An entry from The Fat Guy about being ticked off by a noisy group in the departure lounge reminded me of the last flight I took from Chicago to DFW.  We were delayed after landing because we were early and the plane in front of us at the gate was late in leaving.  I was seated in the next to last row, which isn’t far from where the flight attendants sit on a 777.  The guy in the back row was going nuts because the flight attendants were talking practically non-stop for the 30-40 minutes we were sitting there.  It was both annoying to have to listen to them and unprofessional, as they were talking badly about some passengers they had encountered on earlier flights (not that these passengers probably didn’t deserve to be talked about, but it’s probably best not to do it where other passengers can hear; that little curtain at the back of the plane isn’t soundproof).

Am I the only one who wondered if perhaps Kirstie Alley didn’t gain weight specifically for her Jenny Craig contract?  It’s not like she’d be the first actor/actress to gain weight for a part.

Or am I just too cynical?

I called up Charter Cable last week to cancel my service after Fios TV was installed.  They were fairly nice about it, although the rep on the phone was trying really hard to find ways to get me to keep their service.  They even offered to send out someone to pick up the cable box. 

However, a couple of days ago, a Charter contractor showed up and rang my doorbell.  The first words out of his mouth?  “¿Habla español?”

I took Spanish in high school, but that was a long time ago, and without using it I’ve forgotten almost everything.  I suppose I know enough Spanish to start a fight in a bar, but beyond that, I’m pretty much useless.  Fortunately, this guy understood some English (provided I remembered to speak slowly).  It turned out that he wanted to get into my back yard to access the pole and the cable distribution box that’s on it.

Is it really asking too much that I not have to know a second language in my own damn house in my own neighborhood?  Companies should make sure that anyone they’re sending out knows English. 

And I’m getting really tired of all the jumping-up-and-down and yelling “racist” whenever someone suggests that people speak English.  If a person wants to speak Klingon amongst themselves and any consenting parties, that’s fine with me.  But when you’re doing business, speak English, dammit!  Those who would demand that I learn Spanish to get along in my own country should step back and think for a minute.  Where does this stop?  How can a country survive having to accomodate all the potential languages that immigrants bring with them?

In a way, it’s kind of like telemarketing.  When viewed from their end it seems like a minor thing—because they are only thinking about themselves (i.e. their call or their language).  But for those of us on the receiving end of it, it can be overwhelming.  There’s nothing racist about that.  It’s simple logistics.

Several years ago when I was still working out of the office I was working late and observed a member of the cleaning crew emptying the recycle bins.  I took note that she was simply emptying them into the big trash bin she had with her, along with the office trash.  Needless to say, this didn’t exactly improve my cynicism with regards to the whole recycling movement.

Still, I went ahead and paid the extra $2.00 per month to get recycling service here in Keller.  So it was with some interest that I just watched the guy pull up in a regular garbage truck and grab my recycle bin (as well as the neighbor’s across the street) and empty it into the truck.  Usually there is a dedicated recycling truck that’s quite different from the regular garbage trucks.  Now it’s possible that the recycling truck is out of service and they’re using a regular truck.  Still, given my cynicism, I can’t help but wonder if they’re doing a bit of shortcutting…

This post about the Philips Heartstart Home Defibrillator reminded me of something that came up in conversation the other day with some of the other members of our local CERT.  AED’s are starting to show up just about everywhere, and the price is just about to the point where some people can even afford to have one at home. 

As long as people understand what they can be used for, they’re great.  But I’m afraid that with a name like “Heartstart” some people might get the wrong idea.  An AED is completely automated and will only allow a shock if the person has a “shockable rhythm”.  This means that an AED will not shock someone whose heart has stopped completely (although most of them will advise you to perform CPR for a minute and then it will check for rhythm again).  I suspect it won’t be long before Philips gets sued by the survivors of someone who had no rhythm and died and for whom the AED could do nothing.

But perhaps I’m being overly cynical.  (Who?  Me?  Cynical?  Can’t be.  )

I think I’m starting to get a little bit of a handle on referrer spam, although I’ve had to be pretty ruthless about what gets filtered.  But since my “referrer” page is not published anymore, I consider anyone trying to hit it as a spammer.  It’s not perfect, but it’s better, and my CPU usage is now down to acceptable levels.  There were 21148 requests for the referrer page, of which all but 2057 were rejected.  The problem is that these bastards keep buying new domain names to replace the ones that are blocked. 

