Tag Archives: Spammers

Spam, Gadgets, Doctors, and College… (not in order)

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*What I’m Watching or Listening to Now*
Finished a 4 hour Smodcast Marathon and now watching the newest episode of Kevin Rose’s Foundation (Guest this week, Jeff Smith of Smule)

*Quote of the Moment*
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. – Henry Adams (1838 – 1918)

*College*
On Monday (2/7) I started both Cultural Diversity and my Portfolio Presentation classes, so I sent the usual email to my Professors about my medical stuff and a few other pieces of important info like I always do and they both responded the way everyone else has. For some strange reason when I logged into the campus last night to write some of my Discussion Board I noticed they changed my instructor for my Diversity class without telling me, so I shot off a new email to her as well before writing something like 5 or 6 DB’s (only required to write one for today per class). Obviously haven’t gotten anything back yet for that, but oh well, after my doctor appointment later today I’m going to visit a few people out of town and going to have them give me a hand (mainly for concentration reasons) with some of the homework before I go to class tonight.

*Work*
As most of you know, for the past few years we have been supporting the Relay for Life, held by the American Cancer Society and this year is no different. On Tuesday, February 15th the Kickoff Event starts in the Community Room of SUNY Morrisville (Norwich Campus) at 5pm with the Survivors Dinner, with the Opening Ceremony starting at 6:30pm at the Fairgrounds where they are normally held. As always, we’re trying to raise money for the event and all donations are welcome. (We donate multiple times throughout the year if you’d like to donate but can’t get the money in on time.)

*Medical*
I’ve been going through the next steps for a majority of the issues I’m dealing with now and things are going well for the most part, things are advancing but some of it slower than I’d like. As people may have noticed from prior posts, I normally don’t have any issues talking about my personal or medical issues, etc. but a majority of what I’m dealing with now, I’ll probably be vague at best if I bother to post on it since there are a few things I’d like to keep personal in my life.

*Birthdays*
No one’s name pops in my head right this second and I’m too lazy to look right now, so if your birthday is this month, let me know and I’ll add it, otherwise… :p

*Gadgets*
As of a few hours ago, Verizon and Apple have opened up their ordering systems for the new CDMA based Verizon iPhone and it requires the latest version of iTunes to be able to activate it. Since I got my 32GB Verizon iPhone back on the 7th I must say, it’s just as I thought it would be… I’m not going to go into the whole “OMG, it’s an iPhone on Verizon” or even a normal “iPhone… yay!” type crap, I’m just glad that since I already have an iPad and iPod Touch I no longer have to purchase a second copy of a program just to use it on my phone which is what I had to do on my Android based Droid X. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the Android OS, but as stated, I’m sick of buying a secondary copy of an app just to have that functionality since I most likely have something similar for my iPad/iPod. I guess it also helps that I managed to sell my Droid X to a friend of mine (with accessories) for roughly what I ended up paying for the iPhone, so it worked out great.
I’ve also got the new drives for the Media Server in and I’m just waiting on the new NAS RAID (eSATA) box to arrive (should be here by Friday) so that I can migrate some of the drives out of the tower and JBOD them into the NAS box (for power consumption reasons) but this will allow me more room for airflow in the server box as well.

*Travel*
Currently have an upcoming trip planned where details may be given later, pending on contract negotiations.

*Updates/Upgrades*
Logged in last night to check a couple things and think of a ‘game-plan’ for the current post and noticed that I had 249 spam messages from a lot of morons and a few dumb-asses. After deleting all the spam and upgrading all the plugins I started to write some code for a new project, but hit a little mental road block so I took a break and ended up writing the DB’s that I mentioned above. After the DB’s I talked with a friend on Yahoo for just a bit before starting this post and I keep getting side tracked with everything else going on. But anyway, it’s just after 6:30am so I figured I’m going to attempt a short nap and after I finish my stuff today I may write another post or add more to this one.

Category: Misc. | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Server issues, Wiki, Akismet, and other random thoughts

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The weather here sucks so bad I’ve precanceled my back treatments for tomorrow cause there’s no way in hell I’m going to drive an hour in this shit. On the plus side to this weather, I’ve had time to work on some of my sites and servers. The web server that hosts this site, the wiki, etc. was having some stability issues over the last week and after some emails back and forth with the guys that run it, everything has been resolved (as far as we can tell) and all the sites/domains are back to 100%.

On the topic of the wiki, since the server was having stability and speed issues I decided to change the back-end software that runs it to something that utilizes a database to see if that helps. Sadly the new software uses a different form of Wiki Syntax so it’s taking a little longer than I originally planned. You can find out a little more info about that clicking the link in the last paragraph.

