I finally managed to make a few things happen for the positive. Nothing so satisfies me now but to watch the maillog and see spam being properly filtered. Somehow, between DirectAdmin and the server side spamd daemon, something got disconnected, and DA didn’t think spamd was running even though it was. Waking up to a pile shit in the form of 100 spam emails really puts bad weight on creative energies, especially when waiting for important e-mails. I blew up MX records for my mail server earlier this week and have since found that at least 3 people tried and failed to get through to me during that seemingly brief window of time. One attempt was important enough that she called me at my 212 number, which was not set to ring a phone at the time.
That person is very interesting. She is working on a cold case from 1957 which involves a collect call made from a phone booth in Rockland, Illinois to Sycamore. She is trying to establish a timeline that proves or disproves the possibility that the convicted (who is in jail now for this crime, all these years later) could have had time to make the call. This isn’t fiction. I’m going to pass it along to certain colleagues and online connections to see what people think. I used to make collect calls all the time but this scenario is before my time, when collect calls typically had to go through a local operator before being passed on to an operator in the destination city, or even an operator in the middle. I don’t remember ever making a collect call that required 2 operators but why would I remember something so ephemeral?
It is proven beyond reasonable doubt that the payphone in question existed and that a call was almost certainly made from that phone in the general time frame allotted to the timeline that resulted in the successful prosecution of the convicted. What is not know is how long it took to make the collect call. Minutes, even seconds matter to piecing together an accurate timeline.
Another success involves fully closing the old web servers. That feels like such an epic gesture. I have to delete everything first, in the unlikely event that folks at the data centers feel like snooping through my emails and such.
Wandering around the wasteland of my unsent e-mails and notes-to-self I made the unfortunate and random discovery of emails and notes from before and after 9/11. I couldn’t stand to read that shit. Memories of all the confusion and struggling to understand, all while waiting for the other shoe to drop. What was next? I’d walk around New York and ask “Is all this gonna be gone soon?”
When the blackout happened a couple of years later a radio announcer reported that the lights were out and no one yet could explain why. Then in a “related news” tone of voice she announced the assassination of a high-profile terrorist in Thailand. I think she said Americans were involved in the killing. Without meaning to the announcer made it sound like the blackout was some kind of retaliation or related to this terrorist in Thailand being felled. It made me realize for as long this country continues to exist we will be forced to consider any major outage or incident to be an attack. The war isn’t coming to us via invading armies but via middleware.
The other success of late was getting SSH access from this tablet. It is still troubling that I couldn’t figure out why the client I’d been using before no longer works. I took the low road and bought another client, which it turns out is way better than the one I’d been using. So that’s all good.
And I got all the backups back in order on the RAID.
At the ghetto coffee shop. Still smarting from what a mental drain that spam problem was, now actually waiting for spam to come in so I can see it get properly filtered.
I wrote an email to a reporter/producer from a Netherlands TV station. He inquire about (what else) payphones, and specifically their place in New York history. It prompted me to summarize the history of NYC payphone’s from the mid-1980s to present, as I’ve watched the slow stubborn death of the city’s independent payphone providers. And the summary I came up with was better than I might have expected, or rather better than I might have come up with on my own without some external inspiration. If I’m going to be on TV, even in the fucking Netherlands, I want to know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen other outlets bring in “experts” from colleges or universities but anything I’ve heard from them simply recycled the conventional wisdom that payphones were unsanitary and used mostly as urinals. The Clark Kent/Superman myth also gets a lot of love even though it has fundamentally no basis in fact.
