Well, yesiree-bob, I got intruded upon this weekend. Not in a physical way mind-you, but in a digital way. I awoke Saturday morning (around 10:30 AM or so), having the night before hosted a rompin’ good night of Winter Feasting and Pokering, to Geoff calling to tell me A) that he was sorry to have missed the Winter Feast and B) that the server was down, and that both of these things made him sad.

Needless to say, I was pretty bummed out. Since I started leasing that server back in August 2003, there hadn’t been a single minute of down-time for the server! I logged onto my hosting company’s website (EV1Servers.net) to see what was up. I soon noticed that a trouble-ticket had been opened up due to “Acceptible Use Policy Violations”. Further, it gave me the indication that my box had been cracked (not hacked). AKA intruded, transgressed, violated. This happened at 4:20 in the AM, and at 4:38, EV1Servers had — quite literally — pulled the plug on the server. I needed to contact them to get them to start investigating what was up. Unfortunately, the Abuse Department can only be contacted via email, and when I pressed the Customer Support lady about me phoning them (“You are telling me they have no phones at all?”) she replied “Yes, the have no phones.”. A pretty blantant lie, I’m thinking, but nonetheless they had started their quick investigation about 12:30 or so, and had brought my server back up to me around the same time. They amended the trouble ticket to say that they had found some suspicious files consistent with an exploit of a webserver/scripting bug and that I should start the cleanup immediately.

Turns out it was a cracker with an IP address from somewhere in Brazil, and the target of the denial-of-service attack they mounted was also in Brazil. I’ll save you the gory details, but there were a couple of bugs (aka “vulnerabilities”) that were exploited to allow very limited but annoying access to the webserver. I host a server with a number of websites on it, and I can’t keep tabs on every piece of software (like webmail, galleries, bulletin boards) at all times. The best I can do is keep server-wide security as tight as possible. A big “oops” on my part, but I thought I was safe. After ensuring that the crackers hadn’t destroyed any data or left behind any “backdoors”, I brought the webserver and databases and everything save for the email system back up around 2:00 PM or so.

While I managed to plug the hole in the webserver that the crackers had made, I found there was another hell-of-annoying thing that had happened — the crackers had flooded my box with all sorts of SPAM email. I had to meticulously weed out those SPAM from legitimate emails and clean up the mail queue. I think that very few SPAM emails escaped my box. This was the biggest pain in the ass, and much to both mine and Kelly’s chagrin, it took me until damn near 5 o’clock to bring the mail subsystem back on-line.

Last night (Sunday) I spent most of it on the couch fortifying my server with firewalls, intrusion-detection software, and a number of other little tricks to help me fend off those pain in the ass crackers.

I realize most of this won’t make a lick of sense to most of you, but I thought it might be interesting to hear about the saucy underside of this thing we know as the intarweb. If you are really interested in knowing more specifically about what happened, feel free to contact me.

With Ben’s recent passing, among other things, it has struck me that things have changed. Stepping out of the workaday I’m in and looking back down the hallway of my life (that’s how I visualize time past and time to come) has allowed me a bit of perspective. It feels to me as if I’ve just changed rooms — a door has shut behind me with a thud that surprised me. I remember a similar feeling in early 1997, the day another friend of mine committed suicide. I felt then as I do now that I’d changed rooms. The comfortable uncomfort of high school was a thing behind me — death and those it that it touched was and were real, and I better get my head on straight.

This last nearly 8 years were ones where I think I found myself — where we all found ourselves in one way or another. The fluid uncertainty that is growing up and out of high school and into college gels into what we are now. It is a time of serious stresses, new boundaries and slowly settling uncertainties. Morals and ideals begin to align themselves like iron filings in the presence of a magnet. Grief and resentment come with the realization that time has passed beneath your feet and behind your back, and it’s all a little bewildering. Eventually I found my feet. That me in that when is now looked back upon with amusement, wonder and occassional disappointment. I’m happy with what I’ve become, and I don’t regret as much as I used to. I am comfortable with who I am, partially because I know I’ve changed for the better. I made it through that time of uncertainty, fear and change, and I’m a better person for it.

