So today I was out walking the dogs Ciarra the Husky and Her Majesty Greta the Schnauzer. For a few weeks, along the route, I noticed that some utility company had poured a small concrete pad and FPL had installed a meter on the pad. Sticking up out of the pad were two large plastic conduit-looking protrusions covered with duct tape.

Just what this installation was was a  mystery until today. Then I saw the little orange flags stuck in the ground. Yesss! Fiber baby! It looks like AT&T, our favorite purveyor of invasion of privacy, is laying fiber-optic cable throughout our little town of Melbourne Beach, FL.

Some family I have in West Palm Beach say that they have telephone service, pay TV and 10Mbit/sec internet service delivered to their home by AT&T. Whaaaat?! Where do I sign up?

I can’t wait to see what Brighthouse Cable (the local cable company) does now that competition like this is coming their way. In my opinion, they have been totally slack in realizing the potential in their coaxial cable. I don’t have exact numbers but there is A LOT of bandwidth in coaxial cable and Brighthouse has been wasting it by nickle-and-diming their customers while trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of them.

Instead of this, they should have been upgrading their head-end equipment to provide more and better serivces. As with a lot of things these days, time will tell.

The other day I purchased a very non-standard video card on eBay. Interestingly enough the seller was in the next town over from mine so I decided to save the $12 shipping fee and go pick it up myself.

Suffice it to say, I’m never doing that again!

So, I spoke with the seller guy on the phone to set up a time when I could come pick it up. Assuming that most people work for a living I suggested that I come by after work. He said that was fine. The next day, I got a call from him at about 1:00pm saying that he’ll be home the rest of the day.

Hmmm. Ok, well I work from home so I went to pick it up at about 2:00pm. The guy’s house was in a decidedly “industrial” part of town which was strange but whatever. Everyone has to live somewhere right? Next when I walked up to the house, the front door was wide open and there were some people just “hanging out” watching tv. Remember, this is 2:00pm on a Wednesday.

Once I got into the living room there was all this junk piled up in various places about the room. There were stereos, CB radios, wiring harnesses, etc. The place looked like the present crew either cleaned out a pawn shop or just got back from a burglary.

When I finally met the seller it all came together.

The guy was totally disheveled looking, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and dressed in some tattered jeans and a t-shirt that was WAY past its prime. Needless to say, I grabbed that video card and booked it out of there. Not to mention that I felt like I needed a shower when I got back to the car. Yick!

So how is eBay like sausage you ask? Well eBay works well and you can get some incredible deals but you don’t want to see what happens behind the scenes. Kind of like seeing sausage being made. It tastes great but all you want to see of it is the nice display case at the grocery before you eat it. Again…yick!

So, recently I’ve been made aware, by checking my web stats and staring at web server log files for far too long, that there are certain enterprising spammers (bots?) that use anonymous proxy servers to do their dirty work.

The use of anonymous proxy servers in this way is rarely allowed by the proxy owner and tends to deplete bandwidth and processor resources rarely with any return on the proxy owner’s investment. Spammers typically use automated methods to use these resources.

Because of this, I will be implementing a CAPTCHA type system to verify the “humanness” of my proxy users. Don’t get me wrong, I know that CAPTCHA systems are not perfect but I doubt that spammers in general are going to build software into their automated spamming systems to defeat my human test. You can see an example of this type of system on this anonymous proxy site.