The Akismet plugin for our wordpress blog here on zen.org has stopped—get ready for it—a total of 537,920 spam comments. In two years. That’s half a million.
The peak was in June 2008 when more than 71 thousand attempts were made.
My Sony laptop (VGN-TZ398U aka PCG-4P2) has the horrible habit of forgetting about its wireless device when I put it to sleep/standby. When it wakes back up, I have to go through crazy steps to make it work again. The laptop is running Vista Service Pack 2, though Vista as shipped on the laptop had the same problem.
A while ago I created a batch file which I could right-click an “Run as administrator” to make the device magically work again:
rem Restart the wireless interface, needed on vaio vgn-tz398u after
rem sleeping. Run as admin.
rem
rem cf http://www.wlanbook.com/enable-disable-wireless-card-command-line/ for an alternative using DevCon.
netsh interface set interface "Wireless Network Connection" disabled
netsh interface set interface "Wireless Network Connection" enabled
But this has been a royal pain. Then I found the answer in a post “How do I get a Vista laptop over its wireless quirk“:
In your Device Manager, open up your network card and go to the Power Management tab. Uncheck (what should be) the first option, “Allow the computer to turn this device off to save power.” This will stop the connection from being dropped whenever the computer goes to sleep/standby. Many wireless cards don’t let you do this, but most, if not all, wired NICs can.
My thanks to the user niles on that site who had the final real fix for me. It’s working like a charm!
I have some documents which have to get to the US as early as possible next week. FedEx in Ireland is really picky to begin with, and on a Saturday even has their office closed—and their phoneline hangs up on you if you even try to listen to their office hours. At best, we’d be driving up to Dublin Airport to give the package to them to fly out. Skip FedEx and try DHL — no answer. Gah. This is after I went to An Post in Dún Laoghaire at 3:45pm to try to use their courier service to send it out. The lady said their guy had left at 4pm (it wasn’t even 4), and the best they could do is delivery in 4-5 business days. WEAK.
Unless we could figure out something else, a hunk of the weekend was going to be spent scanning in about 150 pages and then
Our friend Helen, who works in TV/film, suggested a courier company called Wells Cargo (a fun name if you’re from California). I emailed on Saturday morning, and less than five minutes after I’d sent my mail, my mobile phone rang. There was your man asking for some details, and able to have someone collect before 8am on Monday—for delivery to our accountant in Florida on Tuesday. And I can pay them with PayPal.
Very, very impressive. I’ve every expectation their guy will appear on Monday morning; apparently this company’s even in Elana’s rolodex from when she worked in TV production in Los Angeles.
We’re definitely gonna use them again. They so saved my ass I figure a plug is in order. 
I had the best Fathers Day experience this morning: at the hotel in Portland Maine after landing from Ireland, I took our two boys (ages 7 and 2) to the hotel’s pool for an hour. Lots of playing and laughing by all of us. Walking from the pool to start the process of heading up to Islesboro, Patrick, the 7 year-old, said enthusiastically, “That was SO much FUN!!”
It sure was.
Cool gathering of dedicated GNU hackers in Montreal this week. Many, it appears, are here on their own dime/pence/whatever, with most companies not forking out the cash this time around.
… they give you reasons to get great pictures when you’re away from home and miss your family.
What a horrible day.
The car alarm started going off for no good reason—and is still going off now. After multiple phone calls, someone from Ford Assist is supposed to show up by 17:45 (it’s now 17:00). Hope they do. The guy on the phone was suggesting I just wait to bring it in for service tomorrow—until I said my neighbors and I would join together in bashing the shit out of the car if it was going off all night. Oh, did I mention I tried calling the place where I got the car and am supposed to take it for service—but they never answered the phone? Even once? I’m worried that they’re not there anymore, even tho we did the annual service on the car a month ago perhaps they’ve all disappeared. You know, in these difficult economic times…
…and no, they bought the bank, to use a phrase I heard today. Interestingly, their cars are all going up for auction Saturday morning.
Simultaneously, the keypad for our house alarm decided to freak out. All the buttons flashing, nothing makes it shut up. A cryptic “VRKD V1.4 000″ message flashing on the display. A couple of days ago the alarm went off at 23:30 for no good reason, and while E and I were looking at it we saw flashlights outside our front door. We open it, and there are three Garda in full riot gear asking if everything is okay; apparently the Panic Button of the alarm system sent a message up to them that were were in distress. … And now an hour later, the battery is disconnected in the car, and will hopefully stay quiet tho it might go off again. (And only once, Mr AA Guy said.)
So Mr ADT Repair Guy, a nice fellow, came yesterday to check the house alarm system. Didn’t find anything obvious, tho did replace the battery on the panel up in the attic. So now this afternoon it’s throwing a shit fit, and a few phone calls later I’m up in the attic pulling the power off the new battery—to no avail. Next phone call, I’m downstairs with a small screwdriver to open up the panel and disconnect the little red and black cables to cut the power to the panel. Ahhh, silence.
Of course I’m being told they don’t think they can get a new board for it—instead, did I know the Garda passed some 2-signal response thing Feb 2008 (??) so I need to upgrade my system. Mr Sales Dr0id is supposed to come tomorrow to talk about it … what a coincidence that my panel died, huh? Not to point fingers or anything…
Back to the car, Mr AA Guy was really nice and helped cut thru the bullshit on the phone with various people. I have to bring the car to the repair place over in Stillorgan tomorrow, where Enterprise Rent-a-Car will meet me with a car covered by Ford for 2 days. I doubt the car will be fixed tomorrow afternoon, but maybe Friday? Please?!
All of this is going on while I’m trying desperately to get past some nasty technical road-blocks in work that’s already well overdue. Low-level problems which involve crazy contortions to get at the source code for it to be able to know why their bug is making my program hang so much.
And tonight I have to go to a meeting at the school and mention that I’m the name they’ve seen on all of the letters about enrolling their kids in the school and it’s not my rules (but instead that of the whole Educate Together system of schools) which may have made their kid not get in.
exhale
But it’s okay.
I’ve got Elana.
This morning the Scudder Falls Bridge entrance to I95 was just at the speed that made it too annoying to enter, so I drove over to Washington Crossing Bridge. Hunks of ice where flowing down it, not as large as the painting, but not to shabby. I could not help but draw a parallel to the inauguration, it made me a little faklempt about today.
I was reading that extreme leftist web site, Daily Kos, the other day. I was confused as they kept saying GOTV out of any context. I was thinking that it must be this really cool new television channel I don’t get! Well, while there is a mobile phone content provider called GoTV, it didn’t seem to be worth all the comments. Perhaps I was seeing the fnords!
Alas, no, it means “Get Out The Vote”. Even if you don’t like anybody on the Democratic or Republican ticket, vote Green, or Libertarian, perhaps Nader. Or even (shudder) Constitution Party. Write in Ross Perot!
I’m waiting a few hours at the Thompson Toyota, my Prius is getting some minor work done to it to pass state inspection, it still takes a few hours. They have a wireless connection to the Internet, but even though last time I connected without problems this time my PII Debian system was not happy. So I checked out the bank of beat up Gateways with vagabond keyboards in the corner. I wiggle the mouse, and up pops the Ubuntu Heron! Wow! I can tell from the scribbled out tag that these are likely hand me downs from Thompson Lexus, I bet them bastards over there now have Vista. I expect that they just didn’t want to pay for Licenses, but I can do some work!
The neat part is that other people are actually using them. By default there are no icons on the desktop, so some people can’t find Firefox right away, but they find it. The card games seem most popular thought, at least today. I guess Ubuntu really is a user friendly system.
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