Vampire Dream

Today was Friday the Thirteenth, after all.

The night before, I went to bed late, around 0500, and had a nightmare that derived from "True Blood." Vampires were stalking my friends and I, and we were hiding out in different houses to escape, but somehow they would find us. I don't remember blood-drinking, a vampire-myth that I always found implausible, but they drained our life-force by painful touch. Each vampire had marked one of us for his own. In our absence, each vampire would starve, because they could only feed upon us and no one else. Starvation caused the vampire to lose their looks and become hideous, monstrous, savage-looking, which made them scarier. When they fed upon us, they recovered their looks. I remember the dreadful knocking on the door and then the door being opened and the monster coming in to find his prey and feed.

I awoke and found it most curious that I was dreaming about vampires, but then again, I had spent much of the night before playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and my player-character happens to be a Demonspawn Necromancer that had mastered a spell known as Vampiric Draining. I achieved final victory with this character in "The Pits" scenario of Sprint.

Later in the day, I found myself alone in a big empty building that is supposedly haunted by a noisy ghost. My friends have sworn that they have seen and heard this ghost. Of course I am skeptical, but I kept my skepticism to myself, because I have learned that people who believe in ghosts do not like to hear the opinions of those that do not. It is the same with religion. No believer really wants to hear the opinions of an atheist, especially not in person. In social settings, my object is to get along with people, not to persuade them of my beliefs. This blog is like the vault for my private opinions and philosophy.

I was asked if I felt scared to be working in the haunted building all alone, and I replied I was not. I thought to myself that if I saw a ghost, it would be a very good thing, because it would serve as a refutation of my opinions, and I would welcome the evidence. I would not say that a ghost is proof of the afterlife, because it could be many other things, but I would like very much to see one, even if I would feel frightened. I am willing to feel frightened if the reward is seeing something far out of the ordinary that will give me new knowledge. There was a time in my life when I called upon deities and certain supernatural beings to reveal themselves to me in any fashion whatsoever, but they did not choose to trifle with me. A supernatural event might have led me to belief, but such did not come.

I did not hurry and was not timid when I worked tonight. But I did not see or hear a ghost nor anything out of the ordinary. I believe the human brain is very creative and imaginative, and sometimes I wonder about ghosts, and I am willing to meet one, but I never have, and so I do not believe in ghosts.

Twenty Pounds

With age comes the retirement of the pleasures of youth and discovery of other pleasures, those more suited to age. I came to the conclusion today that I need to lose twenty pounds. It was like a revelation to me, a certainty that that was the right thing to do. I feel that my old ticker will be better off for it. Having given up alcohol, the next logical step is to abandon candy and sweet drinks. People give these things to me sometimes, especially at work. I have to learn to either say no or else dispose of the unwanted gifts discreetly.

The Folly of Volunteering

I need to tone down my enthusiasm. I often find that I link to a site, promote it in forums, recommend it to friends--all for free naturally--and then sometime later, the site changes policy and jabs a thorn in my side (userstyles), or deletes my account without warning (project honeypot), or goes down for good (the 'tree). I have no luck with my recommendations AT ALL. I have no luck with volunteering my time or talents. Usually when I volunteer, I wind up in the end feeling like a fool. I think the best thing to recommend is a dead author. That way, one will never be disappointed.

Homage to Ibuprofen

I have a secret. My favorite drug is ibuprofen. It makes me feel so good. As far as I'm concerned, the fountain of youth is ibuprofen. That and a competent, non-drowsy antihistamine are the primary drugs I would need on a desert island.

Namecheap, the Worst Web Hosting Company

Namecheap, Inc. just sent me an invoice for--well, I don't know what. They expect me to pay a bunch of money because, I guess, they need money. I haven't hosted with them in years and my domain is no longer registered with them. I'm not surprised their morals are amiss. Namecheap is possibly the worst web host in existence. Their service was lousy, with unexplained bizarre errors, and their tech support, which I frequently had to use, was foreign, incompetent, unresponsive, and uncaring. I was never so happy as when I abandoned my Namecheap account and moved to a different host, even though it cost me financially to do so. Namecheat is more like it.

