Recent blog entries for ldunbar

A lot has happened since my last update, nearly 6 months ago. Let's see, I got laid off, found a job, company went out of business two months later and have been looking for a job ever since. I did manage to land a few projects that provide just enough money for me to scrape by. I won't complain because I know that there are others out there who are far worse off than I am.

Terror Mosquitos
There have been a lot of stories on the news regarding mosquitos spreading the west nile virus. How long until these bugs are considered terrorists by the Bush Administration?

Spam
has anyone noticed the amount of spam on mailing lists lately? I'm getting about 40-50 per day, and im only on 4 lists. Mailman definately needs to get some spam protection built in.

Personal life
I've decided not to renew my lease this year and move to a cheaper neighborhood. They wanted to raise my rent at my current place, which would put me above the 1k mark. I refuse to pay 1000 dollars to my landlord for the way she treats her tenants. There are several drug spots in our building, homeless people frequently either squat or sleep in our hallways and my girlfriend was confronted by a junkie as she disturbed him shooting up on the staircase. I know that there are worse places to live in NYC than where i do, but these places dont usually cost the amount i have to pay. I wish i had done some more investigating prior to moving in.

Work
My supervisors have let us know that we will all be let go at one point or another. I think he is going to let one person go right away, another couple in two or three months, and then keep myself and one other person on until the summer. My future looks great, i can hardly wait for the time off. NYC is probably the worst place to be jobless at this time.

During the past few months I have not been getting much sleep. I think i may be suffering from insomnia. It doesn't help that i am an incredibly light sleeper and my girlfriend isnt. During her slumber, she frequently pushes me over, hits me or talks in her sleep, all of which wake me up.

I've tried everything i can think of. I've even grown a tolerance to over-the-counter sleeping pills during the past 6 months. If things dont change soon, and i dont expect them to, i'm going to have to see a specialist.

unfortunately, this could not come at a worse time. I've got problems at work, college starting in two weeks and apartment hunting next month. I'm under an incredible amount of stress, and while my girlfriend would like to help, it's just not possible. Heck, most of my problems are due to her in the first place.

on the good side, my coding has gotten much, much better lately. It's probably due to the 10-12 hour workdays, 6 days a week that i've been putting in.

So I've just picked up a new client. It's one of those jobs you have to be weary of until your are paid at least once. I'm honestly surprised they are still in business. They've got me setting up new servers and troubleshooting their existing ones. It wont be that bad, provided they can afford to pay me as per our contract.

On another note. I never realized how bad nimda really was. They are constantly infecting those machines. Has anyone had success cleaning and then locking up their win2k boxes? My solution would be to install linux on them instead, but management wont hear that.

There's an ariticle today in the New York Times' Circuits Section about digital photography and how it worked out better for journalists at the WTC disaster. In it, one paragraph sticks out:

David Handschuh, a staff photographer for The Daily News, was blown a block away by the force of the implosion at the trade center. He credits emergency workers, who pulled him from the rubble three times that day, with saving his life.

Who the hell does this guy think he is? If emergency workers had to pull this guy out three times, it means that they were not able to help other victims at the scene. It's pretty damned selfish to be taking up that much time of the workers and then putting yourself in a situation where you would need help again.

mobius: the existence, position and cause of bin laden is hardly within the last 2 years. Even normal, non-intelligence personnel, have been hearing about him for more than that.

Anyways, what possible difference could it possibly make how long ago we heard about him? Hitler wasnt evil becuase some people in the world never heard of him prior to his actions? That's completely absurd. You see, you have your order wrong. You think that a person must be evil because we've heard about him in the news for some time. I would say that we heard about him in the news BECAUSE of whats been done. The media is not generally a proactive source. They often report news that has already happened. bin laden did not need the news to become the asshole he is now.

I do not consider America/British actions against the Taliban as senseless death and destruction. It's terrible that innocent civilians died, both in the United States as well as in Afghanistan. The difference here is that the situation was almost entirely in the Talibans hands. They could have, and should have at least started investigating terrorist activities, arresting known terrorists, closed terrorist training camps and cooperated with the global community. To openly admit that not only did they know where osama bin laden was, but they were in fact hiding him was just plain stupid.

Two word summary of my life after having been to 5 funeral services in the past 3 weeks: Fuck You

sej: I agree completely with dan on the matter. It is far too difficult for the average hacker to make any non-trivial changes to an existing application. I really couldnt have said it better than he did. Personally, it would take serious consideration joining a project after it reaches a certain point. At that point, it would take me days to figure out what the hell i have to do in order to make any significant change. Id rather save myself from that frustration and look elsewhere. Afterall, that isnt my idea of fun.

While dan blames the code aspect of the project, i might also point some blame to a lack of organization and communication. How many projects out there have readily available information for new developers?

I always thought that webdevelopers, testers, documentation folk and graphic artists were under-appreciated in this community.

Got an email this morning that our webserver was used to probe someone's ftp site. I'm not sure whether I believe it or not though. The last line in his email was:

"If you are unsure of how you can prevent this sort of thing or have other questions about security, please feel free to reply to this email and inquire, I do this for a living."

Uh-huh.

You'd think that someone that does this for a living woulda sent a log of the probe. I've checked our logs and didnt see a thing.

I'd like to see the dates in this log. I'm willing to bet that it was during the time that our line went down after wtc.

My supervisor has got it in for one of my co-workers. I'm not sure what brought it on, if anything. But he has given him attitude since he first met him. Personally, I think that he is scared of being replaced and wants to show the agency that he is still needed by making others look bad. Today he was yelling at him over the phone, loud enough for his supervisor to pop her head out of her office to see what was going on. There's just no place for that type of behavior in a workplace.

I more than seriously considered quitting out of disgust today. I'd rather take a paycut with another job than stay here.

On the good side, our T1 is back in action.

I am scheduled to go into our downtown office to retrieve hard drives and documents tomorrow. When I asked the OGS people what I should expect when going in there i was told that the building was "somewhat damaged". I'm really not sure what that means.

Wish me luck.

Like most offices in new york city, our T1 is out. Verizon is not giving any estimates on when they will get it back up. I spent the beginning of this week working out a solution for it. The only thing i could come up with is to have the router on the WAN call up our router at the top of every hour to exchange the email waiting between the offices. It seems to be working pretty good so far.