bookerdog.com

We’re still hanging in there, even as our colds hang on. Our Parents As Teachers “parent educator” mentioned that her info on this super-fun virus is that it can stick around for a month.

Hear that, virus? Your time is up! Now hit the streets!

Other than that, what can I say? Tim is leaving for a weekend of fun without us (which

should be 100 times funner than the usual fun, right?), where he will sleep like a rock for hours on end, drink bourbon and play the ponies, while I will grow increasingly resentful unstable exhausted morose without him.

I do so hate it when we must part.

But the best part is when he gets back. Because then he owes me.

[insert sinister laugh here]

I’ve been updating equipment and finally getting around to getting the dedicated server up and humming. Unfortunately, while I’m doing that, I’m sure there will be some unexpected outages here and there. Just like there was last night when you found that you couldn’t browse through any of the pictures…

Oh yeah, and if you’ve found that you’ve had a “Not Found” message popping up when you type in www.bookerdog.com here lately, I had our ISP switch our IP address to one that wasn’t in a block identified as harboring spammers. Seems there’s a loose, un-regulated body out there known as SPEWS that tracks the IP addresses of spammers out there. They then release those “banned” ip-address lists to people who run servers. OK, sounds good right? Well, turns out with ISP’s like ours which are small scale operations, if banning the specific addresses doesn’t produce the desired effect, they then will hold the whole block of the ISP’s address hostage. Unless the ISP evicts the spammers, their whole block of addresses remains on the list, no matter if there are plenty of good internet citizens like us residing in the block.

You’re thinking, well, that doesn’t sound so bad, I really don’t appreciate the bestiality e-mails that show up in my inbox anyway. But the problem is this, most of these big spamming operations aren’t running out of a little ISP like the one we use. Rather, they work from places like AT&T or UUNET. Well, shutting down e-mail from blocks of those two companies would effectively shut off e-mail receipts from over half the e-mails in the US. For addresses from these large providers, the SPEWS group does what it should be doing anyway, identifying and blocking specific IP addresses rather than whole blocks.

Now, I’ve no idea the motivations behind my ISP not banning the spammers leasing addresses from him, but I’d imagine it’s money. These guys use big-time bandwidth and pay for it. Trying to strong-arm a small ISP to give up major sources of revenues to huge providers like AT&T or UUNET seems unseemly to me. At what point does an ISP become too large to block? There aren’t any guidelines, and the SPEWS Group seem to be deliberately obscure about who they are, and what their motivations are. There is no oversight and no published listing of their policies and procedures for listing an address, or escalating it to a range of addresses. About all you can do is go to a newsgroup site and bitch. You’ll get slagged at first, then given some idea of what to do. Then once you boot the offender, update the DNS addresses, you’ll get slagged some more, and then, maybe if you bitch enough, they’ll take your listing off.

With the proliferation of third party anti-spam software for e-mail servers that use the SPEWS list as the core listing of banned ip addresses, this “star chamber” is only gaining in prominence. They dodge the legal issues by not actually ever blocking e-mails, only providing the list of “offensive” sites. They claim to only be a “Consumer Reports” of internet addresses. Hmm, I only wrote down the list of who the Jews were, gave it to the Nazis, but I didn’t actually kill anybody. Seems a specious argument, and judging by their posts on the newsgroup, the power has gone to their head, big time. I don’t disagree at all with their basic premise, but I am bothered greatly by this system being maintained by a bunch of vigilantes.

OK, so enough of the techie rant. We’ve got a new address, the DNS is updated, so you should be able to get to us without too much trouble.

On the home front, both Beth and I have heads clogged with persistent, annoying mucous. However, that didn’t stop us from getting out on chilly Saturday morning and completing a 5k run in 32:20. We exceeded our expectations, and Beth even tried to give Auggie and I the beatdown with a mean kick in the final quarter mile.

So we’re headed back to the pediatrician again, since Auggie hasn’t been able to kick this cold, three weeks later. I must admit that I am still not 100% better yet. I’ve never had a cold hang on this long before.