The host I recommend is Bluehost, a class act all around. They may be Mormon-owned for all I know, but they do web hosting right, and on the extremely rare occasion that I have needed their tech support, I have talked to real, live American techies on the telephone who know what they are doing. I've never been talking to a Bluehost representative without feeling like they are intelligent and, perhaps more importantly, care. I've used Bluehost for many years. I don't know of any other web host that is as good as they are, although it's true I haven't tried many. Bluehost is even recommended by Wordpress, which I think is very impressive in itself. Their founder runs the entire company on Mac or Linux, scorning Microsoft. I've followed his blog off and on through the years. I doubt we would agree on politics, but as far as computers go, I think we are in agreement.

For the past couple days, my site on Bluehost has become inaccessible around midnight every day without explanation and stays slow until the morning. So I can't recommend Bluehost without reservation. I need to become more cautious about my enthusiasm for things. It seems like the very moment that I praise something, that's when I discover its shortcoming. In the case of Bluehost, I discovered their nightly slowdown about the same time that I renewed for two years. However, I think that this may have been a temporary glitch, possibly due to Wordpress attackers.

If this is the only post any visitor to my blog ever reads, then so much the better. Namecheap caused me hardship with their unexplained errors and incompetent service.

7/30/2013 Update: This post against Namecheap has been attacked on over ten separate occasions by spam comments linking to malware sites that try to infect people's computers with viruses. My policy now is that whenever that happens, this post will be updated to be the front-page, very first post; or else I may post another message about Namecheap and its sleazy, unethical business practices. There's no way that Namecheap can get out of their well-deserved poor reputation. They are going to have to live with it, no matter how many spammers they hire.

I Like

Usually I blog about things I hate. Today, for variety, I blog about things I like.

I like to watch drag, dance, comedy, drama, and documentaries, not necessarily in that order.

I like to fool around with linux, even though I'm the only one I know that does.

I like to play weird, off-the-wall openings in Chess. The weirder, the better, in my book.

I like to cooperate with people and give them good advice. It may be that the only purpose in life is to spread a little bit of wisdom and sunshine here and there.

I like to get paid for doing work that I enjoy, rare enough though that is.

I like to have a lot of that sort of work.

I like to play some of the most difficult races in Dungeon Crawl, such as troll and mummy, just to see if I can win with one of these "impossible" races.

I like to fight crime by working on security for web sites.

I like to discover that strangers are actually good people with good intentions, rather than something else.

I like to avoid complications.

I like reading.

I like cats.

I prefer winter to summer, cold to hot, spicy to plain, and bitter to sweet.

I like zombie movies, and I've finally come around to liking Game of Thrones.

Wordpress Security Vs. Wordpress Search Ranking

Wordpress security is sometimes at loggerheads with a site's search ranking. There are many tricks and tips recommended by security wonks that will actually decrease a site search ranking, such as banning all hits to xmlrpc.php, or disallowing various paths in robots.txt. I've experimented over the last several days and learned what works and what is counter-productive. I do not believe it is wise to ban hits to xmlrpc.php, and I do not think web admins should second-guess Google when it comes to directing robots. Google knows what it is doing, for the most part, and additional rules make Google angry, in a manner of speaking. I watched my site plummet from #2 in search rankings for a particular term to #5 after adding a lot of rules to robots.txt. Needless to say, I yanked those rules right out!

There is such a thing as having enough or even too much security. With regular backups of the database and the files, I am not inclined to follow all of the recommendations set forth by Perishable Press, one of the few sites I regularly follow. I view Perishable's advice in the way of guidelines and educational material. The author has a knack for explaining technical issues without resorting to jargon, with a humorous style reminiscent of Stephen King--the American vernacular, gotta love it--and he offers excellent examples on .htaccess. He is my "go-to" site when I am confused about arcane .htaccess syntax, which is often, because .htaccess syntax is unintuitive. I use some of his security tips, but not all, because some cause problems. I am also concerned that perhaps other problems may be created that I cannot detect, problems that may become evident in the future after I add a new plug-in or there's a new update to Wordpress.

