Category: Uncategorized

Phony Hurricane Photo

I know a lot of sites are linking to this photo. As long as you’re here, please feel free to visit the rest of my site – Thanks for stopping by.

Geoff Fox

What is it about the Internet that makes people so gullible? Already today there’s been the swen worm from my dad and now yet another dubious photo. This time it’s Hurricane Isabel as a ship approaches.

How many things are wrong with the photo? The water’s calm. The skies are mainly blue. The ‘hurricane’ which took up a few hundred miles, fits nicely in the photo.

Hurricanes aren’t all of a sudden events… they ease in a little at a time.

This photo will be filed away with the NE Blackout satellite image, the smiling tourist atop the World Trade Center Observatory as the first plane barreled in, and all manner of goofy, tearjerker e-mails about dying kids and picture postcards.

The Internet has made us all publishers. But most publishers understand there’s an obligation to do some fact checking before you send something on its way.

On the Internet, lots of people want to break that big story. It’s just not that easy.

Isabel Show and Tell

It’s not live on this site yet, but I do produce some hourly, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs showing temperature, dew point and wind speed.

I didn’t set up in time to get the Carolinas, but I do have some interesting wind readings.

The times are CDT because my web host decided, when my machine was restored, to restore it to CDT instead of EDT. I will fix that later.

On these graphs, the lines from top-to bottom are: temperature, dew point and then wind.

The Worm My Dad Sent Me

My dad loves his computer. I think, like his son, he is obsessed with this unbelievable access to nearly anything. But, he is not a sophisticated user. And, in his defense, that puts him squarely in line with the vast majority of other computer users.

Earlier this evening, my dad received the official looking email on the right from Microsoft. With all the viruses and worms going around, Microsoft was proactively sending out a patch to fix yet another weakness. Except, the message wasn’t from Microsoft.

I wouldn’t know any of this, except, sometime after 10:00 PM Thursday, I received the very same email. But, to me, something looked fishy. Microsoft doesn’t email software patches! In fact, though I’ve registered all my Microsoft products, I don’t think I’ve ever received anything from Microsoft.

I ‘opened’ the email up and took a look at the code. I could see the path the message took to get to me. It originated somewhere on adelphia.net. Adelphia is a cable TV provider with high speed Internet service and my dad is a subscriber.

I looked closer.

The originator of the email was there… not in name, but in IP address. Though we type www.somethingcool.com or email to foo@bar.com, these ‘people friendly’ addresses are translated into the raw IP numbers (the equivalent of street addresses) before they’re sent on their way.

The IP address was my dad’s.

I said, “You know not to open unexpected attachments.” He said, “It was from Microsoft.” And, of course, to him that’s what it seemed.

The writers of this worm, which I’ve since learned is Win32.Swen.A, knew no one would execute this program unless they were tricked. And, it’s a damned good trick. The email message looks legit.

In the past I’ve gotten similar messages posing as security queries from PayPal. Send us your login name, password and credit card.

Enough is enough. It’s time we changed our methods of email.

As it stands right now, this network of networks, designed when only those invited could get on, is too trusting. If you say you’re someone, the Internet inherently believes that. But, it doesn’t have to be that way.

It’s time for a new mail protocol which will verify the sender is who he says he is. Maybe we can cut down on, or even eliminate, spam while we’re at it.

It will be a painful transition, because the mail programs we now use aren’t up to the task. But, we have gone beyond the point of hoping the Internet will cure itself.

Hurricane Coverage – Enough Already

There’s a TV news oriented daily newsletter called ShopTalk which is published at the TVSPY.com website. It’s been around forever… even before there was an Internet. It’s the place to vent, if you want to be read by most everyone. And, today it was my turn to vent!

From: Geoff Fox

me@geofffox.com

RE: Isabel

I have watched today in stunned disbelief as Hurricane Isabel has turned TV news into some sort of weird reality show.

It’s been live shot after live shot, featuring soggy, windblown reporters in harm’s way. Since 1961, when local TV reporter Dan Rather found his way to CBS based on his performance in Hurricane Carla, hurricane coverage has been looked upon as the perfect inclusion in an audition tape. Over the past few years, with increasingly good live capabilities, we’ve just gone nuts.

Gritty hurricane coverage means more eyeballs watching. It is compelling television. No one will deny that. But, hold on. What the hell are we doing and showing our viewers?

Even with the moderate (for a hurricane) wind that Isabel is now producing, projectiles of all types become airborne. How long will it be before we see a reporter or photographer killed or injured live? And, how can we report on evacuation orders when the example we show on the air is of us disregarding them. We are promoting disrespect for public safety.

Some folks covering the storm might say, “I have experience and know what to do.” This is somewhat like dodging a few bullets and then declaring yourself bulletproof.

