Bit Decay

In June, I was getting very tired of the continuously variable transmission in the Saturn Vue I was driving. It took a lot of torque to get it to downshift. Since it was always trying to gear up, it usually couldn't find that torque without putting the pedal to the floor and waiting. And waiting. I'd normally end up downshifting it manually just to make sure it was revving high enough so I could accelerate when I needed to.

There were only a few payments left and it still had some value so I decided to look into trading it in for a Mustang. I've always liked Mustangs and wanted to own one. I thought the previous design was getting back to what a Mustang ought to look like but the new retro models really blew me away. My favorite models were the '67 and '68. I think the new retro models are based on the '69.

I looked around a bit and found I could get a better price on a 2007 since Ford was offering additional incentives on it. I found a local dealer that still had a few. We went to look at the GT convertible. Between the X-Plan price, the extra incentives, and the trade-in value of the Vue, we were able to get the price to a point we could afford so we bought it.

Although the convertible is nice (I actually have a tan - probably my first since I was a kid), what I think I like best about it is the fact that when you hit the gas the car moves - even if it's already moving. The Vue would have to take a few moments to think about it first. Even the Saturn LW300 we own - which is no slouch at 170HP - takes a while to react when you punch the gas pedal. The Mustang just gets up and goes.

Everyone thinks getting a sports car would get you into trouble but I actually think I've calmed down a lot since I got this car. Since it reacts so quickly, I no longer feel I have to try to stay ahead of things. It's so much fun to drive that I just sit back and enjoy the drive instead of getting all hung up on the problems in traffic. I'd love to put the car on the track and see what it can do but I won't do that on the roads.

In January, Scott found a good deal on an engagement ring so he emptied out the big jar of coins he was saving for that purpose and bought the ring. He didn't want to tell Megan why he spent the money so he told her that he used it to pay the rent. For the next few weeks, Megan was very upset because she knew what the money was supposed to be for and figured she'd never get her ring.

Scott's cousin works at Medieval Times and managed to get a group of us in free on Valentine's Day. In the middle of the show there's a break and they announce birthdays and other events. At the end, they put the spotlight on Scott and announced he had something to ask her. He proposed to her and she accepted.

The wedding will be next May.

I said I was going to start posting about some things that have happened this year. Here's the first entry.

Charles Anthony Oryniak was born January 9. His parents are my oldest daughter Melissa and Dave, the guy she's been living with. Apparently, for a few generations in Dave's family, the men have been named Charles. To be clear on who was being addressed, they've taken to calling each other by their middle names. Dave's full name is Charles David Oryniak but they call him Dave. Melissa and Dave decided to carry this on with their son and plan to call him Anthony. I think this is foolish so I call him Chuck.

The roof didn't make it to Birmingham on Thursday morning like it was supposed to.  It didn't get there Thursday afternoon, either.  But at least the insurance company's delegate figured out where it was.

Apparently, whoever ordered the roof for the insurance company's delegate had it shipped to one of their facilities in Indiana instead of shipping it to the installer in Birmingham, AL.  I'm not sure when they stuck it on the plane but it didn't land in Birmingham until late Thursday or early Friday morning.  This was the news I got when I called them on Friday morning to see what was going on.  I was told that they would call the installer, give him the tracking number, and let him pick it up at the airport instead of waiting for it to get delivered by truck to his shop.  I went to my training class expecting that this was what was going to happen.  I was wrong.

They never called the installer to give him the tracking number.  Maybe they found it too late and it was already on the truck, I don't know.  So my class ended at around 2pm and we headed over to the shop hoping to pick up the car.

No one was at the shop.  We called and got the installer who was just around the corner.  He came over to see us.  Fed-Ex had tried to deliver but for some reason couldn't find him even though he claimed to have been there all day.  So the roof stayed on the truck and would be available for pickup when the truck returned to the airport around 6pm.  My plan in case the roof didn't show up was to leave for home anyway and have the roof shipped to New Jersey to be installed when we got there.  This wouldn't happen, either, as he had already removed the old roof.  Why not?  They had been telling us for three days that the roof would be there "tomorrow".

At this point our plans were totally shot for the rest of the weekend.  We could not leave Birmingham as planned on Friday.  If the installer picked up the roof Friday night, he could install it Saturday morning but we wouldn't be on our way until early afternoon at best.  This would put us nearly a full day behind schedule.

I called the insurance company's delegate and made sure they knew I was very upset.  I called the girl who had been handling my account and she wasn't at her phone.  I hit 0 to get to the operator and asked them to find her because I needed her immediate attention.  The operator told me she would try to find her and have her call me back.  I called back a few minutes later and left a voicemail message for her.

I then got on the phone and cancelled one of the hotels we had planned to stay at.  Hopefully I won't get a cancellation fee since it was technically beyond the cancellation time.  I called the hotel we were supposed to stay in Friday night and asked them to move the reservation to Saturday.

