These two were at the same church on two consecutive weeks:

YOU HAVE NEVER FORGIVEN ANYONE AS MUCH AS GOD HAS FORGIVEN YOU

PEOPLE ONLY LOOK AT YOUR OUTSIDE, BUT GOD LOOKS AT YOUR HEART

I see some similarity between these – a common theme of labeling all people shallow and ascribing true humanity only to god.

Let’s look at the first one.  “You have never forgiven anyone as much as god has forgiven you.”  Think about what this claims to know about people.  It claims you, the reader, cannot forgive anything or anyone completely – not ever.  Logically it is not possible to extend more than complete forgiveness, so the maximum amount of forgiveness god could extend if he existed would be 100% forgiveness.  If the statement were true, it would mean the only complete forgiveness comes from god, and from this it follows that human beings are not capable of complete forgiveness.  Does any reader doubt that I have the intended meaning of that statement right so far?  But if that were so, it inescapably follows that we must be holding at least a little of every grudge for the rest of our lives.   Every one of us, holding a bit of every grudge, for every slight, for our whole lives.

What does that say about the people who would offer such an observation?  Do they really think the capacity of human forgiveness is that pathetic and limited?  Are they looking into their own souls for that information?

Looking at the other one, we see the same mindset on display.  “People only look at your outside, but god looks at your heart.”  Really?  People only look at your outside?  Well, there go a few basic ideas about the better parts of human nature, like love, compassion, altruism, and trust.  None of those would be possible without the ability to look deeper than a person’s outward appearance.  This statement paints us all as selfish, shallow, thoughtless.  Certainly many people are.  Perhaps the person who put up that sign is.   But the nobler aspects of the human experience include much more than that, and I’d like to think most of us are capable of being more.

What binds these two statements together is the attempt to take the better side of human nature, the things we do when we are at our best, and deny we even have those characteristics at all, usurping them instead to claim them as attributes of god, and leaving us with only the base and shallow parts.  Does this sound suspiciously similar to the doctrine of Original Sin?  It does to me.  All goodness is god’s; anything else is man’s.

I find this offensive.  These positive traits, and others like them, are generally collected under the rubric of “goodness,” and they are good things.  These are things we should be happy we’re capable of.  And then along come religious flim-flam artists with a false deed in the name of a nonexistent owner, and try to con us out of them.  It feels like being sold the Brooklyn Bridge.  People who buy it start feeling like they’re not capable of being good without god – which is the intent, of course.  You can’t make your own goodness; you have to channel god for that.  All you’re capable of as a human being is shallow triviality at best, and evil at worst.

What a poisonous philosophy.  How full of self-loathing it is to proclaim that we are all shallow and nasty, to the last man, and that anything good we do is really not our doing at all.  And how twisted to believe spreading this toxic meme is a moral thing to do.  And, perversely, how unpleasant to spread the idea that it’s okay to indulge your shallowness and nastiness because god forgives you for it.

In this last observation I am aided by the opportunity to watch, at a range far too close for comfort, the behavior of a couple of self-proclaimed bible-believing born-again christians.  These two are a seemingly bottomless well of self-serving lies and unbelievable viciousness.  They don’t care who they hurt, or how badly, and they firmly believe whatever they do is sanctioned by Jesus with their place in heaven assured.  Where is the incentive to better yourself, to become a more decent person – a more human person – if you’re persuaded that nothing in this life matters, only the next one, and your exalted place is assured there?  Sure, it makes you feel good to feel like you’re forgiven, as that church sign promises, but it sure doesn’t make you a better person.  Not everyone will take advantage of this loophole on a daily basis, of course – only the worst of us will.  Each according to his own character.  But for people who need a little bit of moral guidance to pull themselves up out of rottenness, imbuing the belief that you can stay rotten, and keep acting rotten, and evade responsibility in the end, is not very good advice.  I’ve seen too many sanctimonious christians who behave like jerks without a care where the chips may fall, and I’m not very interested any more in giving a bye to churches dangling bogus universal forgiveness out like a free sample at a supermarket.

I seem to have digressed somewhat from my original point.  But someone ought to tell them that these “sins” are not theirs to forgive.

IF GOD IS FOR US, WHO CAN BE AGAINST US?

This one is actually kind of scary, don’t you think?  It sounds like something any hawkish demagogue might say, and in fact I thought it might be a quote from Hitler when I first saw it on the sign.  It turns out to be from the book of Romans, but I still feel like I’ve heard it in connection with Hitler.  Maybe I’m confusing it with the SS motto “Gott mit uns” – “god is with us.”

