Fun with VMware networking

I’m working from the in-laws’ house today, so I need to access the same networking stuff I do from home. I have Tunnelblick running OpenVPN on my OS X laptop to provide access to my home and office servers from here. All that works fine for my OS X apps but it doesn’t carry over into my VMware Fusion sessions. Those sessions treat themselves as independent devices and therefore don’t route through my VPN.
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Rain

Looks like we got a total of 1.06 of rain yesterday (midnight to midnight). Unlike other rains, I wasn’t able to capture any of it in Lake Turner as I’m in Virginia now.

There is a person in Garner selling 300-gallon plastic tanks, though, and I’m considering picking up another one. Can’t have enough rainwater, y’know.

Highlights of 2007: Turner family reunion

The “next generation” of Turner family reunions took place in Pine Mountain, Georgia in June. This was the first family reunion organized largely by my generation of Turners. We had a great time visiting with all the other Turners, though it ended way too soon they way these things tend to do.

Our kids have it good in that they’ve got so many cousins nearby. Its good to get them acquainted with their larger family, too, so reunions are important. From all accounts, they had a ball playing with all of their extended cousins.

We’ve decided to do these things every two years. They’ll get more valuable as we go, I’m sure.

Highlights of 2007: Blog homeruns

This list naturally draws most of its material from the blog. Thus, it makes sense to recognize the posts and changes that are significant here at MT.Net.

From the propeller-head side, I migrated my blog’s software from its old Drupal beginnings to WordPress. With this change came the addition to the archives of my very first blog posts, originally posted in some of the first primitive blogging software, bplog. I think its fun to read how my blogging has progressed over the years.
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Time for the Highlights of 2007

Its time for me to write my annual recounting of this year’s notable events. Putting this list together this year has amazed me at how many things I have to write about. Just to give you an idea, the AT&T billing nightmare and the bogus car warranty calls that I’ve been incessantly blogging about didn’t even crack the top ten! The Chinese proverb “may you live in interesting times” certainly applied to me this year.

With all that said, let’s get on with the list!

NY Times covers “ghost calls”

On a related note to the hang-up calls I mentioned, Slashdot pointed to a N.Y. Times story on so-called “ghost calls.” The story is a good primer on what web resources exist for tracking these calls. In other words, this story describes the kind of battles I’ve been fighting for the past few months.

The story also provides an interesting tip for defeating the calls that I hadn’t heard of before:

Because the predictive dialers try to identify answering machines by measuring the amount of time that someone or something speaks, one way to defeat them is to give a long greeting, as an answering machine does, rather than a simple hello followed by a pause.

Be sure to check the comments in the Slashdot post, as the geeks (as usual) have excellent information on how these predictive dialers really work.

Annoyance Calls

For the past few weeks we haven’t just been getting car warranty calls. Another annoying situation has established itself where we’ll get a hang-up call at 9:15 PM on Sunday evenings, followed by one about 6 minutes later. Then, at 4:25 AM on Monday morning the phone will ring again and – just like the other calls – there will be nothing but a dial tone.

I’ve since configured Asterisk to block these calls so they will no longer get through. Even so, I plan to see how good the crackerjacks at AT&T are at tracking them down by filing a complaint with them. Back in my BBS sysop’ing days, I had a phone number to the phone company group that could track any number. I’m sure I can find the AT&T equivalent with a little effort.

This has gone on for weeks now and its time to fight back.

Tasering rule of thumb

After reading about another tasering incident, this time on an irate Best Buy customer in Florida, I’ve decided that the problem I have with the incidents I’ve seen is that in none of the cases do the officers make any attempts to detain the suspects before they go for the phasers. Officers should never unholster a taser unless they at least first attempt to place a suspect under arrest. If you don’t have probable cause to arrest someone, you certainly don’t have cause to taser them.

Mouthing off to a cop is one thing, resisting arrest is another. Causing a commotion in Best Buy is no excuse to shock someone.