Scott Bush

The city of Seattle is constructing something-or-other along Lake City Way. As my carpooler and I drove by today I saw something astounding: big-people Legos. That’s right: rectangular concrete blocks with four or six stubby cylindrical nubs on top for stacking. How cool is that

Wonder if they come in colors besides grey?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever got some mail offering you a mortgage, degree, medication, stock tips, enlargement of a certain male body part, OEM software, etc. What? Everyone? Keep your hands in the air if you get more than one a day… okay, how about five per day? 10? Two dozen or more? Wow.

If you’ve been living under a rock, you may not know that stuff is called spam, and it’s the bane of everyone’s existence; much more so if you happen to maintain a mail server. How can we cope? Well, first off, don’t buy anything from such messages. You scoff, but people do or it wouldn’t continue. Other than that, you can obfuscate your address.

Address obfuscation, translated into English, is a way to hide your e-mail address in the code of web pages where it may appear (such as your blog, company site, etc.). This can be done many ways with varying levels of sophistication. Recently, I transitioned my organization’s web sites from out-in-the-open addressing to the simplest obfuscation: HTML entities. An example will make this clear:

joe@hotmail.com becomes
joe@hot »
mail.com

That may look like a huge mess (and it is to our eyes), but when a web browser (such as the one you’re using to read this) sees it, it displays the familiar English-text e-mail address. Looks the same, works the same unless you’re an e-mail harvester program crawling the web, in which case you see the HTML entities and don’t recognize them. You are denied the evil pleasures of spamming me.Of course, such measures don’t stop the addresses already floating around spammers’ lists. Nor does it stop the other methods by which addresses are harvested. But it does ameliorate the problem, which is almost as awesome as me using the word ameliorate in a blog post. So give it a shot with the addresses posted on your site.

Tip: if you’re a Mac user (as you should be!) you can easily obfuscate address using this widget. If not, there’s a simple web-based tool, too.

PS - If your arm’s still in the air, you can put it down now.

Having a blog affords me the opportunity to share little nuggets of humor that otherwise would never bring smiles to our lips. Here’s one such perfect little story, which I share in narrative form.

Date and time: Sunday, 7:55am

Location: Front of condo building in Kenmore

Scott stands about, waiting for his ride. Enter Lisa, carrying small, brightly-colored purse.

Scott: “Hey, what’re you doing out here now?”

Lisa: “Going to church, waiting for my ride.”

S: “Me too.” Small talk, until Scott notices the phrase displayed on the purse.

S: Curious, pointing at the purse “What does your purse say?”

L: “Ditch Him—pretty funny, huh?”

S: “Totally. Fits well with the He’s Just Not That Into You mentality, right?”

L: Laughing “Yep, but get this. I was in the bathroom at church one week and the old ladies there saw it and were like ‘What? What?! Ditch Him? Him? Oh my gosh, that woman is advocating to ditch GOD!’ Yup, they thought I was the devil”

S: Confused “What? Why’d they think that?”

L: Pointing to the ‘Him’ “Look again. See the capital H. Him. Like Jesus, get it?”

S: “Wow… ha ha ha, that is hilarious! The curly writing obscured it for me. What’d you do then?”

L: “Hissed like a snake and ran out of the bathroom, then laughed my butt off.”

S: “Well played, very well played indeed.”

I swear that’s all true… except maybe the last two lines. Actually, she just pointed out it was a novelty-phrase purse and left it at that. But my ending is funnier.

This post is for those of you loooking to resolve a very tricky issue with your SOHO network (and not for anyone for whom the words in the posts title are totally foreign, excepting “nightmare”). I wish I’d found a similar post before I spent weeks going batty. Here’re the setup and the symptoms:

• You manage a network that uses NAT, giving all computers on your network internal IP addresses (typically 192.168.x.x).
• Your network has one external-facing IP address assigned by your provider, which is given to your network routing device (like a Linksys, D-Link, or Belkin; or, if you’re awesome, you’re using a Soekris device running m0n0wall).
• Your e-mail provider runs *nux with QMail and Courier-IMAP as its mailserver
• Mail clients on your network experience frequent, intermittent connection problems to your mail server. This problem is unrelated to web browsing or other internet use, and is not restricted to any particular machine.
• Your stress levels and/or hairloss increases while your peer confidence levels decrease.

The issue, my troubled IT colleagues, lies in the imapd config file. Mine lived in /etc/courier-imap/imapd, though yours may be elsewhere. The issue is with the default value for the maxperip setting, which is only four. This means that the fifth mail client to connect to the mail server receives an unceremonious rejection. But, if you try again then you may get through once the other connections finish, which complicates the troubleshooting process.

To resolve it, simply open the imapd config file in your favorite text editor and locate the maxperip setting. It’ll look like this:

##NAME: MAXPERIP:0
#
# Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address

maxperip=4


Simply change the value 4 to something more reasonable for your network: I use the number fof computers in the office at any one time, plus 5 for good measure. Honestly, you can set it higher until the problem disappears.

I hope this saves someone out there some headaches (assuming Goolge indexes this post and gets found by those in need). If so, I’d love you to post a comment.

Today is the beginning of the three-day Enlightened Wealth Institute (EWI) at the Hilton in Seattle. (EWI is the new moniker for Enlightened Millionaire Institute, which they say reflects their focus on “enlightened living” rather than money.) I’m going to attend, but not until the weekend because I’m busy helping at the NSRF Winter Meeting held just across the block at the Sheraton. The focus for this EWI conference is “mulitple streams of income,” which EWI founders Robert G. Allen and Mark Victor Hansen describe (both instructionally and narratively) in their book The One Minute Millionaire. In a nutshell, it advocates approaching wealth-generation through (no surprise) multiple ways, such as real estate investing, “info-preneurialship,” and both Internet- and retail-based sales. The book also strongly advocates the use of teams and mentorships, which are hallmarks of the EMI process.

In 2003 I attended a similar EMI conference in Las Vegas focusing specifically on real estate investing. It was very exciting and had a lot of information about REI; I was already an investor but the ideas—and indeed just the energy in the room—were inspiring. Yes, it was a hard sell in the vein of “you’ll learn more when you become a member and have access to x, y, and z!” Nothing wrong with that, as I’m sure their protégé mentoring program they were selling would be very rigorous and (with some luck) prosperous.

I’m looking forward to the material since I could use a little “pumping up” after the disasterous challenging process of our home-building deals in Florida. I’ll post again once I’ve learned more.

UPDATE! Mathew Baldwin saw fit to include the first of my updated clichés on his site. Thanks, Matt! He’s also got round two of the CRP going.

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First, if you don’t regularly read Matthew Baldwin’s oddly-named blog, Defective Yeti, well… that’s up to you. But you should. It’s as fun as a barrel of monkeys, not to mention as American as apple pie.

As evidence of this fun, he’s currently asking his readership to participate in the Cliché Rotation Project. I’ve submitted four entries that are as cool as a cucumber. But, as they are likely too full of baloney to be among the winners, I’ll post them here.

Old & Busted	New Hotness
“Keep your eyes peeled”	“Put your deadlights on high beams”
“Bought the farm”	“Took out a third mortgage on the double-wide”
“cold as ice”	“chilled like a Frappuccino®”
“bite the hand that feeds you”	“pimp-slap the mailman with the welfare check”

None of them are good, of course. The first entry’s word deadlights pays homage not to Steven King, whom I believed invented the word in one of his dozens of mediocre works, but to pirate slang as I discovered listening to Treasure Island over at Librivox.

Astute readers may notice four intentional clichés in this post. Any others are unintentional and I ask your forgiveness.