The obvious interpretation of this statement is “god is on our side.”  Or, as some of the apologetic sites would have it, “we are on god’s side,” which means pretty much the same thing in spite of their insistence that it is actually a completely different matter.  You and god are on the same side.  We get it.  And just as obviously, you are supposed to answer this rhetorical question in your mind: “Nobody.”  Which makes perfect sense, because (as already discussed in this space) the domain of an omnipotent ruler should never contain anything that vexes or displeases him.  Leaving aside for the moment the fact that this itself proves an omnipotent god impossible, let’s just take it at face value and stick with the answer “nobody.”  No one can be against us if god is for us.

Well, I am against them.

Thus, logically, god is not for them.  My existence proves that.  If no one can be against those whom god is for, then having even a single opponent proves that god is not with them at all.  This means either god is against them, or there is no god, or the bible is wrong about god.

I wonder, if you held their feet to the fire, which one they’d pick?

There are plenty of places you can go to get an alternative explanation of how to understand this particular bible verse.  Mostly they’re full of that weird christian “logic” they use to obfuscate a perfectly clear biblical statement of nonsense.  They’ll explain to you that it really just means there are a lot of haters when you are on god’s side, but I still don’t quite get how that relates to the original statement, unless they mean to say that the answer to the question is not “nobody” but rather “almost everyone,” which seems counterintuitive (to put it charitably).

I think I got that argument right, but frankly, it’s hard to be sure.  Religious logic bears about as much relation to actual logic as a child’s drawing of a car bears to an actual engineering blueprint.  It’s hard for me to follow because I foolishly keep expecting things called “logic” and “reasoning” to actually be logical and reasonable.  To me it all looks like this:  “I went to the store today, and the sky is over our heads, so that proves rocks are made of banana bread.  Praise the lord.”

At any rate, in context of the previous messages I’ve seen on that board, the guy who puts them up is not concerned with subtleties and apologetic attempts to turn the bible on its head (though that seems amazingly easy to do when the need arises, considering it’s supposed to be the perfect word of god).  I’d guess he means it exactly as it appears: God is on my side and therefore no one can be against me.  Which takes us back to the scary part.  History, both ancient and modern, is full of people who believe god is on their side, and they tend to do horrible things, chief among them being murdering all the other people who are not on your side and are therefore against god.  Once you come to believe you have divine blessing to implement your whims, there’s no practical limit to what you can convince yourself you have license to do.  “If god is with us, who can be against us?” sounds more appropriate for a muslim terrorist training camp or a Nazi rally than for a peaceful American suburb.  It sounds divisive, strident, and faintly bloodthirsty.

Kind of creepy that this guy sells chainsaws.

WARNING

STAY BACK 200 FEET

NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BROKEN WINDSHIELDS!

And I thought, brilliant!  I never knew it was that simple.  Whatever you think you might do wrong in traffic, no worries; just put a sign on your vehicle and it’s okay.  I’m going to put some signs on my car right away.  “Warning: Not responsible for speeding!”  “Warning: Not responsible for collisions!”  How about “Warning: Not responsible for random gunfire emanating from this vehicle!”  That’ll be very liberating.

Maybe that extends past traffic behavior.  I should try it.  You never know.  Maybe wear a t-shirt that says “Warning: Not responsible for shoplifting!”  That should save me a bunch of money.  I won’t even have to pay for the t-shirt if I put it on before I leave the store.

Of course, in the real world, that sign is just meant to make people think it’s their fault when a poorly-secured rock comes tumbling off the back of that truck and flies through the windshield.  “Oops, honey, I was following too close!  Guess it’s my bad!  Here, hold a cloth to that until it stops bleeding.”  Plus I guess it’s also intended to implicitly warn people that the trucking company intends to do their best to evade responsibility.  “Don’t bother asking us to pay for what we broke unless you have your lawyers ready.”  There’s also the irony that this sign is nowhere near big enough to be legible from 200 feet away; you have to be a lot closer than that to read the sign saying you shouldn’t be that close.  And 200 feet is like nothing at 65 miles per hour.  It’s about two seconds, just time enough for that rock to take one bounce off the pavement before it comes through the glass.

But who cares?  Silly people, thinking there’s something wrong with barreling down the highway and spewing dangerous projectiles into traffic!  What do you mean, we’re responsible for our rocks coming off our trucks?  Didn’t you read the sign?

