Mark Turner Dot Net

I just finished the Bill Bryson book, A Short History Of Nearly Everything: a fun, fascinating review of all the science you never paid attention to in school. Bryson has a lot of ground to cover, bringing to life discoveries in the atomic world, genetics, geology, physics, astrophysics, and many, many others. He whittles these complicated subjects down to their human stories, while keeping the science real. I found it very entertaining, as I mentioned here before.
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MT.Net may disappear from the Internets momentarily over the holiday weekend. Have no fear, I’m migrating DNS servers.

If you lose us, check back in a day or two and all should be well again.

I had a call come in from “Tuscany Industries” this morning, number 702-520-1117. I answered and decided to play their little game. A recorded female voice warned about my car’s warranty expiring. If I was not interested in renewing it, she said, press 2, otherwise press 1.

I pressed 1 and their phone switch said “transferring to the operator.”
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I’ve finally decided its stupid to drive nearly to Apex from North Raleigh when I want to see my doctor. The cost in gas and time don’t justify it. I work from home 90% of the time so why schlep across town and back if I don’t have to?
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There was a brief MT.Net outage yesterday when my Xen VM ran out of virtual memory. It seems the pre-built CentOS image I began using did not mount a swap partition, nor did I think to check it for one. Thirty seconds of sysadmin work later and the problem was solved.

So far I’m digging the service. Like I said previously, the days of the absolute need to run on bare hardware are now over. Funny how the early days of computing revolved around time-sharing and the promise of the PC was to free you from such sharing. We’ve almost come full circle, eh?

The U.S. Americans are saved thanks to such as Maps for Us to build up our future.

How do people build these things so darn quickly?

(h/t Scott)

I never thought I’d be happy to get a $182 electric bill but I was today. In spite of record-breaking heat this summer, with a string of days above 100 degrees, our August power bill is actually less than it was last August! With power experts warning of bills 11% higher or more, I was sure we’d be looking at a record power bill. Needless to say I’m pleasantly surprised!
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I just got back from a client visit which lead to an interesting revelation. I went there to support the network management software that my company makes. Upon arriving at the client’s desk, I happened to notice a familiar KVM appliance sitting on his desk.
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Just got another phishy call, this time from number 702-520-1214. This time the CallerID read “Upgrade Now” and a message about satellite TV service began right after I said “hello.” When I asked to be taken off the list, a gentleman transferred me to an AUDIX voicemailbox, where a female voice said “this number will be removed. Sorry for the inconvenience,” or somesuch. Interestingly enough, this gentlemen sounded like the same guy on their system’s voicemail menu. Is this a one-person operation, perhaps?

I kept waiting for AUDIX to hang up but it apparently never does. Thus, I’m going on 12 minutes now tying up this bozo’s trunk, wasting his money.

At least now I know these clowns are using Lucent equipment to run their scam and not Asterisk.

Welcome to the new server! If you’re reading this, you’re now pointing to the new server. Everyone else should catch up with the next few days.

I just saw the Youtube video of Miss Teen South Carolina, Lauren Upton, flubbing her answer to a question about maps. She ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed, huh.

(You might find the Tube Maps that Morningtoast.com created helpful for deciphering Ms. Upton.)