The Vent and Rant Thread

[PeterT]

And that is on top of my Fitbit Flex falling off my wrist yesterday morning while I was out on client pickup(s).

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I've been running my own Exchange Server since before forever (started at 4.0, for goodness sakes, when it was useless!) I've also had the exact same email address since 1992 or 1993, and it's been published in myriad books over the years. The ONE thing that saves me from a mailbox full of CRAP is ExchangeDefender. Is it perfect? No, I need to check the quarantine about once a week or so, just to make sure I didn't miss something. But it gets 100% of what it decides is "SureSpam" and sends it to /dev/null, and then the stuff it mostly thinks is spam, but not absolutely sure, it puts in quarantine. (That's all configurable, of course.) The stuff that gets eaten is thousands of messages a week. The number of clearly spam that get through? Probably 5-6 a day, almost all then caught by Outlook, given how I have Outlook set. And about 2-4 a month of "real" messages get put into ExchangeDefender quarantine. Less as you teach it.

Yeah, that's a server side product. Spambayes can be run on a server too, and various folks do, but it's not the usual choice.

One thing I rapidly appreciated about Gmail was the best spam filtering I'd seen. It uses Bayesian filtering too, but the spam characteristics database is composed from the Report Spam clicks of millions of Gmail users. Perhaps one new spam message every two weeks makes it into my Inbox. Report Spam, and I don't see it again. The rest gets labeled Spam, and if I don't manually clean it out, gets automatically deleted after 30 days. Gmail gets the occasional false positive, but it's a moment and a click to reclassify it. (Ironically, one source of false positives a while back was mail sent to the SpamBayes mailing list... )

At this point, I simply don't care about spam.

Another nice side effect was security. My mail resides on Google's servers, and I read it in my browser. Attachments reside there too, and Gmail had viewers for all common attachment types, so I don't need to download them, either.

Email is the primary vector by which viruses are spread, but possibly malicious mail never reaches my machine (and is likely quarantined as spam in any case.) On the XP machine, I was running Symantec Corporate A/V on an employer site license. The version I was running reached EOL and would no longer get virus signature updates. I no longer worked for that employer, and a new version would be on my dime. The only things it had ever "caught" had been false positives. I thought about it and decided not to replace it. I haven't missed it. (On the desktop running Win7 Pro I use Microsoft Security Essentials, but wouldn't miss it, either.)

If I ran my own mail server and used Exchange, I'd likely use ExchangeDefender or the like, but since no spam filter is perfect, I'd run SpamBayes in Outlook to catch what it missed.
______
Dennis

[Stitchawl]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

This tells me that no matter how hard the rest of us try, unless and until this Chinese dragon of destruction is brought to its knees, we can't win.

This is the time of the year that Asia faces its worst smog. Farmers all over Asia are burning their fields in preparation for new crops. It's too expensive for the average rural farmer to plow last year's residue under, so they just burn it off. Combine that with the 'mushroom pickers' who burn the undergrowth in the forests to better see the new crop of mushrooms that will spring up right after the first rains of the season (due in the next two weeks.) Everything is very, VERY dry as there has been no rain for months, so the fires spread all over S.E. Asia, blanketing this side of the world in dense smog. Here is a good pictorial representation of this. The orange dots represent areas of fire. As you can see, Beijing is one of the centers.

Unfortunately, so is Northern Thailand, and I've been wearing an N95 filter mask for the past week. I can't see buildings two blocks away. The good news, though, is that it will all be over in another week or so, unlike areas such as L.A. with its year-round smog. It's an annual problem, one that various governments have been battling with for the past 10-15 years. It's now illegal in Thailand and Malaysia to burn one's field, but there are not enough cops to enforce the laws. The Air Force sends up 100+ flights a day dropping water, but that's just a drop in the bucket (no pun intended) and it's only the rains that will clear the air.

The air is bad for three-four weeks. Really bad for two of them. For those two I wear a mask. No big deal.


Stitchawl

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by PeterT

And that is on top of my Fitbit Flex falling off my wrist yesterday morning while I was out on client pickup(s).

WOOT

I had some pickups this evening, and just on the off chance I checked the vehicle I had used Friday morning. The Flex was there So at least thats one GOOD bit of news.

[kindlekitten]

I think they should all be penalized and forced to stop it's incredibly ridiculous the impact the have on the rest of the planet. My traveler was told that this was year round in bejing

[kindlekitten]

Wheelbarrow with flat tire and almost coming off. The wheel itself is rusted and I can't get the cotter pin out. Had to buy a new one yesterday, decided to go with the Cadillac of wheel barrows.

What frosts me is that no one thought to mention it to me

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

Wheelbarrow with flat tire and almost coming off. The wheel itself is rusted and I can't get the cotter pin out. Had to buy a new one yesterday, decided to go with the Cadillac of wheel barrows.

What frosts me is that no one thought to mention it to me

There's a Cadillac of wheelbarrows??!

(I am tired of continually refilling the tires on this one, and the bed is cracked in 2 different places. OTOH, I do have a compressor sitting in the shed, so...)

