Power failure... I woke up and thought, "Why is it sooooo quiet in here. Oh, my computers are off. AAAAAhhhh!" :)

I finally got the pictures online from our visit to Moy Yat's grave.

I spent some time making up a page containing tips on Playing Natural Selection Better. I haven't really told anyone about it yet, but I'm getting hits already through Google.

51.3% of the voting age population of the USA turned out to vote in 2000. ( Numbers from Federal Election Commision )
Half of the country doesn't vote and people think Nader stealing votes from the Democrat De Jour is the issue?

So once upon a time, there were Badgers Badgers Badger and now the same people have made Kenya

Congress in considering an act called PIRATE. I should be up in arms and fighting back but I don't have the spirit for it lately.

I went down to Valhalla, New York yesterday and visited the grave of Moy Yat. (Pictures pending) We trained some Ving Tsun (Wing Chun) and I got home after midnight. Apparently I caught a cold while I was down there. (stuffed up nose and sore throat) Guess 3.5 hours is not enough sleep before a big day. Lot's of water today.

I missed the regional SCA practice that I was trying for today. I needed sleep too much. :( Maybe I can get my butt to the local fight practice instead.

I'm still getting those trojan virii in the form of returned emails. Disturbingly, I got a really attractive html email looking like it was right from MS. This the day after I complained about how poorly the emails were faked. It had the same file attached as all the others.

Anyone out there know how to track back to someone when all the headers are different? Hmmm, maybe I'll just move over to a real email server, one running Spam Assassin...

I Did manage to get to the Troy fight practice. I made a point of leaving my sword and shield in the car so that I wouldn't be tempted to pick them up. Fighting against a pole armer is typically more work than fighting a shieldman so I get the urge to be "nice" to the other fighters and stay still. Reducing the challenge that you give the people that you're training with doesn't really qualify as being nice though.

Anyway, I fought only polearm and spear today and had more fun than I'd had in a very long time. My defense was ON especially up close. I even managed a couple spear tricks I've never done. When someone charges as a spearman, he has "one" chance to kill his target. I managed to backpedal and choke up fast enough that I got a second or third shot. One time when I was charged, I threw the first shot (Spears win range.), backed up and choked up allowing a second shot, then I sped up (backwards) and re-extended the spear. It was freakin cool.

Okay, this is just getting annoying.

Received: from jdhcv (191.net061198119.t-com.ne.jp [61.198.119.191])
by atg-smtp2.t-com.ne.jp (T-com) with SMTP
id 390F4CCF69; Sat, 27 Mar 2004 11:59:21 +0900 (JST)
From: "ms internet message service" <>
To: "Mail Client" <recipient@emaildomain.com>
Subject:
Date sent: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 11:59:21 +0900 (JST)

Hi.
Message from microsoft.com

I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.

Undeliverable to bkxkrvae@microsoft.com
Content-Type: audio/x-wav; name="egicxirg.exe"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

Received: from mqwpvry (d17.bj.brasilvision.com.br [200.222.59.51])
by linux4.brasilvision.com.br (8.12.8/8.12.8) with SMTP id i2OG47eE010483;
Wed, 24 Mar 2004 13:04:08 -0300
From: "" <postrobot@rocketmail.com>
To: "Network Recipient" <recipient@smtpdomain.com>
Subject:
Date sent: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 13:04:07 -0300

Hi.
This is the qmail program

Undeliverable message to ixbnpnyqx@rocketmail.com

Message follows:
Content-Type: audio/x-wav; name="bpyufrld.exe"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

Received: from ndzg ([82.38.74.44]) by smtp-out6.blueyonder.co.uk with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.5600);
Fri, 19 Mar 2004 19:09:23 +0000
From: "Postmaster" <postengine@puremail.com>
To: "Mail Client" <user@emaildomain.com>
Subject: Abort Report
Date sent: 19 Mar 2004 19:09:24 +0000
Undeliverable mail to hmxirvr@puremail.com

Message follows:
Content-Type: audio/x-wav; name="bafhz.exe"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

It's just a sad, sad way to try to get a trojan onto someone's machine.

1. I've never sent any emails to these domains, so I never bounced anything from them.
2. If the first one fails, I'm not going to be More susceptible to the second or third one.
3. .exe is NOT an appropriate extension for a .wav file. .Wav is a good extension for a .wav file.
4. Returned emails shouldn't carry Executable files.
5. I'm never going to Run an executable file from an email that I don't trust absolutely. (Absolutely also includes the known sender is knowledgable enough to protect their machine 100%.)

Someone harvested my email address. Probably off my resume. :( I knew better than to have it there in plain text and I got talked out of it.

hehe :) Help I'm being attacked by stupid people! (Not that I want to be attacked at all, thank you for playing.)

