Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, Technology and Society

Under Attack

9 Comments

Some @n@l orifice is sending out spam using my long-time email address as the return address. So I get all the bounces. Typically, it’s about a thousand emails, in addition to the usual spam, and this is the third time this week (which makes me wonder how many of them don’t bounce, and actually get through). And I can’t filter it, because I have to know if email bounces, in case someone I was actually trying to send email to bounced.

But when these attacks happen, I have to just delete it all, because life is too short to go through them on the off chance that one in a thousand will actually be a legitimate bounced email.

I know Clark’s law (no, not Clarke’s Laws). The one that says that any sufficiently advanced amount of cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice, but it’s hard for me to believe that this is not intentional. I don’t know if my having to deal with all of this extraneous unfilterable email is the intent, or it’s just a side effect of the desire to make me look like a purveyor of p3nis enlargement devices and drugs.

Anyway, if I seem unusually testy, you know why.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Fedora Upgrade Woes

5 Comments

OK, so I followed Pete’s advice, and tried an upgrade from Core 7 to Core 8 via yum (yes, I know that Core 9 will be out shortly, but I figure it would probably be a mistake to go directly from 7 to 9, based on previous experience). Everything went fine until the end, when it failed with this message:

–> Processing Conflict: glibc-common conflicts glibc < 2.7 Error: No Package Matching glibc.i686 So, now what? [Evening update] OK, I ended up having to completely blow away glibc. Unsurprisingly, it broke my installation, with no obvious way to fix it. But it allowed me (finally) to do an ftp upgrade via a rescue CD. I'm now running FC8.

Administrative, Science And Society

Don’t Panic

C’mon, people, I appreciate the concern, really, but get a grip (or is that grippe?). It’s just the flu.

In most cases, you don’t need to see your doctor when you have a cold or the flu. However, if you have any of the symptoms below, seek medical advice.

  • A cold that lasts for more than 10 days
  • Earache or drainage from your ear
  • Severe pain in your face or forehead
  • Temperature above 102° F
  • Shortness of breath
  • Hoarseness, sore throat or a cough that won’t go away

Emphasis mine. The first five bullets never happened, the hoarseness lasted about three days last week, I never had much of a sore throat, and the cough is a lot better today (i.e., I didn’t do it much). I’ve got most of my energy back, and I think I’m mostly over it.

I think that there is a lot of wasted money in the health care system of people seeing doctors when there’s really not much that they can do. It also clogs up emergency rooms. It’s particularly bad when they bully them into prescribing antibiotics, which have no effect on a virus, and then they take half the course and quit, thus breeding more resistant bugs. I’m not the type to avoid a doctor if I need to see a doctor, but really folks, it’s just the flu.

Administrative, Science And Society

Don’t Panic

9 Comments

C’mon, people, I appreciate the concern, really, but get a grip (or is that grippe?). It’s just the flu.

In most cases, you don’t need to see your doctor when you have a cold or the flu. However, if you have any of the symptoms below, seek medical advice.

  • A cold that lasts for more than 10 days
  • Earache or drainage from your ear
  • Severe pain in your face or forehead
  • Temperature above 102° F
  • Shortness of breath
  • Hoarseness, sore throat or a cough that won’t go away

Emphasis mine. The first five bullets never happened, the hoarseness lasted about three days last week, I never had much of a sore throat, and the cough is a lot better today (i.e., I didn’t do it much). I’ve got most of my energy back, and I think I’m mostly over it.

I think that there is a lot of wasted money in the health care system of people seeing doctors when there’s really not much that they can do. It also clogs up emergency rooms. It’s particularly bad when they bully them into prescribing antibiotics, which have no effect on a virus, and then they take half the course and quit, thus breeding more resistant bugs. I’m not the type to avoid a doctor if I need to see a doctor, but really folks, it’s just the flu.

Administrative, Science And Society

Don’t Panic

C’mon, people, I appreciate the concern, really, but get a grip (or is that grippe?). It’s just the flu.

In most cases, you don’t need to see your doctor when you have a cold or the flu. However, if you have any of the symptoms below, seek medical advice.

  • A cold that lasts for more than 10 days
  • Earache or drainage from your ear
  • Severe pain in your face or forehead
  • Temperature above 102° F
  • Shortness of breath
  • Hoarseness, sore throat or a cough that won’t go away

Emphasis mine. The first five bullets never happened, the hoarseness lasted about three days last week, I never had much of a sore throat, and the cough is a lot better today (i.e., I didn’t do it much). I’ve got most of my energy back, and I think I’m mostly over it.

