Antonio

I don't mean to sound gay or anything, but Antonio Banderas looks pretty hot dressed up as Zorro.
...
As that thought was echoing around in my head, trying to come up with some kind of angle on it that could be stretched to a couple of paragraphs, my mind went tangental, and I started to think about George Hamilton in 'Zorro, the Gay Blade'. ZtGB was, quite frankly, the best Zorro movie ever.
I think about getting that movie on DVD so that I can share it with people around me. But I fear a repeat of the Blazing Saddles debacle:
"Look at this great movie that I've seen so many times I'm word perfect on it. And then, having seen the movie, my random pronunciations will be slightly more comprehensible!"
(time passes during which time, they have maybe watched the movie)
"What did you think?"
'I only watched about 20 minutes of it, it wasn't very good.'

Evolution Email program

I have the 'catchall' addresses for 4 separate domain names funneling into my email account. That means I receive between 180 and 280 spam messagers PER DAY. This is a pain. I did, at one time, have a self-rolled bayesian filter on my email box. It would sign on for me during the day and whack any messages it thought were spam before I ever even checked my POP account. This worked, but it was a bit cumbersome.
About a 6 months ago I switched to Ubuntu as my primary Linux distro. Evolution in Ubuntu comes with Spamassassin built in. I ditched my own spam filter and started using this functionality. For about a month, it was a disaster. I spent a lot of time laboriously picking through the mountains of email to identify to the filter which messages where spam and which were actually useful to me.
The second through fifth months showed a gradual increase in efficacy. But over the last month I must have hit some kind of threshold. I now get a total of maybe THREE spam messages in my inbox per day now. For about two weeks I just couldn't believe what I was seeing and figured that the filter was marking false positives.
But that was just my paranoia. Spamassasin has had no false positives during this time frame. Just fantastic stuff! I think I would recommend my Windows using friends to switch to Linux just for the chance to use Evolution.

Dutch driving lessons

I still have a driver's license from the states, but now it is time to get that puppy turned over into a Nederlandse Rijbewijs. We have come into possession of an automobile, which means that I will not need to keep doing my grocery shopping on a bicycle with two overloaded saddle bags 15 times a week.

The driving rules here are just a tad different than in the states. For example, you yield to traffic coming from the right. Intersections aren't specially marked, you just always yield to people coming from your right. (Unless you have been given special bully permission by no less than 6 (SIX!) different types of road sign) Bicycles are always right. Even if they swerve in front of you for no reason, bikes riders are the victim. And pedestrians trump everything. And there are lots and lots of traffic cameras (flitsers) that take pictures of your license plate if you are speeding or run a red light. But these gray boxes are usually very well marked, how handy! And when you try to explain about American police officers hiding behind billboards in speed traps, Dutch people are just shocked all to pieces, "I thought that was just a joke for in the movies!"

So, me and my 18 years of driving experience have to unlearn and relearn a whole bunch of information over the next few weeks before the big and very expensive riding exam. Wish me luck.

Speaking of long lost compatriots

I heard from the wife of a friend that my friend now has a blog also.

kulwhip.blogspot.com

I highly recommend reading Ron Culhane. He's funny as hell and he's just not going to take it anymore.

Shannon D. Brown

My good college buddy Shannon sent me one of those classical messages of our times:

"You still there?"

Does your email address still work? Are you still connected to the internet? Can you still read? Are you, in fact, still alive?

Because there's just so much time and space to reach across these days. I'm floating 6 hours in the future to the Eastern part of the USA. 6 hours is a lot of time, that's practically a week in internet time.

So, I wrote back to say that, yes, I am still here. He has a web log, you can get it all straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, at http://www.technobohemia.com.

Bingely Bingely Beep

Ruby on Rails was a wash, for me anyway. I started digging into it and just kept hitting limits on what Rails could handle. "That's Okay, because it's extensible!" I hear those wacky Ruby folks say. But the fact is that I can run rings around anything I can do in Ruby with Perl. Sure, there are some nifty shortcuts, but Perl is very deep, and experience counts for a whole lot when facing a deadline.
So, for now, I'm sticking with what I know.