As always, the last 10% of the project ends up taking 90% of the time. Also, quite a lot more money involved too — I'm not even going to total it up because holy cow. (Let's just say that I'm certain that I've spent more on this kitchen update than I paid for my car.)
My kitchen is almost done being rebuilt. So I'd might as well write up why it took a kitchen rebuild to get a working dishwasher again.
So I just got a gigantic (thousands of dollars) bill for my CT scan a month ago, with an "uninsured discount." This means that Sutter's billing department has most likely either forgotten to bill my insurance, lost the information outright, or made a stupid data-entry error which has caused them to believe that my insurance isn't valid. Either way, this is going to be another giant headache that takes another fucking year to take care of. All for a test that found nothing.
And this is why I should just stop caring about my health.
I was using 5ite.com as a cheap VPS for my email hosting. Over the several months that I was using them, I was constantly plagued with frequent outages, and my uptime was nowhere close to the guaranteed 99.9%. No matter how much I complained about this, they did nothing to rectify said guarantee. Often they would go down for a whole day at a time and not respond to any customer emails or even say what was going on via Twitter, nor would they provide any information afterwards.
This morning was the last straw, however; there was another protracted outage yesterday, and when I opened a ticket their response was that they were undergoing "emergency maintenance." Today my server came back up, but lo and behold, the file permissions were all completely broken; it looked like they had done a hamfisted system restore because everything was owned by root:root. User files, temp files, device inodes, everything. So of course, very little of the system actually worked.
Fortunately, I happened to have a backup from several hours before the outage, and was able to restore all my files. To LiNode, where I am setting up e-snail.us anew.
It'll take a while for DNS to propagate for the new mail.e-snail.us address, but hopefully when it does I can hit the ground running with a working email system, modulo the likelihood that I've forgotten to migrate some config files or SSL certs or whatever.
I had to reinstall Windows XP on my netbook, and of course it's asking for the product key, which I am supposed to enter from the 'certificate of authenticity' that is attached to the bottom of the laptop. Attached specifically to where the computer gets REALLY HOT, and the label has a thermal 'feature' that makes it turn black if it's heated up.
Time to just use TinyXP instead.
It wasn't enough that their best phone (the Motorola Triumph) had a terrible touchscreen and problems with battery life.
It wasn't enough that, despite it being an unlimited-access pay-as-you-go service, they didn't allow forwarding to third-party voicemail providers, and didn't provide any decent application-based voicemail of their own.
It wasn't enough that the data service was slow and the voice service horrible.
It wasn't enough that they never updated the phone to anything even remotely recent Android-wise, and never released the kernel source allowing the modding community to take it into their own hands.
It wasn't enough that they didn't anticipate that my expiring credit card would cause a problem and prompted me to update it instead of freezing my service when I was out in the middle of nowhere and needed to get in touch with people, and didn't give me any way of finding out what had happened until I got home.
What really pushed me over the edge is that they remotely disabled all of my phone administration applications (Astro File Manager, Gingerbreak, Superuser) and limited my access to my own filesystem.
(Of course, all the stuff above didn't help either.)
These are the sorts of things that bug me:
So if the next redesign is iPhone 5, then that retroactively makes the iPhone 4's name pretty silly. But if they call it iPhone 6, everyone who doesn't have a sense of history will be upset.
Speaking of history, I'm glad that Apple finally has a device (the new Nano) that does all of the fun pedometer/run timing/achievements/etc. stuff that my Sony Ericsson W580 did four years ago. Maybe I'll upgrade. (I probably won't.)
So I was doing a Google search and the damn thing started pointing me to the "+You" button like it was the end of the world if I didn't click on it. So I clicked on it, just to make it shut up, and signed up for Google+ again from my one and only GMail account (that I have only for my Android phone and YouTube account at this point). I figured I'd make a token effort at filling out a profile and adding suggestions to my circles, and at least reconnect to the Song Fight friends on there.
It was, of course, taking those suggestions from my email address book, and after all the people in my address book who are already on Google+, it also asked me to add/invite everyone else in it too. And then it kept on making suggestions on the feed sidebar. The top two suggestions were myself (via the name and email address that had gotten banned to begin with), and my grandfather, who as previous readers of this blog know died a bit over a year ago.
There was no way to opt out of this.
Stay classy, Google.
After going disc-only on Netflix I decided to go ahead and turn Blu-Ray discs back on, since a significant portion of my queue is actually in that format now. I have very quickly learned to loathe Blu-Ray's advanced "features," which are of course being used for nothing but advertising now.
