Dave Ifversen's Journal

On the road again...

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:33:09 GMT

The ebike was down for a couple of weeks. The motor is great, but the wheel that came with the kit is a typical cheap Chinese piece of crap. The wheel started wobbling while I was riding the bike, and when I looked into the problem, I discovered that the rim was bent. Not only was the rim made of very thin aluminum, but the wheel was not assembled correctly in the first place - none of the spokes were tensioned properly. I ordered a new rim (an Alex rim from Alfred E. Bike in Kalamazoo), and talked one of the big bikey nuts at work into truing up the new wheel for me. (Truing a wheel is an art, not something to be undertaken lightly - if done wrong, the wheel can "taco", usually at the worst possible moment.)

While truing the wheel, we discovered that one of the spoke nipples was stripped out (probably part of what caused the original problem). Of course, the Chinese manufacturer used a non-standard spoke (2.4mm) - none of the bike stores in Chicagoland carry these (I know, because I called a *lot* of stores). As a last resort, before ordering a whole new set of custom made spokes from Canada, I found one local bike store that would re-thread one of my existing spokes to take a standard nipple (I had to talk them into it - they were afraid of ruining the spoke). It worked, and we got the wheel finished and back on the bike. Nice and straight, and the rim brakes work perfectly. I am now back to telling OPEC to stuff it!

I still need to work on going up to 48 volts and getting a LiFePO4 battery (higher speed and longer range), but that will probably wait until winter.

You load 16 tons, and what do you get?

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:25:02 GMT

Tired and sore, that's what. Two more loads cleaned out of the garage (one load taken to Dr. B.'s dumpster, which filled it to the top; the other load is sitting in the Jeep waiting for the dumpster to be emptied). It has made a noticeable difference in the "Pile-O-Stuff" (tm) in there, but I still have more to do. Found lots of things that I thought had been lost in the mists of time. Also found lots of mouse poop. Yecch!

2 loads gone...

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:13:46 GMT

So I got two loads over to Dr. B.'s dumpster. (Mostly old, outdated electronics and other junk that I have no idea why I moved from the old apartment - I should have dumped it before we had the moving party.) I even found the Indiana Jones hat (no kidding - a few years ago, I bought a "licensed" Indiana Jones fedora) - I found it in the first box opened, and wore it the rest of the day to keep the sun off my head while moving stuff around on the driveway. Two loads in 90 degree heat is enough for one day.

Hasn't made a noticeable dent in the clutter in the garage, but that will come (eventually). If I keep up with a couple of loads a day, by the end of the week there should be enough room in there to have the new door installed.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the bolt-ends of fabric in there (we have 20 or so bolt-ends of fabric from the Steelcase company store - this is the nice, heavy duty upholstery fabric they use for office furniture. Why my mother-in-law bought all that fabric I have no idea, but it now resides in the garage, next to the crate containing the ark of the covenant). There is more furniture to go, and then boxes (and boxes) of books that need to be sorted through and kept or disposed of (depending on the book).

Much more fun to come....

Now where did I put the Indiana Jones hat and the bullwhip...

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:34:37 GMT

I will need them, because I am venturing into ... (wait for it) ... The Garage ... to do some cleaning. The garage has not changed much since we moved in - boxes piled up everywhere (some that I haven't looked into since I was in college, (mumble) years ago), old furniture wherever, misc. stuff in any old place, the ark of the covenant in a crate, and maybe even the Roswell alien (who knows?). (What, you think we could actually put a vehicle in the garage? Ha! I laugh at your silly notions...)

The landlord says he will have a new garage door and opener installed (yea!, we need it), but I will have to at least clean out enough stuff so the installers can get to the places they need to do the job. So I took the week off from work - hopefully, enough time to get some of the detritus taken care of. Disposal is not a problem - Dr. B. has a 12 yard dumpster, and he says I can fill it as many times as necessary. Two or three Jeeploads should fill the dumpster nicely...

If I'm not heard from in a week, release the hounds...

Still doin' my part...