Current copyright law has completely lost sight of this.  It’s all about ownership now, and exploiting creations to gain maximum profit, paid by the public – who were formerly intended to be beneficiaries of this arrangement, not just a revenue source.  And as copyright holding organizations have pushed this view on the public and the legislatures with greater and greater zeal, and greater and greater success, the term of copyright has been extended and extended again.  This makes no sense in view of copyright’s original aim (to benefit the public) but perfect sense in context of its new, twisted aim (to benefit the rightsholders).  This is especially true when the rightsholders are corporations.  Individuals are mortal, and it’s hard to argue that, say, John Coltrane or Walt Disney can benefit now from the continual extensions of copyright that prevent their work from falling into public domain.  There’s no good argument for extending individual creators’ copyrights to almost 100 years as it is today, because people don’t live long enough to enjoy the benefits of copyrights on their creations that run that long.  But corporations, in theory, are immortal, and so it makes perfect sense for them to pursue longer and longer terms of copyright, so long as they can keep people convinced that copyright exists to protect their profits and not to benefit the culture at large.

The visible fallout from this is, of course, that the shared cultural commons of most of the last 100 years is locked up behind legal barriers in a way that did not happen in previous centuries.  Derivative works are hard to accomplish, and there’s a tremendous lot of stuff that becomes unavailable just because it’s impossible to track down who to pay royalties to if you want to put it back in print.  But there’s a less visible fallout, too, and that is the decline of quality (or homogenization of character) that this change in ownership brings about.

The current arrangement does not favor individual creators.  It favors enormous, faceless corporations (like Disney or Warner, for example) that exist not to create, but rather to own and exploit creations.  The actual creative process is almost incidental to them, sort of a necessary evil, which is evident by the words they use to describe the creations: “content” or “product,” while the creators are “content providers.”  (This is in much the same way as a waitress is a food provider.)  This means the people making the decisions about what gets created are not the creators; they’re marketers, and they’re interested in what they can sell, with no particular regard for artistic value.  Marketers and corporate types being what they are, the typical answer to “What can we sell today?” is “The same stuff we sold yesterday, and in the same way.”

So while Disney and Warner and their ilk are very good at exploiting the creative work of others, they’re lousy at actually being creative.  Their goal is usually to tame the creative impulse and turn the creators into “content providers” who will furnish them with something safe and familiar that they can sell without having to think of a new way to sell a new thing.  This is a recipe for artistic stagnation.  You don’t get innovation and fresh new ideas from a focus group or a test audience survey.  That has to come from individual minds, and those are exactly what our current way of regarding copyright law is squeezing out of existence.

I have a friend who believes copyright should be abolished.  I argued with him at first but increasingly I find I can’t really defend it any more.  If we can’t put it back to what it was intended to be, then maybe abolishing it would get us closer to that original goal than we are now.  I’m not 100% sure I want to take that position just yet.  But I feel myself edging closer to it.

How does America continue to function when so many Americans are just plain crazy?

Not just crazy, either, but proudly crazy.  Boldly and vocally crazy.   Besides the obvious foolishness of christianity as Americans practice it, we have “birthers” who believe the president isn’t a citizen, scientologists, homeopaths, New Age bullshit, orbs and chakra and bible codes and holocaust deniers and moon landing deniers and all sorts of other nutball stuff.  Astrology, for pete’s sake.  I can’t believe that’s still with us.  Somewhere out there I’m sure there are people who think the little slips of paper inside fortune cookies are real messages from some genuine cosmic oracle, or the Magic 8 Ball really does tell the future, and I’ll bet there’s a Church of Elvis, too.  In any rational or reasonably civilized society, people holding these opinions and others like them would be objects of general hilarity; you’d be ashamed to show your face in public if people knew you believed in angels and demons.  But in the USA, if you have an irrational belief, there’s a bumper sticker for it, so people who’ve never even met you can know you’re proudly nuts just by driving behind you.

How do we function?  Seriously, how?  We have a culture that not only tolerates irrational stupidity, it actually encourages it.  We make a business out of it.  Here we are, a decade into the 21st century now.  Everyone has a cell phone and a computer and a car, and some of us have access to amazing lifesaving medical care, and we have a thousand other benefits of science and technology that simply didn’t exist a hundred years ago.  Quite a lot of them didn’t exist even a generation ago.  We live in this high-complexity world, surrounded by products of science and reason; and our culture is shaped around it, or by it; and yet huge chunks of our population are walking around with very little understanding of how it all works, because they don’t have the mental tools to grasp it.  The spot in their brains where reason and logic should live is occupied instead by the same superstitions that have been holed up there for generations upon generations.  You’d reasonably expect a high-tech society to be run by intelligent, thoughtful people; instead we have people who think god has a perfect plan for the universe but will put it aside for your benefit if you murmur a few words to the empty air.