My car is parked under a maple tree and the sap is running. I gotta wash the sticky off my car soon. :)

We had a brown out around 6am, had to reboot the computers and my linux box was misconfigured. In its linuxy way, it started serving webpages even though I couldn't log in. :) I know I should get used to it, but in my windows experience, a computer is useable first then useful second.

I opened up port 8080 on my machine so the my ol' friend Mike can see my site from work. http://cerul.dyndns.org:8080 works. Now I just have to wander through my website and make all the links behave regardless of port. Wonder what I can do about my photo gallery...

Since Gallery requires a complete address, it's now on port 8080 exclusively

Why'd I use port 3000 to start with? 1) Verizon was blocking port 80 and 2) I picked 3000 out of thin air a year ago when I didn't know better.

Today's Pyx106 Babe of the Day picture should be captioned "Take the freakin picture already, I have sand in my freakin suit."

Engrish.com also contributes to today's mirth with Uncle Colonel Sam Sanders

Slashdot has a cool 'article' today. Life of Brian coming to Theaters. As always, I suggest you only read the comments from the masses if you have a shaker full of salt on hand.

Macaroni Grill for dinner out tonight. Ate myself into a coma. (Yes, I'm typing this in a coma right now).

Gonna be a busy weekend if I can handle all of it. The Kung Fu group is going to visit Moy Yat's grave Saturday and there is a muster for SCA heavy weapons on Sunday (3 hours away, ick).

I wussed out on Kung Fu this week. Gas costs are getting to me.

Most of today was spent on the FoxPro Wiki. I'm organizing and writing the intro to wiki stuff there.

I'm watching the Planet of the Apes movies in order (Love the libraries here.). They're pretty good but not uplifting in the slightest. If you hated the new version of PotA, try the old one with Charlton Heston. It's much, much better.

Someone in Brasil is sending my trojan viruses and trying to pretend that they are returned mail that I sent. Guess I should double check that my email address isn't available in plain text anywhere on my site.

Rock climbing yesterday got my calves to Really hurt last night. They're feeling mostly better today. Heck, the world has even changed back to reality from the "Hand hold, foot hold, rope check, lift" focused cycle that I spent yesterday in. BTW, that mindset isn't the best one for several other tasks like playing Munchkin or trying to get to sleep.

Munchkin is a cardgame parody of role playing games. There are several cards like "Bribe the GM with food" and "Copy character onto new character sheet" which make you go up a level. Monsters include everything from a potted plant, to the Jabberwocky to Squidzilla. And you smite them with weapons like "Spiky knee pads +2" or the "Swiss army pole axe".

Real Dancing Robots (windows media player needed for this .wmv movie)

I just got back from some inside rock climbing. *Tired!*

I found a link to this on the alt.2600 Usenet group. Matrix Rewrote. It's Matrix screen captures with new dialog pasted on top. Some of the stuff is IRC (chat) stupidness, but some of it is funny without a lot of background explainations.

The Selective Service Agency is working on a plan so that the US can draft computer experts and linguistics if the need arises. Article from Seattle PI (Post Intelligence)

Also from the Seattle PI, Photo's of the Year (2003)
My favorites include a Bald Eagle, an airborn skateboarder, a soldier's welcome home kiss, some BIG boots, a girl swimming and the camera being pepper-sprayed.

I drove the 100 miles down to my Kung Fu class yesterday in the snow (down the Taconic *shudder*). When I got to class, I found out that the gym it was in had decided to close early. 5-minutes-after-my-arrival early. *shrug* So we all went out to dinner and talked about Kung Fu.

My subscription to Lindows.com's Click And Run program has expired. Now I'm thinking about letting apt-get convert my machine over to straight Debian. The problem being that I once managed to bork my whole machine using what was supposed to be a user friendly install tool (dselect?). It had this nice list of all the software packages that it could download and install for you. I told it to remove something and it failed to tell me that the entire windowed environment was dependent on that piece. Neat computer to *splat* in less then 10 minutes.

That time though, I had the CNR subscription and was able to reinstall Lindows from CD and get all the applications off the net again. I'm kinda nervous about trying this without that safety net.

Well, I've borked my Lindows box. It's still running, but I don't have any Graphical User Interface right now. I'm typing inside the nano text editor right now over an ssh connection to my windows box. :)

Well, I have a GUI back, Window Maker. With thanks to Jaime for the tech backup, Jenny for the space and the Dalai Lama for the reminder that getting angry (for example at your computer) is a choice.

So far, Jenny has coped very well with my love of Arwen. Prolly something to do with the fact that Arwen doesn't actually exist.

