Category: The Vault

Where Old Stuff Goes to Die

AOL Feedback Loop … Love/Hate.

I just received an AOL SCOMP feedback loop email a few minutes ago. Well, actually I received several hundred of them, which happens all day long, but one in particular stands out:

To: abuseaddressATchuck’srealjob.net (note, this address is not real)
From: scomp@aol.net
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:50:14 EST
Subject: Email Feedback Report for IP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
X-AOL-INRLY: barracuda.XXXXXX.net [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] scmp-d21
X-Loop: scomp
X-AOL-IP: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

This is an email abuse report for an email message received from IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX on Fri, 17 Nov 2006 10:50:38 -0500

Note the two timestamps. Today is Tuesday, November 20, 2007. The mail in question being reported as spam was sent …

…THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTYEIGHT DAYS AGO!!!

I’ve grown accustomed to a certain amount of lag in AOL’s feedback loop, but I never would have expected it to grow to OVER A YEAR!

Mind you there is a lot to love about this system. Carl & his crew built a wonderful tool for netops to monitor-by-reflection what is going out of our networks… but the user-generated nature of it tends to rear its head in ugly ways. Mostly it serves us in locating the occasional web forms that are being exploited by spammers, which was the case in the above example. But the firehose of legitimate mail being tagged by AOL users as spam far outweighs the trickle of actual tinned-meat smelling stuff. Mailing lists, ecommerce confirmation emails, morons who forward *everything* (I eventually will hunt every one of them down and .. sigh), and honest-to-goodness personal correspondence makes up 99.999% of the feedback loop from AOL. It truly provides insight into the feeble mind of most AOL users.

We have setup a mail filtering system that files away all the vast majority of legit stuff based on sender, and it leaves the oddball stuff for human parsing. This one above ended up for me to parse, and I just had to say something about it in public.

So there, I have.

My excuse for light blogging of late…

Not to mention all the other stuff I should be working on.

At work we’ve been busy as beavers building onto our facility. We’ve been at it pretty much non-stop for the past year and a half, but things seriously kicked into gear about 7 months ago. First an electrical expansion, we doubled our UPS capacity. Then we started a project to expand our cooling capacity, roughly quadrupling it. That is the stuff that has been keeping me busy of late. You can read all about it here.

Theoretically this project will finish next week, but I have a sneaking suspicion that another one lies in my near future.

My geek project @ work

Most days I’m a high-tech executive dealing with the day-to-day operations of my company. Occasionally I get to do a little geek fun on the side though. Here is my latest one:

Constructioncam!

I set up an old Mac Mini with Boinx Software’s iStopMotion in my office yesterday, and today packaged it into a weatherproof container:

That was before I closed it up, so you can see the insides. 😉

We mounted it up on the roof, here:

That is the base of a 19″ telco rack bolted to the roof screenwall.

It is running a test timelapse now. I’ll post a link to the result soon.

Here it is:

Last words on the Monte Shelton Rally, and other things…

I like this photo

I’ve been REALLY busy at work the past week and a half, so please accept my apologies for the lack of updates here on the website. You can follow those links and see what has been going on, and to be honest, what you see there is merely the tip of the iceberg in many ways. For one, those articles only capture the actual work of preparing the access and moving the units, but don’t begin to describe the gyrations that went on behind the scenes with engineers, technicians, the property management folks, etc. All for moving some equipment… you would have thought we were building The Pyramids or something! For the other this is the start of a very large project. We’re expanding our capabilities by a factor of 2X… the largest such jump we’ve taken since 2001. I’m ultimately responsible for the largest project, and associated budget, that this organization has ever dealt with. That said, I’m very confident we will succeed because I have an excellent staff, who know what they are doing.

But I digress…

Today I FINALLY exported all my photos from the rally and uploaded them to my server, so now you can sit back and view them all. I usually do this before, and then use HTML links to reference them in my posts, but somehow this time I did it backwards. Want to see them? Here they are!

I hope to get the 65E’s toe-in checked, now that I’ve fixed that loose inner tie-rod end (I also have new gaiters, which arrived today from Terry’s Jaguar) early next week, because the week after next…

I’ll be driving out to Montana to run in the Going To The Sun Rally once again. My dad can’t make it this year (one of the reasons why we did these two short rallys this summer) so my friend an co-presenter at so many Macworld Expo conference sessions, Shaun Redmond will be flying up from Canada* to join me. I’m really looking forward to it and hope to surpise and delight my regular readers with some interesting stuff in conjunction with the event. Stay tuned!

* Yes, “flying UP from Canada” is correct in this context as Shaun lives in Ontario, and due to a geographic irony, is quite a ways SOUTH in relation to my location in Washington. I’ve always been a geography buff and love pointing out stuff like this. 🙂

Chris in Chile: Photographs

Chris & his host parents

We’re finally getting around to sorting through the 1000 or so pictures that Chris brought back from Chile. Unfortunately one of his memory cards was lost in the mail, so some 450 or so images were lost. 🙁

We do have a few good ones, among the ones that did make it here. If you are dying to look at them all, you can sift through the haystack here. The first 15 pages are repeats from the last time I posted. Chris’ camera broke shortly after he arrived in Chile, so many of the images are blurry. Add to that his photo skill inherited from his mother and you have well… what you have. 😉

But for your viewing pleasure here are a few needles from the haystack. As soon as Chris has the time to tell me what they are in more detail, I’ll post captions. (note: As of 8/14/07 they now have captions provided by Chris!)

backyard BBQ

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