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Nov. 8th, 2001 09:55 amI have been in Waterville a week now. Insert pointed drumming of fingers, just once, here. Near as I can tell, there has been no motion on the Cambridgeport front. I have been tentatively sniffing at other opportunities, just in case. Several phone calls to make today. I wonder how much more line I should let out for Chez Charla... while I really want to live there, my confidence will be seriously eroded if I find out today that we're right where we were two weeks ago. The clock is ticking on the prime immediate backup location, just to make things more interesting.
Interesting, yes, ah yes indeedy.
I'm sorry I am so grumpy. Here, look at pictures of a bunny with a succession of leaves on its head.
Other stuff from a letter to a friend:
I have been kept sane during my stay by hanging out all day at the offices of Arcus Digital. They have a wirless network, and I have a laptop. And they have couches and lots of snacks and soda. (And a tip jar.) Mmmm. It's a pretty good environment, but for that it's in the cultural wasteland of central Maine, and that it's all-male. Then again, there are none of the loutish males that appeared increasingly during MINT's decline, so that's nice, but working in a crossgendered environment is still preferable, to me. Then again again, it's not like I'm actually working here. Or even plan on staying too much longer.
I will, however, be doing some work. This evening Andy talked to me about my first piece of contract work Arcus'd like me to do... an easy task, good teeth-cutting, not just with here but with the whole freelance thing. Naturally, Jim & co is all about telecommuting, so I'm very much not tying myself to this geographic spot by accepting the offer (though I do expect to visit semi-oftenly).
At least undef is back in business, more or less... the machine has a fresh new copy of Debian Linux on it, installed under the supervision of Arcus people, who didn't let me set up any security holes this time, and had me install software to help keep the thing hardened. To which I say: good. I'd say that this will absolutely positively be the last Bad Move this box has had to make, but with three such events in 2001 alone, I really wouldn't trust myself with such statements anymore. Then again, the situation is totally different... it used to be an insecure junkpile running either on my apartment floor or in a company machine room, and now it's a very secure box maintained by paid professionals in a dedicated hosting facility. We'll see what happens.
That letter was writ two days ago. Since then, my domain has become fully world-visible once again, though I've yet to properly crawl through the whole site and see what's broken and fix it all, again. It's worth it. I say to the l33t h4><0rs: Come on in. And burn! Yesh.
The cafe upstairs, Jorgenson's, is for sale. Everyone at Arcus will be very very sad if it turns into something other than a cafe, because, mm boy, good coffee right upstairs, available through the afternoon? Friend, that's half the reason I took the job at O'Reilly last year, with the promise that it'd be moving to Davis Square and its three late-nite coffee shops. (Ed note: I took the job, and it didn't move. And then I got laid off anyway.) According to this news story, the owners are selling all their inventory and equipment along with the space, so that's a hopeful sign.
A photographer came in to shoot John and myself playing Lost Cities at lunch yesterday for that story, but they used a photo of a college student instead. Foo! Doesn't two hairy guys taunting each other over a bizarre-looking card game have far more visual appeal than some waifish bookworm? Bah.
The shower in my parents' house is from the seventh and a half floor. I have to kneel in order to wash my face.
Strange fact: three people in the last three days, two of them friends who are not prone to make such random outbursts, have independently exclaimed how very tall I suddenly seem lately. MaryMary and my Mom offer no hypothoses why this is so. Andy thinks that I used to slouch by default, and have stopped. I am totally unaware of any of this.
I've started writing again, pretending that I'm settled. Ellie has been sketching rough drafts of book covers. First there was a neat cover featuring two Arabian birds, kites, which editor Linda thought was wicked cool, except that they seemed to be about to kill each other. After Linda asked if she could tone it down, Ellie made one with some sort of fru-fru bird, which Linda labeled "milquetoast". Sadly, Ellie snuck me the URL to it, and just seeing a possible book cover with my name on it made me fall in love with the thing. Since I just finished Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, I emailed the URL to a friend: "Want to see my daemon?"
