Online Fame | A 'blog written by Chris Rhee

I played in an online no limit hold ‘em poker tournament the other day and thought I’d brag here. Winning $33,000 in fake money is not satisfying enough so I must milk it for all it’s worth and brag about it on my website.

I may hold off on playing for a bit because I don’t want to play too much and not get any work done, but if you’re interested in playing, check out pokerfunclub.com– my username is, “chrisrhee”.

I haven’t been posting because my girlfriend and I have been debating about whether this color I used as a background for a form on a webpage is yellow or pink. See for yourself: IT_IS_YELLOW.gif

This isn’t even our first color-related altercation. A few months back, I was watching her browse through clothes in a store when I said a skirt on the rack was white. She said it was blue. I called her a filthy liar and then said we should ask for another person’s opinion. So we took it up with someone who works at the store and she agreed with my girlfriend and said it was blue… She was also deemed a flithy liar.

But I’m totally going to win this argument…

Reasons why the color is yellow

• I wrote the hexadecimal value for the background color
• I got that value by taking the value for yellow and lightening it
• The filename of the screenshot is IT_IS_YELLOW.gif– if that’s not solid proof, I don’t know what is

Also, I’m beginning to think that I should make a weblog called, “I haven’t been posting because…”

I meant to write about this a week ago, but maybe it’ll still help people who are having the same problem. I get a call from my dad saying that he can’t send email from his work using Outlook. I skip past my initial, “Why are you still using Outlook, you fool” line and try to help solve the problem.

After a couple of attempts to fix things, he still can’t send email, but he can receive it fine. I try to send email from my computer (using his login information) and it works fine. So the problem lies somewhere on his work network.

After resetting computers, routers, etc. I’m told that their ISP is Yahoo!/SBC DSL. So I start searching for errors related to that company. It turns out SBC blocked port 25 and didn’t bother to notify anyone about it (or if they did try to notify people about it, they did a shitty job about it). And port 25 is the default port used to send emails through SMTP… So let’s recap:

• ISP
• SBC
• DSL
• port 25
• SMTP

If you’re an average computer user, I’ve lost you, already. And that’s the point. Why would they block a port that all average computer users have been using to send emails with ever since they got their internet service from them and not make a decent attempt to notify their customers of the change? Well, that’s one more reason I’m glad I switched from them to a different broadband provider.

Solution #1

Use Yahoo/SBC’s SMTP server to send email. Go into your account settings and change the Outgoing server (SMTP) to: smtp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com

If possible, I’d avoid this because they have some sort of limit set on their server. Which I hit while trying to test emails on each computer… I sent a test email from one computer. Then went to the next and sent a test email from that computer. Went to the next computer, tried to send a test email and bam, I was temporarly banned from the SMTP server. Thanks, a lot.

Solution #2

If you can, enable a copy of SMTP to run on your server on a different port (like port 26– or any other port that isn’t blocked). Here’s a how to guide. Or if you have cPanel/WHM on your server, you may be able to simply enable a copy of exim on a different port through the control panel.

Either way, it’s a pain in the ass that their customers could do without.

Part of the reason why I haven’t been posting much is because I’ve been working a lot and during my free time I’ve been looking at different project management solutions (And I definitely didn’t want to post about something that would significantly lower my chances of getting any lovin’ this month).

There is no perfect solution out there. There are pros and cons to everything and it makes decisions a lot harder. I wish I had the time to build everything that I wanted to use.

I’d really like to give Trac a try, but you have to install about five things before you can even install the actual Trac software. That shit is no fun. A lot of other project management software I’ve looked at is so complicated and overwhelming that the average person wouldn’t bother using it. Then I look at the more simple solutions and it’s just too simple to get a lot of good use out of it.

Also, it doesn’t help that so many of these project management solutions look hideous. I really need to commit to something soon, though. Trying to juggle multiple projects on a notepad isn’t much fun… but it sure is quick and cheap.

Update: There doesn’t seem to be perfect accounting software, either. But unlike project management solutions, even the accounting software that you pay good money for looks hideous.

“The server move was gracefully executed and there were no problems”…

Close enough, anyway. If you can see this post it means your viewing my website on the new server. If you come across any errors, please let me know.