That link is part of a very large LoTR Gallery. Same software that I run for my pictures. Much nicer site.

To learn more about PHP, I'm learning about Gallery, which is written (largely?) in PHP. My first topic is the .htaccess file. I found a great Comprehensive guide to .htaccess

From a job posting today,

Applies and appreciates wit and sarcasm as creativity stimuli

Loooooooooong personality test for job lead. 3 parts, the first was time restricted, the second and third were yes, maybe, no questions. Similiar in theme but worded differently to these:

You like to torture kittens
The government is the source of all evil
If parents would only beat their kids more the world would be better
You sometimes make fun of personality tests to people who have "shared the pain"
Sports and Parties!!

And in all likelyhood it's as reliable and shaking someone's hand and looking them in the eye.

Browsing through my webserver log file, I found an entry saying that someone found my Pennsic pictures by searching Yahoo for "water filled fire pit". Out of curiosity, I tried that search and found that I'm Yahoo's favorite for those terms and that the League City, TX Volunteer Fire Department is 3rd because they have a training facility with a liquid filled pit. Apparently, you have to be careful when spraying things into a pit full of flaming liquid otherwise the flame liquid will be flung out of the pit.

So anyway, the pictures of their training facility hadn't been resized so I resized the pictures and sent the webmaster a note. That's what the world gets when I'm out of work and bored out of my gourd.

If you're here looking into HomeCS, take a look at my Feb 14th blog entry. Basically though, they're bad.

From the Cagle Political Cartoons site. By Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake City Tribune.

Found the website of a pair of my old Potsdam friends, Autumn and Dave.

*Sigh* Looks like my windows 98 machine needs to be wiped and reinstalled. It's starting to act 'funny'.

Been contributing to the FoxPro Wiki as I continue to learn FP in case I land a specific job.

I'll keep google from posting blank entries with my robots.txt file. Oh, Penfold is my Google mascot now. He was the side kick of Danger Mouse and the third place winner of the "Penfold Look-A-Like Contest". (will grab a picture soon.) I'll take 15th in a google search on "Tom Cerul"! There appear to be 2 other Tom Cerul's, but they don't appear to have websites.

Hey Merlin! Good to hear from you, sorry about the COBOL, but it's work!

DynDns.org blocked my website for several hours today. I don't know why but the software that I use to keep my IP address updated (ddclient) was contacting them every 5 minutes regardless of whether it had new information or not. The folks at DynDns.org are kind enough to direct people over to my machine, I have to be kind enough to not spam them with traffic which serves no purpose. We'll see how my bug report gets responded to.

I've written up a couple files containing tips for Natural Selection and tips for Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. If you didn't know, NS is a combination First Person Shooter (FPS) and Real Time Strategy(RTS) game. TA:K is just a RTS. The tips files aren't pretty, but I think they've got some good stuff. I'll make one for the original Total Annihilation soon.

I'm result #15 in a google search for me! #1 on yahoo and MSN though. :/

Today's song: Hemispheres(lyrics) by Rush

The urge to build these fine things
Seemed not to be so strong

But the winter fell /upon them
And it caught them unprepared
Bringing wolves and cold starvation
And the hearts of men despaired

Also today's song: Autumn's Leaves(mp3 8MB) by Amanda Haney who I dated for a happy time.

Wombat Crossing Sign

Google is entering blank comments into my guestbook.... Wonder how I make That stop.

Jenny and I went to Lauren's birthday party. She's three soon and speaking very well but only when no one else is talking.

Ed has recently torn apart his kitchen (pictures) and pulled out the old staircase in preperation for a complete kitchen redo.

An old friend from Potsdam contacted me through my guestbook. He's also unemployed and he passed on this depressing article. February Job Growth Surprisingly Weak

Lot's of traffic on the firewall trying ports in the range of 10270-10290 and port 41170. The two IP's that I checked belonged to AOL. I'm getting 4-5 hits in the 10,000's then one 41170 then it repeats about 5 minutes later. *shrug* I wouldn't mention it except that I couldn't find anything on google about those ports, so it looks like a new virus.

And no, It's not that online gang war, that's a email worm so it wouldn't be probing these ports.

4 hours of sleep. Hammering outside. Power failure? Reboot! Resuming nominal sleep function.

Just figured out why ddclient wasn't updating my IP address with dyndns.org anymore. It's set up to get my current IP from my router. I changed my router password and ddclient wasn't able to log into it anymore. So, end result is that my server should be available more. (power failures excluded :)

Did my impression of a baby harp seal at fight practice yesterday. Happiness did not result. Feeling all better now.

Hmmm, time to pay the rent and rotate my weblog. February 2004 blog