All posts by Wil

Author, actor, producer. On a good day, I am charming as fuck.

Vote Early and Vote Often!

My sister just pointed me to amigovernorornot.com . . . specifically, this charming candidate.
Sadly, this charming candidate is getting his ass kicked by WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER!!
Horror!
Terror!
Dogs and cats living together!!
I think you know what to do.
UPDATE:Score!! First place in less than an hour!!!
We must remain vigilant, however. The forces of evil and evil doers of evil are lurking everywhere!
Tomorrow, the world!
To the moon, The Cheat! TOOOOOO THHHEEEE MMMOOOONNNN!!!!111

/away

I’m taking off until the 20th. I will do my best to audioblog while I’m /away, but I won’t have internet access. If you place a TextAd order, or anything like that, I won’t be able to approve it until then, FYI.
If you’re in or near Portland, Oregon, be sure to come out to Powell’s in Beaverton on Wednesday the 13th @ 7 p.m. I’ll be reading from, and signing Dancing Barefoot. Powell’s originally ordered 125 books for the event, and they just increased the order to 200 to meet the increasing demand!! I’m really excited about this event. I hope to see lots of WWdN readers when I’m there.

Everybody else, play nice, and don’t even think of having any parties. I have the neighbors watching you guys.

I heart spammers.

For some reason, since we moved to our new server, about 60% of my outbound e-mail is getting blackholed.
Typical messages:

Remote host said: 550 : Client host rejected: REJECT – We do not accept spam!
Connected to [IP] but sender was rejected.
Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 Rejected: 66.216.97.162 listed at blackholes.intersil.net
Remote host said: 550-66.216.97.162 blocked by blacklist.mail.ops.asp.att.net. 550 Blocked for abuse. Please send blacklist removal requests to [email protected]
[IP] does not like recipient. Remote host said: 554: Recipient address rejected: Relay access denied

For those of you scoring at home, we are NOT a relay. We have never been a relay. Congressman, I can stand here before you right now and tell you, if you think we are a relay, you. Are. INSANE!
The uber-cool guys at logjamming have tried to contact the various RBLs that are blocking us, but none of the RBLs have responded. One of them went so far as to block our freakin’ request:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at logjamming2.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
[email protected]:
Sorry, I wasn’t able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1) I’m not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

That’s sheer genius, osirusoft! Make us prove that we’re not an open relay, and bounce the freakin’ e-mail we send to prove it! Hooray for self-fulfilling prophecies!
Thanks a lot, Spammers. It’s bad enough that you clog my inbox with shit. Now you’re screwing up the Internet so badly, legit e-mails get killed.
Freakin’ brilliant.
UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out to me that the RBL issue is because of Rackspace, not WWdN or logjamming. I had no idea that Rackspace was so spammer-friendly. That sucks the most. It was also brought to my attention that I misread the qmail error (don’t tell anyone, okay? It will reveal to the world what a lameass non-technical-pseudo-geek I am) about osirusoft. They didn’t block our request. Our mailserver just timed out.
None of this changes my feelings about spammers, though. While we are all annoyed by the proliferation of junk mail, and its continued invasion of our inboxes, this problem of innocent people getting caught up in RBLs and the like is something I’ve never thought about until it happened to me.
Therefore, on behalf of the Internet, I would like to invite all the spammers in the world to kindly fuck themsleves.
And don’t cuddle after, you bastards.

Dancing (barefoot) with Domokun

I’m going to be at Powell’s Beaverton store in Beaverton, Oregon on Wednesday. I’ll be reading from and signing copies of Dancing Barefoot. I’ve been excited about this event since the day it was booked, and that excitement has grown exponentially over the past few weeks.
Well, excitement just hit a whole new level: Powell’s initially ordered 125 books for the event . . . and they just ordered an additional 75!!
I was so excited when the order came in, I did a little dance. Then I read this, and I did a much larger dance.
Then I read THIS and I shit myself.
While dancing.
I did the happy shit dance.
Just me and Domokun, trilwing around my living room like Beauty and the Beast.
It was freakin’ beautiful. A tale as old as time.

greasy thumbprints

I went to Darin’s tonight for his birthday party. It was big fun. Nick brought the world’s best fruit salad, and Dee (Darin’s awesome wife) made this >deadly< rum punch. Sadly, I was only able to have one small cup, because I had a curfew tonight. :) While I was there, I played poker with some of the guys (managed to lose about eight bucks over three or so hours . . . but mostly played well). In between deals, David said to me, "Hey, that was a great article in the OC Weekly about you and your book." "OC Weekly? My book? What?" "Yeah, I just read it a month or so ago. I would have told you about it, but I figured you already knew." Funny how when I'm in a Fark headline, tons of people (apparently unaware of the hours a day I waste over there . . . thanks, Drew ;) will e-mail me about it, but when there's a story that I wouldn't ever know about otherwise, a month passes before I hear about it. It's a little weird for me to be posting two stories about myself in the same day, but I thought this one was fucking awesome, and really wanted to share it with WWdN readers.
Oh, we saw
Blueman Group on Thursday night. If you live within an hour of a city that’s on the Complex Rock tour, you MUST go. And get there early enough to hear Venus Hum and Tracy Bonham.
Tell them Uncle Willie sent you.
You’ll be glad you did.