This has been around the discussion and social bookmarking sites for a while, but with the close of 2006 I think it appropriate to note how the future never quite turns out the way we envision it.

As you will see, this was especially true of AT&T in the early to mid 90’s.

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: The Future – From the Past

In short: A man defends himself and his wife by killing a man who sprayed their home with bullets, threw a whiskey bottle through a window and then proceeded to break in to the house.

Cut and dried, right? Not so fast; it seems the homeowner had the temerity to defend himself with an AK-47 assault weapon. How dare he! Doesn’t he know that those are only to be used in ways that will give headlines to the Brady Bunch for another go at “Scary-Looking Gun Ban II: Electric Boogaloo” ?

The good news is that another home-invading goblin is pushing up daisies. The bad news is that we have a lot of ground to cover before we educate people that a semi-auto rifle is a semi-auto rifle, regardless of the magazine size or the type of grip it has. * sigh *

Publicola: The Root Of Homeland Is Home

And gone. Good riddance.

Your stormtroopers at work.

Hey, they’re lucky they let them leave the burning house alive. It appears the new sensitivity training is working.

Until I have time to fix things (oh, yes, I have solutions!), comments on this page will be disabled.

This is due to the more than 14,000 blog spam posts I have seen in the last 48 hours.

If it weren’t for my slave kittens my weblog would not be an unusable, unsalvageable mess. Once I’m done fighting other fires I will fix this problem, too.

My mail client gave me a rather unusual message this evening. It told me that contact with my mail server had been lost.

Okay… unusual, but not too concerning. However, the fact that I could not get to any of the web sites we host was a bit unusual.

It took a while, but once I logged into the machine I noticed it was slow. Also, I had a load average of 89.15. Since the normal load average is about 0.15, this concerned me.

The culprit was httpd – the Apache web server. It was trying to serve data to nearly 150 clients at one time – not a lot by most standards, but this machine isn’t made for that sort of use. I saved a dump of the network connections and killed the web server ASAP.

Examination of the network dump revealed that most of my connections were coming from one netblock … in Syria. Checked the logs… yep, it’s a spambot run out of control. Plus, I’m probably not that popular in Syria. Luxembourg? Hell, yes! But not Syria.

So, I added them to the IP filter list, turned down the clients that the http server would talk to and turned things back on. All seems well. For now, anyway.

To my wife and best friend:

Happy Birthday.