One of the things I really enjoy is people threatening to sue me.  That has happened so much the last few years, mostly from people who refuse to pay their bills and I take some action against.  They claim they’ll be suing me for defamation or some crap like that most of the time, not that I ever go talking about them to anyone except courts or police.  It costs me too much money to actually sue them and get nothing from it, so I just make the motions as necessary and let it be on the record.

     The particular asshat, however, doesn’t really have a dog in this fight.  I wasn’t trying to screw her over in any way, but since her asshat boyfriend felt it was okay to not show up to court, leaving me in a serious bind, I simply felt it was a good idea to stop allowing him to screw me out of $175 a month for all the sites he hosts on my server for the price of one.  And then he doesn’t pay his bill properly, at that.
     Her email was down for a grand total of four hours in the mess, and instead of either of them calling and asking that I turn them back or making any attempt to try and resolve the situation, she starts running her mouth.  Estrogen abuse!

     As I said, her email was down for a grand total of four hours and then I realzed, “Wait, she might actually need that, and it’s not her fault her boyfriend is a dick,” and I turned it back on.

     But apparently, even going that far wasn’t good enough.

     She’s threatening to go to the Better Business Bureau, having her father do the same (yeah, Asshat hosts sites for a bunch of his friends, on my servers, which I pay for, for free!), and then bitches and complains that if I don’t transfer all domains over to them by 12PM, worse things will happen.  Oh, if I don’t burn all their data to DVD and mail it to them by Monday, they’re going to sue me.

     Customers are responsible for their own data backups.  Asshat’s known that forever.  They have the data — they put it up there!  It ain’t like these are friggin’ dynamic, data-driven sites or anything!

     And her, she can’t even figure out how to do a Domain Transfer.

     Sorry, dear, but you don’t DEMAND anything of me.  If you’d asked nicely and either of you had even attempted to be civil, this would’ve turned out a lot different.

     So you people go ahead and go to the BBB — that requires that you were actually doing business with me, which you weren’t.  You all never paid for hosting, anyway.

     And go ahead and sue me — it’s so baseless, that I’d represent myself, and you’d still lose.

     As for the other allegations that I owe him money and crap like that?  You better take that up with your asshat boyfriend.  I don’t owe him a dime — he was paid up with interest and it’s easily proven.  And hey, when I did all that cooking, I bought half the ingredients.  How ’bout that?  And how many times have you people called me for help with everything from moving to car repair to even helping you two sort out your personal problems between each other, what did I do?  I was always right there.
     I asked for one friggin’ thing.  And waiting til the Zero Hour to back out like you both did — and maybe he didn’t bother to tell you, which is his fault, not mine — is pretty reprehensible.

     So much for being my “friends.”

     When you know someone for twenty four friggin’ years, you expect them to show up in court to vouch that certain events happened when they were around two and half years ago.

     I think it’s a pathetic as Hell that at the Zero Hour, I’m told, “Nope, won’t be there.  Don’t worry about it!  You don’t need me there.”

     Yeah, I damn sure did, too.  It was “required” for my case, and I certainly appreciate the way you just cast me aside at the last minute, claiming I never gave you a date — which I certainly did two weeks ago, and then mentioned it again on Saturday.

     I really appreciate you.  That’s a Hell of a way to end a friendship.

     The Wildcat won’t be there, either, apparently.  But at least has somewhat a more reasonable excuse.

     For whatever reason, the house I’m in now has some pretty bad wiring.  It’s a relatively new house — built in the 70’s, perhaps early 80’s — and shouldn’t have the problems it does. 
     Unfortunately, that’s one of the things you’ll always get into when you own a home.  There are quirky things about most every house.  In this one, the fuse box may even be a bit overloaded…

     Last Friday night, I had an overwhelming sense of dread.  I felt like someone close to me was in trouble, and there was nothing I could do.  I was distraught, and I couldn’t shake that feeling.  My car had messed up the night before, and just everything seemed to be going the wrong way.  And what should happen but every time I came into the room and sat down on the bed, the ceiling fan would begin this eerie whining, and shake violently back and forth.
     But it only happened when I came back into the room and sat down on the bed…

     I tested that theory seven or eight times, and finally decided to pull out the voice recorder and leave it running in the otherwise silent room for a few minutes… I mean, a little EVP never hurt anyone, right?

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUQNtpGdSAw)

     And so, two things became obvious:

1. Those weren’t ghosts.  They were telephone signals.  There’s obviously a massive amount of Extremely Low Frequency radiation pointed at this upstairs room from “somewhere,” and somehow, it’s bleeding through.  Perhaps it’s the fault of bad grounding in this house’s wiring, or perhaps having a telecommunications transmitter inadvertently pointed directly at this room is the whole problem with the wiring.
2. The ceiling fan was never mounted straight, and it was extremely loose.  I opened and closed the door each time I moved from the bed, walking into the hallway, and just that amount of air pressure was enough to make the ceiling fan go crazy.  A few twists of the screwdriver fixed the problem, however, it’s still off balance… just not so much that the door makes it appear to be a murder weapon from the afterlife.

