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News from people with similar DNA

The week after next I'm going to have a visit with my sister, Tracy Velazquez.  She's coming to Houston for some conference and of course will spend some time in Boerne with us.  Yes, this is the Tracy Velazquez that ran for Congress in 2004.  I was the one to blame for her campaign web site, including the blogging software.  So I must confess that I'm not the first person in the family to have started blogging.  If you visit the archive of her site, you'll see that her sense of humor is similar to mine, once again proving indisputably that we have similar DNA.  Alas, she lost that election, even though she's "hot".

My son, Tony (11), recently advanced from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts at the Blue and Gold banquet held at the Boerne Convention Center.  I was unable to get any decent photos with my cheesy cell phone camera.  I did, however, get a picture of the most beautiful, talented, creative and intelligent girl in the world.  That would be my own daughter, of course, Aria (7).  She is pictured here demonstrating the effect of static electricity from balloons on one's hair.

No respect

Last night, Tony told me he had found the perfect song for me.  It's called "Code Monkey" by Jonathan Coulton, and you can listen online or buy the MP3.  I tell you, I get no respect.

My swag's in the mail

Erin from ActiveState referenced my blog earlier this week, and she got a creative marketing idea from my Nutty Warnings blog entry. I pinged her back, teased her a little, and got a free T-shirt!  I love geek swag.  The last time I was this happy was when I won the puzzler from SoftArtisans (using a Perl script, heh heh) and received a free SoftArtisans T-shirt and a license for ExcelWriter, which I am still using in production today!  Actually I was more excited about the T-shirt, because for a few hundred dollars anyone can license their software!

I've raised the white flag.  I've had it with hosting e-mail.  I just purchased an e-mail hosting plan from GoDaddy, and I'm in the process of moving all the e-mail accounts.  And instructing customers on how to change their Outlook settings for the new system.  Hopefully, I can get everyone moved over in the next couple of weeks.

The sordid tale of the tar-baby from hell begins about four years ago, when I was having problems with the ISP that was hosting my e-mail service.  As things happened, I came upon an open-source mail server called Lumisoft that was written in C# and was able to handle SMTP relays, POP3 inboxes, and had a cute WinForms UI for administration.  It must have been the macho call of the wild - I can do this!  I grabbed an old computer, wiped it clean, installed Windows 2000 Pro on it and set up the mail server.  I had initially intended to use it for just my own purposes, and my wife and I used it for our e-mail.  But as things progressed, I started getting calls from customers who were getting angry that their ISPs weren't filtering their spam and letting e-mail viruses get through.  So I picked up SpamAssassin, and wrote a couple Perl scripts (shoutout: using ActiveState ActivePerl) that would comb the mail looking for spam to tag and also tossing out anything executable.  These Perl scripts were fired off by a little C# Windows Service I wrote in a half-hour.  And I'm happy to say I haven't had a single e-mail virus in Outlook in four years.  But things quickly deteorated.  To summarize:

• Network downtime - my ISP doesn't answer the phone on Sundays, so when do you think it goes down?
• Security Breach - a slacker at my ISP had a null VPN password, allowing a Japanese spammer to hijack my mail server as his own personal SMTP relay.
• Spam - causing an increasing burden on the old 450 MHz Pentium II.
• Abandoned E-mail Accounts - piling up the spam and filling up the disk
• Disgruntled Customers - I always know when the mail goes down, oh, I hear about it!
• Clueless Customers - who sign up for all sorts of online crap and wonder why they have so much spam!
• Hardware Issues - Ugh

I've had it up to here, and now I'm putting POSTAL to pasture. (Yes, I named the computer "POSTAL" as a joke.  Ha ha, just serious.)  I can get 100 POP3 e-mail accounts from GoDaddy for just $30 a year, and it comes with a webmail interface.  The admin interface is a pain in the rear, but I'm sure they can do a better job with uptime than I can.  I will miss having a bottomless e-mail account that users could send 100 MB files to, but the need for that has decreased as well.  At least I won't be wasting any more time on this.

This is better than going postal.  Don't you think?