Poor Auggie’s cough is just getting worse, though, so a doctor friend of ours recommended that we take him in to get a short round of antibiotics. My standard joke up until now has been that we have SARS, but that just isn’t funny anymore. That stuff is getting really scary.

Last night was a fun one, sitting around talking with friends, two of whom are very pregnant. I love trading war stories about our birth experiences. Of course, one of the moms-to-be is expecting her first, so I tried to dial it back a notch, as far as the whole “gut-wrenching pain of labor” thing goes. My standard joke in this situation is, ‘It sucked. I’m convinced that natural childbirth is nature’s population control.’

I need to stop with the standard jokes. How lazy am I as a conversationalist?

Tim and I are planning to run a 5K on Saturday, and I was feeling a little intimidated by running in Forest Park. It seems so hilly! So we went to the park yesterday and ran around the bike path for about 3.5 miles. It wasn’t bad. Especially considering that Tim pushed Auggie in the jogging stroller. My legs aren’t even that sore today.

Woo hoo!

And, of course, yesterday was the day of the big Peace Rally in Forest Park as well. We just chalked it up as extra practice for parking on race day, since the U.S. Women’s National Marathon Championship or something is also Saturday morning. Will people come out to watch that?

I guess we’ll see.

This just in! A sweet email from Kim just reminded me that, after extensive searching of ye olde Innernet, I was unable to find a Smiths box set. Um, Rhino? Can we have this out by May?

I did, however, note that there are at least two Morissey box sets. The injustice of this fact is not lost on you, I’m sure.

After a day of running (literally) and running around, plus an extra workout tonight (I wanted to try out a new tape I got from eBay today), there should be none of the problems I had last night falling asleep.

Ah, but I do love to watch Kansas lose. [later: D’oh!]

Sometimes my complete and utter idiocy surprises even me. I do really, really stupid things all the time: miss turns while driving, fall down while walking (OK, this hasn’t happened for a while), say insensitive things to people I love, stay up to watch the weather forecast and then completely zone out while the forecast is on committing nothing to memory… And then this evening, I wore a pair of shorts to the coffeehouse.

Yes, I’m being overly hard on myself, but c’mon! Shorts?! It was only 68 degrees today in the middle of the afternoon. What was I thinking? At least I did take a jacket that I could drape over my legs like the huge imbecile that I am.

You know what I love about our coffeehouse? Other than the fact that it’s run by the coolest lesbian ever. They are the center of St. Louis’ “Instead of War” group. This is what their specials board said tonight, ‘We don’t have any FREEDOM FRIES, but we do have a FRENCH kiss (some kinda coffee drink, I guess), a FRENCH dip and FRENCH roast.’

Ha, I love lesbians. And I also love that, in order to be anti-war, you now have to be pro-French. Isn’t that a little much to ask your average Midwesterner?

On the way up to the coffeehouse tonight, Tim and I once again ended up talking about bands that we liked in our youth. I think it started during that song on Spoon’s Girls Can Tell where the guitar riff is completely stolen from an old Cure song. Tim brought up The Smiths, and I swear that I almost wept, remembering how much I loved that band. (There’s gotta be a Smiths box set by now, right?) Anyway, we ended up waxing nostalgic about our naive teenage love of Toad the Wet Sprocket and the like. It got a little ugly, with reminiscences about ill-fated hookups and ill-advised college radio broadcasts.

Sorry to go on and on, but I love talking about music that I love. Especially the old bands that I grew up listening to. It’s like stumbling across an old stuffed animal that shared your bed for too many years, or thinking back on that silly Michael Jackson poster that stared down at you from your bedroom wall during the entire fourth grade.

Mental note: Two cookies + grocery store = 2-hour Auggie nap extravaganza!

I got to eat my whole lunch all by myself. Weird.

It’s interesting how little I am following the goings-on in Iraq. With a toddler who watches nothing but PBS when the TV is on, which is usually only in the morning, and then college hoops in prime time, the only news I get is from Dan Rather’s news breaks during time outs. Sweet!

Somebody email me when it’s over, OK?

Did I mention that I’m now only a month behind uploading pictures? Here’s one of my favorites from February: