Digital Choke Daynotes

"Daynotes" are popularized by a Internet Web site called the "Daynotes Gang" (http://www.daynotes.com or http://www.daynotes.org), a collection of the daily technical and personal observations from the famous and others. That group started on September 29, 1999, and has grown to an interesting collection of individuals. Readers are invited and encouraged to visit those sites for other interesting daily journals. You can send your comments to us by clicking on any mailbox icon.

Reports

Seems like weekends are a lot shorter than weekdays. Which is a silly statement when you think about it, because weekends are only two days long versus a five day weekend.

But I did get a few things done on my list. Got the bathrooms cleaned, cleaned up the barbeque, did some light pruning, and had time for a short nap. The unexpected thing was the nail in the truck tire I noticed while checking the tire pressure. Saturday is not the best time to get a tire fixed; it ended up as a two hour wait. But I was able to take Pam out for lunch after she returned from work, then she let me go home while she went shopping.

Pam was in a cooking mood this weekend. Saturday night was homemade lasagna, Sunday was a prime rib from Sam's Club for our weekly family dinner. Pam's parents brought over some pies from Marie Calendar's, so we let them eat dinner with us.

After dinner, we took the grandkids down the street to look at the neighbor's Halloween decorations. He's been working on them for a couple of weeks. There is a big old dead tree, witches and gravestones and a metal spike fence actually made out of wood. Some black lights, giant spiders, a coffin with a moving ghost, an ugly witch, and a flying bat. And he says he's got a few more things to add to the whole mix.

Since we are new to the neighborhood, we asked him for advice on the amount of candy to get. Pam thinks that four big bags are enough; the neighbor says that we have almost half of what we need. This is our first year in a long time for candy monsters. You don't get many (or any) of them out at the old place out in the country. So it should be interesting.

The fires down in Southern California are quite impressive when you see the reports on the news. And there are some impressive resources available on the web.

One of the main sites I start with is the Disaster Links page at CBSnews.com (http://www.cbsnews.com/digitaldan/disaster/disasters.shtml). (Note: all of these links here will open up a new window so you won't get lost on the way back here.) It's a great page full of different kinds of links for all sorts of disasters. For instance, take a look at the mapping capabilities of this site at the U.S. Geological Survey (http://wildfire.usgs.gov/). Then go here to the California Wildfire Information page at http://wildfire.usgs.gov/ca_geomac/viewer.htm .

That site is a great example of what you can do with a Geographical Information System (GIS). You'll need a fast connection, but you can click on an area of the map to zoom in. The map is almost three dimensional, and when you get into the fire areas, you can really see the size of the fire areas. You can select different layers on the right side of the screen (try the elevation layers). It will take you a bit of time to get used to all the options, but it is quite interesting. You can spend a lot of time just on that page, just be patient and let the pages load before you click again. You can also click/drag a rectangle to zoom in on a certain area.

Another good site is from NOAA, which shows satellite imagery of wildfire areas at http://www.osei.noaa.gov/Events/Fires/ . They have some low and high resolution images; you'll really want to have a fast connection to get the high-res images. But they are quite impressive. And take a look at their fire mapping page; this one http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/FIRE/hms.html shows all the fires in the U.S.

Those links ought to get you started. And I suspect that you'll spend quite a bit of time wandering through them, so make yourself comfortable and start clicking on the links.

Short shrift tonight. Tired. Busy at work, getting the spam server ready to put on line. Some final configuration and testing tomorrow, and then we'll put it in place. Hopefully, the whole thing will get us back to a decent level of spam blocking.

If you tried the links to the fire maps from yesterday's post, you probably found them a bit busy. They are quite interesting, though, and an interesting use of technology. All that smoke down there must be a real hazard to your health. We were planning a trip to Disneyland soon (taking along the grandkids, of course), and may have to delay that due to the worse than normal air.

Snow is forecast for Idaho in the next couple of days, so I need to arrange for Stacy to get some snow tires installed on her car. Although the first storm will probably not stick, the winter conditions usually result in driving on packed snow. Those of you in the snow belt probably know that, but she's a (Northern) California girl. All we usually see about snow is the local news dweeb (usually the low man) standing in the snow telling the viewers that it is "really snowing up here".