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:41:56 GMT

... to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I've lived with the ebike for a month now, and if anything, I like it better now than I did when I first started riding it. I managed to scrounge some 12AH SLA batteries - they work much better than the 8AH batteries I was using. I haven't found the max range on this battery pack yet. The local bike shop laced up a front wheel for me with the dynamo/drum brake hub I found online - I *really* like having front drum brakes, and I'll end up using the dynamo to charge up some AA NiMH batteries to run the lights I just got the parts to build (4 watt ultra-bright LEDs with optics, rated at 108 lumens per watt - <tim allen>more power, argh argh argh</tim allen>). Someone at work also gave me a seat post with spring suspension, which I put on the bike. Not enough O's in smooth...

Still waiting on the regenerative braking controller - they must have shipped it on a slow boat from China. Once it gets here, I'll open it up and replace the MOSFETs with higher rated ones, so I can overvolt the system to 48 volts - the motor should be good up to 60 volts, so 48 will be no problem. Couple that with (eventually) a LiFePO4 battery pack, and I should be able to boost my top speed to 30+ mph, with a greater range than I am getting now.

So far, I only drive the jeep to work when I need to haul something big or when it is raining (for some reason, I don't think it is a good idea to ride an electric bike in the rain... :-) ). At this rate, the kit should pay for itself by the end of the summer, and I should be able to ride this thing until it starts snowing.

More on the eBike..

Tue, 20 May 2008 16:10:31 GMT

Checking my speed with the doppler speed radar at the lab shows that I can hit ~20 mph going uphill with light pedal-assist - not bad at all. Takes me about 15 minutes to make the trip from home to work (or back again at the end of the shift), and I can do it without arriving at work sweating like a draft-horse. I also found out that if I don't run flat out on the motor, and pedal-assist/coast as necessary, I only draw down the batteries about 30 - 40%, rather than run the pack flat (of course, that means I am running slower than 20 mph, but not significantly so). I still want a bigger, better, battery pack (higher energy density and a better charge/discharge rate than I am currently getting with SLA), but I can live with the current batteries while I work on acquiring what I really want (madtechie2718 pointed me at some NiMH batteries that would probably work well - they're not cheap, but they're also not priced out of the range of sensibility, either).

I did discover that the headlight I am using (IIRC, a 1-watt LED running on 4 AA batteries) is really pretty wimpy - it works, but not real well. One of the physicists at work (a serious bikey-sort) builds his own lights using the ultra-bright luxeon LED units (3 or 5 watts, I think). He is going to let me know when he places another order for the LEDs, and I will get in on it (he buys in bulk from an overseas supplier, so gets a really good deal). He has a pair of these on his bike, and they are actually brighter than the HID lighting available. The other thing I am looking for is a hub dynamo (an alternator built into the front wheel hub) to power the lights. With some mondo capacitors, the lights would stay on for a while even when I slowed to a stop, so this could work.

It's up and running - In Your Face, OPEC!

Sat, 17 May 2008 03:21:39 GMT

Got the electric kit all installed on my old mountain bike - it was actually pretty easy, even considering that I had to open up the rear frame a bit so the motor would fit. Moves right out, too - gets me, the bike, and (more importantly) the battery pack up to 20 or 25 mph with no problems at all. The only issue is that the 8 amp-hour battery pack I put together turns out to be pretty wimpy. In a couple of test runs, I can make it all the way to work on a charge (just barely), so it does what I want it to, but things could be better. The cheapest solution would be to get a 12 amp-hour SLA pack - that should get me to work without the risk of reversing any of the cells. What I actually want is a 20 amp-hour LiFePO4 pack - I just wish they weren't so darned expensive (a pack like that would cost more than I spent on the rest of the kit in the first place - and, now that I think about it, more than what I spent when I originally bought the bike).

In any event, I will be taking the bike to work whenever it is not raining. That should stretch the time between fillups for the Jeep to a month or more. Boo-Yah!

New Toy arriving soon....

Sat, 10 May 2008 23:51:28 GMT

So, with the price of gas getting up to obscene levels, I really need to start riding my bike to work. The only problem is I don't like to get to work smelling like the clydesdale that just finished pulling the beer wagon (and I am sure my cow-orkers don't want me there in that condition either). There is (supposedly) a shower at work, but it is not always available or working - so it can't be counted on. Therefore, it must be time for a new toy....