People who can’t think (or won’t, which is nearly functionally equivalent in this context) would seem clearly unsuitable for the task of operating our society.  And yet we muddle on, although I can’t see how we will manage to do so indefinitely.  Our muddling latitude is almost over.  I don’t know how much longer the rest of the world will put up with it, especially if the muddle-heads get in charge of the government again, which is looking increasingly likely.  The “tea party” movement is basically a group of know-nothing reactionaries who wear their crass anti-intellectualism on the outside as if it were a medal or some sort of ghetto bling for Republicans.  They don’t want to think; they want to be told what to think, by a book with onionskin pages, or a preacher reading it to them and telling them what they should believe it means, or some loutish loudmouth on television whose idea of winning a debate is to shout the other guy down for two and a half minutes.  If this crowd gets back in the driver’s seat, well, it’s like letting the dog drive the car.  Just because he can put his paws on the wheel doesn’t mean he can steer.

We often sneer at the muslim world because they are stuck in the 9th century ideawise.  Well, so are we. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us.  We think we’re superior because we have a higher standard of living and are surrounded by tech toys and the benefits of affluence, but that won’t last long.  If we’re going to live our lives by 9th-century philosophies and refuse to take on the responsibility of living in the modern world, then we won’t have the modern world much longer; we’ll join Afghanistan in the 9th century soon enough.  Autopilot will only take us so far; eventually someone’s got to be at the controls.

And overtly crazy people are just not qualified.

“If it’s too loud, you’re too old.”  I’ve seen this sentiment expressed before, a thumb of the nose by youth to their elders.  I know it’s aimed at me.  It doesn’t bother me all that much, because I have it coming; when I was this kid’s age, driving a car like that, I inflicted my stereo on those around me too, and for much the same reason.  It’s like marking territory, I guess; sort of a broadcast audio swagger.  It’s the kind of thing young guys do when they haven’t learned the difference yet between confidence and cockiness.

So I remember when I was that kid, and I don’t begrudge him his day.  Enjoy them while you can, kid.  Before you know it you’ll be in your 30s, and one day you’ll find you’ve made a habit of turning it down rather than up, and you’ll realize with a shock that you now know from experience what your parents meant when they said, “I can’t hear myself think.”  And maybe you’ll think of that bumper sticker on that long-gone jalopy, and realize that you are now “too old,” by your very own definition, and maybe you’ll even think that you were kind of a jerk about it at the time.  But don’t worry, we forgive you.  So the best you’ll be able to do is go out and show a little forbearance to the younger guys who are doing the same thing.  Because you deserve what you get, same as I deserve it today.

And time is not on your side.

Internet Explorer is a classic case of how Microsoft behaves in the market.  They’re like Wal-Mart; undercut your competition until you drive them out of business, and after that it doesn’t matter if quality slides.  Microsoft was pretty aggressive about developing IE until they finally crushed Netscape, which happened with IE6.  Now, IE6 was arguably crap.  It was the Windows Vista of browsers; sort of a halfway product.  You could see what they were aiming at, but they hadn’t quite arrived there yet, and it had all sorts of rough edges and missing features and security holes and things that weren’t quite kosher, by which I mean not following the HTML standard.  But because they had eliminated their primary competition, they could afford not to care about that, and indeed IE’s flaws and inconsistencies became the standard web developers had to code to.  They had little choice in the matter, and since Microsoft had achieved market dominance with a free product, they let IE rest and never got around to fixing the flaws.

This created an opportunity for open source, and the Firefox developers stepped in to fill it, catching Microsoft flat-footed.  They never expected they’d get competition from another free product. But Firefox was so much better than IE that it had two effects on the market:  1) It forced Microsoft back to the coding bench to finally fix some of the more egregious problems in their browser, and  2) It divided the online world into two tiers.  People who knew what they were doing used Firefox (or Opera, and later Chrome or Safari or other Webkit browsers).  People with no technical savvy stuck with IE.  It is this latter development that earns Microsoft some left-handed thanks.

