Wednesday, March 20, 2002

I wrote up a timeline of my life. It's a prelude to my autobiography. There's a bidding war going on between the major publishing houses. In the meanwhile, you can click on the 'My Life' link to your left. Or you can click here. 9:38:14 PM

We made our first snowman - January 19.  Turns out, this was the only snowfall this year in which it was really possible to make a snowman.  It's a little scraggly looking, but there was only about 3 inches and it wasn't the stickiest. Nonetheless, we had a good time. One of those bonding things. Doubt he'll remember it. I know I don't remember anything from that young. Maybe we'll have better snow next winter. First day of spring today. Vernal Equinox. Sounds portentous. 9:30:58 PM

Lots of things on my mind today. First, I'm downloading the latest version of Mozilla right now. Looking through the release notes, I see that they've got a way to disable those pop-over/-under ads without disabling java script entirely. This is what open source is all about. God forbid Micro$oft should add features like that to their weekly security fixes. How many versions of Internet Explorer from now will we see a similar feature, if ever? I went to the library and got me some more CD's. Lots of independent, little-known artists. Expanding my horizons. If I like any of them, I'll add them to my 'buy-next-time-I-have-money' list. I worked in a library for over two and a half years in high school. They're under-utilized treasures. I keep forgetting that. Free internet access. Books on tape and CD so you can listen to them during your commute. That's aside from all the priceless information in all the books. When I came home this afternoon, the front door wouldn't open. For some reason, the door wouldn't unlatch when I turned the handle. There's no lock on the handle, there's just the deadbolt, which was working fine. I actually spent some time trying to open the door using some wire from the shed outside. I considered calling a locksmith, then just threw my weight against the door a few times. A few seconds later I was inside. Amazing what 220 pounds can do. Looking at the door, I figure replacing the wood I cracked is likely to be cheaper than a locksmith would have been. And until I get around to it, the deadbolt still works. Except that I put a lot less faith in it now than I used to. I switched email programs to Eudora, since Forté Agent hasn't been updated in about 3 years. I'm busy re-doing all my filters. I get about 30 - 50 spams a day. I'm down to about 2 or 3 a day that aren't caught in my filters. Within a month, I hope to have that down to a couple a week. All it takes is figuring out what all the spams have in common - a domain, a character set (in the case of all the Korean spams), words in the subject or body. For a while, you could just filter on 'This is not Spam' in the body. I haven't seen that one lately. Nowadays, it's 'click here to be removed' or 'never sent unsolicited'. I don't suppose I'll ever catch them all. I can live with one a day, I guess. And, of course, my wife and son are coming home tonight. Evidently, the little snot-grabber didn't miss me at all. Grandma has been spoiling him, apparently. Wonder if he'll throw a fit when his mommy tells him he has to come back home?  :) 5:38:28 PM

I wrote a rant about Superman a while ago. Here it is. I'm slowly transferring everything I've written here. 4:28:08 PM

© Copyright 2002 Alexander Johns.