But along the way I’ve discovered that they’re also hitting my trackback script, to the tune of 1987 hits yesterday.  This is a troubling, as it appears to have increased since I’ve begun blocking referrers.  Unfortunately, these hits contribute to server load because EE has to validate the “token” (I use randomized trackback URLs) and then filter the content.  None of the attempts from yesterday were successful, though, due to the filtering.  The problem with these is that there is nothing in the access.log to use to filter on.  The request is an HTTP POST, and consequently we can’t see what they were trying to pass.  So for now I’m blocking the worst offenders by IP.  It’s not likely that any legitimate user will attempt to post more than 10 trackbacks from the same IP in one day.

The following bit of UNIX command-line hackery is what I use to determine the offenders.  It reports the IP of each system that has submitted 10 or more trackback requests during the previous day.

grep trackback access.log.2005-10-13 | grep -v 403 | grep -v 503 | awk ‘’ | sort | uniq -c | awk ‘{ if (strtonum($1)>=10) print $1,$2; }’


Here’s an example of the output:

20 212.142.33.108
11 216.56.240.71
56 217.219.39.3
108 219.144.196.226
12 219.93.174.101
21 219.93.174.102
12 219.93.174.105
13 219.93.174.109
26 63.144.59.210
59 63.144.59.211
14 64.89.16.7
10 67.50.44.156
10 82.110.130.58


Finding and printing the referrer spammers who leaked through the filters is a little more challenging, since some of them use a full HTML <a> tag in their referrer and some don’t.  I suspect that there is some handy-dandy regular expression that would make this simpler, but I’m not a regex guru.  It’s also interesting that some of them (for some reason) are using my own domain in the referrer.  I suspect this is a simplistic attempt to get me to blacklist myself, but I’m not sure.  Given all that, here’s an example of what I use to identify the worst referrer offenders for the previous day.

grep referrer access.log.2005-10-13 | grep -v 403 | grep -v 503 | grep -v aubreyturner | awk ‘{ if ($11=="\"<a"){ $t=substr($12,6); print substr($t,0,index($t,">")-1)} else print substr($11,2,length($11)-2);}’ | sort | uniq -c | awk ‘{ if(strtonum($1)>=10) print $1,$2; }’


And an example of the output:

215 -
88 http://agrino.org/uichsa/wwwboard/567.html
86 http://agrino.org/uichsa/wwwboard/568.html
86 http://agrino.org/uichsa/wwwboard/569.html
85 http://agrino.org/uichsa/wwwboard/570.html
84 http://agrino.org/uichsa/wwwboard/644.html
48 http://generic-######.splinder.com
204 http://#############.50webs.com
32 http://tinman.cs.gsu.edu/~cscjghx/csc3360/wwwboard/messages/86.html
32 http://www.horrorseek.com/horror/dreadful/wwwboard/34.html


As you can see, there are a lot of ones with blank or “-” for the referrer.  Those are particularly troublesome in that they’re hard to block (except by IP, but that’s a losing game).  I’m not sure what they intend to gain from hitting the referrer URL without any referrer.  All it ends up doing is sending them a nearly-blank page (about 100 bytes of almost static content).

One of these days I guess I’ll glue the above commands together into a nightly job that sends me a report in email.  Unless these idiots magically disappear before I get tired of doing this manually…

(Updated to try out word censoring for ###### and a couple of other words…)

I always cringe when I see some dumbass go around the arms at a railroad crossing.  Most of the time they get away with it.  But every now and then one of them will get smashed.  Unfortunately, the latest incident resulted in the instantaneous death of a mother (the driver) and the later death of the father.  The 11-month old child, who is now an orphan, is still in the hospital.

It seems that the mother, in her haste to beat the east-bound train didn’t notice the west-bound Amtrack train on the other set of tracks.  I really wish this would be a lesson to people that the five minute wait for the train to pass isn’t the end of the world.  Better to be five minutes late than permanently late.

