I WOULD like to sincerely apologise for the comments I made about four-wheel-drives in last week's column.
 
Due to a limitation on the number of words, I was unable to say everything I wanted about these dangerous and obnoxious monster trucks being driven by people selfish at best and ignorant at worst.
 
And not just shame on you for driving these anti-social, arrogant four-wheeled bullies. Shame on the car companies for appealing to your insecurity by sucking you in with slogans like "Give way — not" (Jeep), "Get in or get out of the way" (Toyota HiLux) or the "class-kicking" HiLux 4WD utility with its "intimidating styling", "aggressive bonnet scoop" and "dominating moulded front bumpers". YEAH! What next? "Kill everyone and destroy the planet NOW WITH FREE AIR!" Suck up that free air, baby, because soon we'll be paying for it.
 
When I discovered that the word Pajero really is Spanish for wanker, I thought to myself: "It must be my birthday!"

(Read the whole rant. It's a hoot. It's also got some extremely interesting actual statistics regarding 4WDs.)

(Oh, in case you're unfamiliar, here's the trailer for the actual film, "300")

TrueNuff TV's PC vs Mac parodies are extremely amusing (especially if you're a geek).

I love this woman...

Trapped In The Drive-Thru

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A man wants to buy a horse. So he goes to the horse store, and after browsing for a while, he finds one that he likes. “I'll take that one,” he says to the owner.

The owner frowns. “Well, I'm afraid that horse has a problem. You see, he likes to sit on grapefruit.”

The man gives him a funny look. “Grapefruit?”

“Afraid so. Anytime he sees a grapefruit he goes crazy and just sits down right on it. It's impossible to move him when he gets like that.”

The man thinks for a minute and says, “I really don't think that will be a problem. I don't eat grapefruit myself and I never have it around the farm. So I think I'll just take that horse anyway.”

The man pays for the horse and rides out of the store. On the ride home he comes across a shallow river. Halfway across, the horse lets out a terrific whinny and sits down right in the water. The horse won't budge. Finally, in desperation, the man levaes the horse and returns to the store.

Furious, the man says to the previous owner, “That horse you sold me has a problem!”

“I told you! He likes to sit on grapefruit!”

“But he sat down in the middle of the river! There wasn't a grapefruit in sight!”

The previous owner slapped his forehead.

Continue reading "A peculiar joke"…

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old Texas rancher, whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to former Texas Governor, George W. Bush and his elevation to the White House.

The old Texan said, "Well, ya know, Bush is a post turtle.

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a 'post turtle' was. The old rancher said, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle."

The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face so he continued to explain "You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he hasn't a clue as to what to do while he's up there, and you just want to get the dumbsh!t down."

When Andrew's grandfather, Don, died of a sudden an unexpected heart attack, I wrote about it here. I wrote about it as it was happening, mostly for my own edification (gave me something to do) but also as a bit of a tribute to a man I consider to have been truly remarkable.

Apparently, several members of the family managed to find there way here to read it (which sort of surprises, me, but then, it always surprises me to find out people read my blog; it's just a strange sort of perception that I have of my blog and myself). A couple said how much they liked what I wrote, for which I thanked them.

Well... today I found to my great surprise that my blog entry was now part of family history! It has been preserved in the records of the Lawrence Carter Holmes family, which is a pretty huge family (LCH and his wife had a lot of children, and most of their children had a lot of children, who in turn had chidlren.... Andrew's grandfather, Don, was the grandson of LCH, so it's a lot of generations we're talking about, and they're spread out all over Australia and in New Zealand, as far flung as England and the United States).

So the next time someone says "What's the purpose of a blog?" I can say, well, one of my blog entries is in a preserved family history, so there. And yes, it pleases me to learn this. I'm happy that people liked my writing and thought it was a good representation of Don, whom I loved very much and still miss.

The other interesting thing is that the article that was done on Andrew and me (it was kind of an "internet dating" sort of thing, but a bit deeper than that) back in 2000 was found by someone and preserved in the family records. It's not uncommon for people to find newspaper articles or other things of that sort and send them to the historians in the family, who then carefully copy them and preserve the originals. At the Holmes Family Reunions, which are held every three years, they get out all these scrapbooks and put them out on long tables in the town hall (of an extremely small town, I should add) and have signs as to which family branch is in which book and then you can take a book and have a look through. It would be nearly impossible to see them all in the span of the weekend, I believe (told you, it's a really big family), but you can find the ones that interest you and go from there.

Anyway, now there's an article about Andrew and me and how we met on the net preserved in the family history books, too. That's kind of interesting, as the article was really a Melbourne-only thing (in one of those newspaper-like magazines that are free to the reader and get their income from the advertisers), and we couldn't even find a copy of it (they were supposed to send us one, but we never got it and when we called again, they didn't have any copies left). I presume it's on microfiche somewhere or something (do they even still use microfiche? or is it all digital now?), and I guess some clever family historian found it, so that's good, and interesting.

Someday, I may have descendants who will read that and think what a story of the times it was, and how much like his grandfather, Don, Andrew looks (well, he does, and there's a photograph of him with the article). (And isn't it clever that I managed to tie Andrew and Don in the same sentence there? Heh.)

It's nice to know I'm a REAL and ACCEPTED member of the family. I mean, I always felt welcome, of course, but now I've got an actual place in the family history books apart from being the mother of two great-great-great-great-granddaughters of Lawrence Carter Holmes.

