Lackhead.org

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

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

A life-like two-headed dragon. On a key chain.

My life is now complete.

-c

The other day I was stumbling through Salon.com’s site as I normally do and happened upon a touching essay by Garrison Keillor. The profound message that I took away from this writing was that hope and cheer are the results of an inward, personal discovery, and we should keep this in mind and in dark times such as these look for such panaceas right in front of our faces. True that, Mr. Keillor. Unfortunately, I sometimes find such forays eventually hollow, as if I were on some drug trip that however wonderful it felt, was somehow slightly pulled away from reality. And this is the duality of living during the plague of Cheney and Bush; alternating between being pulled down into the murky depths of the daily news, or floating in the ignorant bliss of escapism.

And then enter Naomi Klein, and her latest book The Shock Doctrine. While I haven’t read the book yet (I hope to pick up a copy soon), it was the video she made with Alfonso Cuarón that really made me stand up and notice. Not only is it a video with an incredible impact for its short duration, but it does a wonderful job of maintaining that tenuous marriage between hope and reality. Unlike the end of An Inconvenient Truth, where it seems as if all hope is exterminated by the time the credits roll and then they ply you with “we can do it!” and “you can change the world!” and flowers and bunnies; too stark of a contrast. And while the Klein/Cuarón film does tread on that line, I have to say I came away somewhat uplifted by it. More and more people are speaking out and trying to change things, and yes the process is very slow, but this is the American Spirit I thought had disappeared 6 years ago when someone who made Dan Quayle look brilliant got put into the highest office in our land. And then somehow re-elected.

But hey, I was talking about an improvement in mood, so let’s not dwell on the war criminal that needs his speeches written in phonetics. Check out the video if you like; it does start off dark but it does grow, and I especially love the flowers blooming. You can watch a higher-quality version of the short here, or check out the YouTube version:

In addition, you should check out Ariana Huffington’s latest blog entry about Klein’s book contrasted with Alan Greenspan’s tripe, in particular note the collaboration between Klein and John Cusack (in particular, the preview for War, Inc.)!

Why is it that the knobs on washing machines can only be turned clockwise, while the knobs on dryers work in both directions? They both control a timed countdown, phases of mechanical progress. And washers and dryers are made by the same damn companies so you would think there would be some economy of design at play here. Does it have to do with the yin and yang of washers adding water and dryers removing it? Some ancient ANSI standard that no longer applies but is still rigorously conformed to by industry? What drives this incoherent pattern in life?!?

These are the things that keep me up at night.

-c