Department of Inconvenient Truths
Indicium Parilis Facultas ne Necessarius Veritas

Here’s something I bet you never thought you’d hear me say: I don’t know it all. You may think, from my passages on this website, that I am full of myself and I believe everyone in the world is stupid. Well, most people in the world ARE really stupid, but there’s a shitload of people in this world and even at a 90% stupidity rate, there’s still a buttload of people left. I am not in the top percentile. I just happen to be aware and even better, I have some of the best research skills a person can have. I can research anything. One other attribute I am fortunate enough to have, my reading comprehension skills are pretty high. Once I research something I don’t know about and then read about it, I understand it (for the amount of time I need to understand it, but may have to go back and reread about it later) and do whatever it is that I need to do. Stupid people, in general, have similar characteristics in common: They cannot research (or lack the thought pattern needed to understand they even NEED to research); They’re lazy.; The lack the ability to find a starting point for a project.; The refuse to believe they’re stupid.

Hell, there’s all kinds of things I am stupid about. I don’t pay particular attention to computer hardware until the time I need something. I don’t keep up on the latest tech trends, until something catches my eye. I rely on some of my friends to inform me about different subjects, and they do. I’ve forgotten 90% of the higher math I learned at some point in time. I cannot do many things. But what I can do is, learn. I research and can learn just about anything. I’ve read books on quantum physics and it doesn’t scare me in the least. I can grasp just about any concept and run with it. Then, when I get bored with it, I put it to the side and move on.

Why am I blogging about this? I’ve found, the more someone opposes your view, the more they want to degrade you. If you have an idea that’s not mainstream and you’re speaking to someone through an Internet account, the first thing most people want to do is state something to the effect of: “…what are you? like 10 years old?” If I say what I mean and I don’t beat around the bush about it, if I don’t want you as a friend and I tell you that I don’t want you as a friend, why are people offended by that? Yet, they’re perfectly willing to carry on a “friendly” relationship with someone that doesn’t like them. Take Coolguy for instance, I’ll use his recent adolecent behavior as an example: He libels me at every given opportunity. He’s done it in DAWG PWND (a BF1942 server) and in a Fantasy Football league. Simply because I told him that he’s not someone I want to hang out with. I did nothing else to him but respond to a forum post stating that I don’t consider him a close friend and I want nothing to do with him. I was open and honest and spoke my mind without saying anything derogatory toward him. He’s just not my type of person to hang out with. You hear people say: “…I want people to be open and honest and speak their minds.” Until of course, it’s negative toward them or damn sure isn’t positive. Then, the open and honest person is a fucking prick.

Fine. I am a fucking prick because I say it like I see it and if I don’t want to hang around with you, I will tell you. I am a jerk because I don’t find your company beneficial to my way of life and I tell you about it. LOL. And I am the one being childish? Haha.

As most of you know, I am a tech-weenie. I don’t often write of technical issues because I am burnt out of the industry. I’ve written hundreds of white-papers on many different subjects over the years and I basically cannot stand to deal with tech-issues in my spare time. Therefore, I stay away from the subject when I am blogging or developing the Warzone. Well, there’s one particular subject that came to light today that I thought I would share my opinion of, and that is of course, email and DNS.

I won’t be going into the technical specifics of either, I’ll just be touching on the issue because most of my readers aren’t system admins and I would be wasting my time and yours speaking too technical. And, there’s really no reason to do so, I am just trying to explain and help you out so that you can understand what happens and why I think it happens. *I think* is a very relative term because I am not a member of an I.T. staff for one of the major ISPs, however, my deductive reasoning gives me ample insight into the industry and the fact that I can test, from my home office, many aspects of the internal workings of commercial email servers and give you a break-down of what exactly happens when email fails to send or doesn’t get received.

Most system admins can easily start up an email server and get it working to a certain point. Most system admins eventually do this rather quickly, as it’s a primary-use tool by most companies. Some are apprenticed into the industry. Some go to college, get a B.S. in computer tech or graduate some trade school with something like an MCSE (look it up) and then go out into the world, obtain a job and start doing their work. As most of you realize, most people lie on their resumes. They bite off more than they can chew.

As some of you may or may not know, the Internet was developed by the Military and high-end academia started in the late 1960’s. The folks doing the work were college professors and graduate students (very few) along with theoretical computer scientists. Eventually, the “operation” of computers was deemed suitable for the lay-person to handle and non-technical types were given the jobs of data entry. Even during the 70’s, most, if not all of the high-end stuff was still left to the scientists that specialized in this particular field. Not until the early 80’s were folks that were not formally trained in computers delving into the programming realm. This is where I joined the legion of teenagers infatuated with computers.