However, as I sit here on what I assume to be solid ground, I look back through those doors and I see those who I left behind, those who stayed behind, or those who just didn’t make it. Ben didn’t make it, and as much as I’d like to drag him into that next room, I know I can’t. He’ll have to remain back there a constant reminder of closed doors. A piece of me stays behind in each room, too, and as much as I’d like the old me to come along, that me in that when and me here, we both know where we stand and where we need to be. And that is something I learned not too long ago. Perhaps that bit of knowledge allowed me passage on, I don’t know.

Like looking across flat land on a clear day, I think I can see far down the hallway now, but there have been times in my life — darker times — when it’s hard for me to imagine what will be coming, what is in my future. I can’t say how far away the next door is, or really what is across it’s threshold, but I have ideas. I wonder what I would see had I had been in Ben’s shoes. From what little I knew of his state of mind in the last couple of years, I understand that he felt under great pressures to succeed — academically and personally, and I think I can understand some of those pressures. Marriage and work and the loss of friends, the rest of your life now solely in your hands, all things that lay waste to even the strongest of people. The last few years of my life have certainly been challenging ones, ones where I certainly felt lost and in the woodwork. Each one of us, friends and family alike, have a separate path in life that may lead us further away from one another, but in the end we are never so far away that our bonds are not worth testing.

Julie Hoover has made a tribute video for Ben Edelson. A series of photos set to Coldplay’s “The Scientist” (how appropriate!) There are two version, a large (19 meg) broadband version and a smaller (~2 meg) dial-up version. Download either of them here:

Ben Edelson Tribute by Julie Hoover – broadband (19 meg Windows Media)

Ben Edelson Tribute by Julie Hoover – dialup (1.5 meg Windows Media)

I got the news tonight that Ben Edelson passed away some time in the last couple of days. Ben was a friend during my high-school years (actually only my senior year, 1996), a fellow Quick Recall teammate, fellow Downtown YMCA alarm-tripper and fellow guy named Ben. He was and still is the nicest genius (certifiable!) I ever knew. That was the thing about Ben — he was easily the smartest guy I’ve ever met, and yet despite all of the scholastic triumph that was always lumped (deservedly) upon him, he was a respectful friend to many. That is what I loved, and I think the thing everyone loved about Ben. He was incredibly smart (1600 on his SATs, winner of the 2000 Hoopes Prize for Undergraduate thesis while at Harvard), but despite his educational superlatives he was engaging, funny, filthy and always eager to please. I rarely saw him in a bad mood and he hardly had an enemy. As Hunter put it: “He’s the guy you’re supposed to hate, but can’t help loving”.

He went to Harvard after high-school and then went to CalTech, and received a number of accolades there, and occassionally we’d hear reports from the west coast of Edelson and his adventures. The last time I saw him was probably well over a year ago, but when we did meet it was always a good time. He was, to many of those who knew him, a true inspiration not only scholastically but personally. He was always interested in not only knowing more about the world around him, but the people around him as well. He was truly an independent in my book, one that I’ll never forget.

Ben, where-ever you are, find me out again someday.

update: Julie Hoover’s Livejournal Entry

further update:Gary Spillman’s blog entry for Ben Edelson

funeral arraignments: Meyer Funeral Home (see Ben’s obit here). Funeral services will be held Friday, December 10th, at 11:30 a.m. with interment following in Cave Hill Cemetery – Temple Shalom section. Visitation will begin after 10:30 a.m. Friday. (Meyer Funeral Home, 1338 Ellison Avenue, Louisville KY 40204, 502.458.9569). Map here.

Holiday cheer has come to my beloved Interactive Department here at work in the form of a $16 Christmas tree from Walmart. Mix with left-over lights and a bevy of plushie animals, and you have the makings of mirth in tree form.

In other news, I made beer yesterday evening. I have had this
Brewer’s Best Steam-Style beer kit since last fall, and just now got around to making it with a little help from Winemakers & Beermakers Supply on Westport Road. Nice, helpful folks they are!

On a side note, Thanksgiving was also very nice. We house-hopped between Indiana and Kentucky and had a good time all around. The holidays are starting off well this year.

I’ll tell you with considerable pride that I haven’t given more than the compulsory two minutes of my attention to the Laci Peterson case. It really wasn’t a conscious decision so much as that is how little I watch network news and read the local paper. If it were a conscious decision to avoid this stuff, it’d probably have been more like a couple hours of my life wasted on a murder (notice I didn’t say “alleged”) way across the country. As a side note to my lack of awareness on this case: NPR’s search engine shows that they have only TWO articles containing the term “Laci”, as compared to the some 30 articles dealing with the “Artic National Wildlife Refuge”. I think that explains it pretty well.

