greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Nice try, scamming bastards.

    I suppose I was overdue for someone to try scamming me.

    I just got off the phone with a thickly-accented person who claimed to be from the “Domain Notification Service,” or the “Domain Registration Notification Service,” or something like that. (Phone number: 800-224-8606 for the record.) He wanted to update the contact information for one of my registered domains. My first tip-off is that he got the domain wrong, but that could’ve been a fluke. Unfortunately for the loser in question, I’m the sort of paranoid fellow who insists on getting full name and company identification from anyone who cold-calls me digging for information. I pointed out, in increasingly strong terms, that I will not divulge any information to someone who doesn’t sound even remotely like they’re associated with my domain registrar.

    He insisted that it was vital that I “update” the contact information through him. “No,” I said. My registrar provides services to do exactly that, in a reasonably secure online fashion no less. We went round and around through this pointless loop a couple of times before I wearied of the stupidity entirely and said, “You do not represent my domain registrar and we have nothing further to say to one another,” at which point I hung up… and headed straight for Google.

    It would seem that my instincts were spot-on: Scam Alert! Domain Registry Support. Had I continued the call and divulged any information, I’d probably find myself saddled with a .US domain and (of course) the associated bill. Thanks, but no thanks, you shady bastards.

    So, keep in mind always that if someone calls, faxes or mails you and claims to be acting on behalf of your domain registrar, do whatever it takes to establish their bona fides. Better safe than sorry, always.

  • Compy Swappy And Other Geeky Detritus

    Operating under the assumption that a change is as good as a rest, I’ve swapped the computers in my room. Now the computer I spend 99% of my time on is situated at the desk which features actual legroom. Oh, and the monitor is now much, much closer to my face so I’m not leaning across the desk all the time just so I can read.

    Mind you, I’ll still use the other desk when I have company over for computer gaming. This means, yes, that guests will now be enjoying the badass compy instead of the slightly gimpy “gaming” compy.

    I should have done this months ago.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try out Unreal Tournament.

    Afterward I plan to work on a 3.5 gigabyte collection of my favorite songs so I can load up my Insignia Pilot portable player. This way I’ll be able to just switch it on, tell it to play everything, turn on “random” mode and hear a whole bunch of songs I like all the way to work and back. The previous plan (selecting some of my favorite albums and swapping them out from time to time because there isn’t enough room for all of them) left me agonizing over what to listen to each time I fired up the player, and skipping songs because very few albums are completely perfect, and hopping from album to album periodically, and… yeah. Screw it. Nothing but songs I love, as many as I can fit in, and I should be golden.

    First, though: UT. Yeah.

  • Wavatars in, Tags out

    Thanks to Gravatar’s new support for Shamus Young’s Wavatars, and thanks to the Easy Gravatar plugin, not only are Gravatars back but each commentator gets an auto-generated Wavatar (which they can, of course, replace by registering a user icon choice with Gravatar).

    I should whip up a colophon page listing all of the neat bits from hither and yon that go into making this journal work. Some day. Yep.

    In other news, the tags have all gone away because I got sick and tired of fiddling with them. I didn’t actually delete them but, other than in the handful of postings in which I used them, they won’t appear anywhere at all. (Even in those posts they’re barely noticeable.) (EDIT: Oh look, there’s a mass delete function for tags built into WordPress 2.5! They’re gone for good now!) It’s for the best, really: I went batty at times with trying to figure out what existing tags fit a given post and having to create new tags all the time because none of the existing tags fit. Forget it. If tags are what the cool kids are doing, I’m okay being uncool. The last thing I need is something else slowing down my posting output!

    Of course, crossposts to LJ continue to be automatically tagged… with the category from WordPress. Go figure.

  • Guaranteed Unfunny

    Every week in the bathroom at the office there’s a new brand and/or scent of handsoap. I don’t normally pay too much attention to the labels, but today’s new bottle decal startled me a bit by claiming that the contained product is non-comedogenic.

    I’m sorry, what was that? Are you telling me that washing my hands with your product won’t make me laugh? Is The Joker involved in the handsoap industry somehow?

    It turns out that non-comedogenic means that the product won’t block pores. I suppose that acne could be considered funny under certain circumstances, eh?

  • No more calls, we have a winner.

    I tried out several new themes out over the last couple of days, but this one’s the winner: Mandingo. It sports a 1024x display option, the ability to use two or three columns, two options for banner height, a built in banner image rotation mechanism, and plenty more bells & whistles besides. What’s more, all of them can be managed from its options page, integrated with the WordPress admin interface. I don’t have to fiddle directly with the theme code at all. People, this is sexy. Oh, and it actually displays my category hierarchy correctly! No matter how hard I fought with the old theme I just couldn’t make that work. Oy.

    So. All I have to do now is… er… build a whole new library of rotator images. Ahem. I’m long overdue for working on the rotator images libraries anyway, so some extra incentive doesn’t really hurt.

    (A note to my WordPress clientèle: If you’re interested in a conversion to Mandingo I can make it happen in a jiffy. Mari, especially, would benefit greatly from the upgrade to a theme which supports modern WordPress code and features.)

  • Two Point Five

    My hosted server rebooted spontaneously some time around 7am Pacific Time. I’m not absolutely certain but I believe that this has to do with DNS problems at the hosting facility causing massive churn in the mail processing chain. Infinity Internet is still working on the problems (it looks like a complex cascade-failure situation, partly resolved as of this writing) and Duckpond is ticking along on a borrowed nameserver setting.

    To torture-test the newly-restarted machine, I decided to upgrade greyduck.net to WordPress 2.5. So far only one of the important plugins gave me any trouble, and that was remedied with a one-minute hack to the plugin code. (The LJ crossposter, if you’re wondering.) Almost all of the updates seem to be in the admin interface and the backend code, not in the frontend or the database structure itself.

    The admin interface looks very different, it’s true. I don’t actively dislike it, and I’ll probably get used to it. Such is the way of things.

    Every time I do one of these upgrades I think about getting a new theme. Is now the time, do you figure?

Calendar

March 2026
S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

My Links