Patrick’s Rants

Now that Fidel Castro is in ailing health, temporarily handing power to his brother, the multitudes of old exiled Cuban patriots must be rejoicing. They’ve been running drills, maintaining their marksmanship skills at county run shooting ranges in the Everglades and pondering the fall of Castro over rabid games of dominos. The phrase, “when Castro falls we’re going to invade!” is an unmistakable refrain mostly shouted by cigar smoking old men.

When I was a kid growing up in South Florida there was a story about Park Service “rescuing” an out of gas boat on one of the keys. The boat was full of “fishermen” dressed in fatigues, carrying automatic weapons. If they hadn’t run out of gas they surely would have assaulted the island nation of Cuba and run Castro right out.

On one hand there was the group ready to overthrow Castro as soon as he’s dead. On the other is the group who tells everyone when they’re going to visit relatives. They load up freezer bags with prescription medicines, over the counter drugs and pack their suitcases full of clothes. The suitcase are empty on the return trip if they bother to bring them back at all, and the medications are distributed to anyone who needs them.

So when Castro dies, legions of aging militia will be ready. If he hangs on for a little while longer, so what? They’ve only been preparing for the day for the last forty years.

I finally upgraded my cell phone. I really wanted a bar type phone but the only phones made that way look like some kind of brick, with sharp edges. Even I don’t want to walk around with something that ugly. The one that I thought I might like, a Kyocera, seems to not be available so I ended up with a danged flip phone. And not just any flip phone, but one that will take pictures too. Great!

Well, the flip phone isn’t sooo bad, but I find that I try to hold it to my ear like every other phone that I have. I doesn’t work quite like that and I end up kinda squashing it. The other features available I could take or leave: speaker phone, I actually use from time to time and the hands free stuff I really like – just don’t expect to find me walking down the street talking into my headset (OK, there was that one time) but the voice activated commands? This is a typical conversation with my phone
(Push the button on the side of the phone)

Phone: “Please say a command”
Me: “Call… someone”
Phone: “Say a Name”
Me: “Steve”
Phone: “Did you say Steve?” (not bad at voice recognition)
Me: “Yes”
Phone: “Call (sorta unintelligible)?”
………
Phone: “…command timed out”
Me: “Agggh”
Phone: “No match found. Please say a command”

I’m not sure which of us is dumber here.

Some other features that I was really used to but aren’t on this phone: a mode that vibrates first, then rings if you don’t answer it within like a ring or two. This new phone is either-or. Huh.

Of course, I’ll keep it.

I don’t know about you, but I have my chat program open all day. I don’t get to chat all day since I’m usually at work, but there it sits in my system tray.

All the people I don’t chat with anymore:
A friend of mine used to work from home – he lived in Chicago and “work” was in Cottonwood. We used to chat all the time. He would send me decent funny/political links and I would answer “stupid” Linux questions. It was a great symbiotic relationship. I hardly get to chat with him anymore since he has moved to California to work for the “Big G” as a support… something. Google keeps him really busy. Anytime I do manage to catch him he tells me it’s been a busy week. Well I hope he’s happy! (Hi Steve)

Another friend of mine works as a consultant for Dell, implimenting Linux installations and conversions and such. I don’t chat with him much anymore either since he’s usually flying off somewhere. Still another returned to work for RedHat and although I didn’t usually chat with him online we used to email occasionally and I would see him at our monthly geek meetings. He too flies out to customer sites at the behest of his employer.

That leaves the rest of my Buddy List. There are a couple of people who I chat with because they use my FreeRealty package, but then that leaves me with a really short and quiet Buddy List. It didn’t used to be this way. I used to have a fairly long list of people that I used to chat with – I spent late nights searching for people to chat with. The thing about these lists is that they take work to build and maintain. I have close to 100 people on my list and haven’t seen more than like six online at any given point in time. I don’t add people to my list very much anymore except for geeky type people. What does that say about me?

I’m one of those people who doesn’t answer the phone unless I recognize the number on caller ID. If you have a “restricted”, “unavailable” or “out of area” number, then leave a message after the beep. This goes even more for my cell phone. I don’t give that number to anyone and I won’t even answer a local number unless I know who it is. Enter the obtuse caller. My cell phone was ringing and it was a 520 area code. That could either be a cell phone that hasn’t been updated to the local area code or someone from somewhere else. I was ignoring it – “discussing” the fact that I don’t give the number to anyone with my wife. I lost the discussion and answered the cell.

