Personal

Huh.

More gratuitous photos of my vacation follow. Follow links for bigger versions, etc. Warning: warm blue water ahead.

For the record, this is the front door of my villa: This is the view from the deck: And this is the beach. Follow the links for bigger pictures. Having a great time; wish you were here!

My drive to work today took three and a half hours. This snow…

I admit it: the lure of a free Mac mini led me to take a peek at Freeminimacs.com (original). The deal is that you sign up for one of several offers via their site, and you get ten of your friends to do the same thing, and you get a free Mac mini out of it. Presumably your friends go out and do the same, and so on. The economics of this seem to make sense — it’s your basic pyramid scheme, but less objectionable because the upfront cost of getting involved is minimized. The percentage of people who complete the offer is fairly low (original), while the people behind it are making money on everyone who starts the process. So, sure, for a free Mac mini I was willing to give ‘em my email address. My spam filter is mighty. ...

This is mostly for my mother’s sake. She asked! But, you know, if anyone else wants to take advantage of it that’s OK. (And Derek, I’m gonna take you up on that invitation post-Xmas.)

So here’s the thing. I’m sitting in a talk about spam, and the guy giving the talk is running over various HTML tricks spammers use to get spam past mail filters. A guy stands up and says “So obviously the trick is to block all email with HTML in it!” That’s just stupid. First off, it ignores reality. I don’t live in a world in which I can block all HTML email for all my users; neither do most sysadmins. Second, this is very clearly a talk for people who live in that world. If the context of the talk allowed for blocking all HTML email, then there would be an obvious solution and the talk would take about five minutes. ...

Yeah, I pretty much want all of this. Thanks!

I kinda think I haven’t found the heart of Atlanta yet. I took MARTA up to the Buckhead station, and found a wasteland of shopping malls, alleviated only by a Borders with a stunningly friendly woman behind the counter. Midtown was nicer this morning — the Flying Biscuit is a short walk from the train station, and they do an awesome breakfast. Even if they only have turkey bacon. So maybe Midtown is the right place to be, but there weren’t all that many pedestrians. Hard to figure. ...

My pal Jamie’s doing a music exchange — burn a CD with your favorite songs of all time on it, send it to everyone on the list, you know the drill. In one of those fleeting moments of personal revelation I sometimes indulge in, here’s mine. (Yeah, that’s a pretty weak excuse for personal revelation.)