I decided not to go to a friend’s place today. It’s been something of a Sunday ritual of late, with a few exceptions when one or the other of us couldn’t make it. This being the last week of regular season there’s not a lot of interest, but post season beckons and I’ll make it over there next week. Ostensibly I go to watch football but we barely pay attention to the game and just talk. It’s been good. Wanted to wrap up server issues today. Can’t believe I am finally moving on from the hosting company I’ve been with for 2 decades. I’ve been a little bit of a babe in the woods with this shit, especially DNS, which has always flummoxed me. It turns out this company doesn’t even do that. no DNS for you, kiddo. Took me most of the week to figure that out. Now I have to go through every single domain name one by one and change its A and MX records, adding subdomains to the zone file. There is no bulk way to do this all at once, at least not through Godaddy. And even if there was I would probably prefer to do it one at a time anyway.
I actually smiled today, for the first time in a while, at least as far as my web stuff goes. I got my private web space back in working order, but had pretty much given up on getting the photo gallery thing to work again. The error message was just too obtuse, or so I thought. It only mattered to me because there are family photos from the 1960s and 1970s in there. Obviously I could just look at them another way but I liked having them on the public Internet behind a password protected private space at a URL no one would ever guess.
That smile quickly went away when it looked like I would be unable to post images, but I fixed that too by installing ImageMagick, which I thought was already there. Not that I resumed any smiling or anything. I don’t that much, especially in the company of myself.
Walking around just now I spotted one of the two women i know of in this area who used to work at Avon when I was there. She would be the nicer of the two, as my memory of the other centers around her obscenity-filled manner of addressing her husband. This woman I saw today was amiable and chatty as I recall. Today we made direct eye contact. I wonder if she possibly remembers me and, like me, chooses not to enter into conversation about something we have in common when that something is so long ago that it doesn’t even matter. Her eyes looked like giant marbles.
Strangely, a few minutes after our paths crossed I saw an Avon shopping bag on the sidewalk.
An interesting correspondence from someone in Woodside led to another welcome discovery regarding the new web server. I can rebuild the mailboxes site in about a minute. That shit took a half hour on the old box.
The correspondence reveals that this person in Woodside has been using my mailbox data for years, though he wasn’t forthcoming about the nature of his product. Specifically he was using the full Location ID data for each mailbox, info that even the USPS does not provide. The Location ID for a box looks like 1110600001, with the zip code as the first five digits and the +4 numbers last. That leaves an extra zero, which I convert to a dash, making the Location ID look like a typical Zip Code+4: 11106-0001.
I revamped the site a couple of months ago and removed those full Zip+4 codes from all the pages, though one could still divine theZip+4 from the web page URL of individual mailboxes. That’s not exactly user–friendly, as this correspondent made clear. So I just added the +4 data to the individual mailbox pages, appending it to the zip code. He said that was great. I then asked the gentleman what the nature of his project was, if he was at liberty and/or willing to discuss. He said he’d be happy to tell more over the phone. A little strange perhaps but I am keen to know what use this data has beyond simply finding where a mailbox is located. I’ll think about calling him tomorrow.
Another e-mail from a reporter at the Times suggests he has a big time story coming out about narco subs, which are used by drug lords to move product around via the ocean depths. I think he might have actually gotten a ride in one of them, or else in one of the subs those people use. I doubt any drug lord worth their salt would want a NYTime reporter on board. More gutsy reporting from the guy whose first front page A1 NYTimes story was about me.
Drug lords reminds me of a conversation from a few weeks ago regarding privacy and surveillance. I posited that the only place left where one can expect complete privacy outside of your home is the public bathroom. It reminded me that even the Mexican drug kingpin who amazingly escaped from a maximum security prison got away with it largely because there was a small wall shielding the toilet. The surveillance cameras in his cell could see everything except when he took a dump. This is how they were able to dig the hole through the bottom of the floor without cameras catching it. I guess they either had no audio or did not think to listen to video surveillance, since that activity must certainly have caused some kind of racket.
What amazes me about this is that even in a maximum security prison people can expect some level of privacy in their bathroom space. The future seems certain to change that, I think, not just in prisons but everywhere. All that has to happen is someone gets caught doing something wildly illegal in a public shitter before security goons step in and train video cameras on us all as we shit and piss, all in the interest of security.
Hah, just looked up El Chapo, the Mexican drug guy. He is still at large. But I laughed because a story about how El Chapo declared war on ISIS cited a “Mexican blooger” who leaked the information. BLOOOOOOOOGER.
