Blog: Ramblings and Rants

As I sit watching the excellent rendition of “A Christmas Carol” starring George C. Scott, I wonder: Were we to bring back Charles Dickens, what would he make of his legacy?

From the blog …now, how did I get here?: power what?!

PowerGen is a large company in England that sells electricity.

They’ve formed a division in Italy.

They went for the obvious company name and that’s what they registered the domain under.

It’s not a joke. www.powergenitalia.com

This is how a single lapse in e-mail address dilligence two years ago can result in an ongoing flood of hundreds of spam messages per week.

As you know my system was down for a couple of weeks while I moved. This morning “go through my e-mail” was at the top of my To Do list. Of course, going through 785 messages (not including this week’s) would take time. And, of course, the majority of it was spam. Hence I decided that today would my (usually only one) day this month when I would crawl through the spam building and updating filters.

I had been at it a little over two hours already when I decided to try to find the reason one particular address takes in over 75% of the spam I receive.

As of today, Strawberry Blonde and I have lived together for two weeks. Other than minor adjustments to our routines, things have been going very well. The only real stumbling block is my stuff.

When I move—Chris can attest to this—people are amazed by how much stuff I have. Invariably the mass of boxes inspires someone to accuse me of not packing properly, of wasting space. The truth is actually to the contrary: I am an excellent organizer (thanks, Mom!). I use space effectively. I’ll admit to a little pride in my ability to organize and arrange a home that holds quite a lot of stuff without looking cluttered. I fear, though, that I may have met my match here.

No, I didn’t die. No, I didn’t drop off the face of the earth.

What happened is this: Two days before I was to move the computer went down (no details for now). Then I moved in with Strawberry Blonde. The day our broadband was to be hooked up, we realized we weren’t completely ready. Another day would do it. That was two weeks ago.

I don’t even own a dial-up modem any longer, so that route was out. A proxy screw up at work prevented me from accessing the posting form there, so I was stuck. I couldn’t post.

Today broadband was finally installed. Before I could take advantage of it, however, I had to go to the office for an extended meeting. Then an appointment, then…

Well, here I am. Alive and well and connected. And too damned tired to post much.

I’ll be back with more soon.