Blessed by the Potato

It’s tough these days to get people to come to your Halloween party! Wayfare has, for the longest time, been the thrower of Halloween parties, but the last few years it’s been really tough to get people to come (yes, we live in London now, but it’s not really any harder to get to than Hamilton was, and at this age people are in the habit of staying in guest rooms or hotels for weddings, and out-of-town baby showers, so why not for Halloween?). Never mind that we have even more decorations, more candy, and a fog machine!

Ah, well, if you’re a reader of this blog, (one that doesn’t try to push discount pharmaceuticals in the comments, that is), then feel free to stop on by (in costume, of course!) on Saturday, October 27 (yes, Saturday — that other date was a brief and wild mistake that has been corrected).

Oh those many years ago, when Google first went public, I thought about investing in it. I was a keen user of Google, loving the slick, minimalist interface and improved search results from right from when I first used it in beta. But when the initial share price was announced at $85 or so, I balked. No way was I going to drop that kind of money on a company that didn’t have a solid revenue stream in place, especially following as it did the bust of the dot-com bubble where so many other bright-ideas-but-no-revenue companies ballooned up just to crash. I figured it was overhyped and would fall not too long after the IPO into a range that would be more appropriate, less inflated by rumour and speculation. (Also, to avoid an odd-lot-trade, a share price of $85 (US, which was expensive at the time, too), would have required buying 100 shares. While I might have believed in it enough to invest say $500 or even $1000 in Google just to see what happened in the long run, I couldn’t put down the nearly $10,000 it would take to buy a lot of 100 shares…)

Well, I was wrong. Google’s just kept going up, nearly linearly, for the last three and a half years, and is actually profitable. Someone get me a time machine!

I have a bit of a strange Azureus problem recently. I thought at first that Rogers’ throttling had gotten even more restrictive, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. It looks as though there’s some sort of negative interaction between PC-Cillin, Azureus, and possibly my network card.

Symptoms: As soon as I open Azureus (even if I have all torrents stopped), I can’t surf the web any more, or connect to any local computers over http (that was my first clue that it wasn’t just Rogers’ throttling, my second was that while I was complaining about the network being down, Wayfare was having no trouble at all). I simply get a long wait period and then a could not find server message. The download on Azureus is even more erratic than normal: varying between 0 and 15 kB/s (this torrent was running at around 30-40 kB/s, which is fairly decent, but not a mind-blowing speed, last week). When I was watching it earlier today, the speed seemed to mostly stay around 2-4 kB/s: dreadfully slow, but moving at least. Within the last hour or so, the download speed has been essentially zero (in the 40 B/s — that’s bytes per second, no kilo!). The upload is steady at whatever max I choose to set it at, until I get to about the halfway of my connection’s theoretical maximum, where it plateaus. This all started sometime within the last week — I had left my file downloading when I went away (and the house got broken into), expecting to have finished downloading long before I got back.

Troubleshooting so far: I noticed that PC-Cillin was using well over 70 MB of memory with Azureus open (not checked with it closed). I tried tweaking its firewall (there were a lot of obvious torrent traffic hits in the firewall log with “packet matched filter rule” or some such message, and I have no idea if that means that the firewall let the packet through, or if that means it was stopped. Disabling just the firewall part of PC-Cillin didn’t seem to help the web surfing problem. Closing PC-Cillin entirely, and I can surf the web again. Closing Azureus (with PC-Cillin open), and I can surf the web normally within about 20 seconds. Adjusting the max upload rate down did not allow me to surf with PC-Cillin open. The only things changed on the computer recently are various automatic updates (Firefox, PC-Cillin, etc.), and being forced to upgrade my MSN Messenger (though I still have the problem with Messenger closed).

Solution: I haven’t a clue right now. I’m not comfortable running my computer with PC-Cillin closed, so the download will just have to suffer. I don’t know what makes Azureus kill my connection, even with nothing running. If anyone can suggest anything, let me know!

