upset
Don’t ever check your work e-mail while sitting in a hotel room in a foreign city at 5am on a Saturday morning with an upset stomach. It will not make you feel better.
In related news, if I have to stop eating red meat, I will die. There is no discussion to be had here, I think.
I Think I'm Getting Good At This
I just converted my primary home desktop from Windows Server 2003 (which it had been running for about three or four years) to Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
NFS shares for my Mac laptop and Myth DVR. “Real” Ruby, git, svn, nginx, and MySQL. TorrentFlux web-based torrent management. SSH and VNC access to the machine 24x7. The benefits are endless.
The biggest letdown so far? There’s no good “alarm clock” software out there for *nix. I’m used to Banshee Screamer which I’ve been using since my freshman year of college. Set it and forget it. It’s fabulous. Space bar does snooze, and you can configure everything you’d want to (snooze length, multiple alarms, etc.)
Oh well. Maybe I’ll write something. Or buy a real alarm clock. Who knows?
Sounds Like a Shotgun Wound
Recently, I’ve been flooded with backscatter spam e-mail. This stuff is not particularly nasty, but it’s annoying.
Imagine that someone puts your return address on 100,000 postcards, and then sends them out all over the world. All of those postcards that go to “Address Unknown” or “No Such Number” get sent back to you by the Post Office with one of those little yellow stickers on it, saying “update your address book.” The problem is, you didn’t send the postcard, and it’s not your address book. Then, you get back little replies from people who have their butlers sending out replies like, “I’m sorry I can’t respond to your message right now. I’m on vacation in Switzerland, skiing the Alps.” I’m getting out-of-office replies from people in other languages.
Anyway, it’s kind of annoying. It’s particularly bad for me because of the way I have my e-mail address setup: anything “at jwhardcastle-dot-com” goes to me. This is helpful for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which is that I can use it to kill spam (i-dont-want-your-signup-junkmail@jwhardcastle.com), identify which one of my clients the e-mail pertains to (whitemarlinopen@jwhardcastle.com) or do things with it automatically (add-to-torrents-rss@jwhardcastle.com). The “suck” part comes in when I’m getting backscatter spam from “lkaslkfghj26t@jwhardcastle.com.”
If this keeps up, I’ll have to turn off my really convenient e-mail forwarding and put in a hand-coded list of 15 or 20 manual addresses. I’ve added SPF records in an attempt to limit this kind of stuff, but it doesn’t seem to matter much. *sigh*