their golden anniversary in plenty of time.

(by the way, I was going to put links into this post so you could see what we bought them - but then you'd realise what cheapskates we both are heheheh.)

Sunshine. Clear day. Perfect time. No excuses now - no rain, snow, sleet, no "I have to be somewhere else in ten minutes". The time has come, ladies and gentlemen, to get the bike out and go for a ride. First one of the year. As with the walking, this was an improvement on last year, when I didn't get cycling until late May.

Since I didn't know how much my body would complain at being hauled out of bed and into the fresh air so quickly, I started gently today, doing a leisurely 4 miles in 25 minutes. When I first started riding the new bike last year I'd get back from doing two or three miles and hardly be able to stagger back into the house. I'd be dripping with sweat and fighting for breath. Today when I got back I was merely breathing heavily.

So I think I'm a bit healthier than I was this time last year. I've got a bit more stamina. And a lot more weight to lose.

In the last week we've:

• installed a later version of the accounts package
  
• moved the old accounts package from an old server to the current server
  
• moved the last half dozen users off the old server on to the current server
  
• switched off the old server (three years after buying the new one)
  
• installed spam filtering on the email server
  
• decided to go live with the new shop order entry system next week
  

They've resurfaced the roundabout on the motorway junction near the office. They've painted helpful lines on it so vehicles won't career into each other as they go round. The exit slip road is two lanes, widening to three at the end. They've now coned off one of these lanes, presumably so that the two lanes coming off the motorway can go onto the two lanes painted on the roandabout. Even though the roundabout is wide enough for three lanes and I never once saw an accident there in rush hour in six years of working here.

End result: it now takes at least 10 minutes longer to get off the motorway in the morning.

When you've got one guy coming in to the office to upgrade the accounts system, and another chap from a recruitment agency coming in to sort out the requirements for the position of IT Manager, it's probably not a good idea to think, when your alarm goes off at 6:45am, that it's Sunday and therefore perfectly alright to go back to sleep for another three hours.

My blog is only 5% of the real me. There's so much about me that I don't write about on here, therefore only so much that you, the reader, knows about me. Here are some of the things I don't write about:

• The real reason behind my divorce
• How unfulfilled I feel
• How I'm getting more and more overweight and know I should do something about it but just can't be bothered 95% of the time
• How I occasionally feel suicidal and wonder if my existence actually benefits anyone at all
• My ability to procrastinate like no-one else on earth
• How the skeletons in my closet are now so numerous that I'm worried they'll form a skeleton army and overpower me while I'm not looking.
• Various doubts and fears including:
  • Do other people like me?
  • Am I a likeable person?
  • Am I a good father? How can I be a good father when the amount of contact I have with my son is reducing month by month?
  • Will I ever meet anyone new?
  • Will I ever be able to afford to have a life of my own?
  • If I do meet someone new, how will they react when I tell them about my past?

Some people seem to be able to write about incredibly personal and intimate stuff on their blogs. I can't do that - I can't put it online. I'm able to talk to people about some of the things that go through my mind, so I do have an outlet for some of it,

Some of the things I could reveal about myself are not very nice at all, things I didn't want anyone to know about me but some people know about anyway. I could write reams and reams about those topics, and I'm sure they would generate comments and feedback, and maybe even turn the blog into something people may want to read. This blog could turn into the online equivalent of the Jerry Springer show, where the viewers tune in every week to be titillated and entertained even though they wouldn't dream of going anywhere near the studio guests with a ten-foot bargepole, but they watch despite all this, in the same way that they'd slow down to take a better look at a car crash.

But I don't want to be a car crash. Deep down inside I may very well be a car crash, but on the surface I'd like to be seen as a perfectly sensible little runabout, quite indistinguishable from every other perfectly sensible little runabout out there.

Following on from my post about a year ago on this very subject, the renovation of the local park continues apace. Went back there again today with my brother and his family and was mightily impressed with the way the park looks. All the rides on the new play area had reopened and the place was crawling with kids. Good to see people still going to the park on a Sunday like they've done for dozens of years (maybe even hundreds of years). Bit chilly, but clear and fresh. Petting zoo gone, apparently to reopen on bigger and better premises elsewhere in the park sometime in the next few weeks. My nephew wanted to go out on the boating lake, but we managed to persuade him that we'd do it later in the summer, honest.