A short while later, I got a call from a customer service rep from the insurance company's delegate.  He said he had reviewed my account and realized several mistakes were made and wanted to make it up to me.  He offered to reimburse half my deductible.  I told him I was out  about $160 just in the rental car I had for two days because I had brought my car to the shop in anticipation of a part that never arrived.  If I knew the part wasn't going to be there, I could have kept driving my car instead.  On top of that, I was now stuck in Birmingham where few hotel rooms were available due to the races at Talladega and would lose a day of my vacation.  I had already given up my hotel room so I couldn't get onlnie to search for another hotel.  My best bet would be to find a AAA office to see if they could locate a hotel room for us.  The CSR eventually agreed to reimburse me for the entire $500 deductible.

The installer told me he had a friend who ran a hotel just up the road about a mile.  Luckily he was able to get us a room.

Saturday morning, we came back to the shop.  The installer was already working on installing the new roof.  He said it was a bit difficult since it wasn't cut as well as the roofs he normally gets.  The company he normally orders from cuts the material so that it should lay one inch past the tack strip.  The roof he got from Ford was not cut like this and had no markings for where it should be tacked.  He had to try three times before he got it lined up right.

He loaned us his car so he could keep working while we returned the rental car.  He finished installing the roof and reassembling the rest of the car at about 12:30.  Shortly thereafter, we were on our way to Chattanooga.

We got to see everything we planned to see in Chattanooga and a bit more.  We went downtown Saturday night and rode the electric trolley which was pretty full with people attending a barber shop quartet competition.  Most of the stuff we would have liked to see were closed but we walked down to the waterfront.  There was a bluegrass festival in progress so the area was kind of crowded.  We tried to get into a brew-pub for dinner but the lines were kind of long and we didn't think we could finish dinner before the trolleys stopped running so we got dinner on the way back to our hotel.  Sunday we went too Lookout Mountain and saw Ruby Falls, the inclined railway and Rock City.  Due to losing a day, we didn't get to check out Knoxville.

We're now sitting in the hotel in Kingsport where we'll stay for the night.  We'll be leaving for home early in the morning.

Here we are, Wednesday night, and my car window is still broken.

I brought the car to the dealer on Monday morning.  They said they couldn't replace the glass.  If anything, I could work with their auto body shop but they thought I would have to take it to an auto o shop or an upholsterer (apparently some of them do ragtops).  They thought it would be an expensive piece of glass anyway so I should contact my insurer.  They might require that I take it to a specific place to get it fixed.

So I contacted the insurance company.  They took the details and initiated the claim.  They refer glass replacement issues to another company so I was connected to them.  They did some research and recommended a place to take the car.

A short while later they called back and said they found some notes in the system saying that it was a special situation and couldn't be handled  like a normal glass replacement.  They referred me to another company to deal with this situation.  After they looked into it a bit, they discovered that the rear glass could not be replaced.  It is secured into the roof in such a way that the entire roof needs to be replaced.  They located a replacement roof and we discussed how and where to get it installed on the car.  I was leaving Memphis the next day which wouldn't be enough time to ship it there and install it so they had it shipped to a place in Birmingham, AL.  That's where I was going from Memphis and would be there for three days.  That should have been plenty of time to get it installed.

Originally, I was told it would be there late Tuesday or early Wednesday.  I was told to call the installer when I arrived in Birmingham to make arrangements for installation.  We called Tuesday night and the roof wasn't in yet so I told him I would call back on Wednesday.  I called today at lunch time and it still wasn't there yet.  I called the last company I was working with to see if they could trace it.  They somehow managed to find out that Ford shipped it and it should arrive late today or early tomorrow, Thursday.

So, I'm hoping they're right and the roof will arrive tomorrow morning.  I made arrangements with the installer to drop the car off tomorrow and I'll rent a car until they get mine fixed.  If it doesn't show up tomorrow, I don't know what I'm going to do.  My training is over Friday afternoon and we have plans to go on to Chattanooga that night.  I don't think the installer will be open on Saturday so it really has to get done on Friday or we'll probably have to get the roof shipped back home for installation.  In that case, we'll be praying it doesn't rain since there's no way to keep the water from running off the roof right into the back window.

Anyway, we had a nice dinner on Beale Street in Memphis Monday night.  Met some characters on the street, too.

Karen and I have been doing a little traveling lately.  We'll go out for a day trip or for a couple of days and explore.  Right now she is accompanying me on a business trip through Tennessee and Alabama.

When you're out for this length of time, you will eventually need to use a public rest room.  Just about every time, I'll think the restroom is in pretty good shape but Karen will describe some kind of a disaster in the ladies room.  Unflushed toilets, empty toilet paper rolls and seat cover dispensers, unclean conditions, etc.

Are the ladies rooms really that much worse than the mens rooms?  Are ladies bigger slobs than men, at least away from home?  Or do men just not care as much how clean the restroom is?

