Category Archives: Blog Stuff

Changes to or problems with the use of this blog.

Service disruption

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I’m upgrading my web hosting and the change involves a change in the IP address. If you try to access this blog or any of my websites and you get a “Not Found” or something similar error wait an hour or so and try again. Or if you know how to flush the DNS cache* on your computer you could try that as well.

Do not assume the canary in the coal mine has been silenced.

The change over could happen anytime in the next 72 hours.

*On a Windows machine open a DOS prompt and type “ipconfig /flushdns” followed by the “Enter” key.

Quote of the day—Robert Slaughter

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Robert Slaughter (@bobslaughter)
Tweeted on March 12, 2013 in response to More stalker activity.
[If he only knew the total sum of crazy people in my life he would think I have a herd of recruiters out looking for crazy people and sending them my way.

I actually asked my counselor why there were so many crazy people attracted to me and why I was, in many cases, attracted to crazy women. With her help I think I have solved the later problem. I suspect there is no practical, moral, and legal solution to the first problem.—Joe]

More stalker activity

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If you have been following along I have a “stalker” of sorts.

Background:

At 3:31 this afternoon I got a call from 630-489-9064. I didn’t recognized the number and didn’t catch the name they gave me. He ignored my attempts to repeat himself.

The bottom line was they claimed to be representing someone who was going to sue me for “information on your blog” and that I would be required to show up in California for the lawsuit.

I question the validity of this. I find it difficult to imagine a lawyer would take the case since no false statement of fact was made. Further confirmation of this hypothesis is that the number is not that of a law office. It is the same number that was used to deliver the threat on February 26th.

At 3:50 I received two more text messages from 619-646-7526 (this is the same phone number he used to call and sent me the text messages on February 18th):

I am suing you for internet defamation for eleven million dollars. Your site unlawfully placed information about myself that led to me being fired

And:

See you in court really soon buddy

I suppose it is possible the blog post contributed to him losing a job but I am of the opinion, if in fact he did lose a job, that the main factor is that he has way too many screws loose.

Header photos

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I’m somewhat proud of the photos used for the header on this blog. Taking an idea from Alan I created a page for the photos and added short descriptions.

The pictures are from where I consider home. All were taken either on or no more than a few steps off of land my family owns.

When I get around to taking some pictures in the spring I’ll take down the winter pictures and add those from spring and probably Boomershoot.

Incident number 2013-8424

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Remember the guy that threatened me with, “If you know whats good you will keep your fucking mouth shut about Obama or you will come up missing on the news.”?

Yeah. Real piece of work. He called me. I was on the phone with daughter Kim at the time but I got a garbled voice mail and I called him back a couple minutes later.

After talking about a minute I hung up on him. It was difficult to even figure out what he was talking about and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He called again, and again, and again…

He left a second voice mail which was as follows (reading my blog post for the first part):

  • Any place that I frequent should be considered a known distance gun range.
  • If I can see you then you are within range.
  • My eyesight is quite good.
  • Don’t mess with me.

Yeah. I’m pretty sure those are threats. You looking at some jail time buddy. Have a good day.

He also sent me text messages. Actual time of calls (PST) and text messages were as follows. After the first two calls I did not respond to anything. Typos, punctuation, and grammar errors in the text messages are his:

  • 12:49 (missed call)
  • 12:51 (my outgoing call)
  • 12:55 (ignored call)
  • 12:56 (ignored call)
  • 12:56 (ignored call. Yes, every few seconds)
  • 13:02 (ignored call)
  • 13:02 (ignored call)
  • 13:07 (Text: 206-622-0460 seattle FBI’s number and I also logged a restraining order through the San Diego office next call is to my lawyer to file a suit)
  • 13:11 (Text: I tried to be nice and let you delete it yourself now Im leaving it to the courts. You breaking federal laws Joe not just state.)
  • 13:14 (ignored call)
  • 13:18 (ignored call)
  • 13:18 (ignored call)
  • 13:23 (ignored call)
  • 13:23 (ignored call)
  • 13:23 (Text: and if anything should happen you are held directly responsible. Enjoy the next 4 years of Obama you nazi republican jackoff)
  • 13:25 (ignored call)
  • 13:26 (ignored call)
  • 13:29 (ignored call)
  • 13:29 (ignored call)
  • 13:30 (ignored call)
  • 13:30 (ignored call)
  • 13:31 (ignored call)
  • 13:33 (Text: Thought so you fucking pussy republican asshole. . I KNOW WHERE YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE NOW MOTHER FUCKER!! Thanks)
  • 15:26 (Text: I dont even own a single weapon. I dont hide behind a gun or computer screen like some conservative pussy from seattle washington. Sleep tight.)

