Yet again...I'm not actually getting too much spam, my filters seem to be working well enough, and I turned off wild card emails a bit ago, but now I notice that I get it appears tens of thousands of attempted spams per day to journalsonline.com addresses that have never existed.

So I've taken the step of pointing the journalsonline.com mx record to an ip address that I own, but that isn't pointing to anything. First I changed my postfix main.cf file so that it no longer attempts to receive mail for journalsonline, but that just changed the problem slightly: instead of connecting, looking up the user, and rejecting it now simply rejects the connection with a relay denied error.

Actually, I do get some Relay access denied messages in my maillog, but mostly it seems that I get connects and disconnects.

next morning...my log file was still spewing into the log, but then a bit later it quited down...probably as dns propagated. how nice.

Greg Miller's Guide to Lock Picking for Beginners seems like a good site. I'm really only linking it because of this line under 'purchase a practice lock' he says "Stay away from Schlage, it's more difficult to pick due to the shape of the ward." The second lock I picked was a Schlage, and it didn't take that long...

And then it says "Step 4: Remove all but one pin from your lock Attempting to pick a five pin tumbler is way too difficult for someone just starting out. So you'll want to make your job easier by removing all but one pin from your lock. "

But now it sounds like I'm bragging about what is basically beginners luck, coupled with good instruction and good tools. When we moved into our current house there was messing with locks that had to happen. I don't quite remember why I thought I knew how to do what I was attempting, but I ended up with the cylinder out of the lock and the pins all over the place.

Oh sh**! I said, not to myself. I had no idea how it all went back together, so I figured that I'd take another one apart, but I'd be really careful this time to see how it went together. (Don't ask about this tendency of mine to throw good things after bad...I regularly do it). Anyway, the second lock fell to the same chaos of springs and parts.

A while later Heather took all three locks to the hardware store where they charged us $30 or maybe even $45 to rekey the lot.

(yes, after the second failure I took apart the third lock on the same misguided quest).