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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • North, then South again

    “Why the sudden silence,” you ask? “Again,” you add?

    I took off for the Seattle area early on Friday to visit with Dawn. For the record, I highly recommend train travel over bus travel. Sure, Amtrak is chronically late… but there are fewer annoying people and you’re not packed in like sardines alongside ‘em.

    Anyway. I arrived at the Tukwila station around noon just in time to enjoy a brief rain squall in the middle of a bright sunshiney day. Oh, how I’ve missed Seattle weather. (And by “missed” I mean “managed to blot out from my memory as a trauma defense mechanism.”) Okay, I’m teasing a bit there. Portland weather can be almost as freakish…

    And, ah, by “Tukwila station” I mean “a raised platform attached to the rest of civilization by a switchback series of long, long ramps.” Apparently the real station is yet to be built. It’s kinda neat, really.

    Dawn and I went out to lunch, then pretty much spent the weekend either shopping, hanging out, playing games or eating. Well, okay, we slept occasionally. All in all, I enjoyed the visit and ended the weekend much more relaxed than I’d started out.

    As for not updating when I got home or at any point yesterday… well, I’m a lazy butt. I thought you knew that!

  • Interesting reading about spam

    If you’re wondering about the state of email spam filtering, here’s a relatively positive outlook on the subject.

    Rewriting the spam in less spammy language is the only one of these strategies likely to succeed. But this takes a lot of work. It may not even be possible for some spams. How do you rewrite a mortgage spam without using terms like “refinance” (.9612), “lenders” (.9862), or “mortgage” (.9995)? And remember, whatever euphemisms you use, they have to be different from the ones used by every mortgage spammer before you. Surely at this point it would be less work for the spammer to switch to some more legitimate business.

    That’s an important consideration. If the only way to get past Bayesian filters is to write spams more cleverly, we’ve made spamming a lot harder, because we’ve shifted the burden of cleverness from the few comparatively smart people who write spamware to the large number of stupider people who write the spams.

    Go forth and be enlightened, o fellow sufferer of email spam.

    So Far, So Good

  • Giant Battle Ducky

    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

    Bring it on.

  • Time of the signs.

    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

  • Cyborg me, baby.

    According to the Cyborg Name Generator, I am…

    K.A.R.E.L.: Kinetic Artificial Repair and Exploration Lifeform

    Go on, find out what your Cyborg Name is.

    Cyborg Name Generator

  • Relocated.

    I apologize for the long silence, but moving is the sort of endeavor you save up energy for. And now? I’m moved.

    Yep. Miles away from the house we lived in for almost six solid years. Living with a guy almost exactly my age and his teenaged son. So far, so good, and I’m as comfortable here as I could expect to be given the circumstances.

    For the record, the first thing I did was sit down and eat. The second thing was to reconstruct the easier of the two desks, and the third was to set up the computer.

    Priorities, people! It’s all about the priorities.

    Oh, and did I mention we have broadband here? Oh hell yes. I expect to be posting more often now that I don’t have to fight a crappy slow dialup connection…

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