Ten Things I've done that you haven't

With thanks to John Scalzi's challenge. This was an intriguing exercise.

1. Fathered six children. With the same woman. That I'm still married to. Over a twenty years span.

2. Played big band jazz in a hundred year old theatre.

3. Ran over a skunk. On a motorcycle. (I was on the motorcycle, not the skunk). That bike still smelled faintly of skunk when I sold it two years later: he baked into the exhaust.

4. Early online pedophile stalkerage: was propositioned by a transvestite on The Well at the age of 15 or so.

5. Owned a 1978 Ford Mustang King Cobra v8. It was a piece of crap, but a relatively rare piece of crap.

6. Cooked hot dogs by essentially plugging them into a standard outlet.

7. Nearly blown up a house while experimenting with making my own hydrogen. (A garbage bag full of hydrogen makes a BIG fireball.)

8. Had the brand XYLINX burned into the back of my hand while testing FPGA's for heat issues. It stayed for about three months.

9. Pitched the championship game for my "B" league team. (OK, I'm stretching now).

10. Got a signed rejection from George Scithers at the age of twelve. Thought my crap didn't stink: still haven't published.

The Traveler

I just finished "The Traveler" by John Twelve Hawks. To be honest I'd heard nothing of this book or the author before buying it. I ran across it at The Frugal Muse and it looked interesting.

Apparently the internets are rife with speculation about who John Twelve Hawks might be. The book tells us that he lives "off the grid", and not much else. Some say it's Dan Brown writing for the YA market.

I'm not sure who the author is and don't really care. It's mediocre at best.

It details an omnipresent corporation that has fingers into every database, every public surveillance camera, every system. Big Brother is most certainly watching you. There are folks called Travelers that can cross over into other "realms", and folks called "Harlequins" that protect them. And of course, the bad guys are out to kill or control the travelers.

It's not a bad book, by any stretch. It kept the pages turning, and most of the action was well-paced and believable. It just didn't have a character I could bring myself to give a rip about.

I won't seek out the next book in what will be a four book series, but I won't turn it down if I see it for $3.95, the price I picked up this one for a The Frugal Muse.

I'm ordering one today....

Email Woes

Today was the day I set aside to study for the SCCM beta exam. Granted, I'd been reading off and on, playing in the lab. But today was the day to blow up the lab and rebuild everything with the RTM version and really dig and try different things.

Until.

One user can't send an email to a domain. The ticket gets escalated to me. I do the usual : MXToolbox, etc. We just came off of several blacklists due to some rocket scientist setting up a virus-infected client pc on our network that proceeded to send thousands of SPAM emails out. Yes, port 25 should have been blocked to not allow that traffic, but that was a decision by committee.

Further testing shows an email sent to any address on their domain bounces back almost immediately with that wonderfully useful 550 error.

So I start checking the blacklists again, and it appears that we're all in the clear.

I sent an email from an external account, and a reply came back about half an hour later. So their mail server is actually working.

I immediately decide to blame Postini, but the domain is not on any firmwide blacklists.

Finally I began to wonder if the email was ever even making it out of our environment. The bounceback usually arrived after less then 10 seconds, and that just seemed odd. So I collared out WAN guru and had him sniff the external interface for traffic on port 25 to Postini containing the offending domain... nothing. Specific strings in an email to the domain... nothing.

I set up a second SMTP connector to route email without going through Postini for email to that domain... still no dice. Messages just sit in the queue.

Now this is too weird.

I connect to their email server via good old telnet <servername.domain.com> 25 and get a happy SMTP response. I figured I'd send an email manually to the administrator, who by this time I'd spoken with to confirm that we weren't blacklisted on their end. I'd just let him know that I got this far in testing.

So I type : "EHLO mydomain.com" and get an error response.

That can't be right. There must have been a control character in there. So I type it again. Same error. I check to make sure my syntax is correct, and it is.

Then I try "HELO domain.com" and it works. Like a champ. I send the email. A quick check of our Exchange server shows, sure enough, that it is configured to send "EHLO" and not "HELO". In all the years we've been on Exchange, this is the first time I've run into another server that refuses "EHLO".

I telnet back in and explain the issue in another 'manual' email session. I'm not sure what this admin will respond with, but I'm not inclined to change our config for one domain.

Yes, we could set up a second SMTP connector to route email to that domain that IS configured to send "HELO". But at this point it's the principal of the thing.

We'll see how they respond.

Dumbest idea ever, redux:

John Scalzi finally got around to visiting the Creation Museum, which I blogged about briefly awhile back.

His post on his visit is priceless, and indicative of why he is a published SF writer and I am not. I could never describe a pile of horseshit so perfectly.

Read his post here. And skip not the comments thread. It's nearly as good as the post.

If you read Science Fiction and do not read Scalzi's blog, what are you thinking? Get thee to the RSS reader!

Obvious caveat: If you are a creationist young-earther, this probably ain't for you.

Thanksgiving

Things I am thankful for today:

My wife.

My kids.

A roof over my head (even if it is rented, and even if it is the worst house in a mediocre neighborhood).

Sassafras trees.

Autumn.

Trees in general.

Flat land and tall corn: the scenes of home.

The Discovery Channel.

Videotape.

Pictures, both digital and chemical.

The capacity to love.

Living in America, in the time that I do.

Call Maintenance:

The gravity generator in room 315 is on the fritz again.