Archive for March, 2007
03.29.07
Posted in General at 3:37 pm by Nicholas
Finally got a start date for the County job: April 16. I actually wasn’t sure for a little while there — not because of the background check, but because of the physical. As many of you may remember, my heart rate kept me out of the Army about ten years ago. Granted, it’s not something I’m too broken up about these days, but at the time it was disappointing, because I was really excited about going to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. I still think I could have handled boot camp, given the chance.
Bet they’d take me if I enlisted now, though — but they missed their chance.
Anyway, the County required a pre-employment physical, and sitting in the doctor’s office, memories of the Army physical came back. The doctor took my pulse twice, and both times it was well over a hundred beats per minute. But she told me not to worry about it, and, true to her word, she did give me a positive recommendation for the job. I still have to do one more TB test tomorrow, and then have that read on Monday, but this is the second stage of that test, and I’m not worried about it.
Now I can go back to having coffee in the morning — I was holding off until all this medical stuff was over with, even though, judging by my own measurements, it makes very little difference in my pulse. More importantly, I have a permanent job, with benefits and a retirement plan and a bit more money than I’ve been making. Less to worry about, in other words, which should help with that heart rate. Now, if I can just pass these exams next month…
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03.28.07
Posted in General at 7:40 am by Nicholas
I’ve posted before about my ongoing battle with spam, and some of the weapons I’ve found useful. There was a time when I administered my own email server, with carefully chosen realtime blacklists and a regularly updated set of SpamAssassin rulesets. That was pretty effective, but far too time-consuming — not to mention the expense of having a dedicated server.
Eventually I moved to a shared hosting plan with DreamHost, and tried their built-in spam protection for a while (which also uses SpamAssassin). It was OK, but a bit too conservative — far too much spam was getting through, even when I customized the level at which a message was considered spam. I eventually decided to combine DreamHost’s filters with Gmail, and wrote a blog post and a wiki article about my technique. For a while, that worked beautifully, but something must have changed in Gmail’s filtering setup, because soon I was getting a lot of false positives. One especially annoying category was Amazon Marketplace purchase confirmation emails: without fail, Gmail marked every single one as spam, and since each one came from a different seller’s email address, there was no good way to prevent this from happening.
Next I tried CRM-114, which rarely gave false positives (except from one particular sender whom I had to whitelist), but also never really achieved an acceptable level of confidence. Every day it appropriately marked most of my spam (which I forwarded via procmail to another account) and let the majority of my legitimate email through, but also marked around 5-10 messages a day “unsure.” I then had to train it by forwarding those messages to myself, along with a special command to tell CRM-114 how it should have categorized them. I kept expecting it to get more accurate than that, but after several months I gave up.
And that leads me to the present day. For the past week, I’ve been using a hosted spam filter managed by Postini. Since Postini is designed for large companies, I’m actually going through a reseller called Spam-X, which allows me to filter just one address, as long as I pay for a year in advance. One address comes to $27/year, which is more than worth it for the time it saves me.
In the first week, with just the default settings and a basic whitelist, Postini has caught 419 spam messages, with 4 missed and 2 false positives. Those false positives were both sort of special cases: one was a message telling me I hadn’t won free tickets to a movie, followed by an advertisement; the other was from my bank, telling me there had been some suspicious activity on my account. Both addresses are now whitelisted. I’m still getting the occasional message that hasn’t passed through Postini’s filters at all; apparently some spammers don’t maintain their DNS servers very well. If it continues, I may write a quick procmail filter to reject mail that doesn’t have Postini’s headers.
There are a few features I’d like to see added, like keyword whitelisting, but overall I’m impressed by the feature set. The filters can be tuned to five levels of aggression, and in addition to the general filter you can customize filters for sexually explicit content, racially insensitive content, get-rich-quick schemes, and “too good to be true” special offers. If a legitimate message is mistakenly marked as spam, you can have it delivered to your mailbox as though it had never been blocked — and when you do, Postini asks if you’d like to add the sender’s address to your whitelist. For email discussion groups, you can whitelist “To:” addresses as well as “From:” addresses. I also like that Postini blocks mail before it even gets to my web host’s servers, let alone my local system. I had to change my DNS MX records, but once that was done, I could almost forget about spam altogether.
Verdict: highly recommended. I’m emailing like it’s 1999.
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03.18.07
Posted in General at 7:35 pm by Nicholas
This made my day.
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03.17.07
Posted in General at 10:57 am by Nicholas
Well, this day started off on a high note.