Later on down the road, folks like me obtained jobs in the tech field and we started learning more and more about computers. Some of us went on to different paths. The backbone DNS (domain name services: takes a name, such as whatever.com and breaks it down into a number (address) that is locatable by a series of DNS servers and eventually, tells everything in between where it’s found on the Internet) were ran on Unix based operating systems. It wasn’t until Windows NT 4.0 came out that anything “windows” based had much of anything to do with Internet traffic. At this time, it became evident to just about everyone involved that the introduction of production based web-servers were easily accomplished by the lay-person, someone not formally trained in the tech field. When this happened, droves of people not formally trained in computer tech became their companies’ I.T. person. Eventually, their skills became needed in higher paying jobs and they moved on. A lot of these folks were very good and what they did. They’re still good at what they do, but their place is very remedial. They can run internal stuff “o.k.” but when they’re introduced to the outside world, they tend to be overwhelmed and start doing little things that screw up the way things work.

The very first thing that gets hosed by these people is DNS. How do I know this? Even though I’ve been hacking with computers since 1982, I did not fully understand the complexities of the TCP/IP stack (how the current Internet is ran) until 1998 or so. At that time, I was taught by a very good systems administrator (Steve Gielda of Cotse.com, later Cotse.net) on how DNS and Email are tied together to such an extreme, if DNS is handled incorrectly, all hell breaks lose. That’s not to say that Email breaks DNS. It doesn’t. But if DNS is broken, nothing, not Email, not the web, not FTP, gopher, etc. will work properly. But especially Email because of how closely tied Email is to DNS.

Depending on how the email server is setup (and there’s many ways) if DNS breaks at any level, it can directly effect email. I’ve seen this time and time again. I have gotten to the point that you can give me a basic idea of what your network is doing and I can troubleshoot it immediately, on-the-fly, without taking any true troubleshooting steps. Email can be very complicated. With the introduction of spam-filters and blacklists, it becomes even more complicated. And of course, with the introduction of huge email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail (probably the exception to the rule because Google actually seems to know what’s going on) and others, comes the unavailability of enough trained professionals to man the posts needed to properly administer the servers. Let alone smaller ISPs (when I say smaller, you must take the actual size of Hotmail, etc. into consideration. Anything less than similar to something as huge is smaller, even large ISPs like Time-Warner, etc. are small in comparison), it’s extremely tough to employ the quality and number of admins needed to properly admin email servers. Believe this or not, there’s a rule of thumb that the bean-counters absolutely hate: There’s a 4 or 5 to 1 ratio of Micrsoft servers to Admins and a 7 to 10 to one ratio of Unix servers to admins. Meaning, a typical admin of Microsoft servers is capable of admin’ing up to around 5 Microsoft servers during their normal daily routine and upwards of 10 or so Unix based servers for every one admin during their daily routine). Some of these email providers are utilizing an extreme amount of servers with a relatively few number of admins. Email and DNS are two things you cannot overlook and you cannot underman. When I say “underman”, I don’t mean quanity only. I mean quality first, quanity second. You MUST have good admins and they must be enough of them to handle the jobs assigned and that’s just not happening.

In my area, I primarily deal with three major ISPs. Charter (now Suddenlink), Verizon DSL and Fibernet (a local company). What I’ve found is, the larger they are in my area, the worse they are at admin’ing and maintaining a stable set of DNS servers, not to mention email servers that are stable. Since 2002, I believe I have found Charter’s (aka Suddenlink) DNS and/or email servers to be down, not responding or a black hole appx. 10 times or so. The DNS problems doesn’t just affect mail. It will also affect web traffic and the ability of customers to find websites. Without proper DNS, just about everything breaks and there’s nothing you can do about it. From a misconfigured DNS server with entries such as unknown mail servers, server blocked by their own internal firewalls, etc. to completely unresponsive DNS servers. And when you call tech support and tell them their DNS servers are down, the first-tier tech support folks want you to “reset your cable modem”. Duh.

Most of my former clients (I am now a part-time employee of many companies) now rely on my DNS servers to take care of their DNS needs. Some know this, some do not (some aren’t tech-savvy enough to understand there’s no “any” key), however, most are using my servers because my servers are stable and I know IMMEDIATELY when they go down, rather than the intermittant problems I see with ISP DNS serves.

At any rate, this is one of the primary reasons your Internet service goes down. You’re still connected to the Internet, whether you know it or whether you acknowledge it or not. Most of the times, when your browser cannot find “www.cnn.com”, if you tried to connect to 64.236.24.20 instead of www.cnn.com, you will get their web page. Most people don’t know this and immediately assume their Internet service is down, when in reality, their DNS server is down and the Internet is completely reachable, if you know the right address.

