that geeky dude

Wow. Just…wow.

A friend of mine sent me this link today, talking about “Christian Domestic Discipline”, their description of which follows…

A domestic discipline marriage is one in which one partner in the marriage is given authority over the other and has the means to back the authority, usually by spanking.

Mmmmkay. I’ve heard of spanking for eroticism, and I’ve heard of spanking in a D/s relationship, but never spanking as far as “disciplining” your partner, at least not in the eyes of God. Seriously… One of the writers on this site maintains her own blog, and in this entry, she discusses being “disciplined” with a heavy belt with a silver buckle, and getting seven strikes with it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for spanking children for disciplinary purposes, but that’s because they are children, and need some negative reinforcement in order to stop bad habits. And even then, spanking is a last resort. However, two consenting adults in a relationship, if that relationship is based on being equals, doesn’t need physical discipline in order to make it work. I was conversing about this with another friend, trying to figure out which partner in these ‘arrangements’ (I refuse to call them relationships, since that’s obviously not what’s going on here) is more damaged, and we agreed that it was the women, since they are the ones purposefully obliterating their identity. I really would be interested in knowing what happened to the women who agree to this lifestyle to damage them in such a way.

Also, I’m curious as to what would happen if a woman wanted the sort of power in these arrangements that the men seem to have.

Concerning the cable break near Cleveland we have been informed that the cables have been intentionally sabotaged. The provider informed that they need to change the whole damaged fibre part and that is 3600 feet. Fibre has been ordered and ETA is 1900 UTC. Once the fibre arrives they need to blow it into the 3600 feet long duct before the splicing can start. It is 60 fibres that need to be spliced. The issue is escalated to our top management and also with the provider. As information I also provide this link: http://www.erh.noaa.gov/cle/ showing that the weather conditions in the Cleveland are impacting the time of solving this issue.

While I’ve heard of accidental cutting of fiber, I’ve never quite heard of an ISP being sabotaged intentionally.

Well, okay, maybe not to this level. After all, I did work for EarthLink for a while in the Broadband Support department, and I saw lots of “unintentional” sabotage from telco’s like BellSouth and SBC. Lines broken, taps placed that broke DSL connectivity, loops that didn’t terminate, all of it to get customers from us to them.

However, this Telia outage is really causing a pain in my ass, since Telia is one of my company’s main network providers, and explaining to your average webmaster the details and specifics of a fiber break isn’t all that easy.

I think not. Not that I have actually had a happy birthday in the past decade or so to compare my most recent one (Tuesday) to, but this is one of the worst in recent memory.

First, my step-gramma is in the care facility with a broken femur. One of my ‘adopted moms’ from high school is in a hospice with cancer and a vertical spiral fracture on her leg. That sets a bad tone to start, since this all happened the week before my birthday.

Last weekend David comes to the neighborhood, along with Geoff, and we have dinner with Steve and Sarah, then we go see Transformers (yes, again!) and then head back to Steve’s apartment for the drinking. David gets a little blotto, I get a little buzz, and we watch both Talladega Nights and Team America: World Police, both of which are better when at least mildly intoxicated.

David decides he needs to go to IHOP to sober up, so we head to the closest one while Geoff takes off for home and Steve heads to bed. David is crashing there so we grab a set of keys. We sit down at IHOP and order our food, and are in the middle of eating when I notice a pretty girl and her friend paying their tab and leaving. This isn’t an unusual activity, but what happened next was…

They sat down at our booth after smoking outside, and asked me “Do you know pie?” — I answered “….pie?” “Yeah, pi like on your shirt. “Oh” — so I ask them how many digits they want, because I guessed that asking them to get up close to my chest to read the shirt is a bit personal at this point, and I give them their requested answer (3.1415926) and they say thanks and leave, only to return about ten minutes later to ask us what we do to know things like that.

That starts what turns out to be a four hour conversation, and me noticing random IHOP girl #1’s wedding ring. I immediately shift attention to random IHOP girl #2, since she’s far hotter and seems a bit less flighty. I ended up getting her number, and we said good bye at four in the morning, when I dropped David off at Steve’s.

Monday I was out with Chris, Dan and Jake, and I remembered that Movies 278 had a midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, so I call her up and ask if she wants to go, in which I get an affirmative answer provided “nothing came up”. I bought the tickets online when I got home, because I hate waiting in long lines for midnight shows.

The next day, I called her up, and left her a voice mail asking if we were still on for the evening. After a couple of hours, I texted her. Finally her friend texts me and says “I’m sorry, but she’s not going, she’s going out with her friend Kim”

So not only was I stood up on my freaking birthday, but it was done via text message and by a third party! Now I remember why I hate birthdays.

Okay, so since I’ve moved to my own dedicated server for hosting, I’ve been setting up various monitoring tools. (Things like MRTG and Mailgraph) and I’ve learned a few things about the sites I host…

One is that my old primary domain (unbeliever.net) is apparently on every major spammers hit list.

As you can see from the graphs located here, my server accepts approximately 36 messages a day, combining the inbound and outbound mail. However, it rejects over 2000 messages per day, based on various criteria (the big one are addresses that don’t exist)

I’ve had to debate completely terminating mail services for unbeliever.net, since only myself and Sarah use it.