Archive for November 2006
Well, I’ve had enough
November 30, 2006, 9:53 pmSpam has always been annoying, but it has been, as I’m sure it is for everyone, a very personal annoyance. It happens to everyone, but we suffer alone.
For two years I’ve been using CloudMark’s anti-spam filter on my email - it works on a similar principle to Google. The users teach the system how to respond. When we get spam, we identify it as spam, and that gets fed back to everyone else using the system, so for every one we have to identify, twenty get the boot automatically. Which is fine when you’re getting twenty spams a day - but what’s it mean when I’m having to identify five a day? It means I’m getting 100 overall.
Today, I emptied the spam mail folder - it’s where the program peels them off to, in case something important is mis-identified. It had 1600 in it. In the three hours between empty and going home, it had collected 65 more. I got home, and the folder there had over 4800.
So, let’s do a little math;
—castewar | 1 comment
(posted in the General category)
Yes.
November 23, 2006, 8:12 pmI got rid of the old layout - nobody seemed to particularly like the iframe, so I’ve ousted it in favour of the basic blog layout I was using. I’ll spruce it up in time, but for now the watchword is “minimalism.”
ARE YOU HAPPY, TOREN!?
I did it just for you man. Honestly, I did.
—castewar | 4 comments
(posted in the General category)
$16
November 21, 2006, 7:15 pm
These are those books I mentioned - the Murder Ink companion I mentioned is even better than I thought. I read a bit of it and it’s essays and interviews with mystery writers, editors, and afficionados. It’s also a REALLY good list of literary detectives and all the books they appear in - the author got permission to re-print the “Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones, a definitive library of detective crime fiction”. Nice.
—castewar | no comments
(posted in the General category)
We’re fine, thanks
November 20, 2006, 7:54 pmYou may or may not have heard that the Greater Vancouver Area has found the surrounding water tables turned to blood, and based on that sign of the apocaplypse, we’re killing one another in the street. This is not the case - there is blood and killing, but nobody thinks it’s the end of the world.
Oh, I kid. There’s no killing. There aren’t even any real scuffles over bottled water, when it became apparent that there’s enough lying around to supply us for months without restocking. The only real impact it had was a few days of no coffee (which has ended - the need for Caffeine has trumped the need for Taste, and everyone is brewing again, regardless of any possible aftertaste) and no fountain pop - which means if you like a drink at movie theaters or fast-food joints, you’re screwed.
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Last weekend (not this past one, but the one before, the weekend the water when to crap) I traveled with Maria to Gibsons BC, which was fantastic - rainy, but fantastic. We stayed THE coolest place ever - if you’re looking to get away from it all, I know where you should go. In fact, there are pictures on my Flickr account for you to have a look at. I documented the place in detail. I also discovered that the coolest toyshop is in Sechelt (pronouced sea-shelt - they told me this a lot, because I enjoyed pronouncing it seh-chelt way more) as is the coolest used bookstore (seeing as the population is tiny, the books are pentiful, but the people interested in buying them is limited) - I found a handful of great books, including a big book of Jospeh Dunninger’s magic tricks, all well illustrated. I also picked up a big book of mystery - not a book filled with mystery stories, but rather a reference to things typically found in mystery stories (ie a listing on The Pinkerton Detectives agency or London bobbies). Each under ten bucks.
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Recently, my love of mystery books has grown - in fact, it’s started to lapse over into TV, as I find myself buying used copies of the first season DVDs of things like The Rockford Files, Simon and Simon, and Remington Steele. So, you’ll know why I was happy to find this interview with Donald Westlake.
AVC: What drew you to writing about crime?
DW: If your subject is crime, then you know at least that you’re going to have a real story. If your subject is the maturing of a college boy, you may never stumble across a story while you’re telling that. But if your story is a college boy dead in his dorm room, you know there’s a story in there, someplace.
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By the way, this is the best commercial I’ve seen in a long time, soley because someone was smart enough to match that song, with its incredible lyrics, to that particular game. I know some of you may decide that the music was placed over the commerical by some internet kid, but I’ve seen it on TV, and that is in fact how it plays on the tube.
—castewar | 4 comments
(posted in the General category)
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