I just added a couple folks to my friends list. No, I don’t think we have met, but we have some friends in common and some shared interests, so this is one way to say HI.

Yay, I cleaned my desk! Of course now I have a crapload of filing to do, so cross off one item and add one more. This is sort of like progress, I guess.

Installed air conditioner (temporary installation, involves cardboard and packing tape. Made dinner. Did the rest of the dishes. Updated to-do list. Failed to do curtains, mainly because it’s phucking hot and the AC got bumped up in priority. Oh and M and I got this new diet/exercise plan, called something like the Six Week Total Body Makeover. It allows you to customize exercise and diet to your particular body style. For me it’s a minor variation on “Eat a reasonable balance, watch portion sizes, and do something aerobic to burn fat” since I didn’t really want to shape my body or bulk up, though there are some shaping exercises I might do. For M there are more exercises and a diet that’s about the same with slightly smaller portions. Anyway, it should be interesting.

How to write my name in Kanji Sort of a work in progress This site had some suggested ways that various names could be written. This faq provides an overview of why the process is not straight-forward. Lines with English translations are all dictionary entries from this site. (Left hand is phonetic spelling, middle is Kanji, right is English. Phonetic: ぐれっぐ (gureggu) Suggestion 1: 遇礼具 遇 ぐうする 遇する to entertain/to treat 礼 れい 礼 expression of gratitude 具 ぐ 具 tool/means/ingredients/counter for armor, suits, sets of furniture ...

3:20 pm Installed air conditioner 3:21 pm Turned the puppy on.

Today’s dream involves me on a train and a bus.

OK, first day of my vacation is here. We are planning to use this week to finish up various chores and home improvement tasks (see my to-do list in previous entry). We have already managed to do a few things, most of the big stuff is still remaining to do. The big stuff is mainly painting the rest of the bathroom and installing the cove base and the various wall fixtures again. ...

Would like to do this week: Clean up Clean up bedroom: Heater, TV stand, futon frame Clean up patio: Wood, Wire fence material, Cat kennel, Litter boxes, Extra area rug, chair Clean up kitchen: Cookbooks, Tools, Duct tape, Rice cooker, Sandwich grill, Stuff on cutting board Clean up my desk File papers Clean up living room: Box of computer stuff, bag of games, two cat carriers, stuff on hearth Clean up dining room: Extension cord, tools, bag of games, old receipts, bags, papers ...

Remember my spam rant from Monday? Well it looks like one of these ideas is not new, and is proposed as a draft for a future RFC. It is here. Here is my feedback to the author… I hope it gets adopted and accepted by people. We have a domain that was used for free email before (altavista.com) and even though we stopped the service, we still get hundreds of complaints of “Your user sent me this spam!” - all of them are forged. So I think it would be excellent to get MS records in place, even if acceptance is not widespread, all it takes is a couple large receivers to adopt it and spammers will learn to avoid domains with MS records. ...

I have been thinking about ways to alter email programs (readers, servers, protocols) so that sending spam would be more difficult, and hopefully more expensive and less feasible for spammers. Yes, this is a tremendously difficult problem, but it is also a very important one, so much so that I am surprised it hasn’t been solved already. A friend posted this link which is a filtering system based on this idea. It’s a very interesting way to judge whether something is spam based on parsing out all the words and tokens from two large containers of mail: one with spam, and one with your legitimate mail. It’s a cool idea because it is adaptive, and the criteria is set by each user (or each group that chooses to share info about good and bad messages). ...