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This past weekend, the inimitable James Tucker and I went down to the Moab area to get our climb on. As climbing trips usually do, this one went a bit awry, but we still rallied and got a couple of cool routes in. The full series of photos can be found on my photos page, but I thought a bit of explanation was called for.

It all started innocently enough; the usual get-out-of-town-too-late, drive through the dark, heading south towards canyon country. James and I arrived in Moab around midnight, filled up on gas and water, and drove out to the end of Potash Road to the edge of Canyonlands National Park (no camping without a permit). Luckily, we were alone, far away from any people and any light pollution and enjoyed a beer or two before passing out in the warm night air.

Our goal this trip was the North Ridge of Monster Tower, which sits just off the White Rim Trail. The White Rim Trail is a 100-mile long 4×4 road that runs through Canyonlands and is a popular jeep and bike trail. After downing a quick breakfast of Annie’s Spaghettios (it has the preservatives a boy needs to climb all day long), we set off into Canyonlands and off towards our tower.

About 25 miles in or so, James spotted a piece of trash in the road, and asked me to stop so he could pick it up. He jumped out of the car, and I immediately heard a gushing noise. “My God,” I thought, “that boy really had to pee.” But that was not indeed what was going on.

“Uh, Chad, we have a problem.”
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Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in hand, totally worn out and screaming “WOO-HOO what a ride!”

– Clinic 2316 from Top Tips For Girls

Now one of Clinton’s Laws of Politics is this: If one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think; if one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope. That’s the best.

– Bill Clinton, 2004

Huh, given the tenor of Hillary Clinton’s campaign these days, I have a feeling this new Clinton is writing her own rules. Me? I support what Bill said back in 2004, which is why I am not voting for fear-mongering Hillary.

-c

Greetings all! This past weekend James and I headed down to Indian Creek and got our jam on. Here are some photos of our trip up Lightning Bolt Cracks on North Six Shooter.

Climb on!

-c

Hello blogosphere!

Today’s adventures in How-The-World-Sucks is brought to you by Microsoft, the evil-doers of the computer world. The latest example of how corporate greed is destroying America came across my plate after a few friends, who use Hotmail for their email provider, mentioned that they were not receiving email from me. Given that this was multiple people, I figured that there might be something wrong with my email setup. I just so happen to have a Hotmail account (that I never use) and I used that for my testing. Once I started poking around, here’s the evidence that I gathered:

• Email sent from my personal domain would not be delivered to hotmail.com email addresses. However, I could reply to email messages that originated from hotmail.com, just not send new email to Hotmail.
• Email sent from my work (a domain I help administer) to hotmail.com email addresses would go through, but it would take upwards of 3 hours for email to come through, and they would appear in my Junk folder, marked as spam.
• Email sent from my Gmail account would go through immediately.
• Email sent from several domains run by friends of mine would either never get delivered, or would take ages and ages and then finally appear in my Junk folder.

Weird. According to my mail server logs, and those at work, the email messages destined for hotmail.com addresses were delivered to Hotmail’s servers without any errors, and according to the SMTP protocol Hotmail is then required to either deliver the email, or bounce it back (neither was happening). Now, in today’s spam-filled world this is not always the case, so I was going to give Hotmail the benefit of the doubt for now, and try to figure out what was going wrong. I started poking around on the net, and found zillions of references to people that were having awful problems with mail delivery to Hotmail. Some mentioned issues with Microsoft’s implementation of SPF SPF, so I removed my entries from DNS, with no change in functionality (yes, I waited for DNS caching to time out). Some mentioned spam filtering issues on Hotmail’s end, the only solution to which seems to be paying a 3rd-party corporation $1400 and up, per year, to be whitelisted by Hotmail. Uh, no thanks.

Then, I stumbled across a grammatically awkward but information-rich post by an administrator who ran into similar problems. His post made me try a few things:

• I sent email from work to my hotmail.com address using Outlook and it went through immediately.
• I then configured Thunderbird, my email reading program, to set the User-Agent header to read “Microsoft Office Outlook 11″, and sent email from work to my Hotmail account, and this went through immediately. However, email sent from home with this trick did not work- email would still not be delivered.
• I then configured Postfix, which I use as my email server, to remove any User-Agent header, as well as inserting X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11 as a header (which is what Outlook does). This seemed to be the magic fix, as email sent from my personal domain would now go through immediately.

Wow. In my professional opinion, this clearly says that Microsoft is going way out of its way to make people using open source software suffer when dealing with people that use Hotmail. Just another way in which Microsoft is trying to eliminate competition for its market, not by innovating and producing good products, but by using their market share to fight dirty. Who suffers from this? We do. The people out there on the streets. Corporate greed at its finest.

The net result? Well, I strongly encourage everybody out there that has a Hotmail account to immediately switch to another provider. Gmail and FastMail, among others, would be good choices. In the meantime, I will keep my domain configured to fool Hotmail into thinking I’m a nice little Microsoft drone, using its crappy products, so that I can send email to my friends. That is, until they all switch to a better email provider.

-c

ps- For those of you out there using Postfix, here are the lines I added to my header_checks file to remove the User-Agent header and add in the Outlook header:

/^User-Agent:/ IGNORE
/^To:.*hotmail.com/ PREPEND X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11