My Super Bowl prediction:

The Colts, 28-21, over the Bears. Today is my birthday, so they have to win!

I’ve been working here on the computer all day, writing some PHP and just decided to call it a day. I’m off to get ready for the night. I hope everyone is careful tonight (designated driver and all that stuff) and wish you all a happy new year.

Have you made your New Year’s resolutions for 2007 yet? I have…

First, a bit of background…

Last Tuesday evening (a week ago), I was playing around on MySpace when a friend of mine (who we’ll call “Betty Lou”) sent me a message. After a number of messages back and forth, I sent her a final message telling her that I was leaving (and on my way to her house). It was right about 8pm when I got there and probably between 9.15 and 9.30pm when I left to come back home.

At 1.27am, Betty Lou sent me a message saying “so i just got word that u were sending $idiot a mssg that said uwere on ur way to my house …..well, that was earlier supposedly. true or not? AND DONT LIE!!!!!!!”

Okay, couple of things…

First, $idiot is a friend of Betty Lou’s and doesn’t like me. Boo fuckin’ hoo, get over it. Second, there were exactly two people that knew that I went to her house that night: her and I. 1.27am is when she sent me that message, I have no idea when it was that $idiot talked to her and said I told him I was coming. Something was up…

Last Thursday afternoon, Betty Lou stopped by my office at work. While we’re talking, she mentions that she thinks that someone is reading her MySpace mail. Now, for those of you who don’t use MySpace, your messages have a “status” similar to standard e-mail (”unread”, “read”, “replied”, etc.). The main difference is that once a message is “read”, you can’t make it “unread” anymore. Betty Lou said that she would log in to check her mail and see “read” messages that she had never read.

So, a red flag goes up in my head and $idiot immediately comes to mind. It’s time for a trap.

With MySpace, you can enter certain HTML tags in your messages. <img src …> is one such tag. A plan quickly formulated in my head. Enter Google.

One Google image search later and I’m staring at an image of George W. Bush flippin’ the bird. Perfect! I upload it to my web server and pull it up in Firefox to make sure it’s accessible. It is.

As Betty Lou stands and watches, I send her a message (click here to see it) on MySpace with a subject line of “your nudie pics” Surely someone who was reading her mail would read this one, right? devious grin. I instruct her that she is NOT to open it. She agrees. We talk, she leaves, life goes on…

By the way, $idiot goes to Indiana State University, which is about an hour away…

So, later that night, we end up hanging out and I leave her house around 9.30pm to come home. At 11.50pm, Betty Lou sends me a message saying, in part, “someone read that mssg. and it wasnt me.” I was in bed then, however, and she called me a bit later. She told me on the phone that the message had been read.

I felt around for the laptop and booted up. I SSH into the server running Apache and head for the logfiles. A quick grep for the filename of the image I specified in the <img src…> tag turns up two hits:

x.x.x.x - - [28/Sep/2006:17:33:52 -0400] “GET /images/bushmiddlefinger.png HTTP/1.1″ 200 90003 www.jeremygaddis.com “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7″ “y.y.y.y”

…and…

139.102.249.199 - - [28/Sep/2006:21:42:30 -0400] “GET /images/bushmiddlefinger.png HTTP/1.1″ 200 90003 www.jeremygaddis.com “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)” “-”

The first hit, represented by IP address “x.x.x.x” was me. “x.x.x.x” is my proxy server at work (”y.y.y.y” is the IP address of my XP workstation, if you’re wondering).

The second IP address, 139.102.249.199, wasn’t me. It’s also not in any of the netblocks that would’ve showed up had Betty Lou accessed it Since I didn’t leave her place until around 9.30pm anyways, and it would’ve been physically impossible for her to make it to ISU in 10 minutes, it couldn’t have been her anyways… hmm, wonder who it belongs to then:

[jlgaddis@apollo ~]$ whois 139.102.249.199 [Querying whois.arin.net] [whois.arin.net]

OrgName: Indiana State University OrgID: ISU-1 Address: Office of Information Technology Address: Rankin Hall Address: 218 N 7th St. City: Terre Haute StateProv: IN PostalCode: 47809 Country: US

NetRange: 139.102.0.0 - 139.102.255.255 CIDR: 139.102.0.0/16 NetName: INDSTATE NetHandle: NET-139-102-0-0-1 Parent: NET-139-0-0-0-0 NetType: Direct Assignment NameServer: GATE.INDSTATE.EDU NameServer: CCTS.INDSTATE.EDU NameServer: WASHINGTON.IND.NET Comment: RegDate: 1990-02-25 Updated: 2003-09-24

RTechHandle: CE56-ARIN RTechName: Edwards, Champe RTechPhone: +1-812-237-2961 RTechEmail: cchampe@isugw.indstate.edu

OrgTechHandle: CE56-ARIN OrgTechName: Edwards, Champe OrgTechPhone: +1-812-237-2961 OrgTechEmail: cchampe@isugw.indstate.edu

ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2006-10-04 19:10

Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN’s WHOIS database.

[jlgaddis@apollo ~]$

I’ll be damned, it’s allocated to Indiana State University, the same school that $idiot goes to. Coincidentally enough, it’s only an hour away from the .edu that I work at, and I know some people in I.T. there…

dials phone

So, to skip the details of a phone conversation and avoid incriminating anyone in the OoIT at ISU, I now know 100% without a doubt who that IP is assigned to. Yep, $idiot.

I sent him a few MySpace messages after that, but he never answered. Weird.

Ironically enough, apparently Betty Lou had mentioned to $idiot that she thought someone was reading her messages and he, of course, acted dumb and innocent. He also told her something to the effect of “…why don’t you get your computer geek friend to find out who it was?”