Perishable's .htaccess code is sometimes compressed in a way that makes it difficult to debug or understand what is being done. Perhaps that is a form of showing off or maybe the intention is for the code to execute faster, but I'd prefer to sacrifice efficiency for readability and ease of maintenance.

I am no stranger to compressing code. I won a little contest back in the '80s, getting my name and program published in a national magazine. The challenge was to code a BASIC program that did something cool in only one line. Each BASIC statement could be separated by a colon (:), and GOTO 0 was allowed. But was this a useful or helpful skill? Maybe. This sort of experience may have helped me become a better maintainer of other people's spaghetti-code programs, which comprised a large portion of my career. I rarely had difficulty finding and fixing bugs.

I think Apache wrote the language for .htaccess back when every byte mattered, and in order to save a couple bytes, they made the language cryptic and anti-human. I much prefer languages such as COBOL, batch/script, or BASIC for their sheer readability. I never was a fan of C++, even if it is twice as fast. In my opinion, buy a faster computer, if you need speed. When programming languages are easier to understand and to code, then greater deeds may be wrought by human minds and with far fewer bugs. That's my philosophy about programming. I have indeed worked with extremely cryptic computer programming languages--assembler, no less. I am merely stating my own preference as a programmer and user. It's nice to be able to look at source code and figure out what is going on in just a few moments. Maybe my opinion does not dovetail with job security for those programmers already entrenched in cryptic languages, but it seems rather obvious to me.

Dreaming of My Enemy

I dreamed of my enemy last night. Why, I don't know. I haven't seen him in twenty years. Maybe he died, and his passing somehow touched my unconscious. Don't scoff at my supernatural hypothesis, reader. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. His father died early of a heart attack, and so perhaps now that he is reaching the same age as his father. . .

He isn't my enemy any longer, of course. Twenty years has a way of erasing such distinctions, at least for me, and for the relatively mild wrongs wrought by that nothing. I don't care enough about him to even search the Internet and find out what he is up to. I've tracked down others--old flames, friends, and acquaintances, out of curiosity in the past, but once my curiosity was sated, I always had the feeling of "so what?" It doesn't really matter what they are doing now, or whether they are not doing at all--whether they are dead. Once so many years pass by, then people are strangers, whatever they might have been before. Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder after all.

He was hell on wheels back in the day, and I used to think of him as my archenemy, as indeed he was for a time, but then we got older and ceased to care. The last interaction I remember with him, he was standing by the side of the road. His car had a flat tire, and he did not know what to do. The fool hadn't carried a spare like I always have done. He probably did not know how to change tires. I said not a word, but kept on walking. He could read the look on my face well enough to gather that I wouldn't have lifted a finger to help him. That was what impressed me the most about him, that he could appreciate the consequences of his past actions.

What was my dream about? I don't recall. Maybe it was an erotic dream. He wasn't bad-looking, as enemies go. I don't remember him having a girlfriend, even though he trumpeted his homophobia to everyone, like a pathetic badge of honor. I thought for sure he was a closet case. He palled around with the best-looking guy in school, his very best friend, and didn't spend any time with girls at all. There always seemed something fake to me about his loud avowals of desire for females. I have known a lot of straight guys in my day, and they didn't feel the need to run down gays.

The night before, I think I dreamed about the upcoming phone interview on Friday. I remember a strong premonition that things would not go well. The tension caused a spasm in my left calf, which woke me up. The muscle was like a rock. It was bruised the next day from the long-lasting spasm. I detest spasms, but they do occur on rare occasion, the body turning on its owner.

I don't think much of that premonition, because almost all phone interviews go ill. Phone interviews are just a quick and cheap way of weeding people out, when somebody has a ton of applications. The odds are all against a phone interview. If somebody is serious, they will meet in person.

What use are premonitions if they foresee likely events? I want a premonition that will make me rich or give me an opportunity to work and earn money. That's the kind of premonition I desire. I don't trust poor psychics. And I don't see why psychics would need to sell their services. I don't want premonitions of unhappy events, either. No more damn spasms. I want premonitions of good things that could happen to me, if I do a, b, and c.