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.

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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)

As a bona fide RSS aggregator addict, I’m always surprised at how many bloggers — and non-bloggers, for that matter — don’t use a news reader. Instead, they visit Google’s news page several times a day or have headlines delivered to their email InBox. Now, the code kiddies are capitalizing on that practice with a virus specifically designed to appeal to those who like email news alerts.

Virus writers have created a worm which poses as breaking news alerts. Crowt-A’s subject line and attachment share the same name, but continually change to mirror the front-page headline on CNN’s website. [...]

Windows users induced into clicking on the infected attachment surrender control of their PCs to crackers. Crowt-A installs a keylogger which captures sensitive data, such as online banking login details, and forwards it to attackers. Infected machines are also turned into relay stations for the worm, spewing copies of it to email addresses harvested from infected PCs.

Q: How can you tell when a Democrat is positioning for a Presidential bid?
A: They start talking like a Republican.

Saying that religious people should be permitted to “live out their faith in the public square,” Hillary Clinton spent Wednesday night practically pounding the pulpit.

In a speech at a fund-raising dinner for a Boston-based organization that promotes faith-based solutions to social problems, Clinton said there has been a “false division” between faith-based approaches to social problems and respect for the separation of church of state.

“There is no contradiction between support for faith-based initiatives and upholding our constitutional principles,” said Clinton, a New York Democrat who often is mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2008.

Addressing a crowd of more than 500, including many religious leaders, at Boston’s Fairmont Copley Plaza, Clinton invoked God more than half a dozen times, at one point declaring, “I’ve always been a praying person.”

Yeah, but praying “God, please don’t let Bill touch me. Please don’t let Bill touch me. Please don’t…” doesn’t really count.

(Link via Drudge.)

I love free stuff. I love research. For one week, I get to combine both of my favorite things, thanks to HighBeam’s anniversary next week. The internet-based reference service, which contains more than 32 million documents, is giving away free access (reg. req’d) from January 24 to January 28. Now, all I need is to remember where I put that list of things I’d been wanting to look up at the library.

Link via ResearchBuzz.

I bought a couple of skirts yesterday. I love skirts. In fact, one of the many things that I miss about the 80’s was the pairing of skirts with Doc Marten boots, making both fashionable and yet comfortable at the same time.

I didn’t own blue jeans when I met my husband. When you have a hip-to-waist ratio like mine, it’s hard to find a pair that fits right in all the right places. Buy something that fits the hips, and the waist is loose enough to wedge a small child in there. Buy something that fits the waist, and you wind up with a camel-toed look in front and a cloven-hoofed look in the rear… if you can pull them up over your knees, that is.

Skirts with tights were my regular attire until one day when my then-Hubby-to-be suggestted a romantic walk in the woods. One muddy path, one misplaced foot, and one harrowing slide into a briar destroyed the “romance” of our walk. It also convinced me to buy some jeans.

Of course, budgets being what they are, that meant I stopped buying skirts. Soon, my closet featured nothing but jeans. Until yesterday, it still did. There are the size 6 ones I bought shortly after that fateful hike. I keep them around to remind me to try on clothes before leaving the store. One kid, two years of depression and countless Dove Bars later, I now own dozens of jeans ranging from size 8 to size “ate-too-much.”

Recently, I had a crying fit when the latter size stopped fitting. According to the scale, I’d lost six pounds, but my jeans were more snug than ever. I had to lay down and lift my hips, suck in my stomach, and puuuuuulllll to get a pair zipped. I couldn’t quite walk or breathe, but at least I got those suckers on. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a sweater bulky enough to disguise the overage. So, after peeling the jeans off, I drowned my distress in a stiff martini and gave the bathroom scale a good kick.

Two days later, as I laid all of my size “ate-too-much” jeans on the bed in preparation to pack them up for Goodwill, I noticed that a pair of blue jeans was significantly larger than the others. Strange. I recalled the day I bought them. It wasn’t that long ago. I’d liked the way they fit, so I’d also picked up a black pair by the same maker, in the same size. I’d worn the black pair several times — it goes with almost every top I own — but had only worn the blue ones once or twice. Sure enough, when I laid one pair on top of the other, the black jeans were 2 inches narrower and shorter. I hadn’t grown — they’d shrunk!

After performing the requisite happy dance, I apologized to my bathroom scale and resolved to stop putting my jeans in this rental condo’s crummy little apartment-sized dryer. I’d been bitching about the dryer the entire 2 months we’ve been here. It takes 1 hour and 45 minutes to dry a load of regular clothes, and another 30 minutes when the load contains jeans. Don’t know why I hadn’t thought about shrinkage before, but I was sure glad that I hadn’t abandoned my diet. I was also glad for the excuse to go shopping. Mall-walking is good exercise, you know.

At the store yesterday, I couldn’t find any jeans that I liked. It’s that hip-to-waist ratio thing, again. On top of that, “whiskered” jeans are a bit too young-looking, flared legs make me look like I’m melting into the ground, and pleated fronts are so 1990. The only other alternative were jeans made of that lightweight denim-look-alike that’s so flimsy you can’t wear underwear with them but if you go commando, you can’t walk two steps without someone saying “Must be jelly, ‘cuz jam don’t shake like that.” What the hell are department store buyers thinking when they stock women’s departments with crap like that?

So, I decided to buy skirts. I miss wearing them, anyway, and I’ve reached a “certain age” where I can pair them with tights and ankle boots if I want, fashion be damned. I feel prettier in skirts. Getting dressed every day is an event, and I know I’m suitably dressed for everything, aside from spontaneous “romantic” hikes.

Hubby seems to like them, too. I think, after a few years in which the fanciest thing I’ve worn around the house was a pair of embroidered jeans, he’s rather relieved to see that I still have ankles and calves. Besides, I walk differently in skirts. I sit differently, too — more “girly” as he put it last night. When you’re married to a woman with a personality and intellect as assertive as mine, I imagine it’s nice to see her behaving “girly” now and again.

As an added benefit, I can now rest assured that my soul is not damned to the eternal fires of hell. Ah. Form and function!

It’s likely to be a short blogging day. I have a staggering list of things to accomplish in preparation for Wednesday’s move to our new house.

But first, two reminders:

1. The Snark Hunt is back and your entries are needed. The deadline is midnight (Central) on Tuesday. This week, with our move scheduled for early the next morning, that deadline is a hard-and-fast one. Find out more about submission requirements here.

2. The Carnival of the Recipes #23 is up at Caltechgirl’s place. Aussie Wife’s Roasted Lemon Bay-Scented Fish sounds absolutely delicious to me! Next week’s Carnival is at Kin’s Kouch, so get those recipes sent to recipe.carnival - at - gmail - dot - com.

The FBI has added the names of 10 more Chinese nationals to the list of “persons of interest” believed to be connected to a dirty bomb attack that allegedly targets Boston.

Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, said the names were part of the same anonymous tip that led authorities on Wednesday to announce that they are seeking to question four other Chinese and two Iraqis.

The officials said the tip remains uncorroborated and there is no credible evidence that such a plot exists.

It was unclear why all the names were not announced at the same time. The officials said there was no new information that led to the addition of the 10 names.

Federal authorities say they are no more worried now than they were later.

Still, I have to wonder if any of these 10 names were connected to the Chinese stowaways found in a cargo ship at the Port of Los Angeles last week. Or is that just a coincidence?

PETA lost their latest lawsuit. Let them eat cheese.