As I headed out the door to work, one of my cats (Touch, for those of you who’ve met the little retard) decided to try jumping on top of my monitor. That sort of behavior was merely annoying when I had a 19-inch CRT monitor, but now that I have a 20-inch flat-panel iMac, it’s nearly catastrophic. The whole computer took a dive, sliding off the edge of the desk and landing face-down on the floor. It’s a bit dinged up now, but the scratches on the screen itself buffed out to enough to be unnoticable when the monitor is on. I’m still not thrilled with the situation.
I cleaned things up a bit and made sure the computer still powered on (the tumble had pulled the cord out of the back), then rushed out the door, figuring I’d just barely make it to work on time. Got to my car, and noticed that someone had broken in during the night. The passenger-side rear vent window was broken, and stuff was tossed around inside, but the only thing missing was a $12 pair of sunglasses I was planning on replacing anyway because they were badly scratched. I called my insurance company, but on weekends they only take accident reports — the “glass only” department is only there on weekdays. Not that it matters, really, because the entire cost of the replacement came to about a third of my deductible. I called an auto glass place (Dynamic Auto Glass, on Fulton), and an hour and a half later the truck was in front of my building. It took less than ten minutes to fix the window and sweep the broken glass out of my car.
My prescription for days like this: take the day off work. Get a chili burger at Willie’s on Broadway. Watch a DVD of Kevin Kline in Hamlet. Figure out how I’m going to pass the four exams I’ve scheduled (and paid for!) six weeks from now.
On the bright side, I heard back from the County; I’m going in to sign some paperwork on Tuesday.
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03.14.07
Posted in General at 10:00 am by Nicholas
Here’s wishing everyone a great 3.14, and a happy birthday to Albert Einstein.
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03.13.07
Posted in Humor, Literature at 8:35 pm by Nicholas
In studying English through the University of London External Programme, I’ve been doing as much of my research as possible online. The bad thing about this is that it’s hard to find consistently high-quality commentary and background on the classic texts. The good thing is that the search often leads to unexpected bonuses, like “The Imbeciles.”
One of William Wordsworth’s most famous works is, unfortunately, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” I say “unfortunately” because Wordsworth also collaborated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads, one of the great masterpieces of English Romantic poetry, and the fact that this glorified Hallmark card about daffodils is more famous today than “Tintern Abbey” is a grave injustice.
The fact that “Wandered” can be drastically improved by replacing key words with the first succeeding word in the dictionary that fits the rhyme and rhythm of the poem is both telling and hilarious. I give you “The Imbeciles,” by Harry Mathews.
The Imbeciles
I wandered lonely as a crowd
That floats on high o’er valves and ills
When all at once I saw a shroud,
A hound, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lamp, beneath the bees,
Fluttering and dancing in the cheese.
Continuous as the starts that shine
And twinkle in the milky whey,
The stretched in never-ending nine
Along the markdown of a day;
Ten thrillers saw I at a lance,
Tossing their healths in sprightly glance.
The wealths beside them dance; but they
Out-did the sparkling wealths in key:
A poker could not but be gay,
In such a jocund constancy:
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What weave to me the shred had brought:
For oft, when on my count I lie
In vacant or in pensive nude,
They flash upon that inward fly
Which is the block of turpitude;
And then my heart with plenty fills
And dances with the imbeciles.
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03.03.07
Posted in General at 7:18 am by Nicholas
It’s been a long time since I posted a real update here, and too much has happened to go into detail about any of it. Here’s the ultra-brief executive summary, in approximately chronological order:
- My shipping problems continued in comical fashion throughout the holiday season. There was enough fodder for several blog posts about it, and in fact I started writing about it more than once but never found the time to finish. The US Postal Service lost two shipments intended for me — in one case, they actually returned what the shipper described as “a fragment of the box” to him. I got my money back both times. I also had an opportunity to pick up a shipment at the big FedEx Ground terminal off Power Inn Road, and I think I’m a stronger person for the experience.
- I bought a new 20-inch iMac. Fortunately, this shipment arrived without incident (thank you, UPS). It is a thing of beauty.
- I applied for a couple of permanent jobs: a graveyard shift at Apple, and an IT Technician Level II position with the County. Didn’t get the Apple job, but I got a tentative offer from the County yesterday. Next week I’ll do the usual background and medical check; assuming that goes well — and I have no reason to think it won’t — I’ll be leaving Apple soon. I have mixed feelings about that, but it means job security, a little more money, good benefits, and an 8-5 schedule, so overall it’s a good thing.
- I turned thirty.
To quote the great philosopher: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
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