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. (Who we are.)

Reports

Got a few things accomplished yesterday, but never got around to filling in the "Saturday" slot in these posts. I was able to get out of a trip to the mall by putting up some lights on the back porch. And I did some of the usual cleaning around the house. I got the tree up at the in-law's house (always good to get extra points at the in-laws). And did some shopping with Pam.

Not much else happening. Walked outside and visited with a couple of neighbors, who were working on their decorations. I did it in my shirtsleeves -- a nice day today, partly cloudy, slight breeze, temps in the 60's. No snow to shovel around here.

The usual is on tap for today. The grandkids will be coming over later. We'll probably read some holiday stories, and watch a holiday show. And have a nice visit.

Monday started out OK, worked on a few projects, nothing exciting. After work, stopped by my mother's house for a short visit. Then I started home. And while driving home, had another atrial fibrillation episode.

This one felt different than before, perhaps because I wasn't taking the digoxin any more (as per the doctor's instructions). The irregular beat was much faster, and somewhat scary. But I was able to drive to the ER room, where I got right into the ER section, put on a monitor, got blood tests, etc., and given some drugs to help slow down and stabilize the heartbeat. I got there about 7:30pm, and by about 11pm they decided I could go over into the ICU where they could continue the medication to slow the heart rate, and where they could monitor me carefully until the heartbeat got normal.

I spent a restless night, mostly because of the three visits for a blood draw, separate visits for temperature checks, and a blood pressure test every 10 minutes (automatically by the heart monitor machine). By morning, the rate was a bit slower (around 110), but still irregular. The cardiologist recommended a different drug to get the rate normal, which it finally did Tuesday night.

I got to spend another night in the ICU area, but with less interruptions, and was able to go home yesterday about noon. So I spent yesterday and today home relaxing and recovering. All is well now, but it looks like we'll try the abulation treatment to kill off some errant heart cells. That's been a successful treatment for others, and if it works, there will be no more episodes or medicine required. Since the "a-fib" episodes have been happening about every 10 days, a change is needed.

I spent most of today catching up on the mail and news, including playing around with the latest IE vulnerability that could be used to direct you to another site without your knowledge. You've probably seen the stories about it, and I made up a few test pages. Click this link to open up a new window that will show you how it works. It would be interesting to know if the problem happens in non-IE browsers. Let me know, if you have a minute.

But, there is good news on the anti-spam front. The state of Virginia has arrested a big spammer using their new anti-spam law. Once spam-tracking outfit says that he is the number 8 spammer in the world. It will be interesting to see how that works out. Small victories.

Another slow day at work, mostly because of the monthly staff meeting of the IT group. Today's meeting was a pot-luck lunch, and a 'white elephant' gift exchange. I'm not much of a party guy, so it was timely that Stacy gave me a call during the meeting. (Although it might have had something to do with the text message I sent her while everyone else was waiting for the gift exchange to start.) We had a nice long talk: since she is in a nursing program at the college, she was quite interested in my experiences of the past few days. We had a nice technical discussion of the various procedures and treatments. She wants to get copies of the EKG printouts and lab work results, so I'll ask the doctor when I visit him on Monday. She'll be home the next weekend, and she says she is going to bring her stethoscope and blood pressure stuff so she can practice on me during her stay. I thought that would be interesting -- I'd also like to listen to my heart.

After the meeting, I did some work on the Change Control documentation to implement a login screen on the computers in the company. There are some registry settings to push, and two bitmap files. The bmp contains the text of the login banner message. The registry push will use the bmp files as part of the login screen dialog box. The 'push' will be done through the login scripts.

Since the network services guys, who would normally do the banner 'push', are a bit busy with several other projects, I volunteered to do the work to get the login banner to all of the workstations. That means a bit of script testing, which shouldn't be too hard, since I had already done all the research beforehand. But the Change Control group likes to have full documentation, an installation, and a back out plan, along with user and system impact analysis. So I'll do a bit of final tweaking this weekend to get it ready for Tuesday's Change Control meeting.

The other weekend work-related project is to do a bit of fine-tuning of the user-level security presentation that I'll be giving to another department Monday morning. I've already done one of those, and some comments and questions indicated some minor changes to a couple of the topics that will be discussed.

Pam and I finally were able to leave work about 5:30pm. I was ready before that, but Pam is still in the final budget report creation mode, tidying up a few things along with the rest of her group. So we stopped at Mel's Drive-In for dinner (chicken noodle soup and a turkey sandwich on toasted sourdough bread; quite tasty), then did a bit of holiday shopping, even shopping at the Mall (or "Maul", as defined by John Dominik). The mall wasn't very busy, but we only were able to pick up a few presents. We finally got home after 9pm (after a stop at McDonald's for a hot fudge sundae).

The weekend plan is to get a Christmas tree and do some more shopping. Pam and I looked at a couple of tree lots Thursday night, but the price of a 6-7 footer ranged from $70-130. That's a bit high for our budget, so we'll head for the hills of Auburn (just up the road) and stop by our favorite "Choose and Cut" place and see what they have. Even though it's been rainy most of the afternoon (and into tonight), tomorrow is forecast for only rain drizzle. And drizzle is much better than the snowy weather other Daynoter's have been experiencing.

A couple of interesting links to finish off tonight. Evidently, our Canadian friends can legally download files from peer-to-peer networks, although uploading is still illegal. But there will be a government fee as must as $25 (don't know if that is C$ or US$) on MP3 players. Here's a link:

Related to yesterdays' post about the technique for misleading URLs in Internet Explorer: Brian C and others report that the technique doesn't work right in Mozilla and other non-Microsoft browsers. So if you use those browsers, you won't see how our little test pages demonstrate the problem (try it!).

But, there is a new site that is trying to become the "anti-phishing" information source. There are some interesting techniques shown that could be used with the URL misdirect. I suspect that someone (not me) is already hard at work on one. My prediction: sometime before Christmas, you'll see the URL misdirect technique used in a mass-mailing virus. You read it here first.

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