Further, Louisville has had a bona-fide rash of murders in it’s own right the last couple of weeks. At least seven within the last week, totalling some 60 for the year, a figure that far outweighs the 2 people killed by Scott Peterson both in number and personal relevance.

As I heard the father of the most recently slain boy (17-year-old Johnathan Watson) in Louisville say this morning (paraphrased): “I just want everyone with the guns to know that, yeah, you’re the big men today — but know this — you didn’t just kill a boy, you killed a whole family.” So, while the death of Laci Peterson and their unborn child is certainly tragic and reprehensible, we’ve got 60 families right here in town that could use a little more attention.

That’s right, the capital “A” Audiophile in me made me reconsider how I rip CDs into the digital MP3 format. At lunch today I did a little looking around at the current ripping/encoding systems available for the PC. After a little deliberation, I have found that there are two tools that are considering the audiophile standard for digital music. First is Exact Audio Copy (EAC), a ripper that I find better than they venerable CDex, due in part to EAC’s sophisticated error checking and error recovery methods.

Further, I found that the choice encoder is (as it has always been) LAME (LAME Isn’t an MP3 Encoder). However, earlier this year someone tweaked version 3.90.3 of LAME for ever finer audio reproduction. There are a couple of presets in LAME now called “Alt Presets”. The most popular of these presets is “Alt Preset Standard”. This makes a stereo, approximately 256kbps variable-bit-rate MP3 file of exquisite quality. The filesize is a little larger over that of my previous modus-encoderi of stereo 192kbps constant-bit-rate, but the quality of the music is much better (at least in headphones).

I did a little comparative testing with my brand-spanking-new copy of Interpol‘s newest album, Antics. The results were, to my ears, astounding. I’ve heard stereo 256kbps VBR and I ain’t going back!

On a side note, I should mention that Antics is a really awesome album — much like their previous hailed effort Turn on the Bright Lights, it might require a few listenings for it to sink in. However, after it has sunk in, you’ll be hard pressed to not hum their solid rhythms to yourself, while secretly wishing it was snowing outside. File under: Winter music.

Before the election, and before the overwhelming win for the Kentucky Gay Marriage Amendment, our local super-church, South East Christian helped to support this amendment with their “One Man, One Woman” campaign. This campaign involved numerous billboards and mobile advertising and through their weighty clout and coffers, I think they helped to steel conservative opinion around Louisville at least, where the measure passed 60% YES / 40% NO 20-point margin. The rest of the state voted 75/25 YES/NO. Certainly a win for SouthEast and their campaign, and it could be said for Christians state-wide.

Now, while SouthEast claims that “The same-sex marriage controversy is NOT ABOUT… homophobia, [or] whether homosexuals are nice people, good citizens, loving parents, loyal friends or helpful neighbors”, they forgot to mention that this amendment not only bars gays from “marriage”, but also from the lesser charge of “civil unions” which grants them the same rights as a “wedded couple” which includes any number of legal rights, including inheritance, life insurance, medical decisions, etc. Oddly enough, South East has left this out of their website, on any page dealing with “gay marriage”. However, on a funny ha-ha sidenote, they do reference a number of scientific studies in their defense of marriage. To quote:

The recognition that marriage is the union of male and female has never been seriously questioned in America until the past decade. During that time, activists were busy promoting their own private social revolution, and scientists were busy studying the institution of marriage and its affect on the participants and on society.

The results of hundreds of scientific studies and years of sociological research is undisputable. There is a mountain of evidence demonstrating the rewards to society as well as to individual families of marriage.

This is not an indictment of single-parent families; it is a scientific understanding of the dynamics of family structure.

Wow, hey! While you’re thumbing through scientific reports, why not read up on evolution as well! It’s just a letter away from “faggotry”.

