Have I ever told you how much I hate sounding like an advertisement? Well, it’s true. I do. But I also recall way, waaaaayyyyyy back when I was new to the online community. (Can you say 300 baud modem? I knew you could.) I had no idea what worked, so I probably spent a quarter of my student loans buying and trying computer crap that was about as useful as those dual 8-inch floppies that served as my operating system and file storage.

But I digress.

So, here we are in 2005 and I am regularly inundanted with email asking for my opinion about computer crap. Yeah, I’ve tried lots of it. Yeah, I’ve ditched 90% of everything I’ve tried. Most of the stuff I buy has to do with protecting my system from idiots who have nothing better to do with their time than work on ways to get at my “private” information… as if I didn’t know how to report fraudulent credit card charges, change my account numbers, and consider myself smart for forgetting to tell my husband what the new ones are.

Hmm. I think I digressed again.

The point is, I’ve been trying a new spam filter and, after 30 days, I have to recommend it. Now, when I say that I’ve been “trying” it, you have to keep in mind that I now get well over 700 emails each day, at least 400 of which are spam. No matter what I do — encrypting posted email links, sending unaddressed or incorrectly addressed emails to :blackhole:, using whatevername@NOSPAMmydomain.com — nothing has worked quite right.

For a while, I used a challenge-and-response system recommended by a friend. The only problem? My system’s “challenge” was treated as spam by the spam filters that other folks are using, which meant that our mutual emails were getting lost in the ether! Talk about sucking voids.

Then I spent a year using MailWasher, which didn’t stop the spam from coming in but at least highlighted it to warn me so I wouldn’t waste time reading it. But I still had to click hundreds of annoying checkboxes each day and, ultimately, I found that a pain in the ass. The two months we spent in a rental condo using DSL that wouldn’t accept my MailWasher settings prompted me to search for a different solution.

I found it in Outlook Spam Filter, and I loooooove it. Yeah, I know: there are plenty of you who’ll say Outlook sucks. To which I reply: bullshit. I find it the most convenient time- and contact-management program out there, and I love how easily it syncs with my PDA and cell phone.

Curiously, those who like to say that Outlook sucks seem to think so solely because it’s been so heavily exploited by spammers and code kiddies sending malicious virii through email. Which begs the question: if you can circumvent the spammers and virii, does Outlook no longer suck? Cuz that’s what Outlook Spam Filter does, and I’ve watched my InBox burden plummet down to a meager 140 messages per day. For me, that’s a relief.

So, please accept my apologies if I sound like an advertisement, but I love telling people about crap that works. It’s such a change for me since, like most computer users, I’ve come to expect just the opposite from software programs these days.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Well, in case you were wondering, the move went just fine. We even managed to get the cable/internet dude here on Move-In Day (Wednesday).

Unfortunately, aside from knowing how to dial his office and tell them to turn our service on, he didn’t seem to understand anything else about his job. Install an additional outlet? Sorry, he didn’t have the right tools. Put a new plug into an existing outlet that lacked one? Easy enough, except he didn’t hook the new plug onto the cable wire within the wall. Get the internet service working? Oooh, sorry. The prior owners had scheduled their disconnect for Friday, so ours couldn’t get turned on until then. Friday came and went, and we still didn’t have internet service.

So, this morning Hubby called the cable office and they sent someone right out to get our internet working. But, as for those other outlets, that would require a second appointment on Tuesday. Lovely.

Luckily, the guy who came today knew what he was doing. Five minutes in the house, and he had the internet up and the other outlets working. Plus, the cable modem he hooked up is the latest model and it’s blindingly fast. Rock on!

So, I’ll be posting the Snark Hunt tonight.* Sorry for the delay. Having already read most of the entries, I can assure you it’s worth the wait!

*UPDATE: On second thought, since I still can’t even make my way comfortably through my kitchen and my son can’t find any of his clothes for preschool until I finish unpacking a bit more, I’m going to hold off on the Snark Hunt a bit longer. Instead of posting it tonight, we’ll do a double-whammy Snark Hunt this Wednesday. That means there’s still time to get your entries in and, if you’ve already submitted one, you can go ahead and submit another, too!

