reesesWeb

It's hard not to look down on provincial people, but when they do really funny, stupid things, it's hard not to.

In case it goes away:

Great deli, lousy restaurant

I had one of the worst experiences ever at this restaurant that is a block from my house. Service was great when she occassionally showed up between long disappearances. The food was awful. How many miniature octupi can you possibly eat in one seafood dish? My wife and friend started decorating the edge of their plates with the scary little creatures. The carpaccio was just a big pile of raw meat. We all went away queasy.

Stick to the attached deli; it is wonderful. I hope it stays in business when the restaurant folds.

I bought a new Linksys wireless router to replace both my existing switch/router and my ancient wireless access point. Kat bought a new (groovetacular) laptop, and the love it was giving my ca. 2000 AP was the rough kind that ruins it for anyone else. Since we're an almost completely wire-free ('cept the wall->cablemodem->router linkage) house, this was what we call 'not so good'.

As always, when one does not understand the exact nature of the problem, one usually exchanges one set of problems for another, hopefully smaller, set.

Now, I 'lose' connectivity every few hours, for a period of time ranging from 'annoying' to 'infuriating'. Signal is 'ok' for the various boxes, ranging from 60%-90%+, so all I can think of is that someone has a baby monitor, unshielded microwave oven, or cordless phone that knocks my connection to the ground whenever it rings. However, this is new behavior, not exhibited in the old environment. (Except when Kat's new laptop did its randy business.)

I switched channels, upgraded firmware, read the fora and stopped using DHCP, all to no avail.

Now, it turns out that the WRT54G is just a re-packaged PowerBook 5300C. Of course, the original packaging was lost in a wifist purge this morning.

If you're stumbling on this by googling for "WRT54G problems", let me just tell you not to buy this route, and make your wife run an ethernet cable to her spiffy new laptop.

My lucky break. Googling for rate my poopies brings millions of visitors a day here!

$ wc -l .procmailrc

    330 .procmailrc

$ wc -l .procmailrc~

   1437 .procmailrc~

Ahh...

I've gained enough confidence in the most recent version of SpamAssassin to rip out a huge chunk of my Rube Goldberg spam filtering system, which combined ESR's bogofilter, which I had been using for a year or so, an earlier non-Bayesian version of SpamAssassin, and a HUGE blacklist that I used to teach procmail about spam with a really grotty script.

I decided to throw out bogofilter and rely on SA, because that seemed the better horse to back, if one is only backing a single horse. I still need to rebuild my .procmailrc, but at least I can delay that for a little while.

(Yes, my entire email system does resemble that brilliant Honda commercial, without the windshield wipers. You should see the MUA side, with its ten years of scripts written in sh, bash, ruby, python, and scsh. Really.)

I forgot one other book I read the other day when I was sicker than a black dog:

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, by Mil Millington.

In case you haven't seen his site, Mil has the scariest girlfriend on earth. I only say scariest, and not second scariest, because I am now married to the previous recordholder, who obviously doesn't know about this blog. Go read the site, and you'll have some idea about why this book is worth reading.

I've been reading a lot lately, and since I've basically given up on updating my books page, I'll spout off here on the books I've read in the past week or ten days:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon.

I liked this decades-spanning book which hangs its plot on the development of the comic book industry from its nascency. I like any story even peripherally involving the golem, so it had me early on. There were a couple mistakes, though, that had me worried in the first 50 pages or so:

I don't go nuts for ice cream like some people do, but this is the best frickin' thing on earth. It's all I can do to restrain myself to two spoonfulls when I walk by the freezer.