Most of the web is free.  There are some pay sites that make money directly, primarily porn sites, but for the most part, websites that exist for profit are paid for by advertising, not by customers directly paying for access.  (By websites that exist for profit, I mean that the site content itself is the business; I don’t mean online commerce sites like Amazon.)  Banner ads, popup ads, promotional toolbars, chunks of ads running down the sides of the page.  Who reads these ads and buys from the advertisers?  Primarily IE users.  Firefox has excellent ad blocking plugins available, and they are widely used.  Such things exist for IE too, of course, but the Firefox user base is more technically savvy and more likely to find and use them.

I run Firefox on Linux and I rarely see ads.  It’s actually kind of a shock when I see someone surfing without an ad blocker; it’s like being on a carnival midway, with shouting barkers and a bright flashy colorful riot of come-ons.  But if you think about it, I’m getting my relatively controlled and sedate internet experience on the coattails of the vast majority of less sophisticated internet users, who buy a computer with Windows and use IE exactly as it comes out of the box.  They watch the commercials and underwrite the free content for me.  And of course, the advertisers know this, and spend the bulk of their development efforts in getting more ads onto the IE systems and not caring much about the Firefox freeloaders.

As long as IE remains the dominant browser, this will continue to work for advertisers, and the content they subsidize to get eyeballs on their ads will remain available.  But if ad-unfriendly browsers like Firefox became the norm, they’d either have to code their way around that, or move to a different business model that didn’t involve free content in exchange for ads that no one would want to pay for because nobody would see them.

So, thanks, Microsoft, for bringing a bunch of rubes to the carnival to throw baseballs at the milk bottles for a dollar a try, while the rest of us just walk around for free watching the show.  We appreciate it.  Keep ‘em coming.

The conversation was jovial with the three clerks in the shop during the whole shopping experience, very friendly and colloquial throughout.  My lady friend seemed to be the object of some jealousy from these ladies because I was buying the cookware for myself; she told them that I keep my house tidy and well-organized on my own, rather than expecting her to do the work.  (It is, after all, my house.)  They were envious of her for finding an independent man rather than one who expects his wife to mother him.  They told us we should be life coaches (rather an exaggeration, I think, but flattering) and while two of them were talking to her, the third one turned to me and said, “God must have sent you to talk to us.”  I gave my reply a moment’s consideration, and then said, “If that were true, it would be pretty ironic.”  I probably should not have said that, because of course she asked, “Why?”  And I was obliged to answer, “Because we’re both atheists.”

This turned out to be a major revelation for her, and she immediately broke into the others’ conversation to relate it.  By that time my transaction was pretty much completed and we said our goodbyes; everyone was smiles, and I took my new cookware out to my car.

That night I used the big pot to make some spaghetti, and carefully cleaned and dried it.  In the morning I looked in it and found some spots of what looked like rust.  So I took it back to the store and was met by one of the same three clerks we’d talked to the previous afternoon.  The smiling friendliness and chatty conversation was gone; she was rather cool and curt, and tried several ways to make the spots disappear rather than replace the pot, approaching it as if it were a cleaning issue.  There was no reason to assume it was such; she knew I’d only cooked spaghetti in it, and it had been perfectly clean when I put it away the previous evening.  Brown spots appearing on clean steel are rust, period.  Eventually the store manager got involved and promptly gave me a new pot.  But the transaction was rather grudging, and quite a turnaround from the previous day.

Now, could it be that we were not as welcome on the second visit simply because I was bringing them a problem instead of a sale?  Of course it could.  But somehow I don’t think that was the whole reason.  I get the distinct feeling that I made us unwelcome by mentioning our atheism.  I don’t see why that should be a problem, really; after all, I was not the one who brought up religion.  But on the second visit, the woman clearly did not want to serve us, and it felt personal.  I can’t put my finger on exactly why it felt that way, but it did.  I could be wrong, of course.  Maybe she was just having a bad day.  But it didn’t feel that way.

This will not be a problem in the future.  I just won’t go back to that location if I ever have another problem with the cookware.  It has a lifetime warranty, and I can take it to any Calphalon dealer.  But it’s a little distressing nonetheless.  Maybe I’m just being oversensitive and causing my own distress.

But maybe not.

Now, forget for the moment that “Telstar” was released in 1962 and doesn’t belong on the 1950s channel at all.  The song was released to commemorate, or capitalize on, the launch of the first communications satellites – Telstar 1 and Telstar 2, both in 1962.  It’s an instrumental, so there are no lyrics to analyze, but the feel of the song is positive, cheery, you might even say optimistic.

