Entries in Life

From the spam of the day:

               You are about to become an ordained minister              Become a legally ordained minister within 48 hours     As a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and   ceremonies of the church!     Perform Weddings, Funerals, and Perform Baptisms Forgiveness of Sins   and Visit Correctional Facilities                            Want to open a church?                       Check out Ministry in a Box    

But the great thing about some of the the latest spam is that they take random quotes from literature that it finds online. This particular one had a bit of Frank L. Baum attached:

      But why do you call them foolish experiences? Because they were,      abominably foolish! retorted the Demon,      bitterly

Is admitting that you have a problem.

For years, I’ve been reading my email with Gnus. Even though it is slow, I’ve stuck with it because of habit and convenience — almost everything I do is in Emacs, Gnus is in Emacs, it felt natural.

Now, though, it has started taking too long to manage my email. Deleting or moving spam out of the way takes way too long. Part of this is my problem — I’ve let my inbox get too big. But, I’ve been thinking of switching to Balsa or Thunderbird for some time.

Since I’ve found that SpamAssassin’s Baysean engine is pretty good, especially when I use it alongside SA’s other heuristics, the ability to move email from my inbox to my spambox is becoming more important.

Still, the straw that finally got me to move is this: I upgraded the IMAP server and Gnus couldn’t cope. Evidently Courier-IMAP added some ACL goodness and the extra information on an IMAP “EXAMINE” command is confusing Gnus.

I’m gonna miss Gnus. Its hackability, including tracking down crazy bugs like the one I’ve run into, makes it fun. This time, though, its time to switch for now.

The remnants of Hurricane Ivan is affecting people in PA more than those in New Orleans. Shocking, I know, but it evidently floods more in Pennsylvannia than I remember it flooding in New Orleans.

Of course, the worst case scenario (which never happens) is worse for New Orleans, but for on-going misery, the place to be seems to be the low-lying areas of PA.

My four-year-old daughter, Violet, woke us up this morning. “I’m your servent. Can I get you some coffee?” That was my cue to follow her downstairs and take over the coffee-making.

Sure enough, she came back a few minutes later (because I missed my cue) and asked her mother how she wanted her coffee — one lump or two? “Did you already make it?” her mother asked.

“No, there was some already made. It’s cold.” That really woke me up. There was no way we were going to let our precocious daughter serve us old, left-over, coffee.

Still, their eagerness to help does come in handy. I have a shirt that I’ve been putting off mending for a while — the button was about to fall off. Till last week when Basil was looking for something to sew (his sister had been mending a quilt and he was feeling left out). I gave him the shirt, pointed to the button, and, fifteen minutes later, Basil had done an exceptional job of fixing the button.

Problem is, now he wants to help paint. Hmmm… Gotta find a spot that we can hide.

After several tries — going back and forth getting docuumentation to prove that we’re married, that we live here — I’m finally officially Pennsylvanian.

As a father, I want Basil, my son, to succeed. I try to give him everything he needs to do that. But sometimes my son surprises me by taking what I give him and doing something wonderfully unexpected. And sometimes he disappoints me by doing something bad, like hurting his little sister.

If my only concern was getting him to toe the line, then it would be possible for me to overpower him. I could make it impossible for him to do anything that would harm his sisters. I could take away his ability to do anything that would disappoint me.

However, if I did that, most people watching would say that I don’t love him. If I restrained him like this, they would say I was hurting him because I wasn’t allowing him to learn from his mistakes. And, I would never get to experience the surprise of the unexpectedly wonderful. I would loose anything resembling a relationship with him.

In relation to my son, I am all-powerful. Because I love him, I choose not to exercise all my power over him.

I value a relationship with him more than absolute perfection from him.