It’s been two months since the sellers of our new house accepted our offer. Yesterday, we signed the closing papers and I’ll have the keys in my hot little hand within the next two hours. Finally. All that time, we’ve been staying in a furnished rental condo which, although comfortable, has that “transient” feel.

We don’t make good transients. We collect too much crap.

When we first arrived, we brought only six suitcases. The place seemed rather roomy back then. After a couple of weeks, our shipment of “personal goods” arrived in four large cartons. We left most things packed, aside from my husband’s computer and some kitchen items I needed to use cooking Thanksgiving dinner. When Christmas came, and I bought some decorations so the place didn’t feel quite so transient. Then, too, we received numerous gifts. And, of course, there were purchases all along the way: spices and dishes and canned goods in the kitchen, winter clothes for everyone, books to read, toys for my son to play with.

I’d never make it as a bag lady. Not without a U-Haul.

So, I’ll be spending most of the day carrying boxes and bags of stuff from the rental to the new place, unloading them in the garage, and repeating the trip. Our furniture and other belongings don’t arrive until tomorrow, so there’s really no place to put things away. While that doesn’t concern Hubby — whose attitude about storage is “shove it anywhere” — I hope it doesn’t start a trend. I’m a bit obsessive about organization.

How obsessive? Well, for the two months that we’ve been waiting to move, I’ve fallen asleep each night while mentally arranging furniture and organizing cupboards. I’ve spent the past week poring over books about decorating and home organization. I’ve told Hubby that all I want for Valentine’s Day is a new label maker. (Romantic, huh?). I’ve stopped watching the news in favor of HGTV.

And now that the big day is here? Now that I finally get to start moving, to lay claim to the new house, to walk through empty rooms and see if all of my carefully thought-out arrangements will actually work? Now I just remembered that I forgot to call the utility companies to arrange service, which means that the house will be dark and cold until I run by four separate offices to drop off four separate deposit checks (and a box of Krispy Kremes to bribe the cable folks into giving me an installation appointment tomorrow, since I can’t live without my internet access).

Whoops!

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a whiner. Take, for instance, this guy, who’d trained to be a suicide bomber but is now upset that he got injured before he could blow himself up.

Some people are just never happy.

Those who incite hatred and mass murder are not always extremists but men of culture, Annan told world leaders in opening the first-ever General Assembly commemoration of the World War Two Holocaust.

It’s Tuesday, and that means it’s time to kill time. Take a shot at captioning this. Winners will be announced Friday.

The deadline for the Snark Hunt is tomorrow at midnight (Central). So far, there’s a pathetically small number of entries.

I’m hurt. And surprised, too. Show me some snark, folks. Get those entries in to Snark(at)ElectricVenom (d0t)com.

Now, dammit.

It strikes me as ironic that the same U.S. government that went after Bill Gates on anti-trust grounds for bundling IE with Windows has all but establshed an information trust favoring Adobe’s Acrobat. Every freaking government document that I’ve tried to access of late has been a .pdf file. All hail Adobe. Not.

I don’t do .pdf files. Web-surfing is supposed to be fast, and web pages are supposed to be quickly accessible. That, after all, is the point of having government information available online: accessibility. But .pdf files are neither fast nor accessible, since they make a user wait while Acrobat loads, checks for updates and then loads the requested page.

In this increasingly laptop-oriented web world, Acrobat files are anachronisms. They bog down a system, requiring laptop users to spare extra memory to read a web page that should’ve (and, inevitably, could have) been written in HTML, anyway.

Then, too, there’s the jam factor. At least two out of every three times I try accessing a .pdf file (always with the same stupid optimism), my system crashes and I lose everything else I was working on at the time.

I have to wonder: what idiot governmental employee decided that this was the way to deliver data to citizens in the “information age”?

Dan Rather: the Ashlee Simpson of his generation?

(Link via Lobowalk)