Month: March 2005

Before I went on my travels, my mail reader on my desktop at home was pretty good at correctly determining whether or not something is Junk. For some reason by the time I came back it either forgot something or all spamming techniques had suddenly changed over night. Or in other words, it was hardly ever calling anything spam. So the way to fix this seems to be to re-train it on spam in your collection, so I opened up a folder with a few hundred spam emails and hit ^a and then mark/as junk to flag it all as junk. For some reason, Thunderbird then proceeds to ignore the fact that you just told it everything in that folder is junk and goes and marks a bunch of it ‘not junk’. Lather, rinse, repeat. It would be nice if it actually believed me the first time when I clearly told it the mail was junk. We’ll see if it gets the idea now.

Last night my cat King kept jumping up on the table trying to eat the dinner my wife was putting out. She was yelling and screaming at him but he just ignored her. I looked straight at him and said in a clear, level voice “King, down” and he whimpered and jumped down. My wife gets annoyed at things like this.

Some dork on Forumosa said to check out nerd-core hip-hop rapper MC Frontalot and his trove of free downloadable music where I found a lot of amusing songs. I can’t seem to stop watching the fan-made video for Yellow Lasers so it’s my ‘strange video of the day’.

Jeans are a tool of American Imperialism? Give me a break! Swans are a tool of Icelandic Imperialism. Right back at ya.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2005/03/15/2003246403

When you download software, are you getting the latest version? If you use a GNU mirror, you probably aren’t.

GNU software is the core of most free Unix-like OSes, including Linux. The main site to download this software from is ftp://ftp.gnu.org/ but it is often overloaded and slow. GNU is nice enough to publish a list of mirror sites so that you can get software from a faster and closer site at http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. Unfortunately, MOST (not some) of the mirrors are out of date. And I’m not talking a few hours or days. A few are out of date by a month, most are outdated by at least six months, and some are out of date by two years! I realize this is all free software, but I’d expect a little better than this.

My own tests: All California mirrors outdated except Mirror Monster. All Taiwan mirrors outdated except Providence University and National Sun Yat Sen University. In a break with other regions, all Japan mirrors are up to date. A random sampling of other mirrors shows this pattern extends across other regions.

Don’t believe me? Do your own tests. Click through on the mirrors on the above list and look for the most recent file/directory.

Stayed up until about 7pm yesterday. Already 7pm today, and can probably make it a bit… *thunk* ZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Saturday morning went out to IHOP for breakfast and it was PACKED but the wait for one person wasn’t too bad. After that went to the bank to get some US$, and then went to Mervyn’s to get a new rain jacket and PJs. I had a nice rain jacket I bought in Milan, but it was one of the kind that the waterproofing is not machine washable, so it got ruined… So found a pretty nice one that claims to be machine washable. Back home, finished up taking care of mail stuff and got pretty much everything organized and ready to go.

Took Rick and Anna out to dinner at Sushi Oh Sushi, a pretty good Japanese restaurant on El Camino at Bowers. It was Rick’s birthday on Sunday, so I treated them.

Back home again, got things packed, took a shower and changed to fresh clothes and headed to the airport just past 9pm. In SFO, EVA had a separate Deluxe checkin line, and there wasn’t any line for security, so that went pretty quick, but the EVA lounge in SFO doesn’t allow Diner’s Club access, so I’ll have to wait till I get frequent flyer status to get in there. Still the wait went pretty quick. I was able to sleep in small doses most of the flight. Getting in in the morning, I wasn’t nearly so tired as getting in in the evening. Still, it wasn’t long after I got home that I sacked out. Got up in the afternoon for a while and then was out again by dinner time and managed to sleep until nearly 5am. Now the question is how long I can stay awake today.

Had a nice dinner with my Taiwanese cousins last night. We went out for Chinese food and it was one of those places where I was the only white guy there. Pretty good. My mother-in-law’s brother is visiting them for a couple of months and seems to be having a good time. He was interested about my shop opening and wants me to show him how to make things since he’s a good cook.

This morning the weather had cooled down considerably. Friday broke a few records for high temps in March in the Bay Area. San Jose got up to 32 C. We’re a bit closer to the bay, so probably a degree or two cooler than that. That’s pretty high for around here even for a summer day, but especially for March.

Finishing up some last minute things and getting ready to pack for tonight’s flight.

It’s been pretty warm up here in Santa Clara, a bit unusual for March, but pretty nice. Last night we left a bunch of windows open to cool things off at night. Unfortunately we forgot one thing. In the middle of the night, the heater suddenly kicked in. See, the thermostat is on the first floor, and it had cooled off enough down there to get the heater to come on, but upstairs it was still pretty warm because heat rises and all that, so the heater coming on just made things a lot worse. Oops.

Today was leftover Thai food for lunch, and tonight I go over to see some of my Taiwanese cousins. Then just one more day til I go back home.

This morning talked to a supplier from Dawn about mixes, learned a lot of practical info there.

Lunch was another visit to Thai Garden with edpark and he got to play with my iPod Mini.

Dinner was with Trent and Jenny and Athena and Natasha and their guest from Tokyo, Fu-chan.