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musings of mark since 2001

   My little hummingbird buddy came back to help me water the garden this morning. I was about half way through when he buzzed up close and hovered in front of me for a few seconds before settling on the wire cage for the tomatoes. He just sat there and looked at me, I could tell it was the same one because of the newly bent beak. It’s not bent much, just a little sideways and I’ve seen him at the feeder so it’s still working
   With no fear at all, he would flit up from his roost and fly about a bit and then land again looking right at me just a foot away. I put out my hand to see if he would land on it, that would have been something! The feeder is being used by a lot of them now, the upstairs lady has a feeder too so they enjoy going from one sun deck to the other all day long now.

   I had a tiny new buddy helping me water the garden this morning. After hearing a thump on the balcony glass, I looked out to see a hummingbird teetering on the edge of the deck. Not sure what to do at first, I watched it rock back and forth, stunned and in danger of falling off the deck to the cats below. I picked it up, it didn’t make any effort to be afraid, still too stunned and just held it in my hand for a good long while. Gradually it came around and started looking at me and it’s situation. I placed him down on the wide railing of the deck and he flapped his wings briefly, decided to rest a bit more and stared at me for a while till coking his head and buzzing off.
   Half an hour later while tending the garden, there’s a buzz around my head and the little guy keeps me company until a female shoots by and he goes off on a little chase, returning to fly happily a few feet away from me while I was watering. There’s lots of them here now and you see them flitting all over the garden and coming up to the feeder for a drink, Hummingbird Lane is aptly named

   A great benefit MC’d by Pauline Le Bel at Cape Roger Curtis Saturday night, coinciding with the spring solstice. She hasn’t learned yet to overbook the talent for benefits to cover the no-shows, but Bowen has enough talented people besides Pauline like Corbin Keep, Resin, Shari Ulrich, a large contingent of rhythm from Shasta and her crew that kept the beat with their handmade drums. The rhythm section was extended to include a wood/skin kayak that upside down made a powerful drum with about 20 people all around it in unison.
   The weather cooperated as well, rainy weather turned to late afternoon sunshine; spectacular view from Sundog Farm as the sun set through the lingering evening. Sue Ellen made two presentations that were well received, and the CRC Trust Society benefited from 200 tickets sold and many side donations from contributing groups from all over the island, too many to list!

   Someone calling themselves Joel dropped by my site and sent in this question in to me but he didn’t leave his email address for me to reply to so hoping he reads the blog! The question:
Hi, im taking a web design class and was asked to E-mail professional web masters for their opinion on this question: is it necessary for a professional web designer to know HTML coding? I would appreciate your response, thank you.

The answer is YES! Although you are taking a web “design” class, there is not a WYSIWYG editor out there that can do everything you need as a professional, and at some point in time you will find the need to tweak some of the raw code. I started out thinking I could get away with a good program like Dreamweaver for creating web pages, but it’s just that – you are “getting away with it” and sooner or later not knowing HTML is going to come back to haunt you, maybe even keep you from getting that plum client or job offer. I’m not a designer per sé, (I’m a DEVELOPER), I let the client “design” their own pages, with guidelines for them on “good” things to have and the most user friendly way to incorporate their ideas. The 20 years in the printing industry, before the web work I’m now doing, has given me a lot of experience with taking the ideas and visions of a client and translating them to a functional and easy to navigate web site.
Same principles apply: learn the basics (in printing it’s ink+paper+finishing/binding) for the web and to use the printing analogy it translates to html/browser/presentation. Your design class is teaching you about the presentation, but that’s worthless if you can’t get the html to interact with the site visitors browser, it’s just too easy to click on to another site that’s better, simpler, easier to find what you want, rather a web site puts you through too many hoops to find the content you need.

To summarize: learn html along with design, the two are meant to work together and knowing only one will hold you back and make life a lot harder in the long run.

   Everyone has noticed the increase in spam since the beginning of this year, and as I generally send out a notice to the ISP to report spammers, the one in my Inbox this am was interesting; when I ran the whois on the originating IP and it came back as Halliburton Company, from Texas. Yep, that’s the same one with the Whitehouse in it’s back pocket as it makes a fortune from the cost+ no competition contracts to rebuild the country that they just wrecked. The email header:
Received: from xuyd.v58×4.org [34.187.194.95] by 216.171.238.69; Thu, 19 Jun 2003 20:44:23 +0600 and if you search (Arin)on the IP address (34.187.194.95) in the first “Received: from” you’ll get the output form the whois at Arin.
I’ve found that sending a little hello to the ISP stops ‘em pretty good, but it does take some time to do the whois lookup and copy the email headers into a message for the administrator. A nice boiler plate Helo:

• Hello. The spammer below is either using your resources to send out bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail (“spam”) or is deceptively trying to make it look like he is. In either case, a legitimate company like yours probably would not approve. The information below should be all you need.
  -begin full headers-

This is the reply I get from AT&T from another abuse report sent in and it’s got some links to good information:

• DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE **
• AT&T WILL NOT SEE ANY REPLY SENT TO THIS MESSAGE **

Thank you for your report to the AT&T Internet Investigations and Security Services Team. We are not able to respond personally to each message received, but wish to assure you that we investigate each and every abuse report we receive, and will take the appropriate action. In the future, forward any complaints you have with the original E-mail you received. Please send them one at a time while keeping the subject line intact and include the entire, EXPANDED header information to the following address:
abuse@att.net

If you’ve already included the above information please disregard these instructions.

If you need help in reading the headers visit the following URL’s,

For specific instructions on how to view headers in different E-mail
clients please go to:
http://www.wurd.com/eng/ABCs/spamfight.htm

For general information on reading E-mail headers go to:
http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers/headers.html

These URLs will give you an idea of what we are looking for.

If we can be of further service, feel free to contact us
at this email address:

abuse@att.net

Thank you!

AT&T Internet Investigations and Security Services Team