I finished filing my taxes! I got a nice chunk of change back from the Fed, but had to pay for the State. Here in Indiana, you have to pay county taxes (through your State tax). But I didn’t have my county withholding setup at work — so, I had to pay. It wasn’t that bad, but it did cut into my nice Federal return. Oh well, I have the my county setup a work now, so hopefully it will be fine next year.
I, like Joanna went into work this morning braving the snow. But our office wasn’t closed. I ended up leaving about 9:00am to come home and work from home. Yay for VPN and Remote Desktop! We are suppose to get up to a foot of snow.
The roads aren’t good, but they aren’t that bad either. Indiana just doesn’t handle the snow like Michigan…
For about the past month and a half my email server hasn’t been working correctly. Everything seemed ok, I even got most of my email. But in the past few days it became more apparent that something was up. Yesterday I started looking into it. I run QMail as my email server so I started looking through the logs and the configuration. Nothing had changed and everything seemed correct. I thought maybe it was the DNS. So I ran my domain through the www.dnsreport.com and discovered that it couldn’t connect to my email server. Strange. I then tried connecting to it myself through telnet. It took a long time for it to connect 90+ secs. After much research I found that my server was using relays.ordb.org to check incoming connections against a known list of spammers. I found that ordb had closed down in December.
So, because ordb had closed down, all connections to my mail server had to wait for my mail servers connection to ordb to timeout. The patient mail servers got through and were able to send mail (mainly spam 
) and the impatient ones bounced the email (mainly my bank).
To fix this problem, I found another ip address blacklist checking service (http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ ) to do the checking. DNS Report then could connect to my email server and impatient mail servers now can send their email to me.
So, if you were trying to email me with in impatient email server and it bounced back, sorry… it is fixed now.
Yesterday, was of course the Super Bowl. Josh and Joanna came up to watch the game at my apartment. We had a good playing our own games and watching the big game on TV. Colts!
So it’s been cold here… real cold. It was -7 F this morning on my way to work. brrr.
There is some sort of alarm going off in the apartment below me. It’s been going off since Saturday afternoon. That’s 48+ hours! It’s pretty noticeable especially if there isn’t any other noise. It’s made falling asleep more challenging. Argh! turn off! If it’s not off by tomorrow morning, I’m going to call the apartment manager and ask if they can turn it off. I wonder were the residents of the apartment are?? I guess this means I can blare music and no one will care.
Alisse is still doing well in Ireland. We been able to talk on the phone about every other day or so. Free calls to Europe with Vonage is really paying off! Also, a very cool sounding cafe, The Happy Pear, has been providing Alisse with Internet (along with smoothies and coffee).
So I’m starting to plan out my trip to Ireland. Any suggestions of cool places to visit? We are definitely going to hang out with Bono and the rest of U2. Find the leprechauns and chase after rainbows.
Well, time for bed.