While at the park and marvelling at the fact that people were doing today exactly what they did one or even two hundred years ago, I remembered that when I worked in Richmond-Upon-Thames I used to go to a Victorian evening near Christmas. The streets were closed off so that volunteers who were dressed up in period costume could wander round selling mulled wine and mince pies to passers-by. Of course it was all a gimmick to drum up trade in the run-up to Christmas, but as gimmicks go I thought it was rather good. Everyone seemed to get into the spirit of the occasion and had a good time. I got to thinking that Manchester ought to do a similar thing in the park. Get all the park attendants to wear Victorian clothes, put on turn-of-the-last-century attractions and sell turn-of-the-last-century food. It would make a change to have a tour of the park in a horse-drawn carriage instead of being towed along by a 20-year-old tractor. And at least it would get rid of the burger van for the day.

Conversations held in the car with my son and ex-wife

ex: we've been learning lots of things this week, haven't we?
son: yes
ex: remember when we boiled the egg and there was a crack in the shell? what was the crack called?
son: a hairline fracture
me: impressive!
ex: tell daddy what it's called when a cell splits in two.
son: mitosis
me: wow! I have no way of knowing if that's right or not, but I'll believe you!

He never ever forgets anything, my son.

So we had a day out at Eureka in Halifax. And very impressive it was as well. We spent three and a half hours there, and it still seemed to me like we rushed around like mad things on a mad day being mad. It was "Come and look at this!" and "Hey! This is cool!" all day. We never seemed to spend more than twenty seconds at any one exhibit. On the way out we tried to get him something educational to play with, like a model skeleton or a magnetic sculpture thing, but all he wanted was a robot grabbing hand. Which he used in the car to grab anything and everything in sight. Aww.

Heh, well I survived the first day on my own without anything major going wrong. Actually I'm putting myself down here because I've run the department on my own for several months in the past - the only problem being that something went wrong eventually.

Today I had one of the directors wondering where I got some figures from (answer: I can't remember, this is what the figures were set to a year ago and if they were wrong surely someone would have noticed by now) and an hour later got told that the figures were correct and don't worry about it. I wasn't worried. I didn't set the figures in the first place.

And finally, finally, they told me the plan of action. There's a representative from an IT headhunting company coming in next week to suss out the requirements for the replacement IT Manager. Which is cool. Maybe I can slip them my CV on their way out, heheh.

I got an email from my sister-in-law today. At least I think it was from her. She used someone else's account at work to send it, so it could have been someone else. But that isn't important right now. The message was thus:

Subject: blog

apparently it needs updating, i dont believe it myself as i know your keeping to your new year resolution about posting nearly every day.

Talk about subtle, huh? I could get bitchy and mention that there's no sign of a blog coming from her direction, but that would be below me. I don't do things like that.

Anyway, on to the post. Today is actually quite an important day for me at work. Or tomorrow is the important day. Whatever. My boss, the guy who was hired to be my assistant when I was IT Manager and then took over my role when it became apparent that the pressure was getting to me and I was making mistakes, has today finished serving out his one month's notice and left. He hasn't given any precise reasons for leaving, but after this event I don't think anyone is the least bit surprised. Although his card and collection didn't quite go smoothly. Half the people who wrote in his card thought he was taking early retirement, and I decided that a suitable leaving present for him would be a bottle of whisky, since we got him a bottle for his 60th birthday a couple of years ago and he didn't seem to mind then. However he admitted to me on the way out that he doesn't actually drink whisky. Oops, sorry....

So that leaves me in the position of being the only person in the IT department. They're getting me to simplify and document pretty much everything, which will (they say) keep the place ticking over while I'm not there but will also (I say) reduce the company's level of dependency on me. The situation, as see it, is as follows:

They're not replacing my manager
They're not going to re-promote me to manager
I'm not sure I want the job anyway
I could do with the salary though
They'd better not piss me off otherwise I will hand in my notice and go and find something else to do
I'm going to pass on all the regular daily and weekly jobs on to other people, and concentrate on the more interesting and important stuff, without having to take responsibility for any of it.
They have let me book off a week in May and a week in August (thought I'd get those bookings in before it all gets too hectic!)

H'mmm. Could work. Could be a disaster. We'll just have to wait and see.