Archive - Nov 2004

Comment spam is one thing. Easily ignored. Offensive comments however ... nope, just as easy to ignore. I don't even need to delete them when they don't have the will to stand by their comments and supply a valid email address so they can confirm their post themselves. There is no reason why I should do it. Is it censorship?

Well I got through Komarr in just Saturday and Sunday, including taking about four to five hours out for a rehearsal in Sunday. Which makes it the eighth book in the last month. That's two books a week!

Temple of Raman Ran (Third Level)

"Oh sugar," said Diane, two guards searching the rooms. She tightened her grip on Hamdija in case the jumpy man were to attempt to make a break for it. She glanced around the room, was there any way that they could hide four people here? If not they might have another fight on their hands and her shoulder was still sore from last time. She hated to imagine the alarm that the sound of Rex's gun would raise if he fired it.

Rex stared hard at Hamdija's eyes, then stood up and holstered his gun.

"Hamdija, you able to help? The second one guard steps in, we cover his mouth and knock him down, then Morton says 'Clear'. When the other guard passes in front of the door, I step after him, he'll be expecting a figure to go after him and he won't realize until I knock him down."

He stands on one side of the entrance and signals Hamdija and Diane to stand on the other side and Nick to join him. "Morton, hide in the shadows!"

Nick leaned against the wall opposite Rex and whispered, "What if there are more than two of them? These nooks are on both sides of the--" He was cut of by a shout from one of the soldiers outside.

"There! Halt!" A brief pause then, "The ... fifth one the right."

I've finally sat down and installed a spam/virus filter on Kemitix.net. I might start reading my email a bit more often now. I used amavis-new using clamav and SpamAssassin. At least it's claiming to. Despite enabling SA, I'm not seeing any evidence of it doing anything, other that nibbling at the processor each time a mail arrives. It isn't catching the spam, or even reporting in the headers that it even saw the main. Amavisd is however.

I've been struggling with finding decent links to some of the book covers I link to in my side bar recently. I've finally figured out how to use the Amazon.co.uk images, but stripping out the '20% off' or '30% off' over lay and the extra border. The images all appear to be created dynamically.

Here is the original,
20% off version

Just updating my list of books current and recently read with the latest update. Having just finished Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold. I noticed that I only finished the previous book in the series only three or four days ago. For me that is fast by any standard I've ever had. Include the fact that I've been at work for all of those days and had three rehearsals and had to learn some lines. and before Simon jumps in, Yes, I'm I'm really getting into them. Now onto the next book: Komarr.

Linux News: Health : Girl Survives Rabies Without Vaccine
John Giese, the girl's father, was grateful to the doctors and their novel treatment, but said that prayer had made the crucial difference. "The day after we found out, I called on everyone we knew for prayer," he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this week. "We believe a lot of that snowballed and it really made a difference."

I'm not really a big fan of Rollercoasters. I tend to feel like I'm about to loose my lunch on the tamest of rides. I've never tried anything really big.

This just scares the hoo-haas out of me: Industrial Grade Robotic Rollercoaster

Just discovered Blogline's disposable email feature. It's fairly simple: You create an email address for a specific purpose, say a public mailing list, a website registration, whatever. You then get a subscription to the email addresses inbox as an RSS feed through bloglines. You can read all email sent to that address in Bloglines, or in another RSS aggregator, pointed at that address. Admittedly I wouldn't recomment it for anything sensitive, but mow many mailling lists or New York Times registrations are that?

Just listening to Tom Hanks singing in The Polar Express on Streaming Soundtracks. He certainly sounds like he's having fun.