Journal
Thoughts on photography, technology, music, and creative work.
The Library Tower (AKA the US Bank building) is showing its Lakers pride with a custom lighting job on their crown. I'm sure you know that the Lakers won tonight's game. Go Lakers!
According to dopiaza's Most Interesting Flickr set manager, these are my top ten most interesting photos on flickr:
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](http://www.flickr.com/photos/eecue/407199210/ "6th Street Bridge and Downtown Los Angeles by eecue, on Flickr")
I've been a Vonage subscribe for over 5 years now and I've been very happy with their internet based telephone system. Basically if you get Vonage you don't need a phone line, just an internet connection. When you sign up they send you a little box you plug in to your network to which you connect any standard telephone. Once you plug everything in you get nation-wide long distance for free for about $25 a month or you can get a 500 minute plan for $15 a month.
You can transfer your existing telephone number to it or get a new one. It's just like your normal phone service, but has some other cool features like the ability to simultaneously ring your cell phone and your home. You can also get a soft phone that you can use on your laptop from anywhere that has internet access. Right now they are offering 2 month of free service for both you and me if you sign up [click here to do so].
UCLA scientists are working hard to fight cancer and their latest creations could target tumors directly. I toured the labs making these new nanomachines called nanoimpellers and took photos for Wired. You can check out the photos along with a brief intro I wrote by clicking here or on the photo below:
On Sunday I shot some photos of the grand opening of Mister Cartoon's new shop in my building: The Last Laugh / Upper Playground. I just posted the photos over on blogdowntown:
Click here to see Upper Playground / Last Laugh Opening gallery.
I no longer have a catch-all email address. For years the email (qmail) server that I run was set up to receive anything @eecue.com. So if you sent an email to [email protected] or [email protected] I would receive it. This was helpful as it allowed me to create addresses for every site that I submitted my information to, such as [email protected], [email protected], etc. That way if those companies sold my address to a list I would know they were responsible for the spam.
This seemed like a good idea until I started getting dictionary Joe Jobbed a few years ago. A Joe Job is when someone sends emails from your account to discredit you. In my case it was just a spam bot sending spams from random addresses @eecue.com. I don't think it was an attack on me, I just have a short domain name that has a catch-all address.
The joe-jobbing caused me to receive thousands of bounce messages. Today I finally decided to turn off the catch-all functionality in my email server. First I dug through my archived mail to find any important addresses that I still needed to receive mail at. I added aliases for the ones that would be hard to change. Any address that was easy to change I just logged into the site it corresponded to and changed it to my main address.
After getting rid of the catch-alls I set up a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record on my DNS server. SPF is a record on a name server that tells mail servers which IP addresses are allowed to send email for that domain. Luckily I only ever send email from my personal mail server so that was easy to fix.
These changes should greatly reduce the amount of spam and joe-job bounces I receive.
