Richard’s Personal Blog

Been sick for the past two weeks. Still sick. Sick and tired of being sick. And tired. Went to the doctor on Tuesday. Would have been nice if he’d shown up. He only works three afternoons a week as it is. How hard is it to show up reliably? Now I get to wait another two weeks until he comes back from vacation. If he decides to come back on time, that is. Usually, he’s a fairly nice guy, but right now he’s just being an áššhølë.

On the space shuttle ride that Anna is on (up, down, up, down), it now looks like she is being adopted by the family in Southern California. Turns out that they had broken the promise they gave to the agency up here and gone with an agency near their home that they’d dealt with before, and that’s why no one up here thought they were moving forward and just being noncommittal. I was glad that the adoptive mother, Karen, called me directly to give me the news. I still think they were wrong to go around Advocate for Orphans, but the good they are doing far eclipses the bad.

Knowing that I wasn’t exactly her cup of tea, in some ways I wish Anna could have a much better understanding of the many things I (and we) did for her (or at least tried to do in some cases). And in other ways, I’m not so sure I want her to know. Don’t really know why.

Ever since I had to take some time to repair Richard’s Ramblings, working on the blog has become almost an addiction lately. I keep feeling like I need to keep tweaking and perfecting it. Lord know that’ll never finish! Wrote an insanely simple plugin this morning; it puts Google Ad section tags around posts and comments in order to let Google know what content is the best stuff to analyze to select the most relevant ads. As a hot-blooded, still-virile male, I should be ignoring all this technobabble and using the Internet for the reason it was invented (viewing pørn), but I just can’t seem to make the time.

Since I’ve been home from work today, my network has been scanned by computers from as near as Fremont, CA, and as far away as China, Japan, Portugal, India, Argentina, and Australia.

• 64.81.248.177 (52185: Torrent scan from Fremont, CA) #7
• 125.65.112.216 (135: Netbios SMB service scan from Sichuan Province, China) #2
• 210.233.73.197 (10000: Veritas Backup scan from Tokyo, Japan) #2
• 59.63.25.161 (1434: SQL scan from Jiangxi Province, China) #2
• 219.153.22.23 (135: Netbios SMB service scan from Chongqing Province, China) #2
• 218.15.217.140 (1433: SQL scan from China)
• 218.26.191.171 (1434: SQL scan from Shaanxi Province, China)
• 81.248.193.27 (135: Netbios SMB service scan from France)
• 216.239.127.101 (33442: Scan from CNET)
• 85.240.245.157 (137: Netbios SMB service scan from Portugal)
• 216.184.108.6 (139: Netbios SMB service scan from somewhere in South America)
• 203.94.243.191 (1434: SQL scan from New Delhi, India)
• 200.123.171.225 (1434: SQL scan from Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• 61.88.126.66 (22: SSH scan from Australia)

Since none of those ports are open, there is no vulnerability with those scans, but it’s kind of annoying. If they start going after the WoW, Empire Earth, or the security system ports, I might have to shut access to them downand I don’t want to. Úšhølëš.

Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging for six years next month on that other blog, I still find it hard to blog very frequently here about the mundane, especially those things that I know no one is really interested in. It’s hard to draw the line in the right places; I am well aware that no one in their right mind has any genuine interest in what movies I watch, what foods I eat, what thoughts run through my mind, what’s lined up on my TiVo.

And it’s worse when I leave two-week blocks without saying anything, because then I feel like I have to put down everything I can think of — usually a sporadic, disparate bunch of nonsense, in whatever order I happen to think of them. Like this:

• Taxes are nowhere near done, but the end result is clear and very nice!
• Offered up $1000 and $500 incentives to get Anna adopted.
• Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Anna. It’s not to say that there aren’t hundreds, thousands, 100s of thousands of other children out there that need help, but she is the one that stepped into my life at a time when it was necessary to teach me and guide me. There are times when it is necessary to look at the big picture, to do what’s right, to focus on the important things. This is one of those times. I may be denied the ability to do the utmost by bringing her into our family, but I will not be dissuaded in doing what I can elsewhere.
• I bought two houses today.
• The Richard’s Ramblings blog is back up and running at 99% of function. There are still some usability issues with navigating around if you don’t know where to go, but that will be fixed over time.
• Still have a bunch of naughty pictures to add that I’ve been neglecting lately.
• I should someday photograph my own semi-nudes in order to avoid copyright issues. That is unlikely to happen, however.
• Timeshare week expiring soon. Somewhere to go, but no time or money to do it with.
• Haven’t killed zombies in over a week.
• ‘Nite.

Lots of stuff going on:

• Been consistently taking picture for the phlog every day, even if I haven’t been reliably publishing them — 36 days in a row so far.
• No energy to try to seek out Fat Tuesday happenings, so I miss out on another year. Someday I’ll revel in the revelers…
• Voted today: Hillary; yes for the Indian compacts.
• Spent the past few days recovering from major issues on the ramblings blog. Upgraded from v2.1.2 to v2.3.3. The entire SQL database upgrade process was a manual one. Not fun. Thank God for backups.
• Upgraded one plugin, wrote another one. More to come. Great stuff for a resume.
• Work has been unproductive, though. What’s new.
• I wonder how Anna’s doing. I wonder that every day.
• Replaced most of the innards of my HP LaserJet 4+ printer, thanks to a mail-order kit. $60 and it’s practically brand new.
• Killed four zombies in one session the other day, a first for me. Really satisfying. Disappointed to leave only 1 HP on the fifth before I had to retreat to safety in a local hospital.
• Bedtime.