For the last two weeks, I’ve been using SpamAssassin from Deersoft with Outlook to filter my email for spam.
2 weeks and it correctly filtered 378 spam messages. 54% of my email is spam. What a fucking nightmare. Damn Cantor & Siegel to hell!
You bet your ass it’s worth the $20 they are asking for this software.
So if you use Outlook, get your ass over to Deersoft and get yourself some help for the spam epidemic.
What a week. Sorry for the lack of of light hearted sillyness.
Any time that the things that burn up my energy are things I can’t talk about, it’s a problem. I’ve burned myself out in the last few weeks. Everything is accelerating and I don’t see it slowing down.
You know I love lunch. I truly enjoy getting away from the office for a bit during the day. The last two days have consisted of a bag of corn nuts on Wednesday and a leftover sandwich at my desk today.
I need a break. Where’s my vacation form?
Susan from 2020Hindsight wrote up a better description of the Weblog Meetup I went to last week.
I should have told her about the geocaching story link page I made.
From the pictures I’m shocked, shocked to realize that I have grey hair at my temples. WTF?
OK, I’ve given wardriving a chance, and it just doesn’t cut it.
For those that don’t know, wardriving is when you drive aroudn with a laptop with a 802.11 card and look for wireless access points. If you find one, you can probably connect to it and be ont he internet via someone else’s broadband connection.
Wardriving is an allusion to the older hacker sport of wardialing. Wardialing was/is the term used when you use a modem to scan telephone numbers for other modems or use a modem to hack out telephone calling card numbers. Not that I even did such a thing. There is no way that I did this in high school.
In any case, I had been driving around town with a laptop and a wireless card for a week or so and was impressed to see how many WAPs (wireless access points) were around. I even connected to one at a local coffee shop and posted to here.
Last night, I went out with the specific goal of connecting to a WAP in a secret way. I had to try it. The geek allure was too high. After trying several times, I found that you basically needed to park directly in front of someone’s house to even get a minimal signal. 20 feet in either direction, and you would be unable to get a good signal. I found it quite unnerving to be parked in front of someone’s house trying to access their computer system. It had quite a different feel than sitting comfortably at home with a soda pop while port scanning a box on the other side of the world.
As a hobby, I decided it just wasn’t for me. I guess if you live in a denser area with more WAPs around, it might work better, but in the suburbs of LA, it isn’t much fun.
My weblog spawn are continuing to type away…
The Rants of Mister P
Pat in His Right Mind
Flying W Things
I also took time to make Scary Mommy. I wonder if we’ll see more posts…
Whew, another weekend draws to a close. The kids are sleeping, Michele’s up front ready for the season premiere of Sex in the City, and I’m in the study (surprise!) on the computer.
I think my adventures on Saturday took a bit out of me. While I enjoy time in the heat and sun, it does a number on my energy level. I woke up late this morning and could never really get going. I was just out of juice. I played with the girls in the spa, but it didn’t help.
Michele took the kids out to the park to go bike riding, but I still couldn’t get going. I even had a little spat with Michele over something stupid. Finally I fell asleep up front while the kids were watching Shrek. After a short nap, I woke and felt OK.
I cooked dinner for the kids and gave them a bath. They are tired too.
Well, here are the stories of geocaching on Satuday. There’s no picture of the slight sunburn on neck and arms…
One more thing. On Saturday I made shish-kabobs for dinner. I learned the valuable lesson that you cannot cook raw potatos as part of the kabob. You need to cook the potatoes first, then skewer them. Live and learn.
Tomorrow is approaching fast. I’m not looking forward to what it holds. I can’t really talk about it, but it’s not going to be a good day where I get a lot done. It will involve much sitting in conference rooms being serious.
After work I went to the weblog meetup in Glendale. It was at a billiards place. I grabbed a beer and soon met Susan, the only other person there for the meetup. It turns out that Susan has written several books and is quite web saavy. We chatted for a while about all kind of things. She’s a bit more into the weblog community than I am. I tend to skim weblogs rather than visit them on a daily basis.
Martin stopped by, bringing our total to THREE!. Susan took a few pictures, so I think they will appear on her site soon. We chatted a bit more and I order a club sandwich (no tomato, no mayo). Mmmm, tasty.
We discussed that the next meetup should be in Pasadena proper and not in Glendale. Hopefully the group of attendees will grow over time.
OK, gotta go to work.
I just had to explain what a weblog was to my Mom.
I resisted the urge to say ‘Your soaking in it.’
I am currently sitting in my car across the street from a place called Cafe Pop near home.
While driving home from Martin’s house, I turned on the netstumbling setup and listened to it sound off as I passed access points. As I got near home, it went off again and I pulled over.
After a bit of fiddling, I connected to the WAP and I am ONLINE in the car.
This rocks.
