For a few years, spammers have been sending out spam pretending to be from my personal, vanity domain. I haven't seen many complaints recently, but it now costs me a considerable amount of time daily to delete hundreds of bounces from mail servers that don't recognized forged headers, etc. The recipients' mail filters are probably also down-rating my domain name as a result, too, further degrading the value of my domain name if I ever want to use it for a commercial venture. I am also concerned about someone trying to hold me accountable for spam sent under my domain's name, as I see a lot of the bounces contain evidence that the payloads have been viruses. Yes, I suspect some of this to be joe jobbing, to get back at me for the years I reported spammers to their hosts.

I'm seriously broke, and don't even know what sort of lawyer I can't afford to hire over this anyway, so has anyone know of anyone who has ever been able to get relief from spammers who are using their domain name? I consider this to be fraud and deliberate misrepresentation on the spammers' part, but I really don't know how I could make anything stick in court, especially when most bouncebacks don't even include full headers with IPs. Some days I feel like just rotating to an unused form of my domain name and letting this form go dormant without any MX for a while, but I doubt that will stop the spammers. It just means I will have ceded the field. But what other choice do I have?

Note: one of the reasons why I'm concerned about being held accountable is that in the one business law class I had, years ago, they had a case study of a company that was sued after someone claiming to be their agent made a bad deal in their name. The company had been advised the person was claiming to be their agent before the deal, but had not told him to stop. The company was ultimately held responsible for the person's actions.

Further note: there are technical reasons why I can't use use SPF right now, but when I had the text fields in my zone file previously, I still had a similar number of bouncebacks, which suggests most servers don't follow them anyway. So don't bother giving that advice.

Amidst reports of over 120 thousand reported dead, there are many hundreds of thousands of children who have survived. Most, of course, are local children, but a few are tourists. Most have someone surviving in their immediate family to cling to, so they can return to some semblance of their former life. Some, unfortunately, do not.

Karl Nilsson is a seven year old Swedish tourist, who went to visit Phuket, Thailand, with his parents and brothers. He was swept out of his hotel room by the tsunami, thus separating him from the rest of his family, and was found wandering alone in the aftermath.

Hannes Bergstroem, another Swede, is only about two years old. Amazingly, not only did he survive, but just recently he's been reunited with his father, though his mother is still missing, presumably dead. But in times like these, this is miracle enough to be thankful for.

You can read the details of these kids at the links below, or by Googling the news for their names. But all you really need to know is in Karl's mournful, exhausted eyes, as he holds up a sign begging for word of his family. Family which, local workers believe, likely all perished in the waves.

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,11808458%255E952,00.html

http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/EdmontonSun/News/2004/12/29/800375-sun.html

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1471712004

Remember that for USA citizens, it's not yet too late to donate to certain charities and receive a tax break for 2004, but time is absolutely of the essence. The front page of Google now lists several relief organizations, and I'll make a pitch for another one, Mercy Corps at www.mercycorps.org, if you remain undecided. Some progressive airlines will even let you donate your unused mileage points, so if you have some that are expiring soon, all it will cost you is the five or ten minutes' time it takes to call your reward program and ask.

Hannes is going home with his father. Karl, on the other hand, like countless other children in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Seychelles, Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, may have no one to take him home. Please lend whatever support you can.

(Here's my rejected story submission:)

Top story currently in the news is that Christopher Reeve, 52, died of cardiac arrest over the weekend. Sadly, this comes just as news starts surfacing that nerve grafts might become practical within 10 years as treatment for those who are paralyzed. Reeve, of course, had been paralyzed for the last nine years as a result of a riding accident, but had always hoped to be able to someday walk again...

While Christopher Reeve's filmography includes such diverse themes as roles opposite Muppets and achieving time travel through sheer will, it was the donning of tights and other comic-book imagery that garnered him lasting fame. And yet, it was only late in life, after almost everyone thought his riding accident would remove him from the picture forever, that the true strength of his spirit asserted himself, in what would truly be the role of his life. As a result, he will be missed for his extensive and public rehabilitative efforts and his activism, as well for his acting career.

