YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

Maria was hosting a friend’s bridal shower so after helping to make a few hundred appetizers, I lit out to make good use of the day. I drove up to Poughkeepsie and pulled the bike out of my in-laws’ garage. I take decent care of it but in addition to my usual preride check (tire pressure, oil, lights, signals, horn), I pulled a plug, checked the battery and did a visual check of my brake lines and pads. I cranked the engine a few times to get some oil sloshing around and fired it up. It ran just as well as before I stored it. I let it warm up and took the first ride of 2003. It was a quick eighty-mile roundtrip to Clermont with stops on the return trip in Red Hook to Tiberio’s market, which a guy in the parking lot said I should say goodbye to- there is a Hannaford under construction and Super Stop & Shop renovated a long empty plaza south on Route 9, to grab real estate booklets for Maria and to Holy Cow for ice cream. Nothing improves my mood like being on the road.

Maria started working out the plans for a personal project (excellent ideas, primary source, social research… can’t write about until it’s formally under way) so I registered the domain on Saturday morning and assembled the beginnings of a nice webpage for it. Today, after it propagated, it took all of two minutes to set up dns, another five to add the site to apache and fifteen minutes for me to read the FAQ and double check against Life with QMail before spending a little less than a minute- including sending test messages- setting up the virtualdomain for email. Good tools make the work go faster.

Got an anonymous email sent through the nycwireless.net node owner contact form the other day from someone in the neighborhood who was using my public wireless access point. I’ve received many messages along the lines of "How do I set up my laptop?", "How much do you charge?", "How can I do this myself?" and (cluelessly) "I’m in another borough ten miles away, how do I get access?" but this was the first thanking me. Cool.

Readers- of books, not this blog, there are few of those- always get around to talking about the best places to get more books. When it comes to getting best sellers or to cross another off my ever growing list of must-have technical books, it’s hard to beat the big booksellers that everyone know. I find ISBN.nu handy when price-shopping for a particular book but my favorite is the book liquidator Edward R. Hamilton and their storefront site Hamilton Books. The oddity of the two sites is that the first only allows you create an order form which you then print and mail in (snail mail, not email) with a check (yes, a personal check, if you can believe it) while the second has the expected shopping cart with checkout.

The best thing about Hamilton is not its web presence but the newsprint catalog sent out at roughly monthly intervals. Pages and pages of small type with some pictures for notable items thrown in and the whole thing broken into sections by topic. On a Saturday, I’ll go through it with a pen, putting little hash marks next to some titles, question marks near others, big circles around ones I’ve got to have. After Maria has made her picks we sit down and decide on an order. Because these are heavily discounted, we have an arbitrary dollar limit justified by the fact that there just isn’t enough room in the apartment for everything on the list and the gamble that if the title is there next month it will be reduced. So we engage in friendly haggling as we juggle the titles; an enjoyable (if quaint) way to spend a little time before digging in to our reading.

I’m home, sick with a cold, so I’m catching up on my reading. Just read Flophouse, Life on the Bowery by David Isay. I didn’t hear the NPR broadcasts of Sunshine Hotel: Part I and Sunshine Hotel: Part II (real audio) until after seeing a documentary on Sundance channel but the book is even more striking. These life stories are each rendered alongside the photos in just a few words of interview. I have an arm’s-length sympathy for these characters. I worked in Catskill hotels through college and the porters, dishwashers and housekeepers I met lived these lives and had these faces. The ‘Animal House’, what they called their staff quarters, where they boozed and slept looked a lot like the photos of inside these flophouses.

Spammers will take up any opportunity to get their advertisements through. The past few days I’ve been receiving a lot of it using a bounce scheme. I first saw it around 1998, but I’ve had a dozen unique ones this week so it looks like some crook has rediscovered it. It’s different than just sending a faked bounce or getting one because a spammer hijacked your address to stuff into the sender field because it subverts the correct operation of a properly configured host to do the dirty work. It goes like this:

• Spammer fakes message from you to a bunch of addresses. This looks just like someone is trying to fake you as being the sender. The addresses are probably not real, at least they don’t exist on the target mail host.
• Target mail host refuses it, sending the bounce message to the purported sender- you.
• You get bounce with original message content at the bottom and wonder what the hell happened.

You can distinguish this from the bounces produced by the hijacking of a sender address by the headers but also because you only get a single message, not a torrent of bounces from all over the world. Because most of us want to see bounce messages and they are less common than spam, our filters don’t flag the message and it ends up in the inbox. Charming little bastards.