During my troubleshooting, I had a look at my router and cable modem, and noticed in the logs that my router lost power after midnight (closer to 1 am) on Friday Sept 20. It might be possible that that was the time of the break in. It could be coincidental, since I’m not sure exactly why my router would lose power. I at first thought the thief might have flipped some breakers in the basement to kill an alarm system, but then that would have reset some of the clocks, and they all seem fine. It’s possible the power bar or cord got moved when they were searching my room, and maybe was temporarily disconnected that way…

Edit: Now my firewall log is filled with outgoing ICMP requests every second, so now I fear I have a virus/spyware/something evil going on…

Edit2: I seem to have fixed the problem, but I’m not sure how, exactly, since I sort of did a bunch of things at once. I did remove some suspected spyware with PC-Cillin, and one more piece of unrecognized software that HijackThis found, but I also killed a few background processes (including ATI’s hotkey detection thingy and the PC-Cillin proxy server, which I wasn’t knowingly using, but for some reason was eating 40 MB of RAM anyway). I also set up my router to block outgoing as well as incoming ping requests (previously it just blocked incoming).

I am so incredibly fed up with stupid thieves. What possesses people to steal things from other people?

Perhaps just as important, I’m fed up with incompetent thieves. It makes absolutely no sense to me for someone to put me to all the emotional anguish of being broken into or stolen from, as well as the cost of repairs and actually taking my crap, when the thief gets next to nothing out of it. With my car, I had to pay for thousands of dollars of damage to it, and all the thieves got was a ride for a few hours and maybe $12 from the change in the ashtray, and a used poker set. The benefit to them was way out of proportion to the cost to me, so it’s not just theft, it’s retarded and spiteful.

So Wayfare was congratulating us today since we made it through a Sunday without going to the hospital while we drove back to London, and we got here to find the house was broken into. And broken into by what must have been the world’s most retarded thief. The guy must have been high and looking for drugs, or just out to piss me off and not actually steal anything.

They broke in through the basement window (which I’m 95% sure was locked), and then had to get from the basement to the rest of the house. We have a door at the top of the stairwell, and while there’s a bit of a trick to opening it, it wasn’t locked. So the thief grabs a giant concrete cinder block/brick and bashes the hell out of the unlocked door to get to the rest of the house. Walks through the kitchen (tracking mud, I might add), past the $50 Home Hardware gift card sitting smack in the middle of the kitchen counter (thanks Jonathan!), and into my office, where a lot of things were rifled through, where I think my nice newish digital camera was taken, but where my 22″ flat screen and computer were left (thankfully — I could easily deal with the loss of the screen, but would hate to lose the computer, or at least the hard drive). Then, into my bedroom where a much more thorough search was performed, including looking in the boxes of board games and dominoes (probably for drugs). On my dresser is a box that is my life: I had my passport, an emergency credit card, a bunch of cash/coins, a gold coin my dad gave me after I graduated from middle school (I don’t know what the spot price of gold is, but it’s probably worth at least $200), and all kinds of other miscellany: ticket stubs from my first date, my PADI card, movie passes, etc. They took the box, and all the Canadian money, but (thankfully) left my passport and I think all of the cards, as well as the gold coin. What’s just dumb is that in another room, they threw out the ~$50 in Japanese Yen I had and a crisp $100 US bill (yes, the 3rd place poster award was in cash), and just left it here.

The chocolate bar from my desk was taken, and left, half-eaten, on the floor of Wayfare’s room. Gross, but it might give us the only clue in this case with some saliva/DNA evidence (the thief apparently wore gloves for the rest of the break-in).

The rest of my room and Wayfare’s were rifled through fairly thoroughly, but nothing else was taken. So our best guess was someone was looking for drugs rather than money (and boy, did they pick the wrong house to look for that!). Now I’ve got a long night of cleaning up ahead of me, as soon as the evidence guy from the London police leaves…

One thing I wasn’t impressed with was when I called the police to report that “I’d been broken into and robbed”, the operator got all pedantic on me, saying that it wasn’t robbery unless I was home at the time, so it was “just” a break-in. Then someone took my name and number and hung up, without even telling me when or if they would call back (we ended up waiting about an hour and a half)…

Vote-grabbing new measures is an unfortunate reality in the run-up to an election, and it seems to have affected the Ontario Liberals pretty hard this year. That said, a holiday in February is a great idea, one that’s been bounced around for years (if mostly just in the press as a filler story for February).