Bikerscum - Patrick St. Jean

The carpenter came by and cleaned up the box for the stove and I've got the gas line hooked up and have flamage! I'm looking forward to cooking something hot for breakfast, it's been too long without one. It's in there temporarily because we've still got the cabinets and countertop to work on, but hot food not out of a microwave is a good thing!

In this chapter we see our intrepid homeowner, three weeks in to being without a stove, finding a steal on a new gas range and microwave oven at Best Buy of all places.  Delivery to take place in about two weeks, so more grilling and microwave cooking is in order, though I'm thinking about picking up a toaster oven to tide me over.

I've also got a plumber coming out next week to install the cutoff valve on the newly discovered gas line in preparation for the stove.  And the carpenter is working on a quote to redo the cabinets and countertops as well.  Hopefully in a couple months that work will be done as well.

I finally got the cooktop and oven removed from their nooks in the cabinets and countertop and got a good look behind there.  There is, in fact, a gas line back there, in the middle of a hole the builders helpfully hammered out of the drywall.  So now I'm waiting for a call back from a plumber to schedule him to come out and install a cutoff valve on that line.  After that I'm going to have to remove a couple boards that were used to make the shelf for the oven, cut the countertop (it's getting replaced anyways), and go out and buy a gas range.  I'm probably going to have the carpenter give me an estimate on installing a new countertop while he's out here giving me estimates on some other work.

So China got caught (again) doing what every country on the planet with more than a 56K dialup connection to the Internet does and now there's a big stink about espionage and all the hacking attempts coming from there.

Duh!

There's an easy solution to this issue.  Snag my script and start blocking China (or any other country) in and out of any in/out point of any of your networks that might have things you don't want shared with Beijing.

What's that?  You do business or need to be contacted by folks over there?  Great!  Snag my script, protect your real networks, and put a completely isolated web site, mail server, whatever else you need out there in a datacenter that has no connections to your main networks so that even if it gets compromised, who cares.

If you're not a small fry, you can still use the data provided by the nice folks over at IPDeny to build a rule set for your hardware firewall or other device.

Really people, this isn't that hard.

I've been hacking around with this for a while now and have it in a workable state.  It's a script that grabs the latest netblocks for the configured countries from IPDeny.com and loads them in to IPTables rules.  It's perl and depends on you having the IPTables::IPv4 module installed, but it's fast and just blocking China and Korea has cut way down on my spam and intrusion attempts.

Sorry for the long gap with no posts.  It's been a little hectic around here.  The semester's over and my final grades are in.  I got As in both classes, which is nice.  Five more semesters to go.  All kind of crazy, but hopefully things are calming down and there will be more regular updates from here on out.

We got down to The House of Blues to see The Pogues tonight.  It was a great show, a little bittersweet though, seeing just how badly Shane's doing.  If you ever need an example of what long term substance abuse will do to you, picture a 51 year old man with no teeth, shuffling on stage.  Don't get me wrong, he's still got it and the rest of the bad was in fine form, it's just a little sad because there could have been so much more.  I'm still glad I went, but I'd love to have a time machine, seeing them in 1985 would have been great.

I got started again on that sheared off bolt after church.  My first attempt was to cut a notch in the end sticking out to try to use a screwdriver bit to get it out.  That was not to be the case as the tabs just kept shearing off whenever I twisted.  So I took the throttle body off and drilled in a little to get an easy-out in there.  It worked, to an extent, but all that would happen is I'd get a couple tenths of a millimeter at a time and eventually I couldn't go any deeper, so I just drilled the rest of the bolt out and ran a self tapping metal screw in.  The new sensor's in and working fine.  Now I've got to drive it enough for the ECU to reset the check engine light.