DesertDwarf.com : Ric Fischer’s Blog

My Cousin Ty

Ty came to town. He’s been working over in Iraq doing the same stuff he did in the Marines, but in a different place and without wearing a uniform.

He’s a pretty good guy. He has a sweetheart of a girlfriend named Stephanie. He’ll be back for another visit in December and then he’ll be done with the Iraq thing in February. That’s great news!

This afternoon, Ty, Stephanie, and I went to see Hancock. I very much enjoyed the movie. But, I’m easy to please. Plop me down in front of a good story and I’m transported.

Ty, Stephanie, dad, Uncle Mark, Aunt Barb, and, as a surprise to Ty, my cousin Dan all went to Carrabba‘s for dinner. As always, the food was excellent and the service (even at only “6 and a half cylinders”) provided by our waiter, Jason, was very good. We went to the one in Chandler, AZ.

Thanks for visiting us, Ty.

For pictures, please visit my Gallery.

2008 07 05 Ric Fischer Family
Personal Comments (0) Permalink

Florida - Parte Dos

OK, so I’m cheating a bit. I planned on doing Parte Dos while I was still in Florida last month, but I forgot. I was having too good a time.

But, this time, I took pictures with my new Canon PowerShot SD890 IS Digital Elph. I’ll (hopefully) post some pictures later.

2008 06 21 Ric Fischer Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Florida - Parte Uno

Yesterday, I flew out to Florida and spent the evening with my girlfriend, Dilia, and her family. It was very nice. They cooked me a wonderful meal with thick-sliced beef medallions marinated in Cuban spices (not hot, just flavorful), real mashed potatoes, lettuce salad, and fresh bread. It was simple and tasty. Just the kind of meal I like.

Today, Dilia and I are going to the beach. In fact, we’re leaving in just a couple of minutes. I didn’t bring a camera, but hopefully Dilia will have a camera along.

2008 05 15 Ric Fischer Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Qwest Denies Allows Their Customers

My client finally succeeded in reaching the right person in the correct ivory tower on the proper mountain and they were kind enough to put my server on a whitelist. They gave no explanation as to how my server ended up being on their blacklist. My suggestion to Qwest customes in the same boat: If you can, switch to someone else. If you can’t switch, bug them until they fix it for you.

2008 03 08 Ric Fischer Hosting Comments (0) Permalink

Spelling Checkers - Good or Bad?

Some people are spelling-challenged. I get it. I’m one of those rotten ones who has no trouble with spelling. (Typos are a different matter.) Whether I was a kid and in school or as an adult at work, I’ve often been asked to verify the spelling of something. For some strange reason, while reading a manual at work, I thought of an interesting spelling possibility. If you’ve been around computers long enough, you’ve heard of the troubles that computer spelling checkers can cause. I should note, however, that nothing I read actually made me think of this.

A friend and I had a fun discussion many years ago about pages with “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”. We were making fun of those manuals and their authors who had written the phrase on pages. After all, if you put that on a page, it is no longer blank. The statement is a self-fulfilling untruth.

I wondered if a spelling checker might have ever decided that a misspelled “intentionally” had helped the author by correcting it to “internationally.” Distressingly, as of this writing, Google shows there are 47 pages with this exact mistake. There’s even one with “this page intently left blank.”

If I think of it, I’ll email the those sites and mention the mistakes.

Update (3/8/08): The count for “internationally” is now down to only 27 and the one that had “intently” is gone. Darn!

2008 01 09 Ric Fischer Criticisms Comments (0) Permalink

Cloverfield - 1-18-08

I couldn’t help myself. I just had to do it. I hopped into my time machine, zipped forward to January 18th, borrowed my car [makes a note to remind myself to fill up on gas on the way home from work that day], drove down to Arizona Mills, checked out the time listings for Cloverfield at Harkins Theatres, picked a 7:05 PM showing, bought a large ~~Pepsi~~ Dr. Pepper (why the heck they changed from Coke, I have no idea…it upsets me greatly) in their souvenir cup, went to theatre #11, sat down in the center of the first row behind the railing, and enjoyed the movie immensely.

I’ll go see it again sometime after the 18th, only this time I’ll try to see it with friends and/or family.

2007 12 22 Ric Fischer Movies Comments (0) Permalink

Qwest Denies Their Customers

Hi Qwest,

I run a small web and email hosting service. For some reason, Qwest is blocking emails from my server to any qwest.net customers. An example of the returned message is below.

