The power brick for our DSL modem fried itself late Friday afternoon, so now I’m sipping the Internet through a 45.2Kbps straw. Expect longer-than-usual delays in responses to e-mail and newsgroup postings. I hope to have a replacement brick in hand by tomorrow… keep your fingers (as opposed to your wires) crossed for me.
Kat and I just got back from a six-day trip to be with her family, to celebrate her father’s birthday. I returned to 1,334 messages in my personal mail account, most of them from mailing lists. But about 345 of those messages were spam. I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that if there’s one hanging offense on the Internet, spamming is it.
Granted, I’ve been online almost a decade and never really went to much trouble to disguise my e-mail address, a policy for which I am now paying every day of the year, as I try to clear my Inbox of crap without accidentally throwing away messages from people who legitimately want to talk to me—about CSS, about what I write here, about life in general. It’s an annoyance I really could do without, but it’s way too late now. The spam will stop when I go permanently offline, and not a day before.
The point of all this is not just to whine, although I admit it feels a little better to have vented. The point is that if you really want to talk to me, don’t give your message a subject like Hey there :), as one correspondent did in the last six days. I very nearly trashed it out of hand, along with a few dozen urgent appeals for help from Nigerian mining widows, detailed make-money-fast schemes, offers of herbal viagra supplements, and so on. Please, I beseech you, make your subject lines descriptive in some way, and try to make them unambiguous. Otherwise, your message may find itself in the bit-bucket.
Molly, like us and just about everyone we know, is going through a very difficult period in her life. In a block of text that blurs the line between prose and poetry, she pours a small portion of that turmoil into her Web site.
For some reason Molly’s words made me think of a painting that, without her, I would never have seen: Lu Jian Jun‘s oil-on-canvas work “Deception” “Ear Drops”. The small image of the painting cannot hope to convey the subtle, exquisitely vibrant luminosity of the original, which I saw at the Weinstein Contemporary Artist Gallery in San Francisco two weeks back. They have a number of other paintings by the same artist, every one of them beautiful. If you have the chance, go see the paintings, and do it quickly. There is a show dedicated to Jun’s work coming soon, and I would not be surprised if every piece is gone by the end of the show. I didn’t buy “Deception” myself because it would have cost more than the averaged value of an entire floor of my house… but I very much wished that I could.
A long couple of weeks, including a trip to California that got cut a little short.
I fixed the link to the orbit debris story, which disappeared shortly after I linked to it. Here’s what I find interesting: I linked to it on 23 April. The URL of the story indicates it was published on 3 May. So far as I’m aware, I haven’t been time-traveling, so what happened? In addition, the text of the article is very different than it used to be, including (among other things) a removal of any information about the closing of the Orbital Debris Program Office. Why would an article literally disappear for ten days and then come back with a much different tone? I don’t mind writing followup pieces that incorporate new information, of course, but this isn’t a followup. It’s a replacement. What happened to the original? I wish now that I’d saved the original to my hard drive, just to be able to compare.
I’m feeling a little paranoid about this. Of course, that might be due to watching All the President’s Men last night.
I also notice that the links to the “pure evil in Macs” Web site aren’t working. I seem to have the ability to evaporate pages and sites just by linking to them. Boy, if that were true, I’d start linking to so many extremist sites it would make both our heads spin.
Kat and I just flew back from a weeklong vacation in the Cancun region, and boy, are my arms red! No, really—my sunburn has yet to completely fade. We might actually write up a review of the place we stayed, which is only a few months old. If we do, of course I’ll post the link. First I have to dig throught the 2,407 e-mail messages that piled up in my absence.
While I was gone, John Manning wrote to point out that I need to correct an earlier posting, so I’ll do it here:
<style type="text/css" media="quantum-foam">
cosmos {color: #FEF8EA;}
</style>
Turns out the previously-posted value was the result of computational error. Oopsie.
I would have laughed harder at the article “Item Found In Garbage To Be Turned Into Lamp Someday” except it hit a little too close to home. When we took possession of our house, there were several boxes of trash on the treelawn left by the previous occupants. For no apparent reason, I looked through the boxes and actually salvaged something for later conversion to a lamp. What was it, you ask? Let’s just say it’s plastic, brightly colored, and covered in Grateful Dead stickers.
Last night, Kat and I were lying in bed talking (honest!) when we heard a deep, distant rumble. Even though we hadn’t seen a flash, we guessed it was thunder from an energetic snowstorm over Lake Erie, which happens sometimes. It wasn’t thunder. Our house is located almost two miles from University Hospitals, with a hill between us.
<style type="text/css" media="quantum-foam">
cosmos {color: #A1E8CD;}
</style>
I just thought you’d want to know that. (Confused? There’s an explanation.)