Author Archives: sceptic

DNS and mail annoyances

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A few days ago I tried signing up for an account on a web forum, and for no apparent reason it spent about half a minute doing nothing and then claimed it had sent me an email with a confirmation link. After attempting to get this email resent a few times, I tried a different address and got the email almost immediately.

There were two things that were happening here: first of all, the website wasn’t actually doing sensible error checking. But more importantly (as I confirmed with an email to one of their administrators), they weren’t finding my DNS records to get the MX servers.

I checked my own ability to connect to the iserve dns servers, and with both of them I was getting timeouts and a traceroute which stopped at firewall-01a.iserve.net.nz; on the other hand, I was still seeing the address coming up on the DNS servers I usually use for DNS lookups. This probably means that iserve (or, since 2009, Orcon) are only allowing a limited set of servers to perform lookups on their servers.

As an aside, while looking into what might be wrong with my email address that was affecting one of my domains but not the other, I set up DKIM and DMARC on my main domain; this turns out to be surprisingly easy, but revealed that iserve can’t handle the length of txt records required for a 2048 bit DKIM key. Other things that iserve doesn’t handle includes DNSSEC records.

After finding the apparent root of my problem, I started looking into domain hosting, and found fairly quickly that free domain hosting is easy to find. So I promptly moved the authoritative nameservers for the domain to cloudflare. This still doesn’t fix the fact that iserve doesn’t handle DNSSEC, but I’ll be looking at moving to a different registrar that handles DS records sometime in the coming few weeks.

Long story short, though? Just because something seems to be working, doesn’t mean it’s not fucked up somewhere you haven’t tested (and in some cases, can’t test).

Time flies

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It’s almost the end of another year. And it probably says something that wordpress updates more often than I post here.

I have about a week and a half until I go back to work, and then a week and a half until I get three weeks off. And it would be really nice if the whole christmas thing was over and done with already. It would be even nicer if I had energy and motivation, too.

Do I have a career, or just a job?

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It looks very much like I’m a shoe-in for a job that’s coming up, which is fairly similar to the less technical of my current two. The downside being that it’s a bit less technical than the more technical of my current jobs.

I’ve also been pointed at another job that’s being advertised in Operations. I have strong doubts about whether I have a hope in hell of getting it, but on the other hand it would be much more interesting, and more technically challenging. And would hopefully involve dealing with people somewhat less.

And finally, I wouldn’t want to just leave one of my employers in the lurch by just leaving without making sure someone can just walk into my job and take over without too much disruption.

Ugh. Tired. All I know at the moment is that I don’t want to deal with split shifts or erratically changing schedules any more.

Hey, that’s right – I have a blog!

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Yep. I have a blog. Because I have so much to say.

Have I bitched about work on here before? Split shifts are a pain in the arse, but possibly not as much of a pain in the arse as the erratic shifts. I’m not entirely decided on that, though.

Short notice of the roster for the following week is still annoying. Today I got a copy of the roster for next week; there were no real surprises. On the other hand, the weekend for that week isn’t actually filled in yet – there are bookings that probably need to be covered, but nothing actually put down for them. The relatively late notice is actually fairly normal; the weekend bookings being blank is actually worse than normal. On the bright side, it won’t affect me unless part of my rest of the week is modified. On the down side, that bright side has that “unless” in it…

Brain dead

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Since my last post I’ve moved into a new flat. I have more space and don’t have to share facilities with other people. On the down side it’s more expensive and I had to actually arrange utilities on top of that, plus it’s harder to heat.

I’ve been here for perhaps a month and a half now, and most of my stuff is still in disorganised piles, especially the books. I should do something about it, but I never seem to have energy or motivation when I’m home.

Otherwise, these last few weeks I’ve been quite tired and sleeping poorly. I’m not sure why, but it’s possible that it’s partly because I’m reading too late and not getting enough sleep. I don’t think that’s all, though, since if it were then I would’ve been screwed for pretty much my entire life to date (or at least even more so).

Meh

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Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I suspect this is partly due to stress – I’m living beyond my means this fortnight, I had to move offices on Monday (not enough offices for the number of staff, so I’m now sharing an office with the tutors), I’m thinking about moving flats, I have maybe another fortnight to get a computer lab tidied up and ready for classes, one of my jobs will have significantly fewer hours this year, and the other is on a contract which finishes at the end of November and will need significant justification to the division to renew.

So basically, stressed. Also not really eating well, possibly also due to stress, but possibly also due to depression.

Still single, still a little neurotic, somewhat paranoid, and with relatively low self-esteem.

On top of this, my knee has been hurting for pretty much over a year now, some days worse than others, and you get me not enjoying my life very much.

Dancing has restarted, which is nice, but I’ve been too tired and out of sorts to really enjoy it. Plus it’s hard to deal with people when I’m feeling tired. Which would be less of an issue if I didn’t still feel tired even after getting over ten hours of sleep (not that the ten hours of sleep has happened particularly often…)

With regards to nutrition, I’ve tried adding more carbohydrates into my diet, but this doesn’t seem to have helped much with energy levels. I suspect the lack of energy is down to erratic eating patterns, stress, depression, and general lack of sleep. It may not help that I stopped taking vitamin D supplements regularly over a month ago.

I need sleep.

Cleaning up

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One of the things I hate about my current living situation is that it seems to be a good example of the tragedy of the commons. And what I mean by that is that nobody takes responsibility for keeping the shared areas clean, and there’s at least one jackass who doesn’t bother cleaning up his own messes.

Today I mopped the kitchen floor and cleaned the toilet. Both have needed doing for some time. There was some spilled milk under the fridge which had hardened and stank somewhat. This hadn’t been overly noticeable until the last couple of weeks since the waste disposal unit hadn’t been working for months and some idiot was throwing crap in it despite knowing it wasn’t working.

I don’t like cleaning, and I hate cleaning up other peoples’ messes.

On the bright side, the place is now closer to being in a fit state for inviting friends around. Hmm… I wonder where I can find some of those…

Energy levels and mood not so high

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I suspect I may be undereating. My mood lately has been a bit low, and I haven’t had as much energy as I’d like. I’ve been eating a decent breakfast in the morning, but I think I may need to drop the protein content a little so I actually feel hungry at lunchtime (or at least by early evening).

I also suspect that I may need more carbohydrates in my diet than I’ve been getting lately, to support the activity level of my lifestyle.

We’ll see.

Thermal issues

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A friend was having trouble with his computer crashing whenever it gets heavily loaded. I initially thought it might be overheating, but apparently not. It is giving a MCE, though, which suggests the CPU may be b0rken. A quick Google search says there’s a chance a BIOS upgrade may fix the issue.

All this led me to wonder how my system would deal with heavy loads since being moved to passive cooling. Not so well, as it turns out. The CPU temperature got up to 90°C before I turned up the case fan. After that it went down to around 67°C. I’ve now limited the CPU to 1.8GHz at most, and I think it should run cool enough even if something does decide to peg the CPU.

Apparently I’m looking good

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Tonight I had a couple of different people at Ceroc tell me that I’m looking good. This could be because I managed to catch a little sun over the last week, or it could be due to my ongoing nutrition experiment, but it’s nice to hear.

Also nice to hear are the people telling me how nice I am to dance with. And this includes people who have been dancing for some time now and are themselves nice to dance with.

I made it through to ten o’clock without being completely compost mentis. I was certainly tired by then, mind you, but I still had energy and didn’t have a heavy mind fog. I hope this is the start of an ongoing trend, even if it turns out to be a placebo effect.