This morning, like most mornings, my routine began with rolling out of bed and kicking on the computer.

No, I’m not kidding, but I am exaggerating a bit. I really just use my big toe (sometimes right, sometimes left, depends on mood) to depress the power button.

And wouldn’t you be depressed if a big toe came out of nowhere to squish you every morning? Thought so.

Hmm. You shouldn’t let me go off on weird tangents like that. Back to the story… I checked my email as usual. What was unusual is the proportion of email inbox contents between my new and old addresses. Main address? The usual dozen or so missives, all but two being spam. Old legacy almost defunct address? More than sixty messages… all of them bounced spam!

The hell?

Until this morning, I didn’t know what a “Joe Job” is. Consider me edu-mah-cated. And annoyed. I mean, who the hell would use that address for anything? Argh. (Mind you, at least they didn’t use my current address!)

Also consider me inspired (at long last!) to get GnuPG installed on my home computer. From now on, missives from my main address will be signed. (Okay, as soon as I can make the same thing happen on my computer at work… which shouldn’t be all that tough.)

My public key is right here, thanks.

Signing my emails won’t prevent another Joe Job scenario, but it will allow me to state with much more authority which emails are really from me and which aren’t. This makes me happier. Dammit.

I’m doing another upgrade here, so if things are sorta tweaked out or broken or just plain weird… it’s me. It’s all me. Feel free to tell me what’s not working for you, though. Maybe I’ll miss something if nobody tells me!

My battle monster beat Kyla’s battle monster, nyah nyah!

GreyDuck is a Giant Ant that is Cold-Blooded and Susceptible to Electrical Damage, and has a Metal Jaw, Black-and-White Stripes and a Computer for a Brain. Strength: 6 Agility: 5 Intelligence: 9 To see if your Giant Battle Monster can defeat GreyDuck, enter your name and choose an attack: fights GreyDuck using Strength Agility Intelligence

Bring it on.

Okay, okay, I’ve made one too.

Are you happy now? Thpppt.

(I’m such a follower. But see, I’m mighty selective about who I follow… and it doesn’t hurt that those I’m following are enjoyable to look at from behind. *smirk*)

Church Sign Generator

After basically spending two days flat on my back, I wanted to do something. “Hey,” I thought to myself, “I can add the CDs I’ve acquired in the last year or so to my music catalog!”

Way back in the Dark… that is, the DOS Ages, I registered a little piece of software called Playlist. Its sole purpose was to allow one to efficiently catalog one’s music collection. There were other catalog programs out there, but Playlist was dirt easy: It stored every previous entry for each field, so adding new media from the same artist (for instance) could be accomplished with a minimum of keystrokes. I put 154 CDs into that thing… and the reason I know the exact number will be explained shortly.

Eventually Playlist “went Windows” and earned a new name: Visitrax. Because registered users of the old program could run the full version of the new without paying a second fee, I happily made the transition and hurriedly entered the other 150-some-odd CDs in my collection.

With all of the excitement this past year, somehow I lost track of my Visitrax install. More importantly, I lost track of my old Playlist install directory… in which I had a text file containing the registration code! Eep! I looked on all four of the household computers, I searched through old email archives, and poked around on the various backup CDs. Nope. Somehow when I transitioned to the new PC I managed to leave my only copies of Playlist and Visitrax behind. Damn!

Finally, in desperation, I decided to attach every IDE drive on my shelf to one of the computers to see if I could salvage something from this mess. On (of course) the very last drive in the pile, I found what I was looking for: The Playlist directory with the registration code and (bonus!) the most-recent database… from when I was using Playlist.

Oh well. At least I have those 154 CDs entered in. That only leaves about 200 and some-odd to go… and this time, I’m making more intelligent backups. Argh.

By the way, if you’re at all inclined towards building a catalog of your music, I highly recommend Visitrax. The current version pulls data from CDDB (freedb, actually) for you, and also integrates with Winamp by allowing you to associate a track with its digital version if it’s on your hard drive.