The sad truth is, at this moment, this story is being covered by people who have gone beyond any margin of safety, where one unforeseen circumstance could mean a life. Maybe they don’t know that even solidly built concrete structures, like the Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian, MS, can be wiped clean to the foundation by a hurricane.

Is this worth it?

One last thing… After looking this posting over, I found one misspelled word “airborne” and one improperly punctuated word “harm’s.” How embarrassing.

JDRF Walk

I like Theodore Roosevelt. I especially like his concept of “The Bully Pulpit.” He felt, if you have a stage, use it for the public good. And so I try, as best I can, to help out charitable organizations.

For nearly ten years I’ve been associated with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. I’ve put in a lot of time and effort and feel the results have been very worthwhile. I’m only upset that this year, because of Hurricane Isabel, I haven’t been able to give as much in the way of on-air plugs to the JDRF Walk, being held this Sunday.

There was a nice mention in The New Haven Register this morning.

Fund-raiser helps fight juvenile diabetes

NORTH HAVEN

Hurricane Isabel

Unfortunately, when this website crashed and took over a week’s worth of entries, much of the back story on Hurricane Isabel disappeared too. It has been squarely in my sights for over a week now, and as I type it is about 200 miles from the North Carolina Coast.

A little hurricane background might be helpful here. Though hurricane season begins in June, the ‘real’ season doesn’t get going until the end of August and September. Take a look how long it takes to get to the third named system, and how little time it takes to get three more.

Table 1. Progress of the average Atlantic season

(1944-1996). Date upon which the following number of events

would normally have occurred.
Number Named systems Hurricanes Category 3 or greater
1 July 11 Aug 14 Sep 4
2 Aug 8 Aug 30 Sep 28
3 Aug 21 Sep 10 –
4 Aug 30 Sep 24 –
5 Sep 7 Oct 15 –
6 Sep 14 – –
7 Sep 23 – –
8 Oct 5 – –
9 Oct 21 – –

Throughout the season, as conditions change, the favored locations for storms changes. So, it’s no surprise that Hurricane Isabel is going to hit the coast 2/3 of the way through September, or that The Hurricane of ’38 did too. It’s climatology.

With climatology in mind, and with this system in the far Atlantic about a week ago, I started talking it up on the air. There is a fine balance you must walk with these storms. There are two possible outcomes of a busted forecast and neither are pretty.

If you say a storm is coming, and make a big deal of it, people take their time forgetting. On the other hand, if you don’t predict a storm and it comes, someone will get hurt… maybe killed.

Then, Isabel blossomed. All of a sudden, the storm was classically shaped and drawing in winds of 160 mph with gusts to 195, a true Category 5 hurricane.

People come up to me all the time and say, “You must love hurricanes (or tornadoes, or snowstorms, or anything strong weatherwise).” No! I don’t. First, I always see the potential for damage and injury. Then, I see the potential for a blown forecast. I don’t want to be wrong.

As late as last weekend, the forecast models, and climatology, said Connecticut could be a target. By early this week, it looked less likely. I started lessening the potential on the air. Still, it stayed in the back of my mind that it could be tragic to have the wrong forecast.

Now the national media started to kick in. Isabel was the big story on the cable and broadcast networks. And, some others in Connecticut continued to hang with the ‘what if’ scenario. My forecast became more confident, but not without qualms. I began to reinforce my belief that it would be windy and rainy… dreadful… but not a hurricane.

It was something we could handle with little inconvenience. There might be power outages and minor coastal flooding and little else.

Now, we wait. Within the next 24 hours I’ll know how I did. There’s no doubt, the satellite images show Isabel a shadow of her former self. The Hurricane Center is officially saying 105 mph, but their technical discussions say they think it’s less.

I’m sure at some point someone will accuse me of hyping the storm, though I’ve done everything possible to keep it in perspective. That comes with the territory.

Last thing before I go. In the past, I have been critical of The National Hurricane Center. Not so with this storm. As far as I can tell, I give them an “A” on forecast track and a “B” on intensity forecast.

School – and Hard Knocks

My ‘career’ as a student at Mississippi State University continues. This semester I’m taking courses in Severe Weather and Statistical Climatology.

Last night was not my finest educational hour.

The way it works is, each week you are supposed to watch a lecture, read some text, do homework and take a quiz. Then, every three weeks you take a test based on your homework answers. Finally, there is a midterm and final.

Except for some ridiculous ‘cake’ courses, I watch the lecture (at double speed if it’s on DVD, as most are) but seldom read the textbook or do the homework. I have found that I can skim the book when I need it and do the homework questions I need during the allotted time of the test.

That was until last night!

I had waited until the last minute and had one lecture, two quizzes and two tests to complete before I went to bed. I watched the Severe Weather lecture and then took its quiz and test first. No problem. It was thought provoking, but in the end, I got 100% on both.