Idiotic caller: “This is [somebody] calling from [some company] in Tucson, may I speak to [Mookie Wilson]?”
Me: “No you have the wrong number.”
Idiotic caller: “Can you give me the right number?” (I give them points for originality here – haven’t heard that before)
Me: “I have no idea who you’re talking about”

I slam the phone down with a loud crash rudely in the caller’s ear; well it was more like a “boop” since it was my cell phone.

See why I don’t answer the phone when I don’t recognize the number?

Tell me something I didn’t know. I occasionally do a search engine lookup for my pet project, Free Realty just to see how I’m faring in the search engine world. Most of the time I find inocuous mentions and if I’m lucky I have the top ranked link. Well, not on June 21, 2006. On that day I found that a 14 year old “security tester” ran a script or something against my demo site finding that one variable didn’t get properly tested before being passed to the database. According to “r0t“, “This can be exploited to manipulate SQL queries.” He then claims that there is a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability – though he doesn’t show how that can be exploited. He goes on to state that certain versions of the package reveal information about the server. Whether the server shows installation paths or not – which is what he’s writing about – depends upon the server configuration, not the web pages on it.

So how it comes down is there is some kid trying to make a name for himself running whatever scripts against web sites. He claims that he doesn’t bother contacting the author because one didn’t email him or fix their program. So there isn’t any reason for courtesy I guess. I did fix the flaw, plus a couple of others that he didn’t find in his haste to post about this one, and I managed to do it within 24 hours of me finding the flaw listed on his site. I do notice that that other similar package hasn’t been fixed. I guess they don’t have as big an ego as I do

What originally set me off was an article on secureworks.com. Ah well. I guess he’s doing what he thinks is “right”, but I’m not impressed with his “ski11z”. I would have been far more impressed with an email.

We went down to Red Rock State Park today. When I say “we” I mean me, the wife, kids, my brother, his wife and kids and one extra just for luck. That makes eight kids, four adults in case you’re counting. First thing, when my nephew gets in the water he makes his way over to the “sand bar” which is more like a mud bar in the middle of the “river”. Oak Creek is a little low due to a multi-year drought and is much more of a creek than a river, although where we managed to get into the water was around six feet deep in a couple of spots.
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I do whatever my rice crispies tell me to

If I wanted to listen to your crappy music I’d sit in your car

The ongoing saga regarding Chase Bank credit cards. I recently wrote Chasing Them Away, where I describe my (and my wife’s) continuing frustration with the Chase. Last week an offer that couldn’t be refused. The aforementioned bank sent her a decent balance transfer offer. Having yet another card with a higher interest rate that we wanted to close (don’t get me started on how many we have or how much is on them ) my wife took them up on the transfer. She was able to get a decent sized credit line, but not enough to transfer the entire balance over. Soon after getting the information from the bank she called. She managed to get Chase Bank to move a credit line from the atrociously high 30 something percent to the lower rate card – well all but 500.00. So she has the same credit available between the two cards, just the bank moved the available credit from one account to the other. I didn’t even know this could be done.
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I’m almost to the point where I’m ready to replace my older cell phone with a shiny brand new phone so I went into the Verizon store at the mall. I’m not sure if they do this everywhere, but here they have a “greeter” who takes your name and puts it on their list – presumably that helps with customer service by making sure that people don’t wait too long. I don’t really like the flip style phone, too many people I know walk around with them half open when they get caught on something – and pretty soon the hing is busted. I also don’t care for all the danged “features” more aptly named distractions: cameras, games, music, GPS functions, etc.

Come on! It’s a freaking phone!

Sorry, started to hyperventilate there…

After only a few moments, long enough for me to look around and decide that I like the Kyocera “bar phone”, I am called over the the counter to talk to one of the sales people. I ask her if she can check up on my account since I remember that I should be able to get a free phone. She looks it up and then tells me, “Yes you are eligible for an upgrade.”

“Which phone can I get?”

“Any phone in the store.” (Some may cost a little out of pocket)

“Well, I really like this phone.”

“You can’t get that one with your plan.”

huh? “Any phone” indeed.