1. It's Friday. Nuf said.
2. I am waiting for the UPS man with my Agenda VR3. Due before 9 AM.
3. And, best of all, The RBL is dead.

First, the Agenda VR3 - well, I'm not too terribly impressed with the company, and it would appear that I'm far from the first one to think that way. Keri spoke with them yesterday concerning a couple of problems - specifically, the three-week backorder without a hint of any supply problem on the web page.

It seems that the Director of Sales - or the person identifying themselves as such - did not know anything about the product, had never closely looked at the web site, and didn't know much about selling things. The reason it was backordered is that they're running a promotion with a free modem for the VR3. While that's cool, I don't think the promotion will do them much good - that phone call was the first I heard of it. They don't mention it on their site. There's no mention of it in the shopping cart before clicking "buy". OK...

On top of that, the specifications listed on the web page, linked directly from the shopping cart page, are wrong. They list 16MB of RAM, where the VR3 has only 8. Apparently, the VR3r, the next version, will have the 16MB of RAM. I see a phone call in my future, one where I will regretfully be forced to demand either a 16MB VR3, as promised in the specifications, or a free upgrade to the VR3r when it's released. It's inexcusable to promise a product, ship that product, and then deliver something else. Even if Microsoft has been doing it for years.

Anyway, Keri finally convinced them to break the shipment, so I don't have to wait for the modem to be in stock before I get my VR3. On top of that, because she's a wonderful and beautiful person, she also paid extra to get the VR3 delivered overnight instead of by two-day air. So that's why I'm waiting for the UPS man - patiently, I might add. Haven't whined even once. <G>

Oh, yes - the MAPS-RBL is dead. Well, not dead just yet - but they just shot themselves, and not in the foot either. As of Midnight, July 31, 2001, they will no longer provide a free service - they'll switch to subscription-only. I'm not the only one who wondered at how far their altruism would go, and it turns out we were right - they were in it for the money. The problem is, they don't have a product without a large percentage of the Internet mail servers feeding them data - and by charging a subscription, they just lost better than 70% of their user base, I suspect. The large ISPs might sign up for the pay service, but the meat of their database has always been provided by the little guys, the ones with ten users and a mailing list on their server. Those little guys aren't going to pay for the service - most of them couldn't if they wanted to. The link above is to the story on Slashdot - some of the comments are quite amusing.

This doesn't mean the good guys (who object to spam but object to the RBL's methods even more) have won, unfortunately. The ORBS shut down a couple of months ago - four new services have appeared from its ashes, using its old database and in at least one case, its tactics as well. The same will likely happen here - someone will create a free service to replace the RBL. Of course, they'll have to start from scratch - unlike ORBS, the RBL database is copyrighted - and they won't have Paul Vixie ramming it down ISP's throats. In fact, they'll probably face a lot of resistance and competition from Vixie, now that he's trying to get money and power from this instead of just power. Still, someone will do it. And it will probably succeed.

But you know what? Maybe, just maybe, common sense will break out. I wouldn't bet on it, but stranger things have happened.

More later, hopefully, when I have more information on the VR3. Have a wonderful Friday the 13th.

Thursday, July 12 - Hi.

Yesterday was more or less devoured by locusts. I was busy all day, to the point that when I got home the last thing I wanted to do was work on something on the computer - but I don't remember actually accomplishing anything. I do remember several moments - and periods of time longer than moments - of frustration.

So, hopefully today will go better. We'll see.

I did order a new toy this morning. Keri needs a PDA, and work is going to be purchasing an iPaq for me to use at work - so my toy is an Agenda VR3 from Agenda Computing. It's good enough to do anything I might need for a "home" PDA, and I can have a lot of fun playing with Linux on it. Besides, the other admins will be jealous. <G>

Well, here's hoping there's something more interesting happening today at work. Talk to you later...

Wednesday, July 11 - She Got an Owie

As my favorite brown-eyed little girl would say. Yes, Keri managed to give herself a bad cut on her hand yesterday, so my day at work was mainly not spent at work. <sarcasm>Darn.</sarcasm> Yes, she'll be all right, but she's more-or-less offline until the stitches come out, which will be about a week.

Other than that... oh, I got my paperwork from the Gestapo, I mean from HR at AT&T Wireless. It seems they want to hire me as an employee, which given the current employment market is a good thing. The bad thing is that the personal information they demand is more stringent than I needed to supply for access to NASA. I dunno, I guess I was confused by the whole "they want to hire me" thing - I could have sworn that they asked me to work for them, not the other way around. *After* asking me to work for them, then they want all of this information. If it were important to them, shouldn't they have asked for it first?

