It’s my youngest sister Annette’s birthday today. She’s 15. I emailed her this morning, and when she hopped on AIM this afternoon I got to chat with her for a bit. I hadn’t spoken with her in some time, so I thought it’d be great to catch up. Turns out she was expelled from school, but since she doesn’t live close enough to another district they gave her a tutor for 3 hours per day. I used to be really annoyed by the fact that kids like her could get free tutors from the state, since it’s like they are being rewarded (through better education) for misbehaving. Now that I have a sister in this position I see things much clearer, she has a lot of difficulty learning, so although a tutor would be a better education for ME to her it’s about the same as what I’d recieve in a classroom.
In addition to being expelled, she’s now on a sort of probation from the state because of her criminal activities. She now needs to stay out of trouble for a certain amount of time, if she gets in trouble she gets sent to a youth center for 30 days. She learned this while at court this morning, yep, in court on her birthday.
-$littlestSister- do u know why i went to court?
-Leia26- i lost track
-$littlestSister- asullet and trezzing (threating)
While talking to her my other sister messaged me (why do I even log on?)
-$middleSister- did you get dad’s email?
Subject: This is Dad… Call me, Please!
Sigh. He sent me a mail to an older email address that I don’t check nearly as much as my princessleia.com one. Of course I don’t have long distance on my phone (who uses phones?). I gave my sister my phone number, so he can call if he wants. Assuming we have the phone plugged in, and we’re home, and we’re within range of hearing it it should be fine! Heh.
Family! My more distant family doesn’t bother me, in fact I often enjoy hearing from them, but my immediate family can be such a pain sometimes. Especially when they nag me when I’m busy.
I had to kill a botnet on Xelium this morning. It started around 6:30 and I killed the last bot around 13:00. It wasn’t actually a problem, I caught it when I got online this morning before there were many bots, and I was able to kill them one by one as they joined. The fact that there was a botnet or that I killed it is rather irrelavent unto itself, since this happens from time to time. What really gets to me about this is that these malicious botnets are constructed by the infection of a bunch of vunerable Windows machines. In the process of killing these I noticed that a great many of them are on broadband. This annoys me to no end. It’s quite simple to set up Windows to update itself so that you aren’t vunerable to every problem out there. I guess it’s just not stressed enough to new computer users how vitally important Windows updates are, even with the last huge worm last summer that caused pretty serious problems, for whatever reason Microsoft and the media both failed to stress the fact that an update the month before could have prevented this. And anti-virus software is out there! There are free versions that can prevent many of these computer infections from taking hold, you just have to learn to use them. Maybe I’m just having trouble seeing this whole thing from a regular user’s point of view. Well it’s their loss anyway, every infected host that logs onto Xelium is banned forever, and I don’t feel bad about it.
Or maybe I should just blame Windows for making such a buggy OS that’s vulnerable to all this.
I should append every single entry here with “Oh and I hate Windows and spam.”
-!- mode/#13thHour [+b *!*@*.tr] by PrincessLeia2
Also on the irc network this morning I noticed a few “Session Limit Exceeded” notices. This means that more than 4 hosts from one location are trying to connect at once. I looked into the hosts that were doing this, they were all from Turkey. I joined the channel they were all in, I couldn’t read the topic of course, and they seemed to just be people talking away in their turkish language. When I tried to talk to them t
hey met my inqueries with their own language which I couldn’t understand. I ended up wandering over to another server to ask the only Turkish speaking person I know (who also speaks english) what these people were saying. Seems that the topic of their channel said something about their server being down. So they were visiting our server, that’s fine. But then they started joining channels, and private messaging the users in turkish. Then they joined a channel I was in and started talking to each other. It’s all very odd. I have no idea what their intention is. Are these just harmless people looking for a new network but don’t happen to speak english? Or are these a bunch of trolls who like to go around to irc networks like ours and drive the people crazy? There seem to only be about 20 of them, but it’s enough for strangeness.
I’m going to go find some stuff to work on now so I feel somewhat productive. *wanders off*