Akismet, a plugin, addon, whatever the hell you want to call it, works wonders. For those that don’t know, it takes all the comments sent it and checks them for Spam links and other things to detect and combat unwanted/useless shit. If you jump to the very bottom of the page (in the footer) you’ll notice a little box that states how much spam has been detected and avoided. Sadly the software isn’t 100% accurate and has caught a few comments that it shouldn’t have, but the best part of the software is that once you’re acknowledged the poster as valid it wont bother auto-blocking them (it will still check each post, but will allow them to show if they aren’t marked as spam). I’ve had friends comment about Akismet being crap software how it misses a lot of stuff etc. and they sent me a screen shot of their control panel, practically bragging how shit it was… I took one look and just responded “You moron”. The comments listed as spam WERE spam. Spammers have gotten smart to some of the software used against them and started writing canned responses that at first glance seem valid and you allow those through… this is when they have the chance to pretty much spam the hell out of you before you notice. When you’ve written a post for example like the “Happy Holidays” post I wrote a little while back and get a comment that says something along the lines of “Wow, great post, although I don’t agree with what you’ve said or done 100% I still bookmarked your blog and plan to keep reading it later” you’d think, that’s cool, allow the comment, but if you actually read the sender/poster’s information you’d realize that the comment came from “Free Viagra, blah blah blah, for more info visit this great online pharmacy…..”.

I swear, I don’t believe in “capital punishment” (fully anyway) but I think that every found spammer should have a finger, thumb, penis, etc. fucking cut off… the first time they get caught, they get to name the body part they lose, the second time they’re caught, they take a consensus of those targeted by the spammer to vote on what that asshole loses. I forgot the rest of the point I was going to make, so oh well.

I have less than 2 hours to complete my homework, so I’ll get around to doing that and add more to the blog later. My head hurts.

Category: Misc. | Tags: , , , , ,

Happy New Year, Happy Holiday’s, and um… other stuff.

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No idea why, but the date listed above states Jan. 01, 2009, yet this was written on Jan. 01, 2010 and shows the correct date in the control panel, just not on the site.

Well, it’s almost a new decade and yet again, I spent most of the holiday season alone, but it’s not that big of a deal. Below is a list of random shit… different points I want to make, different things that have gone on without a post, etc. (Trust me when I say ‘random’ as some of the topics will just be ‘all over the map’)

As you can see, the URL for my blog has changed and I’m still setting up the new software, so there’s no RSS yet, no multi-user, etc. at this point in time. The main reason for changing everything around is two-fold…

  1. I got BEYOND sick of random Chinese spammers signing up for blogs on my server. I was providing a service FOR FREE to people that wanted to create legitimate blogs without having to pay for a service. I did this as a side project outside of my company so that there were less ‘restrictions’ on what can/cannot be posted, but still included a Terms of Use agreement. These spammers ruined it for everyone as I’ll be locking down the old Blog Hosting and possibly just forward that sub-domain to a nice little page that states the full reasons to this. In the month of December alone I ended up deleting and banning over 300 users from China that were signing up for obvious spam reasons.
  2. I wanted to allow myself and future users (sign up policy is yet to be determined) to utilize 3rd party software (such as Adobe Contribute) to author/post entries to their blog without having to fully sign in, etc.

The posts you see in this blog (prior to this one) were all copied/pasted from the old blog (I loved the software back-end I used for that service, and I’m still getting used to this new stuff, so be patient with layout, etc.) so some of the posts have obvious font issues, where text may be out of scale within it’s own post. Oh well.

(At least until I get more used to this new Blog software) I will probably be merging the “Server Status” blog into this one, but I’m not sure how I’ll be able to fully separate those posts as I don’t really have the time/patience to go and edit all my personal posts to find/remove any ‘adult language’ and I know it’s kind of unprofessional to have official company related news hosted on a site that does use swear words.

On a totally different (sad) note, it pains me to inform the friends and clients of ICT/CSC (if they haven’t read it in the Wiki yet) that my personal friend and ICT/CSC co-founder JJ passed away last July. The text below is the dedication posted on the Wiki in full:

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 our company suffered a terrible loss. It brings sadness to my heart to inform our customers and friends that JJ (our Vice President) passed away from medical complications. I’ve never been good with dedications or putting these types of feelings into words, so I’ll leave this simple.

JJ, born Joshua (Yehoshua) Jaeden in November 1980, lead an interesting life. We knew each other for most of our lives and he was like a brother to me. JJ is survived by his older sister Nava (Hebrew for ‘beautiful’), his mother Adina (Hebrew for ‘gentle’) and his 2 year old son Joseph (Yosef). He spent his final days surrounded by friends and family and although his medical issues ultimately ended his life prematurely, he would want those that care to know he didn’t suffer.

I return to college on Jan. 04, but I hope that throughout Jan. I’ll be able to rearrange the rest of the sub-domains, remove the ones that are no longer relevant or maintained and update the rest so that they have a more merged feeling to them. My goal is to knock the overall count down to something small and try to make kind of a community out of it. Due to my on going medical issues, college, and the lost of JJ, I believe at least for now, it’s time for the company to take a small leave of absence. Technically we’re not closing our doors and will continue to take some contracts as they come in (mainly due to the fact I haven’t talked to our lawyer in regards to the legality of saying “Hey, we’re closing for awhile, but we’re still here” so we’re going to still maintain a presence just in case.

Speaking of college, as long as I don’t manage to fail any classes (or take the summer off again) I should be graduating with my Associates in Computer Science (Web Design) in mid-October 2010. I took last summer off due to medical reasons; I would have got my degree in Aug. 2010 if I went straight through.

It’s 2am so I’ll post more information later today, when I can organize my thoughts a little better.

Category: Please Read | Tags: , , , ,