I ordered a kit to convert my (mumble) year old mountain bike to an electric. 500 watt, 36 volt hub motor (rear wheel kit, comes with the motor, the wheel, a 5-speed cassette, and a cheap tire and tube), a regenerative braking controller, twist throttle, and new brake levers (with switches in them to signal the motor controller that the brakes are being applied). Coupled with some 8 AH sealed lead-acid batteries, and I should be all set for commuting to the lab. Even if the batteries only last for my ride in, that would be OK - I can always pedal home and catch a shower then.

The whole thing should be here on Tuesday. Wednesday is a furlough day, so I can spend it installing everything on the bike. Yee-ha!

At $3.60 per gallon, every bit helps...

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 06:34:51 GMT

The Jeep has been acting up lately - it has always idled rough, but it was getting worse, and the milage was suffering (when I bought it, I was getting ~17mpg around town, and up to 25mpg on the highway). The other day, it started up then stalled right out. Would not start at all after that, unless I held the gas pedal down - then it would run just fine. Great - the idle air control motor on the throttle-body died.

Managed to get the part, but I did not have time to install it, so I ended up kludging the Jeep to make it run. I finally had time to pull the throttle-body off the intake manifold, clean it, and put the new parts on. Dang, was it dirty (it hasn't been cleaned since I bought the Jeep, and it was encrusted with carbon and old, dried oil and just general crud). I ended up using almost an entire can of carb cleaner, and got things put back together.

Wow, what a difference! I just checked the milage, and I am getting between 18 and 20mpg around town now. Woo-hoo!

Two steps forward, one step back...

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:35:20 GMT

The scene render went well. 600 frames (about 20 seconds), each frame done 33 times (to get all the details in), 720x480 resolution, with the LucasFilms EXR plugin (does really, really well at rendering light in space, used for Battlestar Galactica, among other shows). A render of this type on the Core 2 Quad machine would normally take slightly over 24 hours. On the renderfarm, it was done in less than an hour and a half (and I was only using half the available nodes). Boo-Yah!

The other advantage to ScreamerNet is that it runs in batch mode - we can queue up the scenes, and it will go down the list, rendering everything without any human intervention. Another Boo-Yah!

However, as I was setting up the rest of the farmer nodes, I suddenly lost communication with the Core 2 Quad machine (we use this as the master node). Hmm.... Rebooting said machine resulted in it not finding the system disk. Crap. Looks like we lost the C: drive (no big deal - the C: drive was an older disk that I suspected might have some problems and would need replacing soon anyway). LightWave (and all the scene files) reside on the D: drive (a whopping big, brand new SATA drive), so no data was lost. I just need to run out and get a cheap SATA drive for the OS.

We also discovered that the network switch we are using has died. This was a piece of hardware from the surplus warehouse, so it is also no big surprise. Fortunately, I have a pile of them that I picked up the last time I was over there, so it will be trivial to replace.

If everything goes to plan, the farm will be back up and rendering over the weekend.

Jimmy Kimmel show, here we come! (The producer wants to see some completed footage - once they see what we have, they will probably want Darren (at least) to be on the show to explain what we are doing. Another Boo-Yah!)

Old MacDonald had a renderfarm...

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:58:11 GMT

Both racks of computers up and running... check.
Network up and running....                               check.
Programs loaded on farmer nodes....           check.
Master node configured properly...                 check.
Master node can see farmer nodes...            check.
Quick test render works....                                check.

Tomorrow, I'll get Darren to load up an as-yet-unrendered scene for the movie, and we'll let her rip. In the immortal words of Dr. Emmett Brown, "If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour... your gonna see some serious shit."

Yet another score...

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:05:47 GMT

Wandered back over to surplus. I found a pallet of disk subsystems, surplus from the Grid Computing Center. So I picked up a couple to add to the render farm; each subsystem has 1.8TB of disk space (Boo-Yah!) I may go back next week and grab a couple more.

In the meantime, I have expanded the render farm. Having reached the maximum capacity in my office for power and cooling, I have set up another rack of machines in a spare office down the hall. All networked together, and all accessable through a data center KVM system that was being scrapped from a downtown brokerage (thanks, Dale!). Lightwave 3D (the rendering software we are currently using) has a network rendering system called ScreamerNet - we are installing it on all the machines. I can hardly wait to crank this baby up and see what she'll do....

