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a technique I'd considered but never attempted
Tuesday, May 29 2018
This morning I was momentarily flustered by one of my old web clients (the one with the keywording webapp), and this put me in precisely the wrong mood when I surveyed my Asecular.com email. One email was from Godaddy, and it complained that one of my domains was expiring. Hadn't I just payed those assholes? So I clicked the link and entered by email and password. It didn't let me in. And then, to my horror, I realized the email was not actually from Godaddy. It was a phishing attempt, and the link I'd clicked on was to a non-Godaddy domain. Somehow in my hurry, I'd missed all this. In my defense, the email I'd received was exactly like the kind Godaddy sends. And Godaddy is just dysfunctional enough to fuck up an order I'd just placed. But I need to be more careful. And if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. I immediately changed all the places where I'd used the suddenly-compromised password. For the curious, the password was "1955wilbur" — which I'd been in the process of retiring for years. That said, passwords are hard to completely retire in all of their uses. For at least one purpose, I'm still using the very first password that I adopted at the very beginning of my internet life (back in 1996).
It was a beautiful sunny Tuesday, and the renewed workday went better than expected.
[REDACTED]
The only real hardship was the foolishly-tight hole I'd cut in the clapboards and trim for the rafter plate (the place were the top-ends of the rafters for the shed-style roof of the screened-in porch would attached). I'd only made the hole an eighth of an inch taller than the 9.125 inch width of the board itself, and that board had probably expanded since I'd measured it after having been rained on. I ended up having to use the oscillating saw to cut a thin sliver of clapboard off the bottom edge of the hole near the southern end. I also had to ruthlessly attack a board on a piece of corner trim at a southeastward-point corner. Some of these problems weren't clear until I tried to lagbolt the rafter plate in place. Then, of course, I had the problem of the torx end of a self-tapping lag bolt stripping out completely when I tried to remove the bolt from a not-opportune place. I couldn't just leave it there, so I thought maybe I'd use a bolt extractor (the kind with righty-loosey threads). But the bolt was made out of a super-hard steel and refused to be drilled (a pre-requisite for using a bolt extractor). So then I tried a technique I'd considered but never attempted: to cut a slot in the head of the stuck bolt and then back it out with a wrench-assisted flat screwdriver. I had a nice little diamond wheel I could spin in a Dremel to quickly (and fairly accurately) create a tidy slot. Into this I inserted a big flat-tipped screwdriver with a square shaft that I could turn with a crescent wrench. Amazingly, I found I could back the bolt out, eventually all the way.
Gretchen was so delighted by the beautiful outdoors today that she put a blanket in the yard and threw open the front door to allow tiny Diane the kitten to wander on her own outside for the first time ever. Diane loved the big new world (which extended possibly further than she had thought possible), though she never strayed far from the front door.
At some point I gave Gretchen a crash course on running the electric lawnmower and she proceeded to do a good job of mowing our little patch of lawn. For Gretchen, the most confusing thing about our lawnmower had been the shortness of its cord, which is only eight or 12 inches long. How was that supposed to work? (The idea is that you're always supposed to use an extension cord, securing it with a special strain relief attached to the handle.)
Later, in the early evening, Gretchen had the blanket out on a the newly-shorn grass and was reading her book (Hope Never Dies, a goofy murder mystery solved by a fictionalized post-administration Barack Obama and Joe Biden). For whatever reason, Neville was in a weird mood, snarling at Charles the Cat for even looking at the blanket. And when tiny Diane came over, he charged at her. Neville was guarding the blanket in his bad full-on Bad Neville mode. I told Gretchen it was best to just fold up the blanket and go inside. The biting flies were probably getting pretty bad by that point anyway.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?180529 feedback
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