To my surprise, joining the TUHS team was not as
quiet as I expected. Somehow I spent most of the day
chasing up things, most of which are confidential.
The TUHS issue wasn't made any easier by the
fact that my nameds kept going away. I had guessed yesterday that 12 hourly restarts
meant 6 hours without named, but that's assuming a random distribution. Started a
loop instead:
=== root@lax (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 155 -> while :; do /usr/local/sbin/named -4 -f -u bind -c /usr/local/etc/namedb/named.conf; date; done Abort trap
Sun 12 Apr 2026 02:16:16 UTC
Abort trap
Sun 12 Apr 2026 02:19:33 UTC
...
Abort trap
Sun 12 Apr 2026 13:14:41 UTC
All in all I had 91 crashes in 11 hours, an average of one crash every 7¼ minutes. But then
it stopped. Wouldn't it be nice to know what was causing it?
Cordon bleu for
dinner tonight. Yvonne had bought some Woolworths veal “sizzle steak” for the purpose.
Not a good idea, it seems. Their quality leaves much to be desired, they're too thick even
after hammering, and they're also too tough. Not to be repeated; either good quality veal
or chicken breast, though I personally don't like the latter as much.
It�s time to reverify your personal details
We�re committed to protecting you and the wider community from identity theft, fraud and other financial crime.
From time to time, we need to check in to ensure your personal details are up to date. This is a legal requirement sometimes known as �Know Your Customer� that helps us keep you and the community safer.
The message claimed to be ANZ, a bank with whom I have an account. Is it genuine? One of their settings is the name
by which they should call me, Greg and not GREGORY. And clearly their markup is broken. A
quick look at the source shows:
<meta http-equiv=3D"Content-Type" content=3D"text/html; charset=3DUTF=
-8">
...
It=92s time to reverify your personal details
The =3D are because it was Quoted-printable, and it represents ", which is valid. But the text
contains the character =92 (0x92), which is not in the UTF-8 character set (it's a Microsoftism),
and firefox chooses to
represent it as �. All indications that it's some kind of scam, as does the
message itself:
But the message came from what appears to be ANZ, and it was sent to my private ANZ email
address. Could ANZ be that broken? Yes, in my experience. That's one of the several
reasons why I'm migrating elsewhere. They wanted me to prove my identity with documentation
in a manner that might become clear as I progressed:
OK, go to my onlie profile. First step: I was presented with a QR code. What can I do with that on my
computer? And how do I know what it is? Fired up hirse, my old phone, and took a
look:
For some reason one of the mice on Yvonne's computer, lagune.lemis.com was jittery: the cursor ran back and forth a few pixels
several times a second, though it didn't wander. Maybe for that reason the screen never
blanked, and Yvonne had to turn off the monitor when not using the machine.
Took a look this morning. Nothing obvious. Stopped and restarted X. No help. Disconnected and reconnected the mice. The
jittering stopped, but it still doesn't blank. Why not?
I think that it's really time to replace the hardware.
It's been two years since my cataract operations. No glasses any more? Anything but! I don't
have any accomodation any more, so I have:
A pair of normal multifocals for general use.
A pair of single focus glasses with +0.25 dioptre (4 m) formulation for watching
TV.
A pair of single focus glasses with +1.5 dioptre (0.67 m) formulation for my computer.
A pair of single focus glasses with +2.5 dioptre (0.4 m) formulation for reading.
A pair of single focus glasses with +5 dioptre (0.2 m) formulation for close-up work.
And of course I'm continually mislaying glasses. Today it was the computer glasses. But
this time, despite repeated searching, there was no sign of them. And the window was pretty
tight: from just before taking the dogs for a walk until just after the return. I don't
take the glasses with me when I walk the dogs, though I did check if they were on the road
somewhere. Where can they be?
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