I guess I'm not really cut out for blogging.  I don't feel I think out my view well enough to sell it to someone else so why bother?  I also don't like talking about myself and there are a lot of things in my life that I feel should remain private.  This especially applies to work related things.  I could probably write a book about things that happen at work but I don't think my employer would be too happy about that.  I prefer to stay on the salary continuation program.

Anyway, I think enough has happened this year that I should have blogged about but since I had kind of given up on the blog I never bothered to write about any of these events.  I'd like to go back through the year so far and say a little bit about some of the events of the year.  I'll write up each one in a separate post.

Let me start by mentioning our current trip.

If you buy something on a plan that says you can avoid finance charges if you pay off the bill in a limited amount of time, make sure you are aware of exactly what that date is and make sure you're paid up on time. In my experience, large banks are generally unwilling to bend their policies. The bigger the bank the more inhuman and inflexible they are. The company you're buying from will probably not support you at all if there are any issues with the bank.

We just got hit with an $80 bill for deferred finances from HSBC for a purchase at Musician's Friend. My wife thought she could pay up until March 26 (the payment due date on the bill) but the actual expiration of the offer was on March 14 (noted in a different place on the statement). She arranged for the electronic transfer to take place on the March 17. HSBC will not forgive the mistake and Musician's Friend refuses to get involved. One more bank I'll be avoiding and time to start looking for other discount music outlets.

The letter I just sent off to Musician's Friend is after the break.

Update April 10, 1:35pm: Well, it seems that some companies do care about customer relations.  My wife just called to tell me that someone from Musician's Friend called to say that the customer support rep I dealt with should have escalated the call.  They will be dealing with the finance charge from HSBC on my three day overdue payment.  Thanks, Musician's Friend, and I look forward to doing business with you again.

I have been analysing my new mailserver's log files to determine how effective various methods are at attacking spam. I think the results are quite interesting.

Last weekend, I noticed my mail server constantly getting hung up. There were 15 processes in 'cmd read' state and sendmail had a limit of 15 processes. Several times I had to shut down and restart sendmail. There was nothing in the logs indicating why it was hanging.

I figured this would be a good time to switch my mail to my other machine. A while back I installed qmail but never had the guts to throw the switch. Now that my mail system was hanging I figured I had nothing to lose. I guess I had set it up correctly because it worked fine.

I had found a real good greylisting program that plugged into sendmail. When I originally turned it on, it seemed to cut my spam by about 90%. So I went looking for a greylisting program for qmail. Qmail can be built with a patch that allows the smtpd program to accept plugins and one of the plugins is a greylisting program. Fortunately, Gentoo has a USE flag that builds qmail with this patch applied. I downloaded and installed the greylisting plugin and noticed a sudden drop in the rate of spam messages to my inbox.

One thing that's nice about this particular greylisting program is that it uses a database. You can look in the database to see what hosts are trying to send you mail. If you can determine the system's legitimacy, you can drop the system's IP address and some other information into another table and the node is whitelisted or blacklisted.

I threw together a web page to allow me to monitor what's getting through my mail server into inboxes. If the node names look phony, I plug the name into my browser to see what comes up. Most of the time it appears to be an email marketing company. I blacklist these and any other IP addresses mentioned in the system's MX and SPF records. It's so nice of the spammers to post a list of their machines in an SPF record. I can knock off an entire class C with one blacklist record.

I'm surprised that many of these addresses don't show up in the DNSBL servers. My configuration references about five of them but the only one that actually seems to flag spam is spamcop.net.

In researching spam control methods, I started looking into SPF a little more. From what I've seen, many SPF entries are practically worthless. I guess it's too hard for some folks to figure out a comprehensive list of machines that can send mail for their domains so they end the SPF entry with '~all' (probably not but maybe) or '?all' which basically says "we won't confirm or deny whether any other addresses may or may not send mail for this domain". Also, if I understand the SPF documentation correctly, a 'ptr' entry would allow anyone that has control of their own reverse mappings to pump email from your domain. Google's SPF entry? "ptr ?all". Worthless.

Anyway, the mail is flowing again. I need to check what gets through the greylist a few times a day and move some entries to the black/whitelist but the only spam that appears to be getting through are 419 and lottery scams. The marketing stuff has pretty much dried up.

The "Name The Party" game has come to New Jersey.

Just more of what New Jersey is famous for - political corruption.

Hey Jim, check the back door.

Don Surber comments on how well Bush polls against Congress but this is just plain nasty.

Congress has no mandate. No one likes them. They are the Jimmy Carters of Congresses.

But oh so true.

This is great news. It's about time someone hit back against the RIAA. Let's hope there are more to follow.

I found this on the MythTV Users mailing list. A commenter there wrote:

I recently read an interesting quote, from none other than Courtney Love, (paraphrased):

Piracy is the act of taking someone's music with absolutely no intention of ever paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster, I'm talking about a modern recording industry contract.