Hopeless Geek

So I have some bills from the L&D remaining that I’m paying (waiting for insurance to pay out fully). One says I can pay online at paythisbill.net. Okay, I’m used to medical places outsourcing that kind of thing because it’s hard to get right.

So I go there … “can’t find server.” Wha? I check in Terminal — there’s an IP, but it’s refusing HTTP connections. Well, that’s special. So I check WHOIS... this is priceless.

Domain servers in listed order: NS1.MYDYNDNS.ORG NS2.MYDYNDNS.ORG NS3.MYDYNDNS.ORG NS4.MYDYNDNS.ORG NS5.MYDYNDNS.ORG

Um. Yeah.

I’ll mail it in, thanks.

I’ve discovered that I don’t mind watching shows on the iPhone and have run into a lot of times where it would have been real nice to have some things to watch. So I hit iTunes and found as many cool things as I could that I could sync up and keep handy. It turns out that there’s a lot of really good stuff out there now.

There’s something magical about the Internet. I recently bought a house and have been doing cleanup from the previous occupants’ apparent lack of concern for their living conditions.

One of these jewels of neglect was a refrigerator whose bottom seal had dislodged and hung in a U-shape below the door. When I finally decided the more concerning things were fixed and I wanted to look at that, I figured I’d need a new seal and that I’d have to order it and then find instructions, etc. To get started, I hit Google up for “refrigerator door seal”. Lo, instructions on how to proceed that were clear enough that I could simply re-attach the existing seal.

Think about it. Even as recently as 1995, if you sat on the couch at 9p and decided to go fix the fridge door and hadn’t a clue about how to proceed, what were your options? Call family or friends, or dive in and guess. What do we do today? A simple search, read up on it, and dive in, knowing exactly what to do and expect.

It just doesn’t get old for me.

Flickr is hosting very short (90 sec) video clips now that you can roll in with your photos. Since the drive for the site is very much still photos, I think they’ve found the right balance for the site by setting the duration to be, as they say, “long photos”.

Since I had to test it out I grabbed the first video clip I could find that I wanted to share and put it up. It took it fine and it looks like a photo in the stream until you move over it or view it. That’s pretty much perfect.

Reddit changed its front-page algorithm recently to include all the sub-reddits in a balanced way. That actually worked surprisingly well to keep the politics sub-reddit from taking over the site. Bravo on that one.

However, an issue remains from the time when they added the user-added sub-reddits where you can submit a story to more than one sub-reddit. Well, what happens when you have a story submitted twice to more than one sub-reddit to get attention and both take off?

This.

Mail alerted me from the background that it couldn’t check an account and I was about to just dismiss the error, thinking a server went offline for a little or something, when I read it was a certificate error with Gmail. Well, that happens, so I checked the certificate.

It was for Yahoo.

I have an AT&T DSL line, so all my services are done via Yahoo, so I immediately got a little concerned that there was some lower-level crap going on. I hit Terminal:

$ host pop.gmail.com
pop.gmail.com is an alias for gmail-pop.l.google.com.
gmail-pop.l.google.com has address 64.233.167.111
gmail-pop.l.google.com has address 64.233.167.109

Well, that appears ok. Both forward and reverse lookups show those as being Google’s (even using another DNS server). So then I checked the connection itself. That’s where it got messed up.

$ openssl s_client -host pop.gmail.com -port 995
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=0 /C=US/ST=California/L=Santa Clara/O=Yahoo! Inc./OU=Yahoo/CN=pop.att.yahoo.com
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:1
depth=0 /C=US/ST=California/L=Santa Clara/O=Yahoo! Inc./OU=Yahoo/CN=pop.att.yahoo.com