He shoots, he scores!

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:54:41 GMT

Wandered over to surplus today (always looking for computer upgrades for the render farm...). Found a pallet of machines that looked interesting - closer inspection revealed that they were 1U rackmount dual processor Xeons (2.66GHz) with 200GB of disk and 2GB of RAM. SCORE! (I grabbed an even dozen, but there are another 30 or so left that I might go back for later...). This should speed up the render farm a bit :-).

Capricon photos up

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:07:34 GMT

So I put some Capricon photos up - mostly some familiar looking people :-)

They are here for anybody interested.

Baaa! (meme sheep)

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:53:31 GMT

I am:

Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs)

A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

Which science fiction writer are you?

More snow coming...

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:24:08 GMT

It was actually supposed to start snowing before now, but we have just had rain up to this point. They were calling for 3 - 5 inches tonight, maybe another 3 - 5 inches tomorrow. Looks like most of the snow will come tomorrow (looking at the big radar picture, it looks pretty ugly out by the mississippi river).

Oh well, if it gets really ugly tomorrow, I can always get out the bearclaws and walk to work. (And, the generator is ready to go if the power goes out...)

Baaaa! (meme sheep)

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 22:54:33 GMT

79% Bill Richardson
76% Chris Dodd
70% Barack Obama
69% John Edwards
68% Mike Gravel
66% Hillary Clinton
63% Joe Biden
61% Dennis Kucinich
53% Rudy Giuliani
53% John McCain
49% Mike Huckabee
40% Mitt Romney
37% Ron Paul
34% Tom Tancredo
34% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Things that make you go "hmmm..."

I guess somebody has to fund W's "dirty little war"...

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:47:02 GMT

and this time, it looks like us. But it is not the end of the world.
So the Lab Director had an All-Hands meeting this morning to present the doom and gloom about the omnibus spending bill and how it affects us at Fermi. ($22 billion had to be cut from the federal budget, plus an additional $8 billion to make up for the inevitable "earmarks" (read "pork") that end up in every budget, in order to meet the President's spending request (notice I didn't say "balance the budget", because the federal budget hasn't been balanced for years) and pay for the war.)

The Lab and the DOE are committed to Run II (the current thing we are doing, and the most "real science" we are getting in high energy physics at the moment), so they will not be shutting things down for vast stretches of time. Instead, starting in February (and running through the end of September, which is the end of the fiscal year), there will be a "rolling furlough", where everyone has to take two days a month off (they haven't yet decided if it has to be without pay, or if accrued vacation time can be used). These days off can be planned in advance so as to minimize inconvenience (those of us with built-in overtime in our schedules can take our days off when we are not working overtime).

There will also be a 200 person RIF, probably sometime in April or so. (Given the stated objective of full support for Run II, it is unlikely that anyone from my group (Operations) would be included in the RIF - we are short as it is, and they are not hiring *ANY* new people, so we need all the operators that we have just to keep things running. They will probably not, however, replace anyone who leaves.)

Two big projects for the future of high energy physics (ILC R&D and NoVA) were not funded past what has already been spent so far this fiscal year, so all work on those projects will cease. Staff from those projects will be reassigned (and/or included in the RIF). The projects were not cancelled, just not funded in full for this fiscal year - it is not clear what their status will be next fiscal year.

Of course, all the details for this have yet to be worked out, and we haven't seen the final budget (the DOE hasn't even seen the final budget yet). Representatives at the state and federal level are trying to minimize the pain (if that is even possible), so we shall see what the overall final outcome will be.

Next fiscal year is an election year - generally bleak for any type of budget increases, so we were told not to expect too much more next year than we got this year.

All in all, it could have been a *lot* worse. (Although, I don't know what the future holds for any position in a lab funded by the government - the current crop of bozos running for President (both Republican and Democrat) don't instill a lot of confidence in me for the future of science funding in this country.)