The plan is to get her a set of four studded snow tires (legal up there starting the first of October). The problem is what to do with the 'summer' tires. She lives in an apartment, so there is not any storage there. It would seem to be a nice money-making proposition for a tire store to rent a storage shed. They already get about $45 to swap out the tires. And with all the students up there living in apartments, there should be a demand for it. I guess that I'll have to check out the prices of a small storage unit up there. Or find a nice person with a house and a small spot in their garage. And how do you store the tires? Standing up or laying down. Got any ideas?

Speaking of grandkids (cute kid story alert), Christine reports that she was looking at a catalog of dolls with her daughter Joelle (almost three). They were discussing what dolls she liked, and that perhaps Joelle should tell Santa about the one she wanted. Joelle said "I don't have to tell Santa. I'll just tell Grandma." Smart kid.

Got the new spam servers in place today. Two of them, both working really hard on recieving a bunch of messages. Tomorrow will start tweaking the rules, adding new rules with the new features. Both servers talking to the new SQL server. All three servers running Windows Server 2003. All have the latest updates. All are set to automatically download new updates, with a manual install (my recommendation for servers; workstations get an automatic download and install). The cutover took less than 15 minutes, no mail lost. A bit of tweaking, but was able to leave only an hour later than usual.

Stacy reports that Rexburg Idaho got their first snowfall today. Slushy stuff, a bit slippery, a new experience for her. And probably a $400 bill for snow tires for her car. Along with some extra cold weather clothing allowance.

Well, the weather turned cold. Tuesday, it was near 90. Today, rain in the valley, snow in the mountains, and cold this evening. That put a damper on the number of visitors. So we have a lot of candy left. Most of it is the cheap stuff, but there are lots of Tootsie Rolls and baby Snickers. Those are worth keeping.

The snow in the mountains made a big mess. The big trucks started it this time. When it was done, two truck went over the side, one caught fire, and 10 more were spread out all over the highway, along with a couple of cars. Luckily, no fatalities. But it did close down the highway most of the day.

So, cold for a few days around here. I switched the thermostats over to the heating position, with appropriate setbacks for when we aren't around. And we tried out the gas fireplace for the first time. It doesn't put out much heat, but she likes the ambience. (Pretty fancy word, eh?)

At work, I spent most of the day tweaking the anti-spam server. My hunch of last night about one of the rules causing less effectiveness was right. I spent some quality time with the rules on the servers, and found a rule or two that had some mutually exclusive conditions. Similar to "if the sun is out and you see the stars, it must be night". Not quite right. It wasn't as obvious as that example; I had looked at it quite a few times before I got the "Doh!" moment. I just checked the stats, and I'm getting a 20% catch rate on the spam, which is much better than 5%. I'll be checking it over the weekend to make sure that the false positive rate is not a problem, but it looks good.

On the security front, it looks like another virus is getting spread around a bit. Network Associates (McAfee) released a special virus data file update today to take care of it. I sent this notice out to others:

And good news on the global spam front: one down....(from the Australian IT Times):

And Apple users with an external hard drive should be careful. A story in Wired News (and others) reports

Now, you'll have to excuse me. A few clicks on the DirecTV remote found an episode of "Spenser: For Hire" starring Robert Urich. One of my favorite actors and shows from an earlier time.

A sunny day, but chilly, with temps in the 60's. A bit warmer than those of you in snow country, but not quite short sleeve shirt weather.

I spent the morning moving a few things from my mother-in-law's sister's boyfriend's house (is that enough apostrophes, Brian?) into his new assisted living apartment. It only took one trip, they had professionals move the heavy stuff. As thanks, I got four fairly nice cushioned outdoor chairs.

The grandkids came over this afternoon (my son-in-law helped with the moving; he got a nice bed out of the deal). We mostly just relaxed around the house. Ordered pizza, then they went off to visit their new niece. Pam and I watched "The Italian Job", which was a fairly good movie, but not great.

I took a quick look at the spam-catching percentages. They are now up to about 28%, a great improvement. And since our new infrastructure will handle a higher load, we should be able to keep that level. There are a few tweaks that I'll need to take care of next week, and then I can go onto another project.

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