For example, in Where the Wild Things Are, there are about 15 minutes of unskippable, un-fast-forwardable trailers for other movies. Any attempts at getting out of those and into the movie are met with the trailers being completely restarted from the beginning. (This may have also been because it was the "rental edition" of the movie, which had no extra features.)
Next, The Blues Brothers opens up directly to the main menu — which doesn't load until it downloads a bunch of content from BD Live. All ads, of course. Until that happens, you're stuck with a repeating montage of the key scenes from the film. At least on my BD player it's possible to get past this by pressing "disc skip," but then as soon as the BD Live content finishes loading, it boots you back into the main menu. Absolutely irritating, and completely pointless. The BD Live content it was waiting for wasn't even anything related to the movie — it was all banner ads for other things coming out on Blu-Ray.
As always, piracy is the more consumer-friendly option.
So I got an ear infection about a week ago, and when it didn't clear up on its own I went to my old doctor Monday morning (I haven't yet had an intake appointment with the new doctor so it seemed easier to just go to the old doctor even though the old doctor has screwed up enough times that I am looking forward to switching away from him, why no this isn't foreshadowing in the slightest).
So Monday morning I got in as soon as I could ("How long's the wait?" "No wait." "Great!" An hour and a half later, "The doctor will see you now.") and after five minutes of the doctor rambling at me about things that weren't at all relevant for the situation he prescribed me "a really good antibiotic, no penicillin so don't worry about that" as well as some Allegra, and told me to just take one every night before bed.
Monday night I didn't sleep very well but I figured it was just the infection.
Tuesday night I didn't sleep at all.
All day Wednesday I was feeling tired and drank caffeine which had no effect and was feeling tired and depressed and worthless and suicidal, and I was desperate for sleep so I took my antibiotic and laid in bed and still couldn't sleep, and I got up and checked the warnings for the Allegra, thinking it might have pseudoephedrine in it, but it didn't, so I checked the warnings for the antibiotic and it said that if you experience sleeplessness, nausea, dizziness, joint pain, depression, hallucinations, or suicidal thoughts, call your doctor immediately. (That's just the list of the stuff I was actually experiencing. The actual list of counterindications is much longer.)
So I called my doctor immediately and left a message (marked urgent) and read up on levofloxacin (fun facts: it prevents caffeine from being metabolized fully, it can cause sudden and debilitating spontaneous tendon ruptures, and it has a huge number of severe side effects, has been banned in several countries due to safety concerns, and the FDA indicates that it is only to be used as a last resort!), tried going to bed, and then two hours later gave up on sleeping and got online and started ranting about how if I die overnight it's my doctor's fault and just generally illucidly ranted a bunch. My friends convinced me to go to the emergency room, which I did.
I learned the following:
The ER doc prescribed me some heavy sleeping pills to counteract the sleeplessness, and an appropriate antibiotic for my ear.
Meanwhile I'm still having occasional hallucinations but I'm at least tired enough to fall asleep tonight, I think, and generally feeling better anyway. Also just one day of the appropriate antibiotic (a topical drop that I apply 3-4 times a day) has helped my ear quite a lot.
Oh, and the doctor never returned my call. Thanks, Dr. Lim. You fucking suck and I hope you lose your medical license. Asshole.
So which hospital administrator and/or accreditation board should I contact about this? (This, incidentally, isn't the first time he's prescribed me an inappropriate treatment for a partial solution for a potentially-life-threatening problem and failed to actually handle any sort of followup with anything remotely approaching good medical care.)
So I've been having some minor hearing trouble with my left ear, and last night it became pretty obvious that it's due to an infection or the like. So I figured I'd go to a Saturday clinic to get it looked at (I am between doctors right now). Of course, St. Luke's Hospital (whom I've ranted about so many times in the past) no longer lists their clinic hours on their website, and only provide a phone number; calling that phone number just results in a message that says, "Our office is now closed. Please call back during business hours." They never state what those business hours are.
My health insurance provider's website also doesn't provide hours of operation for any of the doctors in their directory. Searching the Web is an exercise in futility; San Francisco has so many special-purpose clinics that those dominate the search results for any search on "clinic" (Saturday or otherwise), and searching Yelp for "doctor open Saturday" finds a bunch of restaurants which have one or more reviews including the word "doctor" or "Saturday" (e.g. "went here for brunch on Saturday") and plenty of other non-doctors (e.g. chiropractors).