By the end of his life, with his perseverance setting an example for many thousands of others with spinal paralysis, his foundation spending millions of dollars on pioneering research and therapies, and his personal lobbying on behalf of stem cell research, he had truly grown into the role of a super man.

No, really. I've been saying it for a while. But this "survival job" is keeping me from moving forward.

I'm planning to enroll in either the CCNA / PIX Firewall Specialist / CCSP Advanced Network Security Professional Program or CCNA-Firewall / Wireless Security / CCNP Advanced Network Professional Program at SMU, or an MCSE program there or elsewhere in town. This is going to put me in the hole by $10K or so, although I might get a part-time job to offset costs, so when I come out in about 6 months I need to be able to move into something fairly quickly.

I know there's a reasonably good market for MCSEs here, as I do see ads for "LAN/WAN Network Engineers," Microsoft-speak for network/server administration, etc. And frankly, that's the real reason why that's even an option for me. But I'd much rather go back to routers, which is what I used to do before I got laid off. So what I'm looking for, from y'all, is a sense of the market out there, particularly for certified router jockeys, and whether I should go all-out for the CCSP track or the CCNP and wireless track. Although, if you can think of something else that I should be looking at, I want to hear that also. Of course, if you have a pointer to a job already, tell me quick! :) (And yes, I'll move out of Texas for work, I had a great time in Portland)

Okay, a week ago I bought a GBASP, and today I bought a GC.
Only problem is, I haven't yet decided on any games to get for them.

Any ideas? :) I've historically been into RPG and strategy and puzzle games, and so far hate FPS games, and generally dislike sports games as well...

Okay, guys, here's a little something to make you smile... breakdancing transformers.

Okay, I started, now you post something funny and/or cool, too :)

I use friends and foes, not really as a love/hate notation, but just as a way of cutting down on the chaff I have to sort through when I read articles. People who make good arguments, even if I disagree with their positions, tend to end up getting a friend slot, while people who are either trolling, brain-dead, or rude in their commentaries end up getting a seat with my other foes.

However, for a while now, (longer than my moderation points have been missing, in fact) I've had so many friends and foes listed for my account that I've run out of slots, and had to cycle some back off the lists.

I started out by cycling back off anyone who hadn't posted/journalled in at least a month, and that worked for a while, but with the increasing volume of posting, especially by trolls, I've gotten to where I need to keep it under two weeks in order to stay effective. Some people get permanent places on my friends list, like Bruce Perens and Wil Wheaton, (because I know when/if they post again, I will want to read them still) but for the most part, everyone else gets cycled off because, quite simply, if they're not active, there's no reason to keep a modifier tied up for them.

There's a problem with this, however, and that is that it doesn't leave room for improvement by people who post frequently. Obviously, I can remove neutralize the position of a friend if I see them turning into trolls, etc., but if I'm filtering out foes, and automatically keep it going, it's harder for me to see when, for example, newbies wise up and start posting sensible comments instead of flamebait. Sure, their comments are hopefully moderated up by others, but I'm so used to ignoring anything with a red (or yellow) sphere that I might not even notice them under +5, if they're not starting threads.

So... I think I may kill my foes list, soon. I can just as easily start reading at (x+1), and it frees up slots to show me who's actively making worthwhile contributions to the site. What do you guys think? Have you figured out alternate ways of using these tags? (My foes and freaks are as welcome to respond as friends to this - if you're also tired of a pointless detente because of something stupid that happened a year ago, great, let's move on.)

As some of you know, I started another account here at Slashdot because I haven't had mod points in a very long time, probably a year or so, and wanted to see whether I could build up another account.

I must say, being a newbie here sucks, these days. Now that everyone seems to be reading at +2 or better, it's really hard to get people to reply to anything, much less vote on it. I know, I haven't made any stellar insights in that account (or this one, either, actually), but still, I figured someone would have something to say about some of those.

Ah, well. Reply if you feel like it. Right now I'm testing the rumor that adding a journal puts some of us old-timers with perfect karma and "too many posts" back in the running for mod points. Heh.