12 Grimmauld Place Redux

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 11:06:14 GMT

I hate my mother-in-law's house. The place is a dump, falling apart (it would probably take over $40K just to fix all the structural problems, and that doesn't include bringing it up to code). If it were up to me, I would make one more trip there, in order to rent a bulldozer....
(I keep telling Ang that I believe that, with a big enough chipper-shredder, I could fit the whole place into two 20 yard dumpsters...)

The people keeping an eye on the place called last week - the furnace wasn't working. Normally, this would be a big deal - except that nobody is currently living there. The city turned the water off a couple of months ago (since nobody is there, the water usage has gone way down - the city decided that the meter wasn't working properly) - they said that they classified the house as abandoned. When we pointed out that it wasn't abandoned (it was just unoccupied), they said that they would turn the water back on if we wanted, but someone had to be there so that they could test the meter. We just haven't had the time (a Good Thing (tm), as it turns out).

So we made a run to Bland Rapids to winterize the dump (much cheaper than paying someone to fix the furnace, if we could have found anyone).

To winterize it, I had to get into the dirt floored crawlspace. This involved squeezing through this *tiny* little window (note to self: lose the gut) - I would not fit through with my winter coat on (I just barely fit through once I took the coat off). I had to fight through 30 years of cobwebs (think Munster's house, X10) in order to get to the furnace and water heater. I swear I saw Shelob hiding in a corner. I turned off the power to the furnace (the blower motor was running, but the gas had never kicked on - either the igniter board died (this happened once before), or the thermocouple was shot). The fluepipe from the furnace to the chimney was completely rusted away, so that if the gas had actually kicked on, all the exhaust would be dumped right into the crawlspace (I guess it was a good thing that the furnace died). I also turned off the gas to both the furnace and water heater, and opened the draincock on the bottom of the water heater. We left the light on down there, and I added an additional 100 watt bulb in a troublelight (this should keep the crawlspace from freezing during the winter). On the way back out of the crawlspace, I closed the main water valve (the city had already shut off the street valve). Getting out that little window was even more fun than getting in. I came out looking like a Welsh coal miner.

Inside the house we opened all the water taps, allowing any water left in the pipes to run out through the water heater and onto the dirt floor in the crawlspace. We emptied the toilet tanks and put RV antifreeze in the toilet bowls and all the sink traps (and the washing machine drain) to keep the traps full (and sewer gas out of the house). The place should be just fine for the winter - we can fix the furnace in the spring, and get the water turned back on so we can finish cleaning the place out.

I doubt the place would pass any inspection, so we will probably have to sell it as a lot that just happens to have a structure on it that will need to be torn down....

Yet another Windycon over and done with...

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:43:27 GMT

...and it went reasonably well (from a Tech Services viewpoint). A few mis-communications (but nothing major), and things went well past the scheduled ending point Saturday afternoon (so I didn't have enough time to get any dinner before having to set up for the masquerade - many thanks to qnofhrt for squeezing a couple of pieces of pizza out of the filkers (they were the ones who ran later than scheduled) so I could at least have something to eat). I heard (in a roundabout way) that the Suttons were pleased with the sound for the operetta, which was good - I ended up doing it cold (having never heard the piece), and there wasn't enough time for an on-stage rehearsal. It could have been better if I would have had a few more microphones, though. (Note to self: pick up a few more mics for doing things like this - talk to billroper about which mics work best for filk.)

The hotel was more abysmal than I had remembered, but at least this year my room did not smell like raw sewage (like it did a couple of years ago). The parking still stank to high heaven (the guys running the entrance booth ended up selling spaces (on the side) to people attending the circus at the Rosemont Horizon next door), and the elevator near us was dead most of the weekend (thank Ghu I was using one of the con PODS to stage equipment out of, and didn't need the elevator to haul stuff up to the room and back). The door to our room was falling off the hinges, so getting it to close was an adventure (to say the least). And, for some unknown reason, whoever designed the HVAC for the building set it up so that either the whole building could be in winter mode (heating), or summer mode (cooling), but not both. Since they already made the switchover to winter mode, we could not get anything but heat in the room, and what we really needed was cooling. As far as I am concerned, the Wyndham OHare should be used as a demonstration for the con panel "Blowing Things Up for Fun and Profit" - thank Ghu Windy is moving to a *much* better hotel next year! (And, as an added bonus, the new hotel is less than two minutes away from my storage locker where all the A/V equipment is kept! Yea!)

