Hello guys, I’m back again. This time with yet another host, yet another country, yet another layout. I seem to refresh myself whenever I get things back on its feet. This time my good friend Marc Kaldenhoff was kind enough to provide me with some excellent hosting space in Germany, on a decently beefed server. As some of you know, I’ve been unemployed for some time now, while I wait to land my next job. I’ve got a few really promising opportunities that I’ll get more feedback on within the not to distant future. But being out of a job also means that you tend to get a stoppage in income. This means that you have to prioritize what to spend money on and what not to. Unfortunately, my old server had to go as a result of this. This was not something I wanted to do, but was forced to.

During this time, I’m very happy that I was contacted by quite a few of my old time readers asking me what was going on and asking me if there was anything they could do to help me. I want to send a big thanks to you all for this offer, and that you took the time of your precious time to ask what was going on. It really meant a lot to me. And it also proved to me that I actually had readers just aching for more content. And there will be more content, one coming rather soon. In the process of this new move, I’ve gone over to using Google Apps as my e-mail provider. I’ll lead you through the steps of setting this up, and hope that you will find it useful.

I also want to send out a thanks to EditDNS for their great and free DNS service, a service that suits me just fine. Good availability, decent user interface and responsive. I used to use them as a back name server service, but after I had to take my old server offline, I’ve gone over to use them as primary name servers, which works just as great. Though, being the geek that I am, I somewhat miss editing the Bind zone files manually in a shell. But as long as it works, everything is fine isn’t it? :)

If there’s anything you’d like to see on this site, please don’t hesitate contacting me with wishes on what you’d like to see. If I find the idea(s) worth writing about, I will do it. I’m always open for more ideas and to broaden my horizon.

Last but not least I want to thank you, my readers, for staying with me and for the fact that you keep coming back. I hope that you enjoy your stay and that I’ll see you frequently in my comments.

Cheers.

As some of you noticed, my blog just vanished from the face of the earth. And it did, for quite some time too. It was gone well over two weeks. Because of matters out of my control, the server this blog (and other domains) was hosted on was taken offline. But not only was it taken offline, after some time, the whole server was deleted. And yes, I didn’t keep any backups! When will I ever learn?

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Even though I have quite a decent solution running on my mail server to catch spam, some spam mails still evade my spam filter. Quite often I find the spam mails I get to be quite entertaining, and outright amazing. The stuff you get offered would be a rater long list, but for those of you that don’t get much spam, here are a few of them

• Cheap Viagra
  Keeps you going and going and going. Pretty much like Duracell batteries.
• Penis enlarger/extensions
  Increase your penis to the size of an elephant’s penis.
• Get your hair back pills
  Got a bald spot? Fear not, these pills will get you hair which even the most hardcore black metal artist would envy.
• Refinance your mortgage
  Yeah by doing this you will save thousands of $$$’s, we’ll even throw in a free Ceiko digital sportswatch. (they were out of Seiko)
• Want to lose weight; just click here
  We’ll give you a range of pills which will get you slim in no time, when the package arrives on your doorstep it’s just a text book that tells you to get off your fat arse and get out to enjoy nature.

Wanna help out a poor fella; “man, I just lost all my money” or “I know this guy that lives down in XXXXXX who seriously needs some money” or some other really sad story that urges you to donate as much money as possible to help them out. Yeah right! You’re broke, but you still afford internet access do you? Hah, pull the other one.

But recently spammers have been offering stuff that I never thought possible. Spammers actually spamming trying to sell you anti spam software. Oh my, what nerve! I hope they burn slowly on an open fire when they get in hell for all eternity. Just today I received two of those.

When I thought I had seen it all, I get a mail asking me if I wanted to be a minister. If I enrolled to their engenious program I could become a minister within two weeks, and after passing an online exam I would be able to perform weddings, funerals, baptisms, forgive people their sins and what made me laugh so hard I almost wet my pants; visit correctional facilities. Now, just getting the privilege to visit correctional facilities almost made me get my credit card out and enroll to this great course. Just think of that, skip years and years of theology schooling and be able to skip to the fun part. Oh my, I’m sooo thrilled! Really, I am! NOT!

But here is where it starts to get funny, just the other day I registered a domain name for a friend of mine, as a gift. Just a couple of days after I had registered this domain, I receive a mail from a spammer asking me if I wanted to make money of my newly registered domain. As he so nicely put it; “I noticed through my searches that you had registered the domain ‘pumpingirony.net’ and I was wondering if you wanted to make some money on your domain”. I was going all like “what the fuck!”. Given the number of domains that are registered daily, no person is able to check up which domains were newly registered. So my bet is that the fuckers (read: the registrar) I used to register the domain leaked information to a spammer, which then again contacted me. This pisses me off. Spammers are the scum of the earth. If you are a spammer, and read this post I want you to know this. If I ever get my hands on one of you twats, I’ll cut off your balls and roast them on an open fire. That’s the least I could do.

Woohoo!

Site is now live, finally, I’ve been saying for months and months now that I was gonna get this site live, but you all know me. I can at times be extremely lazy. But I thought it was about time, finally got some details with my host sorted out and since it’s my birthday in two days time I kinda consider it to be my own birthday present.

Sometimes you get stuck with some problem that you just can’t figure out. Your server is up and should work perfectly, but does it? Hell no, there is some odd error that you just can’t figure out. In my case, it was a problem with my mail server. I could send mails, but no way in hell was I able to get any mails. At first, I thought the problem was my spam filter that stopped them, but looked through the logs and couldn’t find anything. But then I got to think of something. The domain my private server is on, does not use a real host. It uses what is defined as a CNAME, which means it points to another domain name. So what happened was that whenever someone tried to mail me, the mail got to my server but was rejected as being to the wrong domain since most e-mail clients translates the domain name into it’s real name. So all I had to do to get it working, was to enable my mail server to accept mails for that domain and everything worked like a charm.