East Raleigh rising

When the cops arrived after I called about the metal thieves raiding the subdivision under construction, they began peppering me with questions. I was amused to hear the questions had nothing to do with the crooks.

“Hey, what can you tell me about this subdivision?”

“Is this a multi-family or single-family project?”

“Any idea what these will sell for?”

Crime happens so rarely in my area that cops don’t have much opportunity to visit. The ones that do express surprise that such nice homes like Bennett Woods’s and (soon to be) Oakwood North are tucked inside East Raleigh. “It’s like Wisteria Lane or something,” one told me incredulously upon seeing Bennett Woods for the first time.
Continue reading →

Energy cost of snow days

You know, if I were a local reporter on the energy beat, I’d think it’d be very interesting to study how last week’s snow days affected our community’s energy usage. Did a near-week of school days cause our area to use more or less electricity and/or natural gas? Did our local businesses burn energy to heat and light mostly-empty offices during this time? What about the gasoline saved from all the school buses that weren’t running? Or the commutes that didn’t take place? How about the fleet of municipal utility trucks that constantly worked to clear our roads?

Unlike hurricanes and ice storms, last week’s snow caused relatively little damage to our electricity infrastructure. I think this makes an ideal situation to study because one can essentially rule out downed power lines as the cause of energy savings (if any). I’d love to see a breakdown of the energy costs of this recent break.

Cheap Thoughts: Food Labeling

I was packing the kids’ lunches today, putting in a pack of granola bars as I normally do, when I became curious. These Nature Valley “Oats ‘n Honey” granola bars from General Mills are tasty and have an appealing photo of the bars next to a fat spatula dripping with honey goodness.

Nature Valley Oats ‘n Honey granola bar box

Putting aside the fact that the dry, brittle granola bars in the packaging look absolutely nothing like the moist granola bars in the package photo, I had to wonder how much “oats ‘n honey” were actually in these bars. A look at the ingredient list told me all I needed to know:
Continue reading →

Back on my old IP?

I’ve noticed more cable modem strangeness this afternoon. I reflashed my router today and noticed that my home cable modem is once again on its old 24.40.133.50 address. I have no explanation for what happened to the 24.40.133.16 address I have been using for the last 24 hours.

It’s not been my experience that TWC/Earthlink swaps out IP addresses so quickly. Normally I get an IP address for many months without it changing. It’s very unusual to have one flip in just an afternoon.

Thinking I liked my newer IP address better, I tried to force a new assignment by unplugging my cable modem for ten minutes. Apparently that wasn’t long enough to do the trick, though. I will have to consider other options.

I still have no explanation for the earlier phantom response. Well, no rational explanation, anyway. I could say it was another quick DHCP assignment but that still wouldn’t account for the missing Microsoft ports which otherwise get filtered at the cable modem of every subscriber.

Are these Time Warner Cable shenanigans?

Coca-cola ad causes some heads to explode

I didn’t watch the Superbowl yesterday because professional football kind of bores me. Last night’s blowout of Denver by Seattle makes my choice seem justified. Plus, what does it say when all anyone wants to talk about is the Super Bowl TV commercials?

Apparently Coca-cola struck a nerve in some when they had the audacity to air a commercial with brown-skinned people singing America the Beautiful. Yes, even this patriotic song by Katherine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward is causing some conservatives to flip out. Why? Who the hell knows?

I’ve been seeing responses on the Desert Storm Veterans Facebook page that just make me want to smack my head.

Here’s one pic from Facebook that’s been making the rounds:

Continue reading →

Mystery host answers for mine

I decided yesterday morning to reflash my home firewall’s version of OpenWRT. This involved rebooting the router, of course, and when the router came up the friendly folks at Earthlink (or Time Warner Cable, depending on who runs the DHCP servers) had assigned my home cable modem a new IP address.

As I worked out a few issues with the new firmware, paring down modules and processes in order to make it all fit inside my modest little router, I decided to test the firewall rules to see whether things were working. From my server hosted outside of my network, I ran a simple nmap test to see which ports were open:

[root@tranquil /home/markt]# nmap -sT -P0 maestro.markturner.net

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-02-02 11:44 EST
Nmap scan report for maestro.markturner.net (24.40.133.50)
Host is up (0.035s latency).
rDNS record for 24.40.133.50: user-0c2h19i.cable.mindspring.com
Not shown: 955 closed ports, 40 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
587/tcp open submission
993/tcp open imaps
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 6.86 seconds

That’s about what I expected, so I turned my attention to other issues, including running another test twenty minutes later:

[root@tranquil /home/markt]# nmap -sT -P0 maestro.markturner.net

Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-02-02 12:04 EST
Nmap scan report for maestro.markturner.net (24.40.133.16)
Host is up (0.028s latency).
rDNS record for 24.40.133.16: user-0c2h18g.cable.mindspring.com
Not shown: 991 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
135/tcp filtered msrpc
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
587/tcp open submission
593/tcp filtered http-rpc-epmap
993/tcp open imaps
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 38.88 seconds

For the second test you can see I’ve got a few other ports showing up (TCP 135, 139, 445). These are supposedly filtered by the ISP somewhere down the line (probably the cable modem-level) to block clueless Windows users from exposing their networks to teh Internets.

You can see that these tests produced different results. It what was the same about these results, however, that caught my eye!
Continue reading →

The dark of winter

It’s not been a fun few weeks for me after losing my job before the holidays. I’ve been feeling pretty low, actually, with only my knowing that there will be better days ahead to hang on to. It sucks feeling like I’m not contributing when all I want to do is contribute.

Home life hasn’t been a happy place, which is kind of ironic since when things began going south at work I started to realize how the stress I was feeling could become hazardous to my marriage. Now I’ve the stress of needing to look for work. Things will get better, though. The darkest day of winter begins the return to light.

At least Mother Nature has conspired to give me company in being at home, since the entire City of Raleigh took the week off for last Tuesday’s snow. While sledding with the kids at my neighborhood park on Wednesday, I remarked to my neighbor how awesome the sledding conditions were.

“No kidding,” he answered. “It sure beats a day at the office.”

Well, maybe if you’ve got an office to be away from it does. Sledding is fun but not working is anything but fun.

It’s up to me to make something happen and that’s what I’ll do. And while I know the sun will rise again, I won’t soon forget these dark days of winter.