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Useless comment
I was quite excited to see a comment on my blog today. I read the blog and the person tried to contact me via my contact form and couldn't (I messed up the Apache permissions). He wanted to contact me about a product I wrote years ago for a client. Why contact me? It's not my product and I don't have it. It's like if I contacted the original author of HyperCard and asked how I could get a copy. How would he know?
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Stupid hackers
I periodically check on statistics on my server and noticed that for the last 1.5 hours, my bandwidth was constant even though I wasn't doing anything. I started checking the traffic on my network and saw that some Chinese hacker (or script kiddy) was trying to get into my machine via SSH. I've seen a number of hack attempts into my server and normally write them off, but this was chewing up bandwidth, so I blocked the IP address of the attacker. I realize it is kind of pointless as hackers will use different IP addresses and there will be more later.
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English speaking customer service reps
Yesterday I called my cable company to switch the IP address of my cable modem as I now have a block of 5 addresses and in order to use them, a change had to be made. I called support, negotiated the phone tree, and spoke to a woman with a heavy accent. I explained what I wanted done (my sales rep told me to call support to get the change made) and after explaining it a few times, I thought that she got it. She said she had to transfer me to a modem person and then when the modem person got on the line, he said "I understand you are having problems connecting to the Internet." I told him that there was a communications issue and my connection was fine. So I got my cable modem reconfigured and things were fine.
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Ground loop isolator
I searched for the part to eliminate the hum from my stereo, but all I could find online was one for $10 + $7 shipping. So, I called my cable company to see if they'd come install one for me. They told me to Radio Shack and get a Ground Loop Isolator. I did, hooked it up, and the hum is mostly gone. It's still there when the volume is cranked up real loud, but that could be something else. Very nice.