Circularity: My long-distance provider, Primus, is using SpamAssassin for spam-filtering at their ISP end!
Does this mean I can get a discount? ;)
Tags: circularity, discount, end, isp, mean, primus, provider, spamassassin
SoCal: Wild fires are raging throughout Southern California.
Last night, I was reading J. G. Ballard’s Millenium People (thanks Lean, it’s great!) outside on the balcony, when the Santa Ana winds whipped up suddenly, blowing hot and dry and laden with ash — then the coyotes started howling.
It felt very much like the end of the world… freaky stuff.
Everything is covered in ash; the air smells of wood smoke; the sun is a minute cent-at-arm’s-length red disc; everything is lit in a very odd reddish-orange tint. And the nearest fire is 30 or so miles away. I’d hate to see what they’re like up close…
Somehow I missed all this in Australia… I hear Sydney was like this for a week over Christmas that year.
Some links:
Tags: ana, ash, balcony, boing, end, everything, millenium, night, santa, socal, wild
Wild fires are raging throughout Southern California.
Last night, I was reading J. G. Ballard’s Millenium People (thanks Lean, it’s great!) outside on the balcony, when the Santa Ana winds whipped up suddenly, blowing hot and dry and laden with ash — then the coyotes started howling.
It felt very much like the end of the world… freaky stuff.
Everything is covered in ash; the air smells of wood smoke; the sun is a minute cent-at-arm’s-length red disc; everything is lit in a very odd reddish-orange tint. And the nearest fire is 30 or so miles away. I’d hate to see what they’re like up close…
Somehow I missed all this in Australia… I hear Sydney was like this for a week over Christmas that year.
Some links:
Tags: ana, ash, balcony, boing, end, everything, millenium, night, santa, wild
Music: All good things must come to an end. EMusic has been bought out by some bunch called ‘Dimensional Associates’, and will no longer offer its excellent download service; instead you’re limited to a measly 40 MP3s per month. (For context — last time I downloaded some listening material was on Monday, and I picked up about 80 MP3s in a single sitting.)
They’ve shut down their message boards; third-party discussion groups are filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth; and worst of all, I can’t even download the remaining stuff on ‘My Stash’ (the downloads-to-do list) because they’re overrun with rats deserting the sinking ship. (no reflection on the rats — I’m one myself.) Either that, or they’ve just turned them off; which is annoying as I had lots of music lined up to download when I got a chance.
This is very bad news — Apple’s iTunes is full of crappy music, Mac-only, and DRM-crippled; Rhapsody is Windows-only and DRM-crippled; there’s really no other legal MP3-download option.
I guess I’ll just have to go back to buying 1 or 2 CDs every few months when I’m buying stuff from Amazon (which I do nowadays anyway, in addition to EMusic) and just listening to the radio in general instead.
Thanks anyway, EMusic, for introducing me, helping me get into, or helping me rebuild my collection of such great music as:
It was great while it lasted.
Ah well, I guess I’ll save a tenner a month, which I can put towards the GameFly subscription…
Tags: bunch, dimensional, download, drm-crippled, emusic, end, month, music, offer, stuff
Congrats to Craig and Erica! Sounds like there was quite a lot of work involved for Erica — ouch — but the end result looks very cute.
Good choice of name, too — my friends Tom and Colette will be tickled by this one, given that they’ve named their son ‘Evan’, and their daughter ‘Alice’ ;)
Tags: choice, congrats, daughter, end, lot, name, ouch, result, son, work
I meant to blog about this event back in April at the time, but never got around to it. Basically, towards the end of April, there was a demonstration in Falujah in Iraq, shots were (reportedly) fired from the crowd, and US troops opened fire, killing 2 and injuring 14.
Well, Charlie Stross has saved me the bother ;) — he’s written a good summary of the historical precedent for this chain of events, and what resulted back then.
Tags: april, blog, crowd, demonstration, end, event, falujah, fire, summary, time
Aaron’s trip to CA comes to a end in a big bang of serious meeting-up.
I read his blog using the rss2mail mail-based news aggregator he wrote (I live in e-mail, especially while I’m still on the wrong side of dialup), and I think this is the most homepage-link-laden blog entry I’ve ever read. 45 links, count ‘em! Wow, I hope he can keep all those name-to-face mappings clear ;)
In other news: it seems that football (proper football, played with feet, ie. soccer) is bad for you: the World Cup penalty shoot-out caused a surge in heart attacks for England fans (New Scientist). Ban Football Now!
Tags: aggregator, bang, blog, dialup, end, football, mail, news, side, trip
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing is on fire today. I was tempted to forward on an entry or two, but by the time I got to the end of today’s updates, I think the only thing a reader can do is just go there and read ‘em: Quake players on drugs, Dance Dance Resurrection, and EMI uploading their own music to Gnutella…
Tags: boing, cory, dance, doctorow, end, entry, fire, thing, time, today
The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
The opinions expressed on this web site are my personal opinions, and do not in any way represent those of my employer.