It's not rocket science...

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:19:10 GMT

It's just mixing sound for a live performance.

So we went to the Van Halen concert last Tuesday. The Van Halen brothers, David Lee Roth, and Wolfie (Eddie's son) playing bass (three fifty-somethings and a 16 year old kid).

The venue was so-so (the Rosemont Horizon - I'm sorry, but it will never be the Allstate Arena to me), and the parking was just as abysmal as I expected it to be - so far, the only venue I have ever been to that handled parking well was the Palace in Auburn Hills; when we were there a few years ago for the last Van Halen tour, it took us longer to walk to the car than it did to get out of the parking lot and on to the expressway (they have their own entrance/exit!).

The concert was OK; I enjoyed it - the music was good, the lighting and staging were interesting, and they had some good effects going - but the sound guy *sucked* (for want of a better term). The earplugs I was wearing (after the first Heart concert I went to, I realized that earplugs were a necessity) filtered out the distortion (it sounded better through the earplugs than without them), but this guy couldn't mix rock to save his soul. There was no balance at all - the vocals were either not loud enough, or too loud, or they dropped out altogether, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the levels he set for the instruments. Without earplugs, it was painful to listen to (not because of the volume (although that was painful on its own without earplugs), but because the sound guy was overdriving his amps and speakers, causing ghu-awful distortion). And I don't mean the good kind of distortion one expects at a rock concert. When describing this to some of the people at work, I believe that my exact phrasing was "I could have done better with my butt in a bedpan, and I haven't mixed rock in over 20 years".

There was also no energy in the audience - they just kind of stood there like dead fish (not that dead fish ever stand, but you get the idea). When we were at the concert at the Palace, you could almost feel the electricity in the air - that was definitely lacking at the Horizon. As Ang says, Bob Seger was right - Detroit audiences are the greatest rock and roll audiences in the world.

eBaY hacked?

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:42:30 GMT

Early last week, a hacker (rumored to be one "Vladuz", who has been plaguing eBaY of late) set up a bot to post threads on the eBaY Trust & Safety Forum. Each thread contained personal information about an eBaY member (and appeared to be posted by that member), including things like username, real name, addresses, phone numbers, and what appeared to be credit card numbers (with CVV2 numbers as well).

These posts were noticed by others on the board right away, and brought to the attention of the powers that be at eBaY - nothing was done for about 90 minutes. At one point, the bot was posting threads at a rate of 10 to 15 per minute (faster than eBaY could take them down, when they finally started trying to do something about it). They eventually closed down the message board in order to delete the posts (which ended up numbering about 1200 or so before the board was shut down). The only thing they said about it was contained in 2 posts in an eBaY blog, about how a "malicious fraudster" posted user details that "appeared" genuine, except for the credit card numbers. They said that the numbers posted did not match the cards on file for the users "outed" in this manner. However, I started seeing posts on some of the forums from people who said that the numbers were genuine, and some posts from people who started seeing fraudulent charges on their cards (and one poor person who had his checking account cleaned out).

There were several posts early on, from eBaY "pinks" (employees who post on the message boards are identified by a "pink" byline with their username in it) that had all kinds of crazy explanations about what was going on - one "pink" said that it was a server glitch that was causing anyone who tried to post to the board to post their own information instead, another "pink" said that when anybody tried to sign up for a Paypal account, the info got posted to the board by mistake, and still another "pink" said that each of these accounts that were posted were hijacked by phishing emails.

I started noticing that posts from people that had any real information in them started getting deleted, and some of the posters were getting suspended. Interesting. When a German website (The Auction Guild) got a letter from an eBaY lawyer (who also happened to buy on eBaY) demanding that they take down any information they had up about the incident, TAG posted the letter (and left the info up). Shortly after that, the lawyer's eBaY "about me" page was altered, with all of his personal information posted for all to see. Again, interesting.

They have no idea how many people could be affected by this, (and they are not saying ANYTHING about it, even to people who might have had their info compromised), but it is possible that this hacker has access to the entire eBaY database. Rather than take any chances, I checked with the card issuer for the card I have on file with eBay (to pay my seller's fees when I list something) - they saw no fraudulent charges, but suggested I cancel the card anyway. I did (they have since sent me a new card).

