Bit Decay

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.

I just noticed last night that my main server at home has surpassed 1 year of uptime.

fogey:~\$ uptime
6:00pm up 385 days, 22:25, 1 user, load average: 0.26, 0.10, 0.10

This is a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 160M of RAM. It is my main web, mail and print server. It is running SuSE Linux 7.2.

It came close twice before. Once it was foiled by a power failure. Another time my daughter accidentally kicked the power switch. Both times it was within two months of a year's uptime.

I gotta try this tomorrow morning on the Parkway.

This is great!  Go here and click the link on the right for the Hate Issue (Vol 24, issues 9 and 10 if it slips into the archives).

...perfectly capable, intelligent people are succumbing to pampering and enabling features of society that allow them to drift through life ill prepared for any hardship that may befall them. Finally, when something terrible does happen, they are clueless as to how to approach it. Had they been allowed to make mistakes, perhaps they would have learned something along the way.

Going through hardships makes you more capable of getting through the next problem life throws at you.  If you are protected to the point of never having to deal with hardships, you better hope that protection holds up.

...they have the crosswalk, the walk signals, a voice counting down how long they have to cross, and if that’s not bad enough, a sign reading, “Please wait for walk signal” on both sides of the street. I hate to break it to you, folks, but life is way harder than crossing the street. If you need an additional sign and countdown, you should not procreate. On a side note, it is odd how the city government has money to protect morons with unnecessary signs that warn them to follow the already existing signs, but driving down Alder is like driving on a cobblestone street in Guatemala.

I wonder if the countdown voice speaks in other languages besides English.

Perfect! 16 of 16. Not that it was difficult or anything...

Someone posted this picture in a discussion on woot.com.

Anyone notice a slight disconnect here?

Oh, how many times I've wanted to do this .