     This really made me give a lot more thought to the whole EVP phenomenon.

     Sure, you can make recordings in silence, and end up with all sorts of noises.  Ambient and background noises, wind and air pressure changes and other miscellaneous sounds that you wouldn’t normally notice become amplified.  Since the dynamic range of most microphones is significantly wider than that of the human ear, and the fact that the final recording becomes compressed to fit into an audible bandwidth — not to mention the problems of noise from the internal mechanism on tape recorders and sounds created by digital processing on voice recorders — you end up hearing all sorts of noises that can sound rather ghastly.  It’s the perfect illustration of the old saying, “ghost in the machine.”

     You simply have to take a scientific approach to this sort of thing, otherwise, you’ll end up convincing yourself of all sorts of crazy stuff.  As another old saying goes, “Enough research will tend to support your theory.”

     Inspired by movies like Stir of Echoes, Sixth Sense and White Noise, and entertainment television shows like Ghost Hunters, I know too many people who run around recording EVP.  Most of them are convinced that Ghost Hunters is real, as they’re unable to distinguish the difference between science, pseudoscience and entertainment. 
     These types also totally buy into most of the crazy conspiracy theories going around.

     But, like they’d assuredly tell me … I’m just too cynical… *rolls eyes*

     As for that “feeling of dread” I had Friday night (and through the weekend), I was more than right — in fact, I was dead on, right down to times.  As cynical as I might be, there’s still the fact that I perceive things that I shouldn’t be able to.
     You either get used to that or you don’t.

     If you’re using Pyzor to help you block spam (a lot of people use it alongside SpamAssassin), then you’ve probably run into these nasty “pyzor: check failed: internal error” messages in your maillog since July 21st.
     After digging into on my own a bit, I found two things.  The first was the “InternalError” was being caused by a corrupt “servers” file that contained nothing but “File Not Found” information.  The second was that the “discover” command line was returning:

downloading servers from http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/inform-servers-0-3-x
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File “/usr/bin/pyzor”, line 4, in ?
    pyzor.client.run()
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/client.py”, line 991, in run
    ExecCall().run()
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/client.py”, line 185, in run
    self.servers  = self.get_servers(servers_fn)
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/client.py”, line 410, in get_servers
    servers.read(open(servers_fn))
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/client.py”, line 119, in read
    self.append(pyzor.Address.from_str(line))
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/__init__.py”, line 458, in from_str
    fields[1] = int(fields[1])
IndexError: list index out of range 

     Obviously, linking to non-existent files, especially in the /cgi-bin/ directory, is a bad thing.

     As a temporary measure, simply disable your “pyzor discover” cron job, and manually add “82.94.255.100:24441″ into your “servers” file (wherever it may be with your configuration).

The Wildcat and the Volunteer are finally together.

Permanently.

I’m moving to Tennessee!

We really found out who our friends were at Mary Breckinridge Hospital — maybe two or three — and the rest can kiss our asses! In Knoxville, Mark’s friends became better friends than I ever had in Leslie County. When they ask you how you’re doing, they really mean it. And when they say they love you, they really mean it, too.

At this moment, we’re right where we need to be. We’re right where we belong. We’re soulmates. Right where God intended us to be, and nobody can keep us apart.

Mark, I love you with all my heart. I’ve never met anyone who’d fight this hard for me. You proved it… you proved your love. Because you stuck by me when no one else would, you showed things that no one else ever has. Your showed me what true love is.

And for that, all I can do is return that and say, thank you so much. 

Kenny Chesney: Better as Memory

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBgNbSA4WdM)

But he finally met somebody he can’t just be a memory to.

Oh, baby… I love you.

Always.

So to all the ladies before me, thank you for moving over so the Wildcat could move in!

     It’s kinda like this … Love the emotion, love the lyrics, and sometimes, it’s sorta pertinent.

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qtf-JeaNM8)

      But I hate hate the makeup.  It’s not the 60’s anymore, and you don’t have to turn tricks.  It ain’t the 70’s anymore, and you don’t need a gimmick.  It’s not the 80’s anymore, and you know how to kick Trent’s ass.  The 90’s were just a bunch of “alternative” that all sounded the same.
     Believe what you write, believe in what you do.  That’s what’ll make me like you a little more.

     I mean, Jesus, sorry you smacked your girlfriend when you were drunk.  You poor bastard.  Wonder how she feels?

     Yeah, yeah… I know, you’d hate to see my enemies.  Well, I usually just wait for Karma to kick them in the ass.  I mean, if I didn’t plan out a way for something cool to work and have it turned into another thing to blow them up already, anyway.
     That’s blood on my hands.

