Randall Denley on Stephen the Stimulator

Says Randall:

An unnamed "senior government official" says former tightwad Stephen Harper will be borrowing $64 billion over two years and going on a spending bender the likes of which we haven't seen. Just to be clear, and not to get the unnamed official into trouble, he/she said there will be a $64-billion deficit. The tightwad and bender stuff are just things that we know.

There's also rumors of a tax cut for you and me.

So, to sum up:

• The government is going to spend lots of money it doesn't have; and
  
• plans to pay it back with less of a tax base.
  

All this from the same clowns who, the day before the election, swore up and down that there was no economic crisis, a deficit would never happen, and aren't those Liberals evil for suggesting otherwise?

The voters got the government they deserve. If you vote for idiots, don't be surprised when that's who ends up running the country.

Lotto Update

Back on 9 January, I cashed in my free ticket from last time, and got another $4 quick-pick for the draw ($10 million I think). And while the $4 I spent of my own money got me nothing, my free ticket has earned me... another free ticket.

So that makes my net since tracking this:

• Spent: $8
  
• Win: $4
  
• Net: -$4

So we're leaking money, but we're not doing it a too extreme a rate.

Anti-Spam.

So, having fixed the mailflow yesterday, and done the following things:

• set up greylisting on the primary MX


• set up greylisting on the secondary MX


• configured sendmail to bounce the two top fake addresses that spammers use when faking my domain

...today's spam count in my inbox is 1. One spam. No bounces, or challenge-responses, or postmasters, or what have you.

I just checked in my gmail "spam" folder, and there are only two messages there, one of which I put there because we no longer do business with the store that sent this message.

While I am sure that things will get worse again, I'm pretty pleased that I've been able to make things a bit better so simply.

...well, nuts to me.

I take back everything bad I said or hinted at in the previous post.

Seems that when your $ORIGIN is .com, and your MX record is

MX 10 mail.xdroop.com

...the internet obediently tries to send mail to mail.xdroop.com.com, even though it doesn't exist.

I can't believe I missed that.

Literally fifteen seconds after fixing that and pushing it, the spam is flowing again.

So that means everything bad that's happened during my stay with Tera-Byte has been my fault. They have been a perfect host during my stay -- I never had to think about them or worry about them. And I think I got good value during my stay too.

...well, nuts.

Turns out that when you tell the Tera-Byte people "I'll just let the hosting expire", they interpret that as "delete it now".

So for the next two days, parts of the internet will have the wrong registration information and will be looking at tera-byte for DNS information on my zone. Except that they've deleted said information, so I am off the air to parts of the internet for a little while.

Moral of the story: don't talk about letting the hosting expire until AFTER the TTL on the DNS record has passed since the time you change the name servers of record.

Corollary: start the migration off of a hosted platform more than three days before the hosting is due to expire.

Nice.

Overall I am still happy with my time at Tera-Byte and would recommend them to anyone asking about shared hosting.

Update: it looks like my own version of my zone is missing some magic that Tera-Byte uses to decide if it will let systems relay mail for me. When I telnet to their mail scanner, it refuses to relay. So I'm probably screwed until the zone records time out, which means all my mail will come as a flood on Sunday some time.

Things To Do

My Tera-Byte hosting is up for renewal, and I've decided not to renew it. The main point of having the hosting was to host the weblog; now everything which isn't on the wiki computer is at Google, so there isn't much point.

I am keeping the domain name, though.

This is all a scramble because the renewal is the 4th of January, and I only got notified about the renewal on 25 December.

So I have to:

• set up new DNS hosts


• copy the content from Tera-Byte


• set up the wiki computer to re-serve the Tera-Byte content while I figure out a longer term strategy for those pieces


• set up the primary and secondary MX relaying


• set up anti-spam on the wiki (since that will be doing primary mail)

Longer term it might still be a good idea to move all mail to Google Domains. I looked at that a while back but didn't like it. The Google Domains only offered 2GB per mailbox; meanwhile Gmail was giving me over 6GB (and currently it is 7.2GB, of which I am using about 300MB). Also I have to admit I am a bit disappointed with the anti-spam on Gmail, I am still having to deal with a bunch of spam messages every day I look at that inbox... although it is true that at least I don't have to keep hand-holding the antispam like I used to have to.