Dan's Blog

I’ve been in Mammoth since Friday afternoon.  Everything seems to be going wrong on this trip.  First, on Saturday, I hit an ice patch with my car, and steered into a light pole.  Nobody was hurt, but the car is currently sitting in a parking lot waiting for me to find someone to fix it.

Because it’s Sunday, and no place is open, I decided to go skiing today to enjoy a nice day.  It’s been snowing, and there has been snow the last few days!  This afternoon, skiing through the trees on chair 12, I fell and lost one of my ski poles!  Rachel has promised to try and find me a loaner pair for the rest of my week here.

Finally, when I got home today, I discovered that I had cracked the glass on my iPodTouch display today.  It must have happened when I fell at some point.

Ahh…what else can go wrong!  (Note:  I know that these are all small things, but it certainly is frustrating!)

Hmmm….the past several days I’ve noticed a bot-net “visiting” my server.  It started off with lots of SSH login attempts, and now they’ve been attempting to log into my mailserver!  The logs are quite crazy.  Lots and lots of different usernames attempt to log in, all in alphabetical order, and all from different IP addresses.  I assume I must be on a list…

I’ve spent some time removing people’s logins who don’t use my server anymore, and I made sure everybody who does log in gets a new password.

I didn’t think that was too bad…until I noticed that the bots were now attempting to log into my mailserver.  I’ve installed fail2ban.  Hopefully this blocks some IPs and slows down this attack.

I’m sitting here at the train station in Sorrento Valley waiting for the Coaster to take me up to the Strong Ale Festival at Pizza Port in Carlsbad.

This year they are featuring 75 beers that have at least 8% alcohol to celebrate 75 years since the end of prohibition. Not to mention that I’l get some tasty pizza, too =-)

So far, I know I will be joined by Bryan and Elissa, with Ash joining us later in the day. Tracy is too sick to attend this year’s event.

A review of some of my favorites is likely to follow.

Phew…I’m really getting tired of my job.  Constant 10+ hour days, lots of stress, and very few people that actually care about our project.  I think that next week will be busy, but the rest of December should be easier.  (Granted, it’s not going to hurt that I’ll be up in Mammoth from Dec. 11 to the 18th!)

However, Janurary is going to be miserable.  Must…survive…until…Feb…

I love reading articles on the Big Lebowski.  Someday, I too will attend a Lebowski Fest!

I’ve posted some photos from our family Thanksgiving dinner last night.  Go Look!

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

This year, I’m thankful for quite a few things:

• My awesome family, whom I get to spend Thanksgiving with
• My friends who have been too nice to me
• The fact that I get to go skiing up in Mammoth so much (including that I’m an MVP member!)
• The fact that I’m still employed, even though I don’t love my job
• That most of my co-workers are awesome

I hope that everybody has a nice, safe Thanksgiving!

I wanted to take a minute to applaud San Diego State University President Steven Weber on his decision to remove Chuck Long from the role of Head Football Coach.  The football team has been struggling for several years when Long took over the team.  Despite his promises to “Compete for championships now”, the team regressed from when he took it over.  He went 3-9, 4-8 and 2-10 in his 3 seasons at SDSU.  The team was rarely competitive against Mountain West Conference Opponents, and his teams featured several “worst-losses-ever” type of defeats.  Even long-time Aztec fans were beginning to stop attending football games.  Qualcomm Stadium crowds this year were some of the smallest I’ve ever seen.

Chuck Long is owed over $700,000 per year for the next two years.  President Weber went out into the community, and found donors to pay off most of his salary.  He could have easily just stated that we don’t have the money, and people would have understood.

Go Aztecs

After having an quasi-HTML 4.0 compliant website for years, and refusing to update it to more modern technologies, I have to give myself credit 🙂  First, I’ve created this blog, and now, I’ve created a Gallery2 based photo album.  It’s not “live” yet, but you readers (all 0 of you 🙂 ) can check it out early!

This morning I made myself wake up early and did the tri club bike ride.  This week was just the coast ride, and since I hadn’t been on my bike in awhile, I figured I’d just ride the short 30 mile course.  The ride was nice, however, it was hot, dry and windy due to the Santa Ana winds.  It was so windy, I had lots of people joining me on the short ride.  Thanks to my Garmin 305, I have the GPS track.  See the attached kmz file, or click here for the route.