Category: Personal

The Atkins diet has been getting lots of publicity recently. That’s the one where you cut out most of the bare carbohydrates, and stick to eating foods that are high in protein. It’s not quite as simple as sausage, steak, and bacon, but it does allow you to eat lots of stuff you’d think you’d have to turn down if you wanted to lose weight. I think I’d have trouble living without bread.

Whenever Abi and I try to slim down, we go for a simple calorie-controlled diet: 1500 calories a day. We eat whatever we like, only less of it. It means I get a packet of hula hoops and a finger of fudge each day :-).

I’m back up to 74kg again, and I’d like to lose some of that before Christmas rolls around. I’m finding it hard to get the motivation together, though. As we descend into the depths of winter, my body keeps saying “bulk up…eat more fat…hibernate.” And there’s all of the festive season thing going on with visitors (hi Andy!), birthdays, gaming days, work dinners, etc. Sigh.

It’ll get better after the solstice. Or at least, after New Year.

For some time now, we’ve been looking for a good (or indeed any) Dim Sum restaurant in Edinburgh. Today, we visited the Hong Kong Martell restaurant on Newington Road. And, yum, was it good!

The restaurant used to be the Martell Casino, but it has been the Hong Kong Martell since June, and according to the owners it is now the largest Chinese restaurant in Edinburgh. They have a dedicated seafood room, a main dining room, a Karaoke room, and a function suite for parties.

We went along at about half past two this afternoon, and got a table for six easily–no need to book beforehand. The Dim Sum menu was extensive and varied, with prices ranging from £2-5 for most portions. We ordered a whole bunch of stuff, but the things that stick out for me were the sticky rice parcels, and the scallop parcels, but the vegetable spring rolls were quite special, too.

Their main menu looked equally tempting. We’re already making plans to leave Alex behind for an evening soon, so we can go back!

Last Christmas, Abi took up bookbinding as a hobby. She started of putting binding simple signatures together, but after less than a year now she is making beautiful leather-bound volumes from scratch. It’s really impressive.

Have a look at some of the things she’s been doing here (BookWeb).

I’ve just signed up with Schoolbank.nl, a Dutch web site that does the same kind of thing as Classmates.com, only, er, in Dutch. Not many people from the Bernardinuscollege have signed up yet, but the site looks to be pretty solid and easy to use, so I’m hopeful about it attracting more old classmates.

You see, every now and then I get curious about what the people I went to school with are doing now. I go Googling for names from the past, but so far I’ve only found a handful of folk. I’m not sure if I want to get back in touch again (for one thing, my Dutch is now at best “gebrekkig”, and I’m a little embarrassed about that), but it’s fun to see what they’re up to, what they’ve done with their lives, and whether they’re happy.

• Roger Koumans is now Dr. Roger Koumans. He seems to be hanging out at Caltech now, and looking like a surfer dude. (Photo)
• Evert-Jan Garretsen looks like he is married, and has a young baby called Claire, who was born on 5th September 2001! (Site)
• Frederique Borghans graduated as a physics teacher. (site)
• Elke Rettberg got married to Jeroen van Duin in 1999. (site)

Using four search engines as my primary tools (Google, AllTheWeb, Altavista, and Ilse), I have found the names of half a dozen or so others scattered around the web, but without photos attached to them. If there’s no picture, it’s hard to tell if that is really the person I’m looking for. (Which makes me think that I should probably attach a picture of myself to my own home page. Right now, I don’t have any obvious links to any photos. You’d have to know to go to Alex’s home page, and then flip through the images there to see me.)

To be honest, I’m a little surprised not to have found more people from my class. I would have thought that by now more of them would have had their own home page. Maybe I’m not casting my search net wide enough, but more likely they all have better things to do than blog. If I really wanted to track them down, I would start making contact through the variety of email addresses I’ve found, but I’m not that dedicated. I certainly wouldn’t turn away any contacts from old classmates, but seeing their photographs is enough to keep me happy for now.

Shit–something weird is happening, and I don’t think it’s very pleasant.

I’ve just been looking through our server logs for sunpig, and I’ve found that over the last two weeks, we’ve had over 800 hits on the page “formmail.pl”. This is a script used for sending email when you submit a form on a page. For example, if you fill in a “contact us” form on a site, formmail can be used to email the message you’ve written, without you having to use your mail program. It is installed by default with EZPublishing accounts.

But we don’t use formmail at all, so where the hell are those 800 hits coming from?? Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the raw server logs–only the digested reports. The reports say that some of the hits are being referred through from a page called “contact.htm” on our site (which doesn’t exist), and some are coming from the site www.ademack.com, which, given the content on that site, seems equally strange.

And then there’s that email addressed to a non-existent user on sunpig.com from someone asking to be manually removed from a mailing list because the “delete” link doesn’t work. Oh really?

Shit. Some arsehole has got latched onto sunpig.com having the formmail script installed, and is using it to spam people from our domain.

I’ve tried using .htaccess to re-route all requests for the formmail script, but that doesn’t seem to be working. (I think this is probably because the script doesn’t actually reside on our web space–our host is using some behind-the-scenes magic to make all requests from domains on this server route to a single source.)

I’ve passed the issue on to EZPublishing’s tech support now. They’re good, and I hope they can get this sorted quickly. (Don’t let me down now, guys!) I have no plans to use formmail here, so I’m quite happy if they just block access to it altogether.

If you happen to have come here because of a spam email you received from the sunpig.com domain, please accept my apologies. I hate these people as much as you do.

Update:

Judging by the patterns of access, the emails probably mention the page “www.sunpig.com/contact.htm” as the place to go if you want to be unsubscribed from whatever ficticious mailing list these ugly little gnomes claim to have got your email addy. Because this page used not to exist, if you went there you would get our severely minimalist “404 Not Found” error page. I’ve now put up a page there describing briefly what has happened.

And it also appears that I do have access to my server logs after all. It looks like I’ve got some tracing to do. Fortunately, the excellent Anders Jacobsen has just written an article on how to track down spammers. He just caught one of his own, you see.