Anyway, this is just a little insight into how things work and what breaks. And trust me, DNS breaks and breaks often. As recent as a month ago, I was approached by an employee at a place I do I.T. work for. This guy was having email trouble. “..no one from here can email me at home but my brother can email me just fine.” I asked what ISP he was on and what ISP his brother was on. He told me both were on Suddenlink (Charter). I immediately had an idea of what was wrong. I sent some test messages from different accounts (5). Out of the 5 test messages from totally different email accounts/providers, one made it through. I logged into one of my production servers and did some tests from there and found that my production server with a good, working set of DNS servers found the Suddenlink email server to be located at “X”. I tested “X” and there was no email server running on that IP address. Another invalid DNS entry. I called Suddenlink tech support and explained the problem. They did their own test-email to the account and it went through. They tested from inside their own system and assured me everything was working. I tried to explain to them that of course their internal stuff was working because their DNS servers were reporting the correct information and they were internal. The problem was, externally, we were getting an invalid return in DNS queries for their email server and as long as that persists, it would never work for us. They said “…but I just checked from Yahoo and Yahoo email is coming through.” That’s because Yahoo caches DNS entries for a longer period of time (a different configuration as mentioned above) and your change was recently made. They did not understand this. It took around 30 minutes for me to figure out they were not going to get this. So…. I gathered all of my data and emailed it to them and showed them verbatim, step-by-step how to properly check to see if DNS and email were working properly. Within 2 hours, their incorrect MX (mail exchange) record was removed from their DNS server and email finally started to work properly again. I explained at the bottom of the email that since I did their troubleshooting for them and isolated the problem, during working hours at one of my employers, I believe my employer needed to be compensated for outsourcing my time. I didn’t get a response. Maybe their email was down? ~g~

It’s been a lot of fun. Over the past two and a half years, we’ve had a lot of fun together. IWZ, the “gaming community” or “clan” that we built has slowly been dying over the course of the last year or so. Why? EA/DICE released Battlefield 2. It was flashy, with new graphics a new engine, modern combat, etc. and it basically killed IWZ. When it was first released, as a demo, we were all about playing it. A lot of fun was had on the demo map, Gulf of Oman. When it was finally released, an unheard amount of bugs were found and it became a lot less appealing. With each new patch, up until 1.3, it became worse. With the release of the 1.3 patch, it was playable. Bugs were still there, but not nearly as bad as what it once was. When they released the 1.4 patch, it became unplayable by me once again. I stopped playing it. I went back to playing Forgotten Hope, which in reality, was my true love.

Forgotten Hope is what Battlefield should have been. Problem was/is, there’s only a few servers playing it. One, the worst of them all, WOLF gaming. WOLF’s FH server was admin’d by what seemed to be either extremely young people or the elderly with no rational method of administration and absolutely no common sense. I knew two full weeks ago that my time in Battlefield was soon to be over. Folks would ask: “what about Forgotten Hope 2”? FH2 is suppose to be coming out soon. It’s a mod of the BF2 engine. See, there’s a problem with that. There’s like a total of probably 1000 FH players left. At any given time, there’s only 200 or so people playing it. With these numbers and the fact that EA/DICE have recently released Battlefielld 2142, which is again, more shiny, more flashy and appeals to those with A.D.D., there’s little hope in increasing the player base of FH and FH2. When and/or if FH2 comes out, I’ll probably try it out. It should prove that the server base will fall into the realm of WOLF and a couple other servers once again. When that happens, the same people will be developing the rules for the server, again, not based on true logic and common sense, but based on what WOLF accepts as logic. Their community along with the release of Battlefield 2, have ruined my online gaming experience.

You see, WOLF’s FH server is full of people with little to no real playing skill. There’s a small percentage of really good team players that play there. As for World at War, Battle for Europe, these folks take “teamplay” to the extreme. I’ve signed up and played with them (I hosted a server for them for a couple month, until…) on three separate occasions. Each time, I began playing, in their teamspeak, with squad leaders that wanted to micro-manage their squads to the extint of telling us which vehicle we had to take to the next spawn point and telling us when we could deploy from the vehicle….. we would follow the orders given and deploy at time “X”, within point “Y” and get immediately whacked by enemy forces A thru W. It was unbelievable that people would continually hit a spawn through a full frontal assault, over and over again without even trying some unconventional. I was once told by a squad leader not to fire my weapon at that distance, you cannot shoot someone from there. Duh? In Battlefield, if you can see it, you can kill it. Period. I can shoot someone from any distance that I can see them. If you don’t believe this, you don’t have the ability to lead a dog to piss, let alone a squad in a Battlefield simulation/game.

