It Is No Secret...

Some people think the internet is a safe place to hang out. They forget that way back when, in the early days of the telephone, people had party lines. If somebody received a call, there was a good chance that one or more of the neighbors that shared the line would be listening in. You simply did not share the intimate details of your life over the phone.

Private lines, and privacy laws, sort of changed that. People, especially in the US of A, grew accustomed to the idea that without a court order, people other could not listen in to your phone conversation.

What people do not realize about the internet is that it is not a private place. There is a good chance that every email you have ever sent is in storage on somebody's hard drive, somewhere. Not too long ago, I retrieved a long lost blurb that I sent out when my email address was still a freenet address. Internet packets bounce from node to node, server to server, until they are delivered. At each node, there is the possibility that the mail can be read. Even encrypted mail can be read with the right cracker working on it.

There are also web crawlers -- spyware programs -- that live on the net, picking up and tracking down keywords which are then sold to advertisers who can target people that mention items in email or in blogs.

Yesterday I posted about my buying "new rechargeable batteries for the camera". My blog also references, occasionally, real estate topics. This morning my spamblocker at Earthlink caught this one :

• SpamSummarySuspectMessage


• Date="03/29/2008"


• Sender="Robert Gibbs" "rgarrison@intouchhometours.com"


• Subject="Things to consider when buying a new camera for Real Estate photos"


• UID="1jFC3F6qs3Nl34e1"

Of course, the sender name is bogus. If you do a whois :

Whois has started ...


"Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information.

No match for "RGARRISON@INTOUCHHOMETOURS.COM".

Last update of whois database: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:13:38 UTC"

and a traceroute gives :

"Traceroute has started ...

traceroute: Warning: rgarrison@intouchhometours.com has multiple addresses; using 209.86.66.90 traceroute to rgarrison@intouchhometours.com (209.86.66.90), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets

1 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 2.046 ms 0.484 ms 0.478 ms
2 * * *
3 * * *
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 * * *"
(I stopped at this point; it made no sense to keep hunting.)

It isn't really just a coincidence. I have had people from half-way around the world post comments about something that I have written. The web crawlers parsed my post, fed it into the syndicated feeds, and, behold -- someone I never met, or possibly never intended to have read my stuff, gets a copy and responds.

When people post family pictures on the internet, they are posting for the whole world to see. When they talk about family secrets, those items are then public information. If you want to tell someone something, and don't want anyone else listening in on the world wide party line, write them a letter and hand deliver it. Once they have read it, burn it and grind up the ashes. And do it where the EPA can't see you.

BTW -- I intend to turn on as many electrical devices as I can today. In your face, Earth worshippers!!

I'm Cheap

I was at Wal-Mart this morning to pick up some potting soil and oil for the ZX2 and took a look around the electronics section because I decided at the itch of a nose to buy new rechargeable batteries for the camera. Whilst there, I looked at CD labeling stuff, and also disk envelopes. I have cases for the critters, but I want to save those for stuff that really needs to be archived on a shelf, where the disks might be used from time to time. Other archive material only needs a sleeve, since it will get stuck on a shelf and forgotten unless something drastic occurs, like a need to format a drive.

It was almost $5 for a pack of 100 sleeves. I sez to myself, wait a minute, Horace, you also need to make some new Tyvek sleeves for your credit cards. Why not buy some rubber cement for $1.97 and kill two turkeys with one golf ball?

Ha! and you though I was sane?

So anyway, I designed a disk sleeve (copied the measurements from one that had an iBook install disk) and printed it out.


Then I cut it out, folded the flaps, and applied the rubber cement.


If you apply the rubber cement to both surfaces and let it dry before you press it together, it makes a permanent bond. You can rub off any excess afterwards.


And, to save you some work, you can get the .pdf pattern from:

Disk Envelope Template

and print it out. Might have to set your margins to zero, but I didn't.

I may be cheap, but I like to delude myself with thoughts of generosity!

OHIO is NOT Macintosh friendly!!

Ever since the Democrats took control of the State of Ohio after the 2006 elections, strange things began to happen on official websites. Macintosh computers using the Safari browser could no longer access government documents. I first noticed this at the Department of Commerce website last year, when I had to switch to the PC and IE 6 to get my licensing information. Then, this year, while trying to access the tax forms, I got this:

Pretty cute, isn't it? Most of the text is missing. There is no way you can fill out that form. Even opening it in Acrobat 7.0.5, which they say is required, does not allow you fill out the form on-line, since the only way it will properly open is if you download the .pdf. Then, if you fill it out, you cannot file it on-line.

If the government said that you could only drive on the highway if you used a Ford product, people would scream that their rights were being violated. This is the same kind of thing -- government saying, "Use this commercial product or else."

At first I was going to say something about Bill Gates having bought all the Ohio Democrat politicians. Then I went to Apple's website and found that other people were having the same problems, some of them on Federal websites. It turns out that Apple adheres strictly to the published web standards for browsers. Microsoft does not (that was always a problem, because years ago, way back when IE first came out, MS tried to knock Netscape out of the market by deliberately breaking the rules). The Open Source people who are responsible for Firefox simply make sure that if a site breaks the rules, the browser can use the corrupt site anyway. Apple tends to stick as closely as possible to the standards since opening any little loopholes can let nasty unwanted intruders in; Safari has fewer viruses than Firefox which has fewer viruses than IE. Apple says it is not a conspiracy; it is simply laziness on the part of website developers who learned to code with IE and never bothered to think that standards mattered.

So I think it will be a real hoot in another year or so when all of a sudden, these IE-specific websites will no longer work. Yep, you heard that correctly. It seems that Billy Gates himself has made the pronouncement that the next upgrade of IE will stick strictly to the published web standards. There will be some howls of outrage when all those non-standard websites will have to be rewritten, but the power of the marketplace, with the growing number of people switching to Safari and Firefox, is forcing MS to change the way they do business. And, as has been the MS custom, if you don't like it, they will throw you under the train. And charge you for it in the bargain.

Whew!! At Last!!

Now to finish the handrails...

Them's the Brakes

Spent part of yesterday replacing the front brake pads on the ZX2. It was the first time I had ever worked on sliding-pin calipers, and I don't have a manual for that car. So, like any good cou-rouge, I bought the pads, studied the layout, and dug in to the repair.

Let me say this. I could not find any good, free how-to manuals for that repair on the web. Maybe it's just me, and my search efforts were lame. However, I did take lots of pictures as I went, documented my errors, and plan to build a Powerpoint presentation of my efforts. Anybody with a later Escort or Tracer should find that useful; the total repair cost was about $30 and, once you have an idea how to proceed with confidence, takes less than a half hour per side.

It was a bit of an adventure. There was one potentially serious flub -- I destroyed a retaining spring on the first side I worked on -- when I attempted to fix the spring by creating a replacement part with some spring wire. That repair was superceded by the discovery on the second wheel that an even more critical spring had broken in use, and I had to run out and buy a new spring set for the calipers. It actually allowed me to comment on how to replace the caliper springs without removing the caliper from the car.

The nicest part of the whole exercise was this, though. For the first time in many, many years, I was able to work on my car inside my garage. It is starting to feel like the house has finally been put back together again.