I respect SouthEast’s opinion and the opinion of the lawmakers who support this tripe, but did the lawmakers have to go and completely ban even civil unions? I guess they figured that if they hooped and hollered about marriage enough that they could squeak in some verbiage about civil unions and just really kill the whole thing once and for all. That is some pork-barrel baby and the bath water sort of shenanigans that I really hate to see. To bar marriage from homosexuals is one thing, to categorically and systematically bar them from the rights regarded to any other wedded — or joined — couple is just ridiculous. This is a major setback for a very large and very real segment of our society that is not going to “go away”. Well, I take that back — if you wanted to rid the state of gays, well, you’ve made a step in the right direction, Kentucky!

That, of course, brings me to my final point — Kentucky is attempting a branding initiative that will create a singular, unified logo for the state. You, citizen, can even vote for your favorite logo. (On a side note: the agency that got the state’s business is New West, and according to a little bird New West is shipping a great deal of the some $14 million state ad budget down South to Atlanta in the form of contract work! Thanks Gov. Fletcher! Keep it in the state, man!) Anyway, I figure that at least this time the state is giving the public some choice in what logo will represent the state, rather than foisting some candy-assed design on us. Hey! Kentucky — It’s That Friendly (except to gays). Well, in that spirit of public consideration and contribution, I submit my own Kentucky logo:

jine: antiquated and poetic version of “to join”, or perhaps “to agree with”. Note usage here in this old Civil War bar shanty.

This is the text of an email from a friend of mine (who is gay) in reaction to the Kentucky Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment which passed this last Tuesday…

Friends:

As most of you are probably aware, the majority of voters in Kentucky, along with 10 other states across our fine nation, just placed a ban on same sex marriage into the state constitution, effectively endorsing discrimination as a model practice. I am sitting here very nearly in tears right now because what this means is that the state that I was born in, and spent the first 24 years of my life in, has decided that I am not entitled to the same respect or the same sense of basic human dignity that 90% of the country’s population is automatically accorded. What this means is that my monogamous relationship with my boyfriend of three years is worth less than my father’s less lengthy relationship with a woman from another country; it is worth less than the second marriage of my mother; it is even worth less than a 55 hour practical joke perpetrated by Britney
Spears. It is, in fact, worth nothing in Kentucky.

What this means is that I cannot, and will not, ever be a resident of Kentucky again.

Maybe this seems a bit extreme to some of you, but I’d ask you to try to see this from my perspective. The state I have spent the vast majority of my life in, the one that educated me and collected my tax dollars, has now decided it knows better than I do when it comes to my relationship. All I can think is “What right do you have to tell me who I can marry? What right do you have to determine that my relationship is worth less than your own? What right do you have to presume to speak for God?”

Many people, maybe some of you, think this fight was about giving special rights to gay people. This could not be further from the truth. It was, and is, about affording equal rights to every tax-paying citizen of this country. In fact, the only people with “special rights” in this respect are heterosexuals: straight people have the right to marry, gay people do not. Straight people have the right to inherit property from their significant other, make medical decisions for their significant other, take care of the person they love most in the world; gay people do not. I do not. I am not equal.

So, it’s time I drew a line for my basic sense of self-respect, and sadly for me, that line must be abandoning the state I once considered my home.

I’ve been hearing a bit about the country “healing” after this election — which is as of right now (Kerry is giving his concession speech), officially over. “Re-uniting” is another term I’ve heard today. “Healing” and “re-uniting” is a big bunch of hokum if you ask me — this election only shows that the country is terribly split, and either side is going to have a tough battle. This will be Bush’s last term, and with a pro-Republican shift in Congress, he’ll be pushing even more of his conservative legislation through. The Democrats, long-suffering from the stings of two very, very close defeats will certainly redouble their efforts to curtail those pieces of legislation. Bush’s “standing on principle” and his black-and-white values did well to retain his base, despite polls claiming that a majority of Americans think the US is on the wrong track and that the economy is failing. The gay marriage amendments in 11 states passed by overwhelming margins. These amendments are “protection” amendments — amendments of exclusion the likes of which we have never seen in this country. How do people vote for a politician that they feel is putting the country on the wrong track, both economically and politically? Is the other half of the country so scared that they have to compromise on their economic and national beliefs that they’ll elect the guy who will protect them from the gays and the terrorist by standing on prinicpal? How do you go up against religious faith in a politician? How do you argue against that sort of bull-headed devotion? When you’re against a foe that only knows how to attack and protect, it’s going to be a hard fight.

So, healing isn’t something that is going to happen — re-uniting certainly won’t either. The gloves are off, if they weren’t off before. Get ready.