The overall skill level in Battlefield 1942/Forgotten Hope has steadily declined over the last year as my own skill level has increased. I played BF2 and I was a kick-ass player and I’ve gotten even better in Battlefield 1942/FH. It’s basically the same thing that happened in Desert Combat. It’s gotten to the point of being a joke. I fear no single player in the game. I don’t care if I am tanking, flying a plane or ground-pounding, there’s no single player out there that will “own” me. They may tie my abilities and we’ll come out of the game with a similar score, but they’ll not kick my ass. Knowing this, I have attempted to take on new challenges in the game. I have learned to use all weapons to the best of my ability and as good as anyone else. Flying planes has become rather dull to me. I get more kicks out of tanking than anything else. With the exception of using dive bombers to take out tanks, actually commanding a tank is my favorite thing to do. I’ve learned to zook with the best of them, I’ve learned to knife in FH like there’ no tomorrow. Hell, in Desert Combat, I use to go around with a knife and a medic pack, while engaging an enemy firing a fully-auto rifle at me, point blank range and I would still be able to evade and medic myself enough to walk up to him and stab him with my knife.

Being stupid isn’t a handicap. You don’t get extra points to “even up” the playing field. You’re not mentally handicapped. You’re stupid. Stupidity can be reversed, a mental disability cannot. Read, learn, educate yourself. It’s not our job to “tolerate” or “overlook” your shortcomings if you’re stupid. Therefore, I hereby reserve the right to ignore the chronically stupid.

A friend of mine, Shrek, previously from IWZ, currently a gaming companion, introduced me to the television drama “Jericho”, from CBS. I hadn’t even heard of it (I don’t watch much network t.v., mainly the History Channel, Discovery, Learning Channel, etc.). Being a child of the Cold War, being that I was a major fan of the fascinating 1980’s “post-nuclear-war” story-lines for movies, tv and books, I immediately became hooked on this new show. Considering CBS is kind enough to provide previous airings of Jericho episodes, I went to their site and watched all of them. No, not at one time like some of you may think, it actually took me two night :-). At any rate, I’ve found a helluva show and I am sure, if I decided to look around the web and usenet, I’d find a plethora of theories concerning everything from Mr. Hawkins (watch the show to find out about this stuff people, don’t make me explain it to you) to what or who caused the attacks to occur. Well, I am going to give you my take on the events and let it play out and let’s see how far off I am about the authors storyline.

     At the time of this entry, we’re up to episode #7, “Long Live the Mayor”. That being said, let me be the first to point out that considering this is a television show and not real-life, my “theory” doesn’t really do the “real world” justice. For that matter, it has little to do with the real world. However, through a little imagination and considering some of the points I am about to make, I believe my theories will shed a bit of light of what *could* happen, if certain circumstances present themselves.

     On with the theories. First, and this is probably “the big one”, I theorize that the writers are intentionally misleading the viewers about who delivered the bombs. I think they’re wanting to you believe a foreign power delivered the devices, whether terrorists or not. It is my theory that the people responsible for the attacks are American Citizens and this is their effort to “do something”, whether it be start and/or win a second civil war or wipe out the existing government (see Terms Limits by Vince Flynn, Amazon.com). *** Also see last few paragraphs below.

     The second part of my theory, Mr. Hawkins is a part of the group of people that initiated the attack. He at least knew it was coming and he didn’t try to do anything about it. That’s pretty well evident in the storyline of the show. I am not so sure of Jake. I don’t think Jake Green knew anything about the attack, at least he didn’t think it was going to happen then. Perhaps, he knew and he knew that Jericho would be ok. But I really don’t think he knew it was going to happen, at least at that time. Perhaps he knew it was to occur later and he was preparing by coming to Jericho and attempting to get the money his grandfather had bequested upon him.

     I believe “Gray” will try to take over the city now that the mayor is literally on his death bed. UPDATE 12-11-2006 At the end of the last episode, we found that Gray had won the election for mayor, ousting mayor Green. This proves my “Gray’s power take-over” theory. UPDATE 11-8-2006: “Gray” did try to do something in a “take over” mode when he attempted to interrogate Mr. Hawkins and his family. Although they “found” his FBI identification, I believe that was planted by Hawkins’ daughter and Mr. Hawkins is still hiding something. UPDATE 11-15-2006: Gray attempted more “takeover” moves in the last episode, the episode where Johnston (Jake’s dad, the Mayor) recovered from his infection. Johnston promptly told him to butt-out, that he was still in charge until he was voted out. Jake and his brother will make it to the town to get the Cipro (sp?), they’ll encounter some trouble and I believe Jake will return. As for his brother, that’s iffy. I doubt he’ll make it back, he’ll probaly die while saving Jake and getting the Cipro to take back to their father. UPDATE 11-8-2006: Jake’s brother did not die.