We absolutely don’t have this kind of thing any more.  There are no pop songs celebrating advances in technology.  In 1962, the space age captured the world’s imagination, so much that a happy dynamic piece of music named after a satellite went to #1 on the charts.  Today, technological advances are viewed with either suspicion or apathy.  Can you imagine a popular song named, say, “iPhone,” just to make you feel happy about how cool it is to be able to carry a tiny computer in your pocket and connect to the combined knowledge of the whole human race with it?  If you think about it, we have tech advances almost every week that are as cool or cooler than Telstar was.  The internet is a communications revolution that dwarfs Telstar by huge orders of magnitude, yet we don’t really think about it.  We take that in stride now, and people are blase or suspicious about science and technology.  Even the currently most popular branch of science, environmental science, doesn’t generate the kind of unbridled positivism that used to come along with space-age stuff.  Its positivism, such little as exists, is more about the joy of not changing things, or changing them back.  A song about eco-science would be full of stuffy warnings, preachy, like 1960s anti-war folk songs or civil rights ballads.  Not to say it might not still be a good song with a useful message, but not full of optimism like “Telstar.”  More like Sting.

I’m often filled with a sense of wonder and excitement about how much we can routinely do today that was simply not possible when I was a child, and how much more will be possible five, ten, twenty years from now.  From that viewpoint, it’s a great time to be alive; technology and science and knowledge are advancing at breakneck speed and it’s exhilarating to watch it, to live in this era.  I don’t understand why we all don’t stop and marvel daily at the changes and advances all around us.  Life in the 21st century is amazing.  Look around and try to see it; maybe you can get the same feeling that everyone had in 1962 when they pushed “Telstar” to the top of the top forty.  It’s a great feeling.  We should miss it in its absence.

The Netgear has been in use for about a week and seems to be stable, but it has the same firmware restriction on DDNS hostname as the Linksys E2000 did – it refuses to allow a comma-delimited string of multiple hosts in the DDNS hostname field, even though this is a perfectly acceptable string to send to a DNS provider.  Apparently someone has the idea that if a character is not legal as part of a domain name, there’s no reason to send it in an update string.  So they added that restriction to the UI and in the process broke a perfectly functional option.  Bastards.  But I’m done buying and returning routers looking for one that hasn’t added this dumb restriction, so I reluctantly have gone to using a software client for DDNS updates.  I installed and configured ddclient.

The problem with software clients is that generally they want to poll the web for an IP address.  Not only does this seem like a complete waste of bandwidth when the router always knows the WAN IP, it also limits you to checking in five minute intervals.  Five minutes is too long to be down.  But, as it happens, there is an option in ddclient to scrape the WAN IP from the router’s status page.  Not all routers are supported, but sometimes you get lucky and your “unsupported” router will work with the profile of one that is.  In this case, I examined the Perl code of ddclient and found that the Netgear WPN824 router had the same status page name as the WNDR3700.  I went to Netgear’s site and took a look at the UI screenshots for the WPN824; they looked similar, so I tried that config and was able to successfully scrape the IP from the router.  I set ddclient to run at one minute intervals – which took some doing, because setting daemon=60 in /etc/ddclient.conf had no effect.  It was still polling at five minute intervals.  A little checking around revealed that you have to change /etc/init.d/ddclient and /etc/default/ddclient too.  (This is for an install from the Ubuntu repos, by the way; it seems they did something unique and weird with those.  Probably not an issue if you install ddclient some other way.)

In addition to running ddclient, this machine also runs a script that logs dynamic IP changes.  So that one needed to be changed too, and to do that I needed to figure out a commandline option to scrape the page.  Here it is:

wget -q -O - http://[your_username]:[your_password]@192.168.1.1/RST_status.htm | sed -n '/wanip/ {n;p;}' | sed -e 's/<TD nowrap>//; s/<\/TD>//' | cut -c2-26

This works on the WNDR3700 and it should work on the WPN824 as well.  Obviously you should replace username and password with your own values.

It seems rather wasteful to have two processes polling the router for the same information, and I’m considering how to consolidate them into one poll that feeds both processes. But for now this works and it’s been pretty stable.

One downside to this approach is that this keeps the machine running these processes constantly logged in to the router.  This was never a problem with any other device, but the Netgear, being an “enterprise class” device (whatever that means), prevents a second user from logging on to the admin UI if there’s someone else logged in from another IP.  This breaks the polling if I actually force my way in from another address.  For right now I’m just logging on from the same machine that does the polling, but I hope I can solve that problem with an explicit logout when I consolidate the polling.  I can’t make ddclient do it, but I can make my own polling script do it.

Next time: UPS follies.