I think that there is a lot of wasted money in the health care system of people seeing doctors when there’s really not much that they can do. It also clogs up emergency rooms. It’s particularly bad when they bully them into prescribing antibiotics, which have no effect on a virus, and then they take half the course and quit, thus breeding more resistant bugs. I’m not the type to avoid a doctor if I need to see a doctor, but really folks, it’s just the flu.

Administrative, Political Commentary

Blogging Remains Scattered And Variable

6 Comments

I’m still not over this bug. I was pretty much done with the chills, sweats and fever a week ago, but it’s transmogrified into something more like a head cold. My nose has pretty much dried up now, and my voice no longer resembles that of a frog, so I can do business on the phone again, but it’s settled into my lungs now, and my energy level remains pretty low. Today is coughing-up-a-lung day (though sometimes it feels like I might reach down deep and hock up a kidney). I don’t think it’s turning into pneumonia, but I’ll keep an eye on it. All I know is that I don’t have much energy. The good news is that I’m catching up on my reading, including finally getting around to Jonah’s book(not to mention Mark Steyn’s), both of which Patricia got me as a belated birthday present.

Administrative, Technology and Society

More Fedora Fun

9 Comments

Because my life was too care free, and being a glutton for punishment, I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 7 to 8.

Unfortunately, the latest distribution doesn’t fit on CDs any more, and I don’t have a DVD reader in the machine to be upgraded. So I decided to build a boot disk on a cd, and do it from the network. So I build the CD, for x86_64 (the machine is running on an Athlon 64), boot with it, and everything is going fine until it’s about ready to start checking for dependencies. It gives me a message (from memory): “You are about to upgrade to x86_64, but your previous installation is i386. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?”

I scratch my head. I’m pretty sure that the last install was a 64 bit one. Maybe they mean that it will fail if I don’t have a 64-bit processor, but I do, so I tell it to go ahead. It starts checking dependencies, and the bar starts to move slowly to the right. Until it’s a quarter of the way, at which point it quits moving. I go away and come back in an hour. Still no motion. I go away and come back after a couple hours. Still stuck. I go to bed. I get up in the morning. No more progress. It finally exits with an error.

I try it from a different FTP site. No joy.

OK, if it thinks that it’s an i386 installation, I’ll just update that, and worry about making it 64 bit later. Burn the disk. Boot.

This time, when I get to the same place, I get the following message: “You are about to upgrade to i386, but your previous installation is x86_64. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?”

Note the subtle difference from the previous error message.

OK, the installer is schizo. When I try to install i386, it thinks it’s replacing x86_64, and when I try to install x86_64, it thinks it’s replacing i386. I tell it to go ahead. I get the same result–it hangs during the dependency check, at exactly the same place.

Any Fedora gurus out there with any suggestions? (Pete Zaitcev, I’m looking at you…)

Administrative

Back To FL

2 Comments

I’ve got an afternoon flight out of LAX that gets in late tonight. Things should start to get back to blogging normal tomorrow.

[Update about 3 PM PDT]

Well, tomorrow got here faster than I thought. No, I’m not blogging from the air. I (barely) missed my flight. I could have made it but it would have been sans luggage. I’m staying with my webmaster for the afternoon and evening, and going out on the redeye tonight. Fortunately, I wangled an upgrade.

[Wednesday afternoon update]

Got in about 7 AM EDT. Still catching up on sleep (and not just because of the red eye). Back a little later, perhaps with a (slight) site upgrade.

Administrative, General, History

Back In LA

5 Comments

I took a little longer to drive back from Phoenix because I did two things that I’ve never done, in all the times I’ve made that trip over the past thirty years. I stopped at the Colorado River in Blythe and walked across, and I stopped and did a quick tour of the Patton Museum at Chiriaco Summit. I’d show the pictures, but I don’t seem to have my card reader with me. I might pick one up at Fry’s tomorrow.

The latter was more impressive than I expected, considering that it’s private, not official. More so on the interior than outside, though. They have a number of tanks out there, in various states of decrepitude and disrepair, and no signs to provide any useful information about them. Still worth a visit, though, for anyone interested in military history.