During the summer of 2004 a flap erupted in a Euless subdivision over flying the American flag.  I wrote about the situation and the resolution.  Various factions within the homeowners association were upset at being exposed under the harsh glare of the media spotlight, but it appeared that Mrs. Martin had won the battle.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the people that run these associations are often petty little tyrants who don’t like having their power challenged.  Since the flag flap, the Martins have been subjected to a campaign of harassment by the former president of the Heritage Place homeowners association.

A year ago, two beagles, Tara and Toby, watched from their Euless back yard as a squirrel climbed a tree. The dogs barked at the squirrel. Hearing this, the dogs’ owner, Kenny Martin, called them inside.

City officials say next-door neighbor Margarita Montelongo called Euless police to complain about the barking.

“Upon arrival,” a police officer later wrote in a report, “there were no barking dogs.”

An everyday occurrence in suburbia: Dogs go outside. Dogs bark. Neighbors get upset. Sometimes, neighbors even call police or animal control.

But for two neighboring homes in the Heritage Place subdivision in Euless off Texas 10, this is no everyday occurrence. A search of public records shows that police officers and city Animal Services staff members have knocked on the front door of Kenny and Linda Martin’s house more than two dozen times in the past year. The reason? Complaints about barking dogs.

At least that’s what city records available under the Texas Public Information Act show. Actually, Euless’ animal services supervisor Larry James says, many more calls about barking dogs at the Martins’ home were handled by telephone and did not result in written reports.

Most reports describe the outcome of the visits similarly: “No violation witnessed. Dogs were in the house.”

Although some of the complaints were called in anonymously, James says, “Everybody knows who it is.”

Montelongo’s name appears in some police reports, and city officials in three city departments confirm that Montelongo is the complainant.

Montelongo is former president of the Heritage Place homeowners association. She and Linda Martin battled last year in a public squabble about whether Martin could fly an American flag in front of her home.

The situation has reached an absurd level, with complaints being called in at times when the dogs aren’t even there.

Police and animal services reports show that city staffers visit the Martin home to investigate complaints, but they do not hear any barking.

The feud places city officials in a quandary. Police and animal services officers are stretched thin in the city of 50,000. Yet all police calls must be answered. Animal services, which has two full-time officers, responds to most calls, but not all, depending on other duties.

“There’s been a few times we go to the house and on our way back to the shelter, we pass by where Linda Martin works and the dogs are at her place of work,” animal services boss James says. “They are not even at home.”

Linda Martin showed a letter from a pet day care center she often hires to care for the dogs. The letter states that her dogs were at the center on a day when a complaint was called in about barking at her home.

At this point, it appears that Montelongo has gone off the deep end.  The city has tried to get her involved with some sort of mediated solution, but she is uninterested.  In an effort to curb the misuse of city resources, the city is now going to have to get tough and try legal means.

City officials say they have attempted several solutions, including peaceful mediation.

Assistant Police Chief Bob Freeman says: “We’ve tried to meet with both parties to see if we could work out the issue. Miss Martin has met with us several times. Margarita doesn’t seem interested in doing that.”

Deputy City Manager Gary McKamie says: “From what I recall, there’s no strong evidence that would tell us absolutely that the calls are false.”

David Montague, a spokesman for the Tarrant County district attorney, says it’s a crime to make a false report to a peace officer. Upon conviction, the Class B misdemeanor calls for up to six months in jail and $2,000 in fines.

The city is trying a new strategy. Because animal services officers are not peace officers, police accompany animal services officers to answer complaints at the Martin home, James says. The police officer could act as a witness and file false report charges.

Not that I’m vindictive or anything, but I wouldn’t feel sorry for Montelongo if she were to have to grace the city jail with her presence for a while over this sillyness.

I caught a bit of the WB33 News last night.  They were doing one of those entertainment fluff pieces that annoy me so much (and just why are these people supposed to be news?).  Anyhow, it was about Heidi Klum’s baby boy with Seal.  The male newscaster repeatedly mispronounced her name.  The female newscaster corrected him and noted that, “most men would know that.” 

I wonder just what she was trying to say? 

Damn, it must suck to be these guys right about now.