Lee.org

All 45 megs of it! [removed]

Download it with mad abandon, I now have 10 gig of bandwidth/month. [12-10-03 removed because I’ve got scads of bandwidth but limited space :-( )

I just love my VersaCounter. That’s the hit counter I use on my website. I’ve been having a bit of difficulty getting it to work on the new server. Four hours of banging on it last night didn’t convince it to give up it’s secrets.

But there is a good side… I asked the nice people at Spenix (my new ISP) for shell access to my account and it was granted in just a few hours. I SSHed into my account to run the VersaCounter Perl script and I had the problem resolved in 15 minutes. :-)

As I had guessed (this was just one of my many guesses last night) Spenix has the latest versions of all the Perl modules. This means that the latest GD module -doesn’t- support .gif images. Remember how Unisys sat up after 10 years of giving the .gif file format away for free? Now Unisys wants money for their patented property… Jerks…. Indian Givers… whatever… Well, the free-source community responded by cutting .gif out of the loop. The .png file format works just as well as .gif and uses a different code base. So, all I had to do in my situation was to rename all .gif references to .png, convert the images from .gif to .png and I was good to go! Unfortunately, I made a syntax error when converting but I caught that in a second by running it from the shell (fixing that error without a shell would have been nigh impossible).

Hurray! Maybe I don’t hate computers after all.

PS. See my 12-6-03 entry for the sourcecode :-)

My friend (and apparently a master of ceremonies) MC Mitchell G. wrote to me today about my journal, almost out of the blue… He writes:

ARGH! I’m trapped inside the online version of your
brain when I should be educating people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

EEEEEK!!!!

I smile at a job well done.

I present to you the canonical backup story, in my own words (except for the part about it being canonical.. Those are TJIC’s words).

At my last company, they spent 30 grand on a fancy-ass automated tape backup system. We had 3 full time IT people and 12 engineers (that is generally considered overkill on the IT side).  After the backup system had been in operation for 6 months, which required a co-worker to stay late and swap tapes twice a week, I tested the system by asking for a file I had “accidentally” deleted. The response?

“Oops. It looks like all the backup tapes are blank. We have no backups.”

Currently listening to: Evolution Control Committee, Plagiarythm Nation

Yes

Experimental music makes me ecstatically happy. These guys are great.

I wrote this email and sent it to a bunch of friends today:

Subject: From Lee Sonko: a spam stopper that works

If you follow my online journal, you know that I’m nutty for killing spam. Well, over the last couple weeks, I’ve been using a new spam stopping software that I saw mentioned on TechTV and it really gosh-darn works. I’m amazed, astounded… Heck, I’m so happy with it that I’m foisting it on you in this email.

Is a service called SpamNet. If you have Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express and you get more spam than you can bear, you’ll want to try this thing out.

The service costs about $4 per month with a free one-month trial and I am glad to pay it. I receive something like 60 spams/day. My old spam program, McAfee Spamkiller would block 40 of them, leaving me with 20 ways to get the penis patch, see horny asian lovers, and get my degree by mail. Spamnet brings that down to 1-2 per day and I don’t have to continually tweak the program, it’s automatic. It works seemlessly with Outlook. And it has a very low false-positive rate too!

If you use this referral link, it’ll be just $1.99/month for the first year (after the free trial) instead of the retail $4/month :-) http://www.cloudmark.com/?rc=hze4hl
Or use this referral code when you’re paying for it: hze4hl

———————————————-
So, to sum up:
– Cloudmark’s SpamNet really works at stopping spam and it’s very easy to use.
– You must have either Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express to use it.
– It’s $1.99/month (after the free trial) if you use this link http://www.cloudmark.com/?rc=hze4hl.

Have a great day,
Lee

I cancelled my Earthlink service today.

I changed my DNS so that Spenix would be my new web provider. A month ago I switched from Register.com to GoDaddy.com for my DNS b/c GoDaddy is $8/year instead of $35 and GoDaddy’s website has a few more bells and whistles. Now I’m moving from Earthlink to Spenix b/c, although Earthlink has very good LiveChat support, it’s for a product that doesn’t have as many features and easy customizations as Spenix. And Spenix is $8/month instead of $20/month! Of course, it worries me that the main Spenix.com site appears to be down today. But I’m sure that’s just a little glitch… Yipe!

Some site details like the comment engine and hit counter will be broken ’til I fix em. so there.

I just switched my Amex card from a Gold Card to a “Green Card with Rewards”. Switching saves me a few bucks and doesn’t affect me at all since I’ve never used any of the gold card bells and whistles. I went to the E-Z-PASS website to change my account over to the new credit card number but it wouldn’t take my number.. So I called them on the phone. The E-Z-PASS lady changed me over no problem. I asked for help with the website and she asked me what website I was going to. It instantly dawned on me that the stupid money-sucking, corruption ridden, problem laden, pork-barrel politicking system that was “E-Z-Pass” was to blame. You see, Google’s first response for E-Z-Pass is (obviously) http://www.ezpass.com/. But my bill references http://www.e-zpassny.com. E-Z-Pass NY and E-Z-Pass NJ are two completely different, non-overlapping entities. “But…” I say. And I stop, remembering all the hoopla over the system over the past 3 years. The shady dealings, money laundering, intentional cost overruns, and scandal. And then I wish that I had been an inside-investor in E-Z-P-ASS.