After the message at 13:33 I went to the Bellevue, Washington Police station. I talked to Officer Dill who gave me the incident number 2013-8424 and gave my new “friend” a call. I only heard one side of the conversation but it sounded a lot like my conversation. Officer Dill couldn’t complete a sentence and sometimes even a word without being interrupted. At the end, after maybe a couple minutes, Officer Dill was almost yelling at him in a vain attempt to get him to call the Bellevue police department with the incident number. But he was unsuccessful and my “friend” hung up on the officer.

Officer Dill told me (paraphrasing some), “Yeah. Same as what you described. He is clearly irrational.”

[Stuff deleted on the advice of a psychologist.]

About 15 minutes after I left the police station the 15:26 text message came in.

Liberals are violent. We are better than this.

Update 2/19/2013: I don’t know that either is related but I received a call from a Brooklyn, NY number at 12:52 AM this morning and one from an Illinois exchange at 8:26 AM. Both calls hung up when I answered.

I would like to add, up front, that I cannot recall saying anything more offensive about Obama than I wasn’t going to vote for him and that I believe he was anti-gun. And furthermore I don’t even consider myself a Republican. This guy threatening me is nuts.

Possible blog outages

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I’m in the final stages of testing the import of old blog posts into the current blogging software. It’s looking really good but you never know what might happen.

Last night I accidently restored a backup copy of the database for my real blog when I intended to do that for my test blog. I lost a blog post and few comments. I recreated them but there is a little weirdness with the restored comments.

If all goes well the blog posts will be fully restored by tonight. Please be patient if you experience some outages or a comment gets lost or something. Let me know if you think a comment was lost and I’ll see if I can find it and restore it.

Update (1524 PST): All the old blog posts have been imported. There are a few broken links to fix but things are looking good at this time.

Update (1728 PST): I found a serious bug. 1828 comments were lost in the translation. Probably all of them were my comments. I think I am going to restore to a saved database and start over in the morning. Please don’t leave any comments. I probably will just end up deleting them.

Status of old posts

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As some of you know, because you requested them, I manually imported a few important posts for reference purposes. But there are still thousands more that need to be imported from my previous blog software.

I’m still working on the conversion program to import the content. I’ve probably got 50 hours into it now but it is getting very close. It successfully preserves all the backward links to both posts and comments within the blog and saves all the comments and categories. There will be about 25 links I will have to manually fix up after the 8000+ posts and 20000 comments are imported.

I might actually get it done this weekend. It is hard to predict because you never know how many more bugs you are going to find or how long it will take you to fix them.

Blog status

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Yes. I’m making some progress on getting my blog back up.

It is going to be more work than I originally thought. The conversion program had far too many bugs in it and I’m going to have to write my own to get the content moved over.

I have started the program but it will take probably four to eight hours of programming time and I have a lot of things going on in my life right now that prevent me from working on it. So it might be Sunday night (12/16/2012) before I can get the old content moved over.

I’m going to start blogging here again but with a reduced output while I work on the conversion.

Thanks for your patience.

Quote of the day—Thomas Jefferson (NOT!)

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All the terrible instruments of war are the Natural Birth Right of the American citizen.

Attributed to Thomas Jefferson
[Awesome quote!

I received this in email recently and it looked just a little too good to be true. I went searching for it and was only able to find one instance of it. This instance does not appear to be supported by any reference to any of Jefferson’s writings or speeches. I did extensive searches on http://www.monticello.org which I have found to be a good source for Jefferson quotes in the past.

I must conclude this is not correctly attributed to Jefferson.

While searching I did discover two other quotes I had attributed to Jefferson are probably bogus as well. I have update my posts here and here.—Joe]

The view

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It has been suggested (by Barron and Janelle) that I change the name of this blog from “The View From North Central Idaho” to “The View From The Clock Tower”.

While I got a chuckle out of this it is just a bit too over the top for me.

Besides, in addition to being afraid of heights should things go sufficiently “pear shaped” that a clock tower view might be of interest I think I would prefer a view from a R/C vehicle (air, land, or water) loaded with Boomerite.

