So, the ISP who hosts jgreely.com has been sending email since February announcing an upcoming transition to a new platform.

On November 2nd, they sent one that said “we may not get to your domain before our November 28th deadline, so if you don’t want it to be shut off, you might want to run our migration tool yourself and do your own testing.”

On November 15th, they sent a friendly reminder.

On November 16th, they said the migration had been completed successfully, and I should now update my registrar with their new name servers.

Not being an idiot, I queried the new servers, and found: no MX record, no A records, and only one lonely little CNAME pointing ftp.jgreely.com to (nonexistent) www.jgreely.com. The new IP address, available only from their web console, did not listen for SMTP, POP, or IMAP, but a manual connection to port 80 showed that my trivial home page was there. The control panel also showed that my mail config had been modified, but that no data had been copied over from the old server (someone clearly doesn’t understand how IMAP works…).

There is no published support email address. Their online chat never connects. I spent 72 minutes on hold waiting for someone to pick up, and ten minutes explaining the problem to an arrogant moron. I demanded he escalate the call, and he put me on hold for another 20 minutes. I explained the problem again, in detail, and this guy understood, and said they’d regenerate the zone file and it would be fine in a little while.

And, oh-by-the-way, since the transition of my domain was marked complete in their system, the old server could be shut down at any time. But if I noticed it and called, they’d be happy to turn it back on for a little while.

Two hours later, dig still shows no MX, no A, and one pointless CNAME.

Oh, and the “obsolete platform” had shell access; the shiny new one does not. It does, however, have a lot of overpriced add-on services, like “backup/restore” (!), SEO optimization, blahblahblah. And while on hold for over an hour, they kept telling me how paid audio and video services would “keep customers on my site longer”, and other bullshit.

If they don’t get their shit together Real Soon Now, I’ll name and shame them. And, of course, move the account elsewhere. Maybe I’ll just host it on Amazon and run it myself.

[Update: DNS and old email finally showed up. I haven’t switched yet, since it takes a while for name server changes to propagate, and I still don’t really trust these clowns. First, I’m going to backup my mail archives, then switch the IMAP config to point to the old IP address, then create a brand new account that points to the new IP addresses, so I don’t lose days of incoming mail.]

Based on their behavior since the election, a lot of People Of Leftness are going through the four stages of grief, simultaneously. “Acceptance” just isn’t on the menu.

Another cinematographic term that sounds like it ought to be a fetish. Then again, if your blow-up doll is askew, that would be a dutch-wife angle…

This turned out to be a surprisingly porn-y search tag. I had to skim through several thousand thumbnails to come up with pictures that didn’t include bare tits, bare asses, fuck-me poses, girl-girl, horribly-broken spines, untagged lolis, etc. Not that those are all bad things. Indeed, many of them were quite nice; they’re just not what I’m going for here.

If I were tagging pictures on Gelbooru, I’d have to add a whole bunch of new ones (to avoid…): absurd_breasts, invisible_corset, magic_spine, inflatable_ass, helium_implants, bodily_functions, traced_from_porn, artist_hand_in_pants, oh_that_poor_girl, etc. Fortunately it’s too much work just to browse them.

more...

Google just announced that their new translation engine now handles Japanese. Let’s see what it does with the exact same text I fed to Office 2007 about seven years ago, the first scene of Kyōtarō Nishimura’s murder mystery, Ame no naka ni shinu. TLDR: it’s quite a bit better, although the pronouns are all over the place, and the “embroidered sleeves” bit is hilarious:

It was raining.

It is cold winter rain. It was close to the sleeves.

Even if it enters at night, there is no sign of stopping. Because of that, if it passed ten o’clock, the embroidery figures rapidly decreased.

Even when that man pressed his belly with one hand and came out from behind the alley, there was no sign of a person in the rain.

He was a middle-aged man. The tired suit was wet with rain and was dark.

The man gripped by the utility pole with one hand. However, as if suddenly bravely fumbled, it crumbled and broke into a wet pavement.

From around the man’s belly, red blood is blowing out. The blood is raining.

“help me”

Said the man. However, the low screams have been erased by the sound of rain.

With a splash of water, a taxi passed by. The driver took a look at the man who fell over and down, but he thought he was drunk. Just dropping the speed a bit, I passed by.

The man lifted his face and looked around. There are no figures of people anywhere. I opened my mouth, but it seemed that no voice cried for help.

Blood still continues to flow. The face of a man gradually lost his blood and went.

The man tried to write something on the pavement with a fingertip stained in blood. However, the raining lasting will erase it.

Despair seemed to have caught him.

The man wants to let you know something. However, there are no signs of people, and letters written on pavement are erased by rain.

Also, the taxi passed by. However, for men, there was no power left to raise their hands.

The man looked at his palm stained with blood with a blank eye. The fingertips were stiff.

The man slowly folded the little finger of his left hand. On top of that, my thumb was broken and piled up. The index finger, middle finger, ring finger stretched out.

“three”

, The man muttered with a small voice. But it was not almost a voice. The man fired off his last power and stretched his left hand. Just say that you would like someone to see.

But no one had seen it.

There was the darkness of the night, only the rain continued.

"Our employees were all crying," she said. "And the question that they're asking, especially those who are not white, 'Are we safe?' Women are asking, 'Are we safe?' LGBT people are asking, 'Are we safe?' I never thought I would have to answer those questions."
      --- Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo

In other news, PepsiCo plans to triple their mental-health plan, and supply all employees with diversity crayons and people-of-coloring books.

If you drag URLs around on a Mac, you get .webloc files. If you drag text around (successfully…), you get .textClipping files. Getting data back out of them can be annoying; some applications treat them as attachments, and most insist on grabbing the rich-text version of a clipping rather than the plain text.

webloc () {
  /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'print URL' "$1"
}
clipping () {
  DeRez -noResolve -only utf8 "$1" |
    perl -e 'while (<>) {
      chomp;
      next unless s/^\s+\$"([0-9A-F ]+)".*$/$1/;
      tr/ //d;
      $x.= $_;
    }
    print pack("H*",$x),"\n"'
}

(via)

Related.

[Update: More than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland didn’t vote in Oregon]

…how much faster home Internet gets when you replace a flaky switch. It’s annoying that I had to drive to three different stores to find one (Office Max even had PoE-capable and 24-port switches, but I only needed a basic 8-port today).

I went from 1.4 Mbps down/0.88 up to 58/12; one of the nice things about having an OpenBSD router is that I can run iperf3 on it and verify that it’s not Comcast’s fault before opening a ticket.