And she did. Isn’t that beautiful? =)

Oh, and in case you’re wondering who $idiot is… feel free to check his MySpace profile or Facebook profile.

Damn I’m good. ;)

In case anyone else likes it or is interested (but mostly just to have a copy handy for myself), I’ve uploaded the GDM Login Theme I’m using to the site. I basically took the ZX6R theme by Andreu Sanchez i Costa, changed the image and relocated the login/password box.

The image in the archive file is a PNG, but I’ve also posted a JPG (link below) which is much smaller in size. Check out the screenshot and download the theme if you’d like!

• Screenshot
• YZF600R GDM Login Theme

Rob Levin, a.k.a. “lilo”, Freenode admin was the victim of a hit-and-run driver on September 12th. Rob was riding a bicycle in Houston, Texas, when he was hit. Rob suffered intense head injuries and was in a coma until his passed away on September 16th.

Rob’s family has asked that any donations be made to the Peer-Directed Projects Center or, alternatively, to a bicycle safety campaign in your area.

I just read a somewhat interesting blog post by rmorril entitled Lack of IT Skills = Job Burnout over at ITtoolbox.

To be honest, most of it was rather uninteresting, but one paragraph in particular caught my attention:

“IT workers who are implementing new technology need to have the training to make it happen, or the project will stand a long-term chance of poor adoption or outright failure. Within that concept of failure should be considered the loss of key employees who implemented the technology, or quit at critical times during the implementation phase of the technology. Most workers leave when work stress begins to impact their regular lives, or they find that they are not getting the support or recognition they need or think they deserve. Stacking the deck against an IT worker when implementing new technology by not training on the new technology will impair the workers ability to complete the task effectively, or lead to burn out.”

Yeah, I can see that…

I finally stood the bike up yesterday and took a look at it. Here’s some more pictures of the wrecked YZF600R.

Here’s a couple pictures of the bike:

I put it down on its right side and I haven’t even stood it back up to see what that side looks like. I can only imagine, though… the left side is “up” in these pics and you can see how bad it is.

Well, it was bound to happen…

I was in Bedford tonight, heading home when it finally did.

I had just pulled out of Sprint gas station and was heading west on 16th Street (towards Highway 37) when I was coming through the intersection in front of (the “old”) Wal-Mart. There was a car heading east on 16th as well. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to wait for me to go through the light before he turned (I had the right of way).

So as I’m rolling through the intersection, he turns in front of me. Fortunately Ipay hella attention to other people when I’m on the bike. The only good things are that we were both going fairly slow (me probably 35, him maybe 15 or 20 as he started to turn). I seen him starting to turn just as I came through the intersection and that put him right in front of me. I laid the bike down on its right side and threw myself off right before the bike smashed into his car.

I did a couple of rolling flips, jumped back up on my feet and was, fortunately, alright. The kid was 16 and had a few friends with him. Oh, and he just got his car today. After making sure that everybody was alright, the first thing he tells me is “I didn’t even see you, man!”

This is not a dark area. It’s pretty well lit up. And my headlights were on, of course (they always are).

Please people, pay fucking attention. If I hadn’t been paying as much attention as I was, I probably would’ve went right through the kid’s windshield. Fortunately, everybody is okay but it could’ve ended up a helluva lot worse.

Anyways, I gotta call my insurance company in the morning and he told me that he has full coverage, which is good. I’m alright, for the most part… both knees and elbows are skinned up, there’s a scrape down the side of my upper leg, and my left shoulder is pretty sore.

So I guess we’ll see what happens… maybe I’ll get a new bike. The bike’s in my driveway right now (thanks to the towing guy for the ride home) but it’s pretty dark out so I’ll take some pics in the morning and post ‘em. The fuckin’ thing’s smashed up pretty good, not sure if they’ll wanna fix it or not. I dont know at what point they just “total” bikes out like they do cars. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Pay attention out there, people.

Well, I got to take a pretty nice ride on the bike yesterday. It was a little on the chilly side, but who really gives a shit? I started out in Mitchell, of course, made my way to Bedford, cruised around there for a bit and then headed for 446 to play around on all the “twisties”. I actually went up and down 446 numerous times playin’ on the curves. I stopped out at Cutright, on the boat launch, for a smoke, and a couple other guys pulled up behind me. Don’t really know who they were, but one of ‘em is the guy who runs Hudson’s Photography in Bedford. Ironically enough, he was the one taking pictures of all their bikes!

Anyways, I cruised around Bloomington a bit, being stupid up and down Walnut and College between 10th and 17th and eventually headed for my mother’s place over in Worthington. I took 46 out of Bloomington, through Ellettsville and Spencer, then down 231 to Mom’s, just before you get into Worthington. Hung out there for a bit, had a little cook-out thing, then headed for home.

Went down 231, got on 57 and took it to about Elnora (I think). By the way, 57 is fuckin’ awesome. If you’re looking for a nice, long straight stretch to open it up, there ya go. Anyways, through Odon and that way, headed east on 58 and made it back to Bedford, then back down 37 to home.

I didn’t pay attention to the exact mileage but the whole day ended up being around 225 miles. Had an awesome day (even if it wasn’t the nicest in the world) and had plenty of “ass in the saddle” time. Props to the guy on 446 who went up on one when I passed (for having his gear on when he did it, that is).

Tomorrow I have a meeting in Indy… the weather is supposed to be decent (if not a little chilly on the way there), so I’m takin’ the bike. Normally takes me about an hour and 45 minutes to get there from here, so that’ll be a nice ride in the morning and another one back in the afternoon.