     That ends my theories about the who, what, when, where and why of the show. Below, you’ll find additonal info and some theories concerning America in general.

     *** To expand on my “American Citizens” theory, I’d like to first point out that I did not call them “Domestic Terrorists”. There’s a specific reason for this. Say for instance there’s a large number of Americans that believe the current form of government is bad for their country. If they decide to do something about it, say they decide to vote out the current administration, executive and legislative. They get the job done but partisan politics absorb the newcomers into the “good ole boy system” of Washington (Again, see “Term Limits by Vince Flynn). At this very moment in History, our current 2006 General Election has ousted the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and put more Democrats into office. Now, say the citizens out there that supported the democrats to take over the House decide that the new House of Reps, now with a first-female-speaker in history decide to “play ball” with Washington insiders and nothing substantial get accomplished in Congress, could the folks that put the new House in order get pissed and cause a domestic uprising? Now, these folks may not be in the majority of Americans, however, if there’s a large enough number, are they terrorists or patriots? Bear with me here. Don’t go off on a rant simply because I posed a question you’re unwilling to accept as a possibility because of your self-centered beliefs. The possibility exists and in my opinion, grows stronger every day that a second civil war will occur (I know damn good and well it will occur, I’ve said that for 15 years or more) but I don’t know when. The Second War Between the States could occur over this election. It could occur over gas prices. There is however, no doubt in my mind that it will occur and the current role of government will be turned on it’s head.

     Here’s a couple things to support my theory: On the show, the Director of Homeland Security (or any other agency for that matter) doesn’t provide any information when they finally get the communications link up. The “EMP Bomb” that hits, that didn’t come from the Chinese or from the Terrorists, perhaps an allied country had one get lose, but chances are, it was from an American that was a part of the establishment. Either FEMA/Homeland Security or one of the people involved in attack released the EMP bomb from American stocks. They probably released enough to blanket the country. I would bet, the American Government did it themselves, to counter act the communications links of the people responsible for the initial attacks. If FEMA/H.S. sent up the EMPs and basically counter attacked the citizenry, disallowing communications between different people involved in the attacks, they’re effectively initiating some of the same tactics we would use on other countries. Again, I don’t think another country did it to us. I don’t think there’s any country capable of hitting us in multiple locations like we’re seeing on the show. China has “X” amount of ICBMs but I don’t think they have that many. As for the EMP, why wait that long to do it? The reason is, America was hit by devices delivered in small ground-based vehicles at multiple locations, not by ICBMs. America was hit dramatically. By the time the .gov figured out it was internal, the first step would be to disrupt communications. Could it be that the attackers themselves restored the communications, at least televison wise and the .gov disrupted their signals with the EMPs?

     I am not a kook. If I am a kook then mainstream television is currently catering to the same ideas. Many people I know have said something to the effect of: “…I wouldn’t care if they killed every one of those sons-of-bitches up in washington.” Every month or so, a new program is presented showing the possibility of some of the items I’ve listed above. If I am right, Jericho will show one of these ideas, coming from mainstream Hollywood. Over on the left, you’ll notice a link to the New American Revolution. To go a bit further on this, the author mentions “do you think an armed citizenry could win against the strongest military in the world…” The author further elaborates about the success of the Vietcong and NVA during the Vietnam war. The author doesn’t really take into account that the people that make up our military are American Citizens. Will their loyalties lie with the Federal Government or with their hometown friends and neighbors. I believe, as I wrote in my introductory short story (now defunct however preserved in my archives) for Battlefield America (which was to be a mod for a game), that the military would split, pretty much down the middle. The National Guard will lean to the citizen, so will parts of the other services. People frown when you say “National Guard” because they’re considered “part time soldiers”. Lemme tell you something about our Guard and Reserve that you may or may not be aware of, they receive, in parts, the exact same training as our career military personnel do. Don’t you dare take them for granted, they’re as good as any full-time soldiers. Sometimes, they’re even better because not only do they have the acquired military skill, they’re also skilled in their civilian profession, something that seldom happens in the military rosters of full-time soldiers, sailors, airmen and marine.

     At any rate, I’ve given enough to think about for now. Enjoy and let’s take a look at this in a few weeks when the writers for Jericho reveals what actually happened.