Another Opinion Among Many

Not the phrase. The band. After hearing the song “Pain” on a commercial for the show “Criminal Minds“, I paid a closer attention to this band. I then realized that I had heard other songs from this band on the radio lately and I liked them. Like a lot of bands produced by Jive Records, this one has an edge. Their music is formulaic, which makes them marketable, but its edgy enough that you’ll want to listen for at least a while.

This is the band that I like the most for the moment (although I’ve got a thing for Marilyn Manson’s stuff right now too). Don’t worry, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Aguliera, SRV, and Black Sabbath are still in the mix as well.

We’ve all been there.  It doesn’t matter if you’re using dial up or some form of broadband.  At one time or another, you’ve had trouble getting on the internet, or the experience was so slow or inconsistent that you were pulling out your hair (I have none left, and now you know the cause).

Diane’s been having a terrible time seeing her website, which is hosted at GoDaddy, from her Roadrunner account, due to a terrible time with DNS.  It seems that RR is blocking GoDaddy access (or, in my opinion, too lazy to update DNS caches).

Macbros is having a hard time with page loads.  Loading his site, especially, has been slow or incomplete, and the tech support that Rogers provides is abysmal.  The CSR’s role is to receive a call and dispatch it on a low minute average.  The last time I did tech support, we were supposed to average 400 seconds per call.  Most customers were (and still are) newbies to the internet.  They get 6-1/2 minutes.

I’ve been experiencing similar problems, from time to time.  I moved this site to a new server and I wasn’t able to see it at its new location for 3 days, because Rogers has piss poor DNS propagation.  Many of my fellow Rogers victims use other services to see the rest of the net, and I’ve been tempted as well.  I’ve also had a bit of trouble with pages loading today, as well.  My suspicion is that with the new installations of Rogers Home Phone (DTS phone, not VoIP ), they want to ensure that there’s enough upstream to accommodate the  the phone network, to prevent signal degradation.  I don’t know why, though, as the only problems I’ve had have been chatting with people using Rogers own cell phones.  Everyone else can hear me better.  Besides, as the tech confirmed (what I thought already), is that the phone is using a different frequency spectrum, so there’s no conflict with the internet signals, for example.

I’ve been developing a habit of saying something to summarize things lately.  My new phrase seems to fit here, too.  Its all crap!

you can use the phrase too…I’m not the copyright holder of it (dig at Apple and stupidity)

So, tonight, I checked my email account that I send “abuse” reports from, in case the spammers I’m trying to shut down are affiliated with the ISP I’m emailing (why not spam an account that I don’t care about, huh? hint - I have 200 gmail invites to burn, so I can invite myself). I see that there’s a “could not be sent” response to an email I sent to a spammer’s ISP. I also have noticed that I’ve not received any more spam from any domains with a folder /~tariq in them. Here’s what I got (some of my personal email stuff is going to be blocked out with the “$” sign):

Mail Delivery Subsystem to me
More options Jun 9

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

abuse@netcathost.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: DNS Error: Domain name not found

—– Original message —–

Received: by 10.70.37.13 with SMTP id k13mr3086879wxk;
Fri, 09 Jun 2006 15:06:52 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.70.58.12 with HTTP; Fri, 9 Jun 2006 15:06:51 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 19:06:51 -0300
From: “Corey Thompson” < $$$$.$$$$$@gmail.com>
To: abuse@netcathost.com
Subject: Fwd: 195.225.176.160
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
References:

This IP is still spamming websites with comment spam. They are
violating your TOS

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Corey Thompson < $$$$.$$$$$@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 16, 2006 6:32 PM
Subject: 195.225.176.160
To: abuse@netcathost.com

—– Message truncated —–

This was a response (way overdue, actually, thanks for trying, google) to this email:

Corey Thompson to abuse
More options Jun 9

This IP is still spamming websites with comment spam. They are
violating your TOS
- Hide quoted text -

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Corey Thompson
Date: Apr 16, 2006 6:32 PM
Subject: 195.225.176.160
To: abuse@netcathost.com

The IP 195.225.176.160 has been spamming my weblog daily for about 2
weeks now. The sites that they are trying to spam with always have a
subfolder “~tariq_239files/”, so the abuser may have the name tariq.
The most recent incedent was recorded by my moderator within 2 hours
of 6:30 AST.

This has been a bit of a long haul. You may remember my post about this problem in May. This kind of thing is, unfortunately, too common. The work involved in addressing every spam in this way is too much. But, some times, you can be assured that something good can happen from a bit of work. If you try to go to the site “netcathost.com”, you’ll find its not available. The domain name has been swallowed up and is for sale again.

Another one bites the dust.

I’ve just linked to the Langa List website and the traffic can be interestingly high. We’ll see what happens. If you get alot of traffic all of a sudden, linked from me, that’s why. You’re welcome.

And, I’ve changed my email contact link here to corey at coreythompson dot com.  If you want to send me an email, you can still do so at the new email (and at the old one, if you remember - secret: its a redirect anyways)

I was reading Eric S Raymond’s weblog the other day and felt compelled to put my $0.02 in.  That, for some reason, prompted me to come up with a strange curiosity about how we are viewed as website readers.  if we read a website, whether its a weblog, forum, or static informational page, we are reading the content.

When it comes to weblogs and forums, there’s a twist if you don’t actively participate.  You read the posts and often the comments on those posts (I don’t always read the comments on ESR’s site, though, as they’re often off-topic flame-fests).  You gain insight from what you read.

Without participation, though, you aren’t called a reader.  You are called a “lurker”.   You’re grouped with those who hang out at popular meeting places but don’t meet anyone.  You just observe.

So, the question I raise is:

If you frequent a weblog or forum and only read it, are you observing?  Or, are you reading? Is “lurker” a good term to describe the reading without participation?

This is a graph of the html tags on http://coreythompson.com, according to the generator at http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/ . Kinda pretty, huh?

All possible jokes aside about the title, Stick It an entertaining movie that will be sure to please many a teenage girl (and boy, if he’s even reomotely interested in looking at girls). There are a few questionable spots regarding technical accuracy, I guess. But, I don’t do gymnastics, so how would I know. I’m not always into the teen movies, but this one was a good watch all the way through. Missy Peregrym played a tough BMX bitch reasonable well, but I think that the attitude would have been easy for her to pull off. This was a weaker performance for Jeff Bridges, but he pulled it off as well. There are no blatant sexual refefences and the language is acceptable, so you should be able to let your kids watch this one.

Plot Summary:After a run-in with the law, Haley Graham (Missy Peregrym) is forced to return to the world from which she fled some years ago. Enrolled in an elite gymnastics program run by the legendary Burt Vickerman (Jeff Bridges), Haley’s rebellious attitude gives way to something that just might be called team spirit.