Does that mean I'm going to turn them down? No, probably not. I'm not entirely happy there, but I don't have too many options - until the labor market improves, I need a safe harbor that I can be certain isn't going anywhere. AT&T Wireless may not be as secure as AT&T itself, but it's close. No, I don't like that they're requesting this information. I briefly thought the reason for it might be that we have government systems in our network (think FBI and wiretaps) but there are two things wrong with that theory - one, I don't have anything to do with those machines; I know which they are, and I technically have access to them, but they're not handled by my part of the team. Two, these forms are not special inserts for people who might have access to those systems. They're normal, printed, standard forms, so it seems likely that every employee has to give the same information. Coupled with the draconian filtering and firewalls, and the monitoring of web and email traffic, and it almost makes you glad the IT department couldn't find it's rear end with both hands and a flashlight.

Anyway. What else did I do? Well, last night I talked to my parents, watched "Witchblade" (which is turning out to be much better than I'd expected from the previews) and took care of Keri, who's already feeling much better. No progress on any of the many projects, and I'm having a hard time feeling bad about that. <G>

Take care, time to head in to the office. Bye.

Tuesday, July 10 - Heat

Like other Daynoters, I'm suffering from the heat. It seems "Seattle Summer" arrived early; normally, it's only hot and dry for about four weeks either side of August 1, but this year it seems to have started early. All of my coworkers and Keri's relatives are revelling in it, of course, but then they didn't recently move from Arizona. It's really not that hot - yesterday's high was maybe 80, which of course has most of you turning away in disgust. <G> And I feel your pain, really. For whatever reason, though, the weather is triggering my Arizona responses - I'm lethargic, drinking water like there's no tomorrow, and in general just not comfortable. I think it's actually a combination of heat, the intense sunlight (compared to a normal day in Seattle, anyway) and some part of my brain is saying "Ye Gods, it's July, bright sunlight - it must be 120!" It would have been true, a year ago.

Anyway, it means that I got home last night and promptly took three hours to accomplish very little. I gave up from there, just watching TV and ignoring everything until about 10:30, when lower temperatures finally made it all the way into the computer room. (It's amazing how much heat four computers, two laptops, and two monitors can generate...) After that, I shuffled the network shares around (doubling the available space and moving all the network storage to the same drive), worked out some design details for the Next Big Network Change (TM), and fiddled with the X10 code in Fido. The downside being that I didn't go to bed until past 1 AM. Ah well. If it happens again tonight, maybe I'll take a nap after dinner and get up to try and do useful work.

More later - time to hit the road.

Monday, July 9 - Ooops

Well, I "accomplished" a few things this weekend. First, the nameserver is now, finally, stable again. I wish I could say that I brilliantly tracked down a problem in the server or in my configuration and resolved it, but as with moth problems, the root cause is an error on my part, compounded by a couple of assumptions. <G>

See, THOR and PUCK were both running SuSE 7.1. So I assumed, as seemed reasonable, that they were both running the same software. Well, not quite; I had specifically told PUCK to run the optional BIND 9.1.0 rather than BIND 8. Since I never intended THOR to run named, I didn't do that when I set up THOR. Having forgotten that, I didn't update BIND when I pressed THOR into nameserver duty - so I was running BIND 8 with a BIND 9 configuration, and there are a few things BIND 8 doesn't like about that. I had noticed all the problems in the log, but it wasn't until yesterday that I finally noticed the version number in the startup log entry. Ooops. A quick download of the latest SuSE RPM for BIND 9, two fast rpm commands, and everything was fine. Sigh.

I also picked up an interesting book over the weekend; The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, by Pekka Himanen. It's intended - and written - as a work similar in nature to the old essay "The Protestant Ethic". I expected... I dunno, something intriguing but light-hearted, like most hacker writings online. It's not. Pekka Himanen has a Ph.D. in philosophy, earned at age 20, and he's written an excellent book. I find myself agreeing with most, if not all, of what he's saying; and those things I'm not agreeing with are generally either minor points or are at least debateable, in the sense that I might not agree with his theory in some case or another but he at least makes a good argument for it. Recommended. Besides, it's got one of the cooler dust jackets I've ever seen. <G>