Entries in Life

Last night, we were eating dinner and I asked my kids how their day was. Violet used to opportunity to tell us a long rambling story about a good queen, a bad queen, some dogs and cats. After Ginger, her sister, complained that her story had too many “and then”s in it, I saw a “teaching moment” and asked Violet to tell us what the queen was doing with the dog. She made up something and, seeing my opening, I drove home the lesson. “You should try to include the other people in the story. They should do things together.”

She gave me a blank look. “No they shouldn’t. It’s a big world!”

On my mail server, I recently started using SpamAssassin’s baysean learning capabilities. To help SpamAssassin learn, I’ve been going through all the email classified as spam and verifying that it is spam. In the process, I’ve managed to unsubscribe from a few spammer’s lists that I “signed up for” in the past. Those emails that have unsubscribe links are pretty good about unsubscribing me — I don’t get their spam any more.

But, I’ve still been going through the spam box every day. Occassionally, SpamAssassin catches Powell’s Review-A-Day or some spammy looking email, and (more rare) a spam will occassionally slip through SA’s filters to my inbox, but, for the most part, the spam I get now falls into one of a few categories: Nigerian scams, Lottery scams, Mortgage scams, Rolex spams (genuine and fake), spam I can’t read (usually in what looks like Russian, Chinese, or Japanese), and sales of pharmaceuticals (I can’t tell if these are a scam or not). I would set up a weblog to record the interesting stuff, but Leonard beat me to it In any case, today’s fun spam subject line is “V"iagra is out of fashion, find out why.” Yes, I take pills because it’s fashionable.