Recent events have me questioning whether I will EVER give eBaY any credit card information again - just today, on the Trust and Safety forum, several people posted about another apparent intrusion. These people have been very vocal on the boards about what they think of "Vladuz", and they report that all of a sudden, their accounts were made NARU (eBaY slang for "not a registered user", what happens to someone when their account is closed by eBaY). They got emails, supposedly from "Vladuz", where he tells them what he did, gives them personal info from their accounts, and tells them to stop "talking sh*t" about him. Then, just as suddenly, their accounts were reinstated (but, if they had any auctions running, all were lost when the accounts went NARU - one person reported that they even lost everything listed in their eBaY store).

Obviously, it appears that this guy does have access to the eBaY database, and can do just about whatever he wants with the accounts. EBaY either can't (or won't) close the hole, and doesn't seem to be interested in letting people know what may be happening with their personal information. All in all, it is looking more and more like eBaY is no longer a safe place to buy or sell.

Baaa! (meme sheep) - careers this time

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:56:44 GMT

Yoinked from Roxanne's journal....

1. Go to www.careercruising.com
2. Put in Username: nycareers - Password: landmark
3. Take the 'Career Matchmaker' questions at the upper left corner
4. Post the top 10 results.

The list I got (without taking education into account) follows:

1. Electronic Engineering Tech
2. Electrical Engineering Tech
3. Geologist
4. Archaeologist
5. Forensics Specialist
6. Avionics Tech
7. Paleontologist
8. Biomedical Engineer
9. Agricultural Engineer
10. Mining Engineer

When I selected "university education", I got the following list:

1. Geologist
2. Archaeologist
3. Forensics Specialist
4. Paleontologist
5. Agricultural Engineer
6. Biomedical Engineer
7. Mining Engineer
8. Petroleum Engineer
9. Civil Engineer
10. Botanist

Veterinarian (what I really want to do) shows up as number 17 on this list. (Oddly enough, "Explosives Specialist" shows up as number 16.)

Interesting.....

Bwah-ha-ha!

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:52:39 GMT

The lights flickered and went out tonight - almost 2 weeks (to the hour) from the last outage. And, like last time, our side of the street was dark, along with everything east of Avon and north of Mack. I gave it 10 minutes or so for the lights to come back, then called Communist Edison - they actually had useful information this time (1000's out, but a crew had already been dispatched, and our lights might possibly be back tonight). "Well", sez I to myself, "self, this is why you bought a generator". Fired it up, got things hooked up, and had the lights back on in a couple of minutes. I ran out to find a gas station that still had power, got some more gas, then came back and hung around for an hour or so talking to the neighbor. For once, Commie Ed did things right - the power came back on a couple of hours after it went out. Shut down the generator and switched back over to the power grid - all in all, pretty painless!

I really need to scrounge up a transfer switch to make this easier.

Fie on mother nature, pooh on Commie Ed.....

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 20:24:02 GMT

Do your worst, and take as long as you want to restore power - I am the proud owner of a shiny new generator! It took a while (most stores in the area are still short on generators after the storms over a week ago), and nobody had the one I wanted (Troy Bilt 5.5kW) - I ended up with a John Deere 6.2kW unit. (It is actually made by Briggs and Stratton, and is equivalent to the B&S 6200 watt elite series generator, but without the electric start.) It also has automatic voltage regulation (the smaller units don't come with that), and should be big enough to run everything in the house except the central air. (If the power goes out when it is hot, we have a window AC unit that this generator will handle with no problems - that's one of the things I was looking for when deciding what size generator to get.) The landlord also said I could install a 240 VAC outlet in the garage to plug it in and backfeed the house (when my landlord retires, he wants to move in here and sell his other, bigger house - he already has a generator and a garage outlet in his house, so I will put the same plug style in here; he will be able to use his generator here after we move out). As long as I turn off the main breaker before connecting the generator (to isolate the house from the mains), there should be no problem. (If I can talk my landlord into it, I will put in a manual transfer switch - that way, we will be completely up to code.)