Monthly Archives: October 2003

Cold hands, warm heart

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Kathy and I chopped up the tomato and runner-bean plants yesterday evening, just as it was getting dark. As it was a very clear day, it also got very cold. As it was cold, and I wasn’t wearing gloves, my hands got cold. As my hands got cold, they shrank slightly. As my wedding ring isn’t a particularly tight fit, it fell into the compost heap when I was pushing the plants down into it.

Kathy kept her head while all around her (i.e. me) were losing theirs. She got torches from the kitchen, then we carefully took out the plants from the tub. Eventually she saw it, glinting in the torchlight, and she hooked it out with her little finger. What a star!

I’m just glad it hadn’t fallen down as far as the nicely rotting compost further down…

American Ugly

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Having come across ThankYouTony.com, which is full of fawning by Americans, I thought I’d post, pretending to be "Dwight Yorke" from Mobile, Alabama:

“Dear Tony,


I would like to thank you for revealing the true face of New Labour during the recent conflict. Thank you for proving that politicians are lying, two-faced deceivers who do not care about the will of the people, and who would rather listen to the opinion of the president of a completely different country, who should not even be in office.


Thank you for destroying my faith in the democratic process and furthering the cause of American imperialism.


Your actions were in contravention of international law! Who gave you the right to depose another head of state?


Thank you also for wiping out the lives of several thousand Iraqi civilians. And for what? So that the US can control the Gulf’s oil.


Shame, shame, shame on you!”


Somehow I doubt it will be added to the books that are being bound and sent to President Blair…

First Hurdle Fall

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With everything to do in Bucharest, Southampton failed to do anything. Well, they tried hard, and Gordon is rightly proud of their efforts, but the list of destinations on this year’s European Tour is rather short, and will get no longer.


I guess this is what’s good about supporting a team that isn’t Man Utd or Arsenal: you have to take the rough with the smooth, the bad times as well as the good. While last year’s cup run and league placing was exhilarating, I’m glad in a way that success has to be worked hard for, and that it doesn’t come automatically, as it seems to do for some of the larger teams.


Here’s to the slow and deliberate hard workers of the world!

Rules

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After some abuse of the comments system, mostly by dirty spammers, I have decided to implement the following set of rules. Any contraventions shall be punished by deletion and IP-address banning.

  1. No commercial posts (i.e. spam).
  2. No swearing or foul or abusive language.
  3. No personal attacks. This isn’t the playground. Attack my ideas by all means, but if you can’t make your point without attacking me, then you need to learn how to better formulate a counter-point.

That is all.

Pasties

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Kathy & I, along with Lorna and John, went to Cornwall for a long weekend. We stayed in (or rather, near) Polperro at Seaview Holiday Village. The Web site makes it look wonderful. The reality was post-war prefab "cottages" with flat roofs that birds would walk on early in the morning, waking us up.

Ho-hum. It didn’t matter, really. We went fishing in the sea off of Looe, went stone-skimming at Seaton, paddled in the moonlight at Talland Bay, played cards (Chase the Ace, Rummy), Cranium and Articulate, and ate and drank well. In other words, it’s who you’re with, not where you are that counts.

A funny aside: we ate in the holiday village bar on the first night, and there was a "cabaret performance" by a couple of women in wigs called “Abba Nites.” Audience participation notwithstanding, it was more like Phoenix Nights…

I guess that’s what you get for taking advantage of a holiday special offer in The Sun.

Evolution Spam Filtering with SpamAssassin

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I found this in the Evolution 1.4 Users’ Manual:

“If you don’t have SpamAssassin or other junk mail filtering on your mail server, there’s still hope, although it’s not quite as simple. First, download and install SpamAssassin from http://spamassassin.org You'll need to download the "spamassassin" and "perl-Mail-SpamAssassin" packages, and you can install them with Red Carpet by selecting Install Local Packages from the File menu. Further instructions are at the SpamAssassin web site. Once you have the software installed, do the following:

  1. Open a new text file with any text editor ( Programs > Accessories > Text Editor is the most convenient) and paste in the following: spamassassin -e. This will run the SpamAssassin command and report back 0 if the message is not junk.
  2. Save the file as "spam-filter.sh"
  3. Mark the file as an executable program: Open your home directory in Nautilus, right-click on spam-filter.sh there, and select Properties. Then, click the "Permissions" tab and check the box in the Execute column and the Owner row. Alternately, open a terminal ( Programs > Accessories > Terminal ) and enter the command: chmod +x spam-filter.sh.
  4. Back in Evolution, create a new filter: Select Tools > Filters, then click Add.
  5. Select "Pipe Message to Shell Command" as the first portion of the criterion.
  6. Enter "/home/username/spam-filter.sh" as the shell command, then select "Does Not Return" and "0" as the remaining two items. Substitute your username for "username" so that Evolution can find the script.
  7. For actions, choose what you?d like to do with the messages. You can delete the messages automatically, but it's more prudent to place them in a "Possible Junk Mail" folder, and check them over just to make sure a genuine message didn't get flagged by accident.
  8. You're done. Click "OK" to close the filter and "OK" to close the filter editor.”

There – simple, isn’t it!