It's like this xkcd, except about things in real life.
I'm actually surprised it took this long, but I've been suspended from Google+ for "violating community standards." Of course, to reinstate it they want me to change my name to my legal name and provide a copy of a driver's license, or otherwise show that the name that everyone knows me as is my real name from a "reputable source" such as "Facebook, LinkedIn, or a news article."
I was already having a more or less apathetic relationship with G+, and now I guess this settles whether I'll be using it anymore.
In other news, other parts of Google are much the same. "Do no evil" just isn't good enough, guys.
Many, many years ago when I was trying desperately to get a job after grad school, I put my resume everywhere I could. As a result I ended up on the mailing list of Aikon Technologies, a bunch of ridiculous spammers who are the embodiment of the worst practices of tech recruiting. I constantly get job listings from them for things I have no interest in and which aren't even listed on my résumé. Oh, you want me to take a 6-month short-term DBA contract in Cleveland?! SIGN ME UP.
Every week it's a different name and email address contacting me with the exact same form letter. They have an unsubscribe link which does nothing. When I send email to the recruiters to tell them to unlist me, they don't respond (or if they do, it's just to send me the exact same job listing).
A lot of tech recruiters act in this way (using a shotgun approach to trying to recruit talent and find jobs so that they can get that delicious referral bonus), but most of them at least try to target based on résumé keywords, and will remove me from their database if I ask once or twice. But not Aikon Technologies.
Trying to spam filter it is a difficult thing though. I'm worried that if I mark the individual messages as spam, ALL recruiter emails will appear as spam, and there's no way to just mark an entire domain's crap as being spam (you can have it delete all emails from a domain but that's not quite the same, and also not what I want).
So it's just time to get the word out: Aikon Technologies are a bunch of spammers with absolutely no ethics when it comes to candidate placements, and no company in their right mind should take them seriously as a tech recruiter.
I am trying to store my iTunes library on a NAS again, but this is really painful. iTunes seems to insist on normalizing every Unicode character in my library differently every time, and gets confused when there are a bunch of different folders on the NAS for a single artist or album just because there's Unicode in the name. Attempting to fix it via changing the "sort artist" field or the like doesn't really help much, either, because when I change half the songs the other half go "missing."
To make things even worse, iTunes has no way to show just the files it thinks are missing, and none of the various iTunes help threads out there are ever answered by anyone who seems to understand what the problem is.
It would be nice if iTunes didn't try to be so anal about naming its files exactly how it's listed in the id3 tag, and further if it would provide an easier mechanism to reattach to missing files en masse. The fact there's no way to say LOOK ALL THESE FILES ARE IN THIS DIRECTORY is simply flabbergasting.
Basically, iTunes still really fucking sucks.
So, somehow some pretty insidious malware got onto my site. From what I can tell it was installed via an old upload exploit in WordPress, on schadenfood.org (now offline since it's not like I was ever doing anything with it anyway). I did a bunch of forensics on it, and found that while the initial infection was probably just done by automated script, someone actually left a pretty thorough backdoor that allowed pretty much complete access to my whole Dreamhost account (files, shell, and so on).
Unfortunately, Dreamhost's logs don't go back far enough to find out how it was installed, and the backdoor script didn't keep a log so I have no idea what they did during the time leading up to the addition of the SEO spam crap that clued me in to its presence (because of a random happenstance that happened to make me aware that it had been installed at around 6 AM today). I have the IP address of the system that was used to access the backdoor, and I know that over the last few days they'd been accessing it repeatedly, but all of the commands are hidden in a POST request, so I have no idea what exactly they did.
I did go through and find every spot that they'd added additional exploit code, and of course I'm changing what passwords were visible in some way through the account files. Unfortunately, they had access to a couple of sensitive and important files that I was keeping in a private WebDAV share, and I'm feeling very sick to my stomach, especially with not knowing if they ever found the directory it was kept in. (I am, of course, moving all that stuff to my own personal NAS now, and deleting the WebDAV share.)
Fortunately, the only account password they'd have had access to directly was my database password, which I generate randomly and keep unique, and it's not a big deal for me to change it again. There's also a single spot where my OpenID password was viewable as an md5 hash (and it turns out that said hash is findable in some of the various md5 lookup tools out there), so of course I've changed that too.