Blog problems

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As I have posted before I have had some problems with my blog crashing and had to make some serious changes in an effort to get the problem fixed. It was down starting about 4:40 (PDT) this morning until about 2:00 this afternoon.

One of the changes was a change in the IP address. If you have a DNS cache with the old value you will still see unexpected results. So if works from one computer but not another flush the DNS cache (reboot works) and it probably will fix the problem.

My blog is a reference for Wikipedia

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I’m a bit surprised but it is a valid reference.

My Sitemeter gave me the clue::

Domain Name   verizon.net ? (Network)
IP Address   96.239.233.# (Verizon Internet Services)
ISP   Verizon Internet Services
Location  
Continent : North America
Country : United States (Facts)
Lat/Long : 38, -97 (Map)
Distance : 1,180 miles
Language   English (U.S.)
en-us
Operating System   Microsoft WinNT
Browser   Internet Explorer 8.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; GTB7.2; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; MDDC; .NET4.0C)
Javascript   version 1.3
Monitor  
Resolution : 1600 x 900
Color Depth : 32 bits

Time of Visit Feb 15 2012 8:52:39 am
Last Page View   Feb 15 2012 8:52:39 am
Visit Length   0 seconds
Page Views 1
Referring URL   http://en.wikipedia….of_historical_events
Visit Entry Page   http://blog.joehuffm…awrenceJohnston.aspx
Visit Exit Page   http://blog.joehuffm…awrenceJohnston.aspx
Out Click  
Time Zone   UTC-6:00
Visitor’s Time   Feb 15 2012 10:52:39 am
Visit Number   1,346,087

Technical problems

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As I mentioned last month and Kevin noted earlier today I have been having some problems with my hosting provider. I finally had the time to call them while the site was down. At first they were looking just at the blog software but I managed to head them off by pointing out that the very simple web app blacklist.joehuffman.org was also down. Confusing them further was that www.joehuffman.org was working just fine.

They finally agreed that something was wrong with the ASP.Net portion of their server and they “created a ticket” for the problem. In the minutes that followed it appeared they temporarily changed some configuration files for diagnostic purposes and then everything came up.

In the most recent contact I had from them they said it should be fixed in 24 to 48 hours. That mean would the problem should be fixed no later than about Tuesday January 17, 15:00 PST. If you see this site is down for more than a minute or two after that send me an email so I can investigate and escalate as needed.

Thanks.

Update: I received two identical email from tech support, 10 minutes apart, saying they “have recycled the Application Pool” and all is well. I’m not entirely convinced this was the problem since the probably has come and gone many times in the last couple of months. Let me know if it appears to have gone down again.

Thanks.

Update2: I’m still having problems. My provider suggested some changes on my end that will take a couple hours. I won’t be able to get to that until at least late tonight. You can hold off on the reports of outages for a couple days.

Thanks.

Blog problems.

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Yes. In case you were wondering, my blog was down for several hours today. And it has had problems for a hour or two on other days recently. My hosting provider is apparently having problems. I have been busy with many other things and haven’t had time to look into it.

Sorry about that.

Quote of the day—Steven Green

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One year ago, U.S. newspapers and broadcasters could feel confident they controlled the news content they created.

It was understood that competing and special-interest websites couldn’t appropriate that content and post it without authorization.

When such infringements occurred, they were dealt with swiftly and effectively with a simple phone call or email.

Infringing websites typically had re-posted material out of ignorance they were violating the Copyright Act and agreed to remove the material or replace it with a link to the source newspaper or broadcaster.

Then along came Righthaven LLC of Las Vegas, the self-appointed protector of the newspaper industry from such news sharers.

Some 250 Righthaven lawsuits later, Righthaven’s startling achievement is that newspapers now have less — not more — protection from copyright infringers.

Steven Green
March 19, 2011
Righthaven lawsuits backfire, reduce protections for newspapers
[Via email from John Hardin.

Nice!—Joe]

Sorry

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I haven’t posted much recently. Things have been pretty rough at work recently and I haven’t had much time or energy for blogging or even reading other blogs.

Yesterday, in an effort to improve things, I (figurative) threw a couple Molotov Cocktails. Short term things will be a mess but long term it should help clean things up.

Don’t expect a lot of posts until after Boomershoot 2011.