Useless comment

I was quite excited to see a comment on my blog today. I read the blog and the person tried to contact me via my contact form and couldn't (I messed up the Apache permissions). He wanted to contact me about a product I wrote years ago for a client. Why contact me? It's not my product and I don't have it. It's like if I contacted the original author of HyperCard and asked how I could get a copy. How would he know?

Please keep comments relevant.

Stupid hackers

I periodically check on statistics on my server and noticed that for the last 1.5 hours, my bandwidth was constant even though I wasn't doing anything. I started checking the traffic on my network and saw that some Chinese hacker (or script kiddy) was trying to get into my machine via SSH. I've seen a number of hack attempts into my server and normally write them off, but this was chewing up bandwidth, so I blocked the IP address of the attacker. I realize it is kind of pointless as hackers will use different IP addresses and there will be more later.

Why do people waste their time? My server is not very interesting. I wish people had better things to do than try to hack my server. I read yesterday that someone got convicted of a denial of service attack (DOS) last year. Maybe that will teach someone a lesson; probably not.

English speaking customer service reps

Yesterday I called my cable company to switch the IP address of my cable modem as I now have a block of 5 addresses and in order to use them, a change had to be made. I called support, negotiated the phone tree, and spoke to a woman with a heavy accent. I explained what I wanted done (my sales rep told me to call support to get the change made) and after explaining it a few times, I thought that she got it. She said she had to transfer me to a modem person and then when the modem person got on the line, he said "I understand you are having problems connecting to the Internet." I told him that there was a communications issue and my connection was fine. So I got my cable modem reconfigured and things were fine.

I'm a bit tired of call centers that are either outsourced overseas or have people that aren't native speakers. I have nothing against people speaking different languages; however, when I'm trying to explain a technical issue or get a problem solved, the language barrier makes it harder to get things done.

Ground loop isolator

I searched for the part to eliminate the hum from my stereo, but all I could find online was one for $10 + $7 shipping. So, I called my cable company to see if they'd come install one for me. They told me to Radio Shack and get a Ground Loop Isolator. I did, hooked it up, and the hum is mostly gone. It's still there when the volume is cranked up real loud, but that could be something else. Very nice.