HOWEVER: One of the bits of malware I dissected did appear to have the ability to generate a full table dump of my entire database (I don't know if this function was ever activated), and you should be aware that phpBB 2 (like I use here) uses unsalted MD5 password hashes. So you should probably change your forum password here, and anywhere else that you use the same password. Sorry. :( (I'd upgrade to phpBB3, which finally fixes that issue, except that it will break all of the commentary functionality on my site if I do. I should look to see if there's at least a salted-md5 patch for phpBB2 floating around out there though. I've been meaning to do that forever but of course now that's squeezing my buttocks after I've farted, as the Japanese saying goes.)
I have, in the meantime, removed ALL the goofy webservices that I'm not using anymore, and hoping that the ones I still do have installed (because I, you know, use them) are secure. I should definitely check for security updates on what's left, at least. Also, do a full audit on all of my custom PHP scripts because who knows what's lurking in those.
tl;dr: The site was hacked, your password may be compromised, and the hack was directly targeted enough that I'm feeling violated and am probably going to have my identity stolen or something now.
I'm just not able to keep any interest in Google+, for the same reasons that I can't keep any interest in Facebook. Having longer posts doesn't necessarily make things better; instead it makes it seem like I really must read everything, which turns it into an overwhelming burden, and inline comments make it feel like even more of a firehose of information. I like how Twitter is a place where I can just share quick simple notions and links to fuller bits of content. I like how the fuller bits of content are hosted on my own site where I and others can find it easily, rather than quickly being buried in piles and piles of comment replies to Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton. I like how Twitter is just a bunch of messages that people pass along and there's no expectation that everything is seen.
I feel like Google+ is in an uncomfortable middle ground between mass-messaging and blogging, with the disadvantages of both but the advantages of neither. I felt the same way about Facebook. Also, the fact that Google has their hands in ALL of my data, with potentially disastrous consequences, makes their overbearing "real name" policy even more upsetting.
Basically, I still miss blogs and don't feel like G+ or Facebook do anything to help communication - they just do what Twitter does, but longer, and with more overwhelming crap to sift through, and an expectation that you do sift through it all.
That said, Hangouts are pretty neat. It would be nice if it were a completely separate product that were based on Jabber or the like, though.
Nice to know you guys are on top of things, and are registered Apple developers so that you can receive pre-release GM builds of upcoming operating systems so you aren't blind-sided by major operating system upgrades that people have known about a year in advance. Oh, wait.
What is it about pro audio vendors that makes them think it's okay to hold off on updating their software for major changes to their customers' platforms?
It's not just you guys, of course. Native Instruments and MOTU are even worse. At least you guys continue to support your products more than two months after they come out. But still.
I mean, sure, I could just hold off on updating my OS until the driver gets updated, except that this doesn't help me with the new Mac I just bought for my studio, because I'd been waiting to upgrade until Lion came out because Apple was withholding hardware upgrades until that happened. I'm not going to have any way to NOT run Lion on it. I guess I'm just going to have to use a cheap USB audio interface in the mean time.
I understand there being some brokenness and some beta-quality nature to various things when the OS actually comes out, but for a professional-audio hardware company to not be willing to get a single ADC developer license so that they can be prepared and be ready with SOME sort of driver upgrade when the OS itself is in beta - much less after it's actually been released to retail - is just ridiculous.
Apple is VERY GOOD to developers when it comes to keeping them ready for major OS changes. You guys really dropped the ball, and now I'm going to think twice about buying another PreSonus product in the future.
The MPAA and RIAA are at it again. Here is the letter I am sending via that page's form:
I am a constituent and I urge you to reject S. 978, "A bill to amend the criminal penalty provision for criminal infringement of a copyright".This bill is overly-broad and only serves to further cater to the monopolistic practices of the big media cartels who operate as part of the RIAA and MPAA. It further erodes the rights of artists set forth under the fair use doctrine, and provides a chilling effect on free expression and active participation in common culture. It does not protect the interests of the RIAA or MPAA, and will only be used to criminalize everyday activities.
Further, given that RIAA members have copyrights on specific renditions of silence and other fundamental sounds, as well as songs containing every word known to every language, it is likely that they could use this to stifle creative free expression even from those who aren't infringing on the bill, simply because any new song written by a non-member could be shown to be infringing on SOME property. Or are the courts capable of determining whether the two-second silent pause in any random YouTube video originated from track 65 of Blur's "Modern Life is Rubbish?" Could any use of the word "bird" be construed as infringing on the composition rights to about half of the early Beatles catalog?
I urge you to reconsider this bill, and all others like it.
