BilikFamily.com

Spammers - I woke up the other day and heard my laptop putting out its familiar email 'ding', but it was doing it about once a minute. It was spam but not the kind you usually think of. In short I was getting spam bounce messages. Let me explain...

For the past several years I've had my domain configured such that justaboutanythingyouwant @ bilikfamily.com would get to us. A spammer out there decided to use my domain name as part of his 'From:' address as he spewed out random spam messages. His messages would be from randomusername @ bilikfamily.com. There is no required verification on the internet that the 'From:' address is really who it says it is.

Spammers have huge lists of email addresses that they send to. Like any email list, it may contain dead accounts. The messages I was getting were email 'bounce' messages. These were either 'no such user' messages or the newer spam challenge replies, where the sender must do something additional to verify his identity before the receiving server will forward it to his user.

So quickly that morning I had to use semi-automated means to scan through my mailboxes of the past several years and find all of the valid names we've used at my domain. Certainly there's scott, michelle, claire, abby, but I also would often create unique names for commercial entities, in case they decided to sell my email address. I had to reconfigure my mail server so that only valid names would be accepted and everything else would result in 'no such user' replies. That way when a bounced reply message came in for randomusername it would not go into my mailboxes.

I had also setup an SPF record a few weeks back. Basically it makes it easier for an email receiving server to detect when an email 'From:' address is being spoofed like this. Hopefully after sometime this will discourage spammers from doing this.

It's bad enough when they send you email you don't want. When they do this, I think one should be able to prosecute them for identify theft. The spammer is impersonating me and my family, sending out messages claiming to be from us.

Daughters - Claire and Abby returned safely to NH without major travel difficulties. They had lots of stories to tell us about their time in Michigan and River Grove. The boys were happy to have Abby, their Nintendo expert, back. Some Nintendo games require a certain level of reading ability and we've been trying to use this to bribe them to stick with it as we teach them to read. In the meantime they lean on Abby's expertise. Amazingly the girls have been home for days and there haven't been any sleepovers. Who are these girls and what have they done with our daughters?!

Jetta - While my Jetta has been great this past year and a half, I started to hear a resonant humming type noise when the car hit 62mph. A little over or under and things sounded normal. About a month ago I had my local mechanic look into it. I thought it might be tire wear, but even tire rotation did not change the sounds. My local mechanic recommended bringing it to my official VW dealer. About two weeks ago I took it to the dealer for an assessment. I figured that it might be a wheel bearing. After two days they called back saying that it appears to be something in the transmission, likely in the differential. Since it is warranted for 100K miles, they weren't going to spend days trying to isolate which subcomponent it is. Instead they ordered a whole new transmission. So this upcoming Monday my daily commuter goes in for a new tranny. It's a bit overkill for a noise, but perhaps that noise is an early warning for something that's starting to fail.

Anniversary - Thursday was our 18th anniversary. Michelle took the kids and met up with 3 other moms and their kids at Greenfield State Park's Otter Lake for the day. I went to work as usual. When we got home, she and I went out for a quiet dinner. We each decided to branch out and order a meal outside of our "comfort zone" and unfortunately we weren't pleasantly surprised. It's not that the meals were bad, just something we won't order again.

Weekend - This weekend looks to be a nice one. I will go with Michelle this morning to try out the new local Milford Golds Gym. My membership at the Marlborough one entitles me to some limited amount of visits to our local one per week. We might buy a MacMini to replace/augment our aging iMac that the kids use. That iMac was bought back in October of 2001 and shows its age on some website that the kids visit. Flash based websites like Webkins, Millsberry, etc, are sluggish. It does modern video protocols at about a one frame per second rate, making YouTube and QuickTime almost unusable. Since Apple just refreshed the iMac and MacMini this week, I shouldn't get burned as I did on my first iBook laptop. In that case Apple updated the line just days after I bought mine. I was kicking myself on that purchase.

Tomorrow we plan on going up to Lake Winnipesaukee to spend the day with the Nix's. You may remember we did this last year. (see related album) Tomorrow looks to be nearly perfect weather for such a day — sunny, mid-80s. Spending the day up on the lakeside always reminds me of my days at Lake Tomahawk, although the boats on Winnipesaukee are sometimes much bigger, since many rich New Englanders, like Mitt Romney, keep "summer homes" on this lake.