Ian's blog

Is this spam or what?

Dear Ian,

JDG Associates, executive search consultants since 1973, is representing
the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) in their search for a Chief
Security Officer. I have attached a copy of the position announcement,
for your review. If you know of anyone whom you feel would be qualified
and interested in this opportunity, please let me know or feel free to
forward this email. Or ask them to contact me directly. I would be happy
to provide further information.

<<...>>
Thank you, in advance, for your help.

Worked from home today while I waited for the directv installer. He was supposed to be here at 8am to 12 of course he turned up at 1:30. He finished about 3:30 so there wasn’t much point going into the office. Its only a 10 minute bike ride but it was pissing down with rain. So much so that I have now discovered why there were strange puddles of water next to the sink are coming from. I have a leak above the kitchen sink window. Will investigate when the weather becomes nicer.
So now I have Directv. Not quite sure what i will be watching since there are only a few programs I am watching at the moment and they have cancelled all the others I used to watch.
I spent the first part of the morning trying to convince my windows machine to start up the citrix remote client we use for remote conections. My work laptop is part of a test setup in another building from my office so I couldn’t use that to VPN in. I ended up using my apple to connect strange as it seams it works perfectly for connecting to the terminal servers at work. Then I stole one of my 17inch monitors for the latop so I could have a bigger screen, then stole the keyboard.
Spam and Virus mail on imacdonald.co.uk/iwasdot.com/imacdonald.com seems to be working well. I have caught well over 100 viruses and a similar amount of spam since I installed it on my gateway machine. I am using amavis-new to hook postfix, clamav, spamassasin and f-prot together. It works but the config file for amavis is hellishly ugly. I am guessing the previous owner of imacdonald.com was someone called dan since I am getting a lot of viruses addressed to him. Its strange you think that his name would begin with ‘I’

This is a very interesting It is titled “my rides through chernobyl area”

I meant to post this today Annie the Cat

Ok so my dsl line is up and running, now I need to sort out some sort of TV signal. I have a large antenna on the roof that I think has cabling coming in to the basement that is conveniently sliced at the door frame. I guess it was cut when the house was renovated. I have a line that comes in from the cable company. I am assuming that they disconnected the cable when the previous owner moved out. I suppose I should plug the TV in and see.
My current thinking is Direct TV. I am planning on getting a new TV at some point in the future so getting the two room system would make sense. Seems like the HD feeds on cable and satellite a fairly slim so I am going to ignore them for the moment.
I had a look at the systems on offer at best buy. The 2 room system they are selling has receivers that don’t do dolby digital. Again after some research the only channels that have 5.1 sound seem to the premium channels like HBO. I don’t have a 5.1 surround sound system so again that may not be an issue. If I go to an HDTV system then would need an HD sat box and they all do dolby 5.1 so that doesn’t make that much difference.
Now that I am thinking about it might make sense just to get the one room system and not pay the extra $5 per month for the extra receiver. If I upgraded to HD I would need an HD receiver anyway. Seems there is a customer retention plan that will allow you to get a HD receiver for $399 then get $300 rebate on your bill.
Or I could just go with cable.

The DSL line didn’t bounce once today so it looks like I have found a solution. I am listening to the radio scotland feed which is feeding radio 5. Strange they had that english guy from market place on talking about how crap tv is going to be tis fall. So maybe I shouldn’t go out and get direct TV.

Ok so my cunning plan didn’t work. So I made a trip to home depot bought a $8 RJ11 crimping tool and set about to run a direct CAT 5 cable from the basement to the bedroom. So I now have a cable the snakes from the basement up the stair and across the hall. I then connected all the other lines in the house to the interface via a dsl filter. Not the most beautiful solution but it seems to have done the trick. At some point I will run the cables behind the walls. I did discover an other twist to the wiring. The front bedroom line is spliced off of the back bedroom line arrg. So the chance of running ethernet to the front bedroom is almost with out some major remodeling.

I think I have nailed up my dsl line, at least till the phone rings. My original plan was to run dedicated CAT5 to the basement the wire it directly to the interface box but I discovered the telephone line in the back room doesn’t go straight to the basement as I had hoped instead to disappears off to the right about 5 feet then shoots down the to the basement. So it looks like I will have to cut a whole in the dry way in the laundry room then pull cable to there then pull it down to the basement. Not that huge a deal just more than I wanted to do today.
Instead I spliced a piece of CAT 5 on the end of the telephone cable and ran it directly to the interface box. This seem to have resolved some of the issues. The DSL line is reporting 1268 down and 384 up and seems to be staying up. One of my Co workers is going to bring in a DSL splitter which I can add inline and should stop telephone calls from dropping the DSL line and I can get rid of those ugly filters.

hehe, i am drunk 🙂 even had a piper playing at the wharf rat tonight 🙂 enough said,

Today was thebig day. I moved most of the furnature into my new house. Big thanks to HY, Wolf, Katja, Danneille, Wendy and Sucumar. After everyone left (except HY) we discovered that the queen sized matress doesn’t go up the stairs. So I guess I will need to pull it onto the balcony and in through the upstairs door. Sara is giving my laptop some luving right now so she seems to be reasonably happy. The only things left at my old appartment are pictures and the kitchen stuff. I should be able to get that with a couple trips in my car. So watch out for a house warming party. As soon as I have a bed and all the boxes are emptied.