Sharp Tools

Someone at work got me a present!

I found this on my desk:

woot!

New York Subways are a great convenience for all.

Even pigeons, who wait for trains in the tunnels like everybody else.

Lest we forget

Spent a few minutes today staring into the cockpit of the Enola Gay.

Sobering.

I Iz an Op

So I've been running a personal mail server on them there internetz for a few years. I run the Courier-IMAP daemon (with SSL, natch) for mail retrieval. I've always had trouble getting my install of it to handle certs properly - I had made my own CA in order to generate a signed CA and import the root CA into my client. But that never seemed to work, so I just became resigned to clicking the 'Accept' button on various email clients.

I finally got annoyed enough tonight to actually go buy a cert. I installed it. Postfix happily accepted it for SMTP-TLS. But Courier...when I ran my email client, it kept bitching about self-signed certs.

WTF?

After literally 45 minutes of poking around, I discovered that I had (lo those years ago) installed a Courier-IMAP package from source. Yep, remembered that.

Then I'd been editing the conf files for the damn distro version of Courier full, in /etc/courier. Um.

So...

Yeah.

I looked at the source init scripts and decided it wasn't worth my time to re-fucknicate all the conf files, so I eventually just found out where the installed init scripts were expecting to find the cert files and linked those to my new cert.

Works.

Sigh.

Hey...I wonder if that's why Entourage can't see new mail...the damn TRAVERSE_FULL setting is..HEY!

Bonehead maneuver du jour

A few weeks ago I lost my (second!) Rotring Freeway fountain pen. Really annoying. I searched my apartment, including all my laundry (since I keep it clipped to the neck of my shirt if the shirt doesn't have a pocket) and looked in all the usual places my cats hide things. No luck. Fortunately, the Freeway was a cheap pen ($17 on eBay from the UK, including shipping).

Last night, I was doing laundry, so I went back downstairs around midnight to transfer my clothes from the washer to the dryer. I was dumping the load of shirts into the dryer when I felt something hard. Yep, I had just put my fountain pen through the laundry.

Amazingly, the cap had held - there was no ink on my clothes (or if there was, it had diluted enough to be invisible, none of the clothes are white). When I opened the cap (over a sink - I was just smart enough to do that) a gush of inked water turned my entire left hand blue.

The Rotring Freeway is a steel-nib pen. After replacing the (now water-filled) cartridge and rinsing the pen, it seems to work perfectly. Plus it's really nicely clean.

Whew.

Phone Phail

Now that I live in the city of my birth once again, I am tentatively considering putting down various roots. One that I haven't put down yet is that of a landline phone - I just haven't found that I need one. The other day, though, I idly wondered if either of my two phone numbers from childhood was available, because I'd probably unpocket for them if they were.

Sadly, neither is. Ah well, you can't go home again.