[kindlekitten]

Yeah, I'll post a picture later. They are actually the barrows preferred by all of the big hitches going to shows

[Katsunami]

I've been working with some sub-25 year old people as of late, which sometimes made me feel as if it would be better to retire tomorrow. "Do some serious work" seems not to be in the vocabulary anymore, but maybe it's just me, not belonging to "the youngsters" any longer. (Haven't for some time now.) Maybe, back in the day, the somewhat older people thought the same of me. Could be. Don't know. I've considered myself to have been more serious and more disciplined at that age, as compared to many of my peers, but I could have been wrong.

So... then I read this:

Originally Posted by Stitchawl

In 1978 I did a tour as head of security for a strike location....

1978? Before I was born? Wait. Let me count that.

2015 - 1978 + 30-ish or so... makes... 67. Possibly older. Give or take a year or two.

I still have three decades and then some to go before I reach that. Thanks man. Now I don't feel like an old dude anymore.

[Katsunami]

I've just bought a book published by HarperCollins.

While the markup is very good (and leagues better than the markup they did at around 2009-2010, when they started publishing ebooks), I still think they should remove the empty line between paragraphs, and add a proper cover. A default greyish cover just doesn't cut it any longer.

[eschwartz]

It is marginally better than a fingernail-sized image of a penguin -- at least HC covers usually include the title.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

It is marginally better than a fingernail-sized image of a penguin -- at least HC covers usually include the title.

Yeah, OK; it's true that fixing the book fortunately doesn't take the time it did in 2011 (if it was fixable at all, using Sigil, or, horror of horrors, unzipping or rezipping), but it should just be perfect. Even the metadata wasn't.

I think there are still too many steps needed when buying ebooks, and you want them to be perfect...

- Buy the book (Kobo now has a cart, I've seen; finally).
- Download the ASCM-file.
- Download the EPUB using the ASCM-file in ADE 2.x.
- Import the book into Calibre.
- Clean up ADE.
- Save the book back to disk to create an un-DRM'd original version.
- Now fix the book (add cover, remove empty lines between paragraphs, fix metadata, etc).
- Polish the book.
- Send it to the e-reader.

[Stitchawl]

Originally Posted by kindlekitten

I think they should all be penalized and forced to stop it's incredibly ridiculous the impact the have on the rest of the planet. My traveler was told that this was year round in bejing

Some places do have it year round. L.A., Mexico City, Beijing, and it really sucks living in those locations if you have breathing problems to begin with. Laws are passed, but not well enforced. This year, thanks to the new Military government, there is a more heavy-handed approach to dealing with the problem in Thailand, but unless it's done by all the governments, the air quality won't improve by much.

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I've been working with some sub-25 year old people as of late, which sometimes made me feel as if it would be better to retire tomorrow. "Do some serious work" seems not to be in the vocabulary anymore, but maybe it's just me, not belonging to "the youngsters" any longer. (Haven't for some time now.) Maybe, back in the day, the somewhat older people thought the same of me. Could be. Don't know. I've considered myself to have been more serious and more disciplined at that age, as compared to many of my peers, but I could have been wrong.

So... then I read this:
1978? Before I was born? Wait. Let me count that.
2015 - 1978 + 30-ish or so... makes... 67. Possibly older. Give or take a year or two.
I still have three decades and then some to go before I reach that. Thanks man. Now I don't feel like an old dude anymore.

I'll be 69 at my next birthday. Parts of me are starting to fossilize.
I remember when Noah was just a midshipman. I remember when God's dog was a puppy, and Cleopatra played with dolls.

I was born about a thousand years ago
And there's nothing in the world that I don't know.
I saw Peter, Paul, and Moses
Playing Ring Around the Roses
And I'll sock the guy who says it isn't so!

On the other hand, I've just added racing stripes to my walker.


Stitchawl

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Yeah, OK; it's true that fixing the book fortunately doesn't take the time it did in 2011 (if it was fixable at all, using Sigil, or, horror of horrors, unzipping or rezipping), but it should just be perfect. Even the metadata wasn't.

I think there are still too many steps needed when buying ebooks, and you want them to be perfect...

- Buy the book (Kobo now has a cart, I've seen; finally).
- Download the ASCM-file.
- Download the EPUB using the ASCM-file in ADE 2.x.
- Import the book into Calibre.
- Clean up ADE.
- Save the book back to disk to create an un-DRM'd original version.
- Now fix the book (add cover, remove empty lines between paragraphs, fix metadata, etc).
- Polish the book.
- Send it to the e-reader.

I collapse steps 1-3 into one step: Buy the book from my Kindle. Step five doesn't exist.

On the other hand, I then have to add a custom column tracking the original filenames of every book so I can properly transpose the new copy. I guess the real problem is that it's actually more fun to fix them than to read them!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I've been working with some sub-25 year old people as of late, which sometimes made me feel as if it would be better to retire tomorrow.

[...]

1978? Before I was born? Wait. Let me count that.

[...]

Now I don't feel like an old dude anymore.

Under 40? Certainly not an old dude. Even Stichawl isn't an old old dude.