In the month of September alone, my procmail filters have stopped 23,000 virus-laden e-mail messages addressed to my personal mailbox. I was trapping 150 megabytes a day until I decided to route them directly to the trash can.
150 megabytes a day! That is at least an order of magnitude above our normal e-mail volume. No wonder the Internet is slowing down.
I also get a lot of requests for free technical support, mostly because of my involvement with the S3 Savage driver for XFree86. My website is linked from a lot of graphics web sites, and that puts me high on the Google hit list for Savage questions. Many people do not bother to read the part about Linux, so I get a lot of marginally related Windows questions as well.
This month, I had an e-mail exchange go horribly bad. I got a question from a hysterical, hypersensitive, 48-year-old former elementary school teacher who decided to misinterpret my response in the worst possible way. The exchange just got worse with each exchange. It is an excellent example of how e-mail can cause disasters, as well as being a fine case study in the differences in communication styles between men and women.
It makes for an amusing read, as long as you keep saying "thank goodness this didn't happen to me": www.probo.com/timr/Deed.html.
Honestly, folks. If you are too dumb to figure out how to punch a hole correctly in a pre-scored piece of cardboard when you are given a template and a stylus to help you puch that hole, then you are too dumb to have your opinion count, and your vote SHOULD be disqualified. Dumb people make uninformed decisions, which leads to things like President George W. Bush and half-trillion dollar deficits.
We just had a mail-in election here in Oregon. My county (Washington County) still uses the "outdated" punch card system, as do one or two others in Oregon. We managed to make our voices heard, with no fuss and no controversy, and we didn't even have the stylus device; I had to use a ball-point pen.
I heard another commentator say that, with 6 or 7 pages of nominees, some people would vote for one on each page, instead of exactly one. My comment applies to this case, as well. If a voter can't follow the instructions to "vote for one only", then let Darwin take his due and remove the defective voter from the gene pool.
Paul Schaefer was doing his "Great Carnac" routine on Letterman last week. He put the envelope to his head and said, "recall election day". Then, he opened the envelope and read the question: "What does Al Gore most hate to do?"
On one hand, Israel is quite right in stating that Arafat is hurting rather than helping the peace process. I believe tension in the entire Middle East would be greatly relieved if Arafat were to voluntarily leave the country and retire to a sunny beach on the coast of Spain. I don't think he is helping the Palestinean people any longer.
But on the other hand, nothing will turn him into a martyr quicker than a forcible ejection. All that will do is incite Hamas and induce further violence. Plus, with Arafat gone, is there another leader amongst the Palestineans with enough charisma to actually get the nation to follow him, without being a raving loon?
How can this conflict ever come to a rational conclusion? The two sides view things in a completely contradictory way. Israel responds to each act of violence by (A) taking violent action against the suspected attackers, which is a reasonable course of action, and (B) by punishing the entire Palestinean population through shutdowns and curfews and restrictions, which is NOT reasonable. The Palestineans choose to see the Israeli responses as an attack on the nation as a whole, not as revenge against a lunatic terrorist faction within their midst, resulting in more nationwide unrest.
Until we can separate Hamas from Palestine, I don't see that peace is possible. And until Arafat exits stage left, I don't see that it is possible to separate Hamas from Palestine.
The interesting thing, to me, is the way they have it laid out. The first 15 minutes has only one interruption. That means the last 20 minutes, which has weather, sports, and fluff, is more than 50% ads.
I'm going to start shutting it off at 11:20. I don't need to be pummeled with car ads.
I had just over 4 GB of free space left on the disk, when a client came in with a task that required the new Visual Studio .NET. I have avoided installing .NET up to this point, just because I knew I would waste time exploring all the cool stuff in the Common Language Runtime, but when a client knocks, you answer. To my horror, the release notes say that a full installation need 3.5 GB of disk space!
So, I popped off to Fry's this weekend and got an 80 GB Western Digital "Special Edition" for $119. It has a 3-year warranty, it runs ATA-100 (my current disk is ATA-33), and it has an 8 MB buffer, which should make things go much faster. I came in Monday morning dreading the thought of Yet Another Brain Transplant, a task which Microsoft makes unnecessarily hard.
When I opened the drive, I discovered a floppy disk inside containing a set of utilities from Western Digital called "Data Lifeguard" that, among other things, includes a drive copy utility similar to Ghost that understands the NTFS format on my disk. Great, I thought; that's a lot easier than doing it the hard way!
Alas, here is the timeline for my misbegotten transplant adventure.
And yes, the new drive is significantly faster: big programs, especially, load much quicker than before. Color me happy.
And why did I install TWO copies of Win2K on the empty disk? Well, the copy of Win2K on my old disk was in a directory called "\WINNT". In order to copy that to the new disk, I needed to be running Win2K on the NEW disk from a directory with some other name. Unfortunately, Win2K does not allow to you change the name of the system directory when installing to a fresh disk -- it always uses \WINNT. Thus, I had to install a second one (where you DO get a chance to give a new name), and delete the first.
The drive-letter-to-serial-number mapping is one that tripped me up before. In the Win2K registry, in \HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MountedDevices, Win2K keeps a list of the serial numbers of the disks mapped to the DOS drive letters. My old registry, of course, had the old disk listed as C:. If I hadn't changed that, when I rebooted on the new disk, C: would STILL map to the old disk, and the new disk would get assigned something bigger (turned out to be G:). The system would still boot from the new disk (now called G:), but any programs that referred to C: would go to the old disk.