     Got any songs for that?

     Dude, you drank.  You were an asshole.

     Get over it.

     Mind you, it’s a brilliant song.  It’s where you meet someone in a lonely world and you want spend you entire life with them, yet….

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldq-efmOhfw)

     You still might.  Go figure.  *shrug*

     Keep it up, tho.  And if you do, you’ll have more friends that Trent Reznor. That’s Life.

     And Mikey will still like it….

I’ll admit that I am subsrcibed to I Can Has Cheezburger and I look forward to new posts throughout the day to take my mind off work. And I have sent them some images of my kittehs in action.

The other day one of the images had some problem, so I went to the site rather than just looking at it through my RSS reader. I noticed that even though it was just posted, it already had 90 comments. As a blogger, I knew how rampant spam was and since this was one of the most popular sites on the web, I figured the bots were all zeroed in. I took a peak because I wanted to see this sad state of affairs.

Um. Whoa. What tha?

No spam. Instead, it was a very long thread by real people all speaking LOLcat talk! Page after page! On every post! In less than 15 minutes from post to my reader getting it, 90 comments by these people!

I have never seen a more sickening display of a waste of time in my life! I was sure I was looking at a convergence of all those crazy cat ladies, coming together in one common obsession.

Good Lord. If “Get a life” ever had meaning, this is it! This was all fun, and now it somehow makes me sick…

     Last night was rough.  I didn’t sleep well, thanks to a psychotic cat — an obnoxiously loud cat who constantly whines for food and will not shut up — who insisted that running about the place at full chase and jumping on me with all four sets of claws was a good idea.
     It so was not…

     When I did finally wake and venture into the land of the living, it truly seemed that everyone was in a bad mood.  Of the thirty-four people who I spoke to today, only four didn’t jump right in the middle of my ass.  Thus, I decided to ignore the outside world altogether, come home, write some music and catch up on some coding projects that I’ve been putting off for some time.
     After getting two sites completed — which were really tough, mind you — the thought crossed my mind that, “Computers are sometimes more forgiving than people.”  The third site was just midbogglingly complex.  It was simply too much for me to wrap my muddled head around today, so I quickly revised my theory.

     This weekend, I requested the observance of a new, annual Holiday on February 20th.  I really do hope that “Quit Trying to Make Mark Steel Have a Bad Day Day” is a success, because I’m under a lot of pressure right now.
     In addition to a lot of ridiculously extreme, external bullshit going on lately, last Friday marked the twelve year anniversay of the death of one of my best friends.  This Thursday, February 21st, marks the one year Anniversary of the death of another.
     I know for sure that if those two were still around, one of ‘em would be kicking some peoples’ asses for buggin’ me, and the other would be joining in, all the while laughing maniacally and inciting a veritable cornucopia of other could-be-ass-kickers to assist!
     Yes, I miss those crazy bitches.  I really do.  Unquestionably, they were crazy bitches.  And if you think they’d get offended at that, all you’d've had to do was ask them.  They’d laugh in your face. 

     So, yeah, you could say I’m a little introspective today, but it’s not sadness, per se.  On days like these, I tend to evaluate what’s important to me and what’s not.  Right now, there’s a single issue that’s important to me: Thursday night, my Wildcat and I are gonna be able to hold each other and relax.  The mere promise of that one, simple event keeps my spirits up.

     Tomorrow, though, I’m gonna observe “Quit Trying to Make Mark Steel Have a Bad Day Day,” with “Quit Trying to Make My Wildcat Have a Bad Day Day” running along side it.  And I hope the world celebrates “Quit Trying to Make Fill-In-Your-Name-Here Have a Bad Day Day” with us, too, because dammit, sometimes we all need a break!

     I think it’s a worthy, humanitarian cause.

     I mean, for fucksakes…

     Not to sound like Rodney King or nothin’, but…

     Can’t we all just get along?

     I mean, except for this friggin’ cat.

     I may strangle her just so I can get some sleep.

     I stumbled into Robert Munroe’s treasure trove of talented ‘toons quite by accident, and can’t help but impressed.  Sure, some might seem a little obscure, maybe even a bit “geeky,” but what the Hell do you expect from a Physicist and Robotics Engineer? ;-)

     Actually, he seems to be a remarkably talented evil genius:

     In case you didn’t get that one…

     And this remarkably astute piece is titled, “How it Works”:

     Regardless, I think it’s clever stuff.  But then, some people consider me a little warped… Others consider me a lot warped… and a handful think I’m not warped at all.  The latter make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

     Check out xkcd.com for more. 

Tip: Courtesy of xkcd.com, by way of Paul Simer, by way of Les Jones.

     But fortunately, Donnie Hoyle does.  Check out the First Four, the Fifth), and here’s Episode 6 of “You Suck at Photoshop.”

(Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lys2MxjzE94)

     Yeah, extended travel can hurt… Especially Uranus…