Ellie has since moved away from birds and now favors monkeys. Green monkeys. Monkeys reflect both the subject matter and the projected sales figures, she notes. ???
In hindsight, they could go a lot worse. Though I have moved many many times before (14 times, in fact, counting from college on) this is the very first time I have moved without parental guidance, and the price of independence is not slight. So, I have learned and done many strange and wonderful things, and have made some critical timing errors. Yes, I should have started a month before I did. No, I shouldn't have held out for a Davis place as long as I did. I know that now, and am wiser for it. I think I did many other things right, not the least of which was rely on the network of friends and acquaintances I have made here in the last year to help me in the search.
But at the moment, it leaves me homeless, crashing with my parents in Waterville, Maine, and waiting for updates on the Cambridgeport front. Charles and I were hoping for a Wednesday night meeting with the landlord, but this fell through: LL wanted a bucket of rental, employment, and financial references before s/he would even look at me, literally. I forwarded what I could to Charles, and drove north.
Mind you, I would have driven north anyway, since I very badly wanted to plug poor old undef into its new home up here at Arcus. Only this afternoon we finally got it settled, and its webserver works again, more or less. Now I have to get the domain updated (a horrible process involving sending faxes to Verisign, waiting, calling them, being told that they never got any faxes, why don't you try this other number, repeat 1d4 times) and meantime jmac.org doesn't exist for the Nth time during 2001, and all my email is bouncing, and I don't have a phone number or postal address either, sorry. Fucking kiddies. Why'd they pick now to do this? Sigh
The party went OK. Nobody blanched at the costume, though I did maybe overblow the in-character shtick a little bit. I blame Cthulhia and her accursed Radio Free Vestibule album for the bad inlfuence. At least one or two people took photos; will post when avialable.
> I decided to rent a storage locker and have started to pile stuff into it. > > I forgot that I had a small bureau in the large-objects category, along with > the couch. Bloody thing... its next stop after the locker will either be to > a susboid who wants it, or to the dump. All thingies that don't lend > themselves to moving deserve purging from my life. Must find alternate > clothing storage solutions, he said in a rumbling monotone. > > After the bureau-moving debacle I am prepared on calling the couch a lost > cause. Snf. > > Um, anyway: No matter what happens tomorrow night, I have to zip up to Maine > soon after, so that I can exorcise the jmac.org server in the company of > licensed profesionals (they tell me that I'll still get to shout "The power > of Christ compels thee!" at it but this time I should lay off on the holy > water) and then plug it into its new host setup, conveniently at the same > place. If I'm an official resident of Chez Charlas by the witching hour > tomorrow night, I'll sleep there and leave the next morning; else, I'll go > north after the party and return the evening of the first, unless I should > stick around for some reason.
So that's what I'm doing.
Yep, that'll do it.
I am lucky to have both clueful friends and clueless (or perhaps just unmotivated) attackers in this matter. I don't know when the compromise occurred -- I have reason to suspect it happened more than a week ago -- but I started receiving mail from unknown sysadmins last night, saying that they were receiving repeated, failed ssh login attempts originating from my IP. This morning, after I sent out a call for advice, my BOFH buddy Noah found a patched ssh daemon running on an insanely numbered port, and some other service living on port 12345, which I certainly didn't launch.
Since everything else on my machine looks fine, the blackhats didn't seem to do much mischief
outside of using my poor box as a platform for further attacks, and for this I am lucky. However, there's no telling what else they may have accomplished more subtly, so down it all goes.
I guess I needed to be taught a lesson about Internet security, and the lesson could have been much harder -- thanks heavens they didn't touch any of my or my friends' data! However, the timing could have been a lot better, as I have to be moving sometime this week, and that's enough of a timesink in itself. I'm prepared to be without my vanity domain for several days. Sigh.
