The item I listed didn't sell. I'm not sure why; the price was very good - half price for a brand new item. The photos I used were decent, the description adequate. I suppose no one needed them that was looking. I suppose I'll try again later.
The problem with the internet is that it's easily pervertable. This system for example - movable type - is a wonderful way to publish mindless blather so that anyone can read it. In some few cases the system allows people to publish stuff that's worth reading. It even allows people to comment on the mindless blather or to write their own mindless blather and reference the original mindless blather using Trackback pings. Basically a Trackback ping is a message sent to a blog when someone else references your entry. When they do this, you can go look at what they wrote.
When I first started this thing, I allowed both comments and trackback pings.
Sure enough, before too long, someone devised a way that computers could send out spam to blogs advertising all sorts of things - mostly online casinos and E.D. drugs. A few of the ads were far more offensive. So I shut down the comments. Since computers put the comments in this blog they posted a lot of them. I mean dozens at a time. I spent an entire day cleaning that garbage off this blog; I thought I was done. Then I noticed that these same sites were using the trackback system to place the URLs to their websites as if they were other blogs making entries. This is not visible to people who read this site, so it only caused me trouble, but I spent another few hours disabling the trackback pings for all the entries I've made here and deleting probably about 1000 of these pings from the blog. However, they are now gone and this blog is ping free. Take that, you slimey texas-hold-em-online-cialis vendors!
In a related item, I've actually had some success reducing the spam to my E-mail. A couple of months ago, I was being overwhelmed. I contacted my ISP and asked them for help on how to take care of this and they gave me this suggestion:
1. get the message headers for the spam e-mail and paste it into a copy of that message. You will be forwarding this message to the spammer's ISP.
The header looks something like this:
Received: from vms042pub.verizon.net [206.46.252.42] by mail.ev1.net with ESMTP
(SMTPD32-6.06) id AE6DAE3500A2; Thu, 12 May 2005 01:57:49 -0500
Received: from hotpop.com ([65.34.38.26])
by vms042.mailsrvcs.net (Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2 HotFix 0.04
(built Dec 24 2004)) with ESMTPA id <0IGD0024R7HNH2V8@vms042.mailsrvcs.net> for
xxxxxxx@ev1.net; Thu, 12 May 2005 02:01:06 -0500 (CDT)
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 02:58:56 -0400
From: AdCalls@hotpop.com
Subject: South Florida - Make Money Plus Get FREE UNLIMITED Calling In US &
Canada!
To: xxxxxxxx@ev1.net
Reply-to: AdCalls4You@aol.com
Message-id: <2005.05.12.024E2D4E4698443B@hotpop.com>
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/html
Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit
X-Declude-Sender: AdCalls@hotpop.com [206.46.252.42]
X-Spam-Tests-Failed: None [0]
X-Note: This E-mail was sent from vms042pub.verizon.net ([206.46.252.42]).
X-RCPT-TO:
X-UIDL: 409603060
Status: U
Go to www.arin.net and do a whois lookup on the the IP addresses in the lines with the "Received:" in them.
Often, the IP addresses will be under the control of organizations outside the US, so the ARIN website will refer you to APNIC.net or RIPE.net. If so, go to those websites and repeat the whois lookup.
eventually, you will get a listing of the ISP who owns those IP addresses. There will be an E-mail address used to report network abuse. Usually it's something like "abuse@someisp.com"
3. Forward the spam E-mail to this address with the headers pasted into them and the following text at the beginning:
"Hello, The spammer below is either using your resources to send out bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail ("spam") or is deceptively trying to make it look like he is. In either case, a legitimate company like yours probably would not approve. The information below should be all you need."
I also blind CC my own ISP's abuse address. I didn't expect it would do anything, but to my surprise it's I actually get far less spam than I did a few months ago! I may be deluding myself, but I like to think that these slimey scumbags are getting shut down out there.
On the otehr hand, my own ISP may be doing something to improve their spam filters based on these E-mails and stopping the spam. In any event I'm getting far less spam these days, which is a good thing. I've also learned not to post my E-mail address in a form readable by programs that "harvest" addresses. the harvested addresses are aparently sold to spammers for their nefarious work. Instead I change it so that a human can figure it out but a program would have a harder time.
I've been using Ebay to find boat hardware and general stuff for a while now with some good success. But I've never tried to use it for selling anything until now. I have two jib cars I bought new a while ago and never installed them. So, I've put them up for auction.
It ends on May 25th at 10:44:27 CDT.
It will be interesting to see how things go. I'll be sure to report my experience here.
Spring semester is over, thanks be. Overall I liked the classes I took, but at times I was disappointed in my performance in some tests and on some projects. I hope I get a full 100 on my final project in digital design, and an A in the class. I did a lot of hard work on it. However, I also thought I did work hard on the previous project and I only got a 90. I think this one is better, however.
The project was a system to time and send signals for a sailboat race. The time would be displayed on three LED displays and the user could add from one to nine fleets, start them, postpone, general recall, etc... I designed it doing rolling starts, that is, no pause between fleets - the starting signal for fleet one is the warning signal for fleet 2.
Here's the file I turned in. It's only a 268K PDF. If you find it interesting, let me know at rhunkins-at-ev1-dot-net.
Of course, I know there are already systems like this one out there and I expect they are probably more versatile and better than this one. But the point of this exercise was academic. I know could build this thing for real if I had the inclination, but I still think it needs some more work.