Daily Archives: October 10, 2015
Dang Lazy Mule . . .
Or Our Budding Bandido.
I could get used to this. Yesterday and the day before, we had 72 vehicles coming in the gate. Today we had 55. And with the temp finally making it to 83° with sunny skies, it was just about perfect.
We were told yesterday that all the cleanup and completion work here should take about two months. So if that holds true, and it may not, then that would mean we would be here until we’re ready to leave the 22nd of November.
We hope.
We’ve also heard that when things get going here, they might be working a 12 hour day.
We hope.
But then when I ask one of the company men this afternoon if they would be taking the day off on the Monday Columbus Day holiday, he laughed and said, “Hell, we’re lucky we get Thanksgiving and Christmas off.”
So I’m not putting a big bet on a 12 hour day.
This is probably the best gate we’ve had. Close to town, good cell/Internet service, nice surroundings, friendly owner, and not an over-abundance of traffic. Wish they were all like this.
I mentioned recently about my WordPress login page now requiring me to ‘Prove my Humanity’ by adding two numbers together and then entering the total on the screen along with my login name and password. I figured this was to cut down on automated scripts trying to hack your password and get into the site.
Why I don’t know. Of course there’s no credit card data or anything like that. I guess they could do some sort of malware injection through one of the blog posts, but Godaddy monitors that kind of thing pretty closely. And if they did manage to hack into the site, I could immediately regain control by calling Godaddy and giving them my secret password.
But it’s highly unlikely that they could guess my password anyway, as it’s 10 characters of gobbledygook, letters, numbers, upper case, lower case, and symbols. So good luck with that.
But with all that, it’s not slowing down hacking attempts either. I mean you’re talking about an automated script, written to hack in to WordPress sites. So how hard is to program your script to add the two numbers together and type it in the little box along with your name and password attempt.
It’s a computer. It can add two numbers. That’s what computers do. Compute.
And you can see from a few days ago, how well it’s working.
The attempts started a couple of minutes after 9am and continued until a little after 10:30.
Each one of these attempts means three failed logins, and then that IP address is locked out for 4 hours. Here are the lockout settings I’m using.
Then after a second 4 hour lockout, that IP address is locked out for 48 hours. So these attempts are coming from a lot of different IP addresses, and mostly from Eastern Europe. Go figure.
Landon, Lowell, and Brandi went down to Friendswood to visit Chris, Linda, and Miss Piper today, and Landon, our budding Bandido, got what I imagine was his first motorcycle ride from his Uncle Chris.
And of course every biker needs his blue dragon along for support.
Looks like he really enjoyed it too.
I guess anticipating the possibility of a 12 hour shift, I now have a 12 hour Mule. Or maybe it’s just lazy. But whatever the problem, the second Mighty Mule Driveway Alarm system I installed to catch vehicles leaving the pad, just won’t work at night.
It works fine in the daytime, especially now that I moved it closer the other day, but sometime during the night, it just quits.
It’s hard tell exactly when it quits, because we don’t get a lot of traffic at night. But at some point I just notice it’s not working. But the other one coming in to us just keeps chugging alone.
Tomorrow I’m going to try moving it closer again to see if that helps. Otherwise, I’ll try swapping the transmitters. If nothing works, I’ll call the company.
Dang Mule.
On a final note, I had a number of blog readers, including Jan, wondering about the ‘Jewish vampire’ reference in yesterday’s blog.
I seem to remember it from one of those comedy vampire movies back in the late 70’s – early 80’s. In my mind I see Richard Benjamin confronting a vampire, and triumphantly holding out a cross to ward the vampire off. The vampire laughs, calls him a ‘putz’ in a Jewish accent, and begins to hit him with the cross. Benjamin, realizes his mistake, and starts frantically reaching in his shirt, before finally pulling out a ‘Star of David’ just in time to save the damsel in distress.
________________________________________________________
Thought for the Day:
“Trust your neighbor, but brand your cattle.” – old cowboy proverb
adfasdf