The Statistical Climatology test was different. I immediately realized I had sorely underestimated the time it would take to do the problems. The math is simple, but there were a number of problems that demanded multiple calculations on 31 separate numbers.

My heartbeat quickened and I started to sweat.

I rushed through and actually got just about all the math right… but not doing as well as I might.

When I looked at the test result this morning, I had an 80. I know that’s not bad, but my goal has been to maintain a straight “A” average… to somehow make up for my first, ill fated, poorly executed, youthful, college experience. An 80 is awful. All is not lost, but I’m sure I’ll really be scared the next time.

One interesting thing was, two questions, one on the test and one on the quiz, had answers graded that didn’t match what I thought I had entered. That’s troubling. I have written the instructor, but more as a cautionary note should they hear this from others, than a plea for leniency.

I realized, after the test, that I could go about 50 times faster and more accurate with a statistical calculator. We have one very fancy TI model that Steffie uses and an older TI model that would probably do the job, except we no longer have the manual and TI doesn’t have it posted on its web site.

So, this afternoon, I stopped at Office Max and picked up a new calculator. It is a wiz at standard deviation, mean and other statistical calculations I’ll need to do. The amazing part is, it was $7.95.

So, now I’m wondering how do they do that? How did Casio get someone to write the software and design the circuitry, print the instructions (one giant piece of paper folded a bunch of ways like a road map), produce the calculator, package it, ship it from China, and sell it at Office Max with profit being made every step of the way. It’s only $7.95. There aren’t too many ways to split that.

Hurricane Pissing Match

Sometime in the next day or so, I’ll write more about Isabel. But, tonight, I saw an incredible press release from AccuWeather from earlier this summer. It’s posted on the link below.

This is the kind of sniping you seldom see between government and private industry. It’s obvious, the gloves are off.

But, should anyone who forecasts for a living ask to be judged on specific individual forecasts, as opposed to forecasts over periods of time? We all make mistakes from time-to-time. Is one event’s forecast indicitave of anything?

Meanwhile, the most interesting part is that this really is a pissing match, in public.

Continue reading “Hurricane Pissing Match”

Almost Ready to Resume

The tedious process of putting the website together has nearly completed. I know I have lost over a week of entries (some I was able to get from cached Google pages). And, what makes it worse was it was the week I wrote about how I cured the common cold, solved the Iraq problem, pulled the tooth from a bear and slept with an Indian maiden… sorry old joke.

When the website was restored, it came back without much of the programming work I had done for things like the current temperature you see on the right and historical weather info, which is now only starting to run anew in the background and which will go live over the next few days. Also, cron jobs, programs that are set off by timers, disappeared.

Last night, the company that hosts this site offered me a month’s hosting, $10, to cover my loss. How do you respond to that?

I was enjoying writing for this site so much that this interruption and the subsequent loss of material has been very stressful to me.

Anyway, hopefully back to normal later today and beyond.

Oh My God!

I woke up this morning and took a quick look at the web page and all of a sudden, it was September 1st!

Reload. Same thing!

It seems my host ( www.hostforweb.com ) had a crash of a RAID array, and their latest backup was 2 weeks ago. Everything – gone.

And, it’s not only what you see here on the front page, but also programs I wrote in perl and all sorts of customizations and changes.

Words alone cannot express how upset I am.

More later.

Ees No My Yob

After I emailed the note to Meredith, concerning their server which was sending bounce messages to me – hundreds of them – even though they knew (or should have known) I wasn’t the culprit, I got this response (I have not corrected the spelling):

Geoff, Thanks for raising the issue of the SoBig virus infection. From the information that you have provided, it does look like the infected machine is located at Jeter Cook & Jepson Architecs, Inc. of Harford, CT. Their contact information is provided below. Have your IT technical staff contact the admistrative contact or the technical contact below. They may not realize that they have a SoBig infected machine and that it needs to be cleaned.

Jeter Cook & Jepson Architects, Inc. (JCJ4-DOM)

450 Church Street

Hartford, CT 06103

US

So, I wrote back:

Dan,

You misunderstand. In my case, Meredith is the guilty party. You are the

ones sending these hundreds of emails to me. And, you’re sending them to me

even though both you and I know they are coming from JCJ.

Why should I be the person contacting JCJ? I have nothing to do with this

at all. It is your server which is improperly set to respond to these

messages that you know are bogus.

You must take action to stop this before close of business today.

Geoff Fox

Maybe I should just forward all the messages to him? I’m not sure what to

Norwich Bulletin

Another nice quote today in an article from the Norwich Bulletin. It is attached to the link below.

Continue reading “Norwich Bulletin”

No Mas – No Mas

No mas – No mas

I’m sure you’ve heard about the SoBig virus. This isn’t the one the big boned kid from Minnesota got arrested over (he’s with one of the variants of Blaster). SoBig is one of those virii that penetrates your email and then tries to propagate itself by emailing itself to everyone in your address book.