One of my customers has been repeatedly trying to get you folks to fix this. Her company uses Qwest.net. She gave me permission to mention her email address so you could attempt to look up any remarks in their file: xxxxxxxxx@qwest.net

She’s been told by Qwest that you don’t actually run your own blacklisting service. However, I’m reasonably certain you must have your own whitelisting service. Please add my server’s IP to your whitelist. My SMTP server is not an open relay and it never has been. All SMTP connections require fully-authenticated logins.

In addition, I can’t find a single blacklist out there that has my server listed. So, if you’re not running your own blacklist, I’d sure like to know which blacklist service has my server listed.

I see here that you are rated at the top on the JD Power and Associates site: http://www.jdpower.com/telecom/ratings/high-speed-internet-service-provider-ratings/west/1/1

I wish you well in keeping that high rating.

I’ve also blogged about this on my blog at http://www.desertdwarf.com/

Thanks for reading!

Ric Fischer

———— Original Message ————

Subject:	Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender
Date:	Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:03:23 -0700
From:	Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@serv01.desertdwarf.com>
To:	ric@desertdwarf.com

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  xxxxxxxxxx@qwest.net
    SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<xxxxxxxx@qwest.net>:
    host mx1.qwest.net [207.109.18.195]: 554 5.7.1 Service unavailable;
    Client host [208.116.0.66] blocked using bl.qwest.net;
    IP 208.116.0.66 is locally blacklisted

——— This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ———

Return-path: <ric@desertdwarf.com>
Received: from ip7x-2xx-1xx-1xx.ph.ph.cox.net ([7x.2xx.1xx.1xx] helo=[192.168.0.177])
	by serv01.desertdwarf.com with esmtpa (Exim 4.68)
	(envelope-from <ric@desertdwarf.com>)
	id 1J58sl-0008Dr-0m
	for xxxxxxxxx@qwest.net; Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:03:23 -0700
Message-ID: <4769B11F.2070503@desertdwarf.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:02:39 -0700
From: Ric Fischer <ric@desertdwarf.com>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Windows/20071031)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: xxxxxxxxx@qwest.net
Subject: Just a test
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hi Tj,

Just testing Qwest.

Thanks for not reading.

Ric

2007 12 19 Ric Fischer Hosting Comments (0) Permalink

Re-Blog

I started over…sort of. I’m using WordPress instead of MovableType. The latter is too commercial for a single-user blogger such as myself and the former is fun and exciting.

MovableType allowed a bazillion (or less) comments which were spam. I’ve cleared all that rubbish and things are all clean inside and out.

Don’t be surprised if I actually blog about something besides this blog.

And, welcome back (to me, to you, to the blog).

2007 12 13 Ric Fischer Blog Comments (0) Permalink

United States Marine Corps Birthday

I have a cousin that’s currently serving in the United States Marine Corps. At the moment, he’s overseas. He’s a great guy. My family and I moved from Minneapolis to Phoenix in December of 1977 when I was 10 and my cousin was 5. One of our fondest memories of the week-long trip is, just after backing out of the driveway in Minneapolis, my cousin asked, “Uncle Jim, how many more minutes?” He asked that question over and over throughout the trip and, somehow, we were never annoyed with him.

In 1775 on November 10th, the United States’ Continental Congress formed the Continental Marines. On this, their 229th birthday, I wish the Marines a happy birthday. I thank them for their service and their unending faithfulness.

I think it would be fitting to give everyone reading this post a chance to read the entire Marine Corps’ Hymn:

From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli,
We fight our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.
First to fight for right and freedom, and to keep our honor clean;
We are proud to claim the title of United States Marine.

Our Flag’s unfurled to every breeze from dawn to setting sun.
We have fought in every clime and place, where we could take a gun.
In the snow of far off northern lands and in sunny tropic scenes,
You will find us always on the job, the United States Marines.

Here’s health to you and to our Corps, which we are proud to serve.
In many a strife we’ve fought for life and never lost our nerve.
If the Army and the Navy ever look on heaven’s scenes,
They will find the streets are guarded by United States Marines.

2004 11 10 Ric Fischer Family Comments (360) Permalink

Gmail Skinning

As if Gmail isn’t cool enough all by itself…

Mihai Parparita has come up with a method for skinning Gmail. This only works in Mozilla-based browsers because Internet Explorer doesn’t have the feature-set nor the compatibility with standards to be able to take advantage of this properly.

For those that don’t know, skinning is the action of customizing the look-and-feel of a program, website, or other interface. An easily skinnable interface allows you to change the skin without needing to learn how to make skins.

An excellent resource for finding out about skinnable programs and skins for those programs is deviantART.

2004 11 06 Ric Fischer Computers Comments (349) Permalink

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