Early one Sunday morning in 2002, a phone rings in Yu Ling's Beijing duplex. She's cleaning upstairs; her son is asleep, while downstairs, her husband, Wang Xiaoning, is on the computer. Wang writes about politics, anonymously e-mailing his online e-journals to a group of Yahoo users. He's been having problems with his Yahoo service recently. He thinks it's a technical issue. This is the day he learns he's wrong.
 
Wang picks up the phone: "Yes?"
 
"Are you home?" asks the unfamiliar voice on the other end.
 
"Yes."
 
The line goes dead.
 
Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door -- 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu's hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it's done in China. This is how the internet police grab you.
 
Five years later, Yu, 55, sits in the dining room of a small house in Fairfax and weeps softly. She is a slight woman -- 100 pounds and barely 5 feet tall in slippers. Her eyes betray her exhaustion; but she is determined, too. She carries a thick stack of notes with her, and she has scrawled more on her left hand.
 
"Yahoo betrayed my husband and deprived him of freedom," Yu says through a translator, her voice trembling. "Yahoo must learn its lesson."

(Read more at the article. It's pretty shocking. And it just confirms what I've believed for a while now: Yahoo is evil.)

This is a video created by a Nigerian email scammer who thinks he is producing a video for a scholarship payment from a victim he tried to scam. Unfortunately for this particular scammer, the "victim" fought back and created a fake video production company with promises of cash!

It has to be noted that the two people who appear in this video are probably not scammers themselves. More than likely they are amateur actors paid to do the work on the scammer's behalf. Even though their acting is petty shaky, they do seem to have had previous experience!

Titanic in 5 Seconds

Amadeus in 5 Seconds

Fargo in 5 Seconds

Oh, what the hell. Here's the whole list

(As I'm typing this, I've still got tears in my eyes and a few random chuckles. Oh, gosh. I haven't laughed that hard in ages.)

Okay. I'm going to come out. I've thought of doing it for a while, but now, it just seem like it's right, you know?

I read tabloids. Regularly. I read cheap, stupid tabloids, and I read a slightly more reputable one ("Who Magazine", which is the Australian version of "People" and is published by Time-Life). I actually even have.... a subscription. Sometimes, if I'm at the right kind of news agent, I buy American tabloids (which are a lot meaner than the typical Australian tabloid).

I've been reading tabloids since I was a teenager.

And these days, not only do I read tabloids in paper form, I read tabloid BLOGS, as well. One of these days I'll post my updated OPML file (that's a file that shows all the RSS feeds to which I subscribe) and you can download it and see for yourself what a tabloid junkie I am.

There. That feels better. I read tabloids. And I enjoy it. So there.

Okay. The spammer has gone to a distributed attack. From the looks of the IP addresses involved, he/they have a bunch of zombie machines, that is, computers infected with trojans that run the script.

This pisses me off because there are apparently so many COMPLETE MORONS out there who manage to get this crap on their computer to begin with. Hello, ever hear of, oh, I don't know, VIRUS PROTECTION? How about maybe not clicking on everything any random person sends you, think that could help?!

Okay, that vent over, now to the f#%king bastard who keeps doing this: YOU'RE AN IDIOT, MATE! Crashing my server with your poorly written bot will NOT cause your website to have better rankings in the search engines!!!

For now, we've disabled comments, because we've completely removed mt-comments.cgi and we're setting up various means of preventing the spam attacks. They're hitting the script from the outside, that is, they're totally by-passing any pages or blogs, and just going directly. Now that there IS NO SCRIPT there, they can't call it.

We're also doing several other things, including rebuilding the kernal so that traffic has a better connection throttle and we'll be looking at upgrading Movable Type (I haven't done it in too long, I admit it) and a few other tricks we've found.

This kind of comment spamming is, apparently, all too common. On a really big server, it just slows it down. On a small server like ours, it kills it completely.

So, well, no comments for an indefinite period. If you want to talk to me, feel free to email, though.

A British company has been ordered to pay damages for sending spam.
 
Gordon Dick took Transcom to Edinburgh's Sheriff Court for sending an unwanted advertising email, which he claimed was a breach of anti-spam laws.
 
He was awarded £750 in damages plus legal costs of £616.66 through a "decree in absence" after Transcom did not appear in court.

Okay. Yes, our server's been off and on for a few days. It's the same problem as we had before, probably the same idiot comment spammer, running a script that effectively creates a SYN flood, which is a kind of Denial of Service Attack.

This time we've recompiled the kernal and added a few things to throttle traffic and shut down inappropriate multiple responses, plus we've set the firewall up with an extensive block of IPs (I mean a really BIG block, too). The IP block will keep him out for a while, but as this happened a month ago, I'd reckon it won't be long before he's back on yet another ISP and we'll have to block that, as well (we may end up blocking most of Russia, and for that I do apologise, but I doubt there's a great deal on our servers of particular interest to most Russians, anyway, so I don't think they're missing much).

You can see some more of this idiot's work in this guestbook, which has been autospammed just about to death. Fortunately for them, it didn't kill their server (it kills ours for a couple of technical hypergeeky reasons I won't go into).

So that's the deal. Wish us luck that with the new throttling and IP blocks and other precautions, we'll be able to keep this f#$%ing b@st@rd away from our server. I can tell you I'm sending the worst vibes I can manage!