What makes SoBig particularly nefarious is that it spoofs where it’s coming from. So, if you were infected, you might send out hundreds… maybe thousands of emails, but they wouldn’t have your return address, they’d have someone elses… like mine!

As far as I can tell, that’s just what’s happening. If it weren’t such a huge pain in the ass, the funny part would be that the messages bouncing back to me (which I didn’t send) are coming from my direct business competitor, WFSB.

Here’s a short sample of what I’ve gotten hundreds of times already:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

Message violates a policy rule set up by the domain administrator

Delivery failed for the following recipients(s):

newsdesk3@wfsb.com

—– Original Message Header —–

Received: by mail1-haw (MessageSwitch) id 1062729730176807_24713; Fri, 5 Sep 2003 02:42:10 +0000 (UCT)

Received: from L-39C (mail.jcj.com [216.224.41.148])

by mail1-haw.bigfish.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E51C011659E

for ; Fri, 5 Sep 2003 02:42:07 +0000 (UCT)

From:

To:

Subject: Re: That movie

Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 22:42:07 –0400

X-MailScanner: Found to be clean

Importance: Normal

X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000

X-MSMail-Priority: Normal

X-Priority: 3 (Normal)

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: multipart/mixed;

boundary=”_NextPart_000_01AB1BB8″

Message-Id: <20030905024207.E51C011659E@mail1-haw.bigfish.com>

So, what can we learn from this?

First, the network administrators for WFSB (who are listed in Internet directories as actually being from their parent company Meredith) ought to know that SoBig spoofs return addresses and stop sending these bounces. Most other companies have followed that policy of benign neglect.

Yes, bounces are important in normal times, because people would like to know when mail they sent didn’t arrive. But, with this virus, it is obvious from the contents that this isn’t a ‘real’ message.

Second, the headers show that the mail is coming through the mail server at jcj.com, a Hartford, CT architectural firm. It would be nearly impossible to spoof jcj.com because there is a ‘handshake’ with information traded back and forth when the WFSB server gets the mail. If the address were spoofed, there’d be no response and the transaction would end before the mail was sent. Jcj.com shouldn’t be letting this message pass their server… which seems to be happening dozens and dozens and dozens of times.

I sent a letter to the WFSB mail admiinistrator a few days ago. Nothing. Maybe I should let them know I’ll start charging for my services should they send any more of these my way, I wrote jcj.com tonight. It’s too early to expect a response, but they should have nipped this a long time ago..

Meanwhile, it’s another waste of time. Thanks.

Monday Night Football

Monday Night Football

Even though tonight is Thursday, it marked the first installment of Monday Night Football.

It is probably ABC’s most consistently popular program. Unfortunately, it ends so late that most people have long since gone to bed. To make matters worse, a few years ago, ABC added an extra segment, with commercials, after the game, which extends it another 5-10 minutes.

In a fair and just world, Monday Night Football would start at 8:00 PM, a more civilized time. But, there would be no early local news on the West Coast, and that seems to be the stumbling block.

O.K. – I know – This is all very selfish on my part, since I have to stay until 35 minutes after Monday night Football ends. So, sue me.

Tonight, to open the season, ABC ran a musical special at 8:00 PM. With it, we established again that Britney Spears, as adorable as she is, can’t sing, nor can she dance, nor can she even lip synch with conviction.

Did I mention she’s adorable?

Is That a Dinar In Your Pocket…

I drink entirely too much coffee, and I’ll be the first to admit it. Two mediums a day… it’s probably the equivalent of 4 or 5 regular cups. But, I can’t do without it it, and why should I?

Tonight, on my way back to work after dinner, I stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts near home (by the way – what a disappointment while in Southern California this year to find no Dunkin’ Donuts). They know me well enough that often, my coffee is poured and ready by the time I’m at the counter.

As is often the case, especially after being on TV for over 19 years on the same station, I was recognized. It was a young black man. He was wearing flashy ‘bling’ and an elastic type head covering on this awful, drippy, day.

When he spoke, it was obvious that he was well educated and a man, not a child. He had the confidence that comes with maturity.

His name is Aaron Hawkins and he grew up here in town. Now, he’s in the Army, repairing tanks. His home base is in Georgia, but he’s just back from Iraq.

We talked a little about the war (I worry about this Vietnam wannabe war, fought mostly by men of color, without a draft). There are too many historical analogs.

Then, as I was about to leave, he reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet and started to thumb through the bills. He pulled one out, smiled, and gave it to me… a 250 Dinar note with Saddam Hussein’s picture. Current value, around $.20.

I’m sure Saddam saw the proofs, asked to have his hair darkened and a little taken off the jowel… or maybe the artist knew for his own safety that flattery was the best policy.

Whatever the case, it was a great gift from Aaron. I’m glad I got to meet him.