The Blog of Harald

* “Phil Ringnalda”:http://philringnalda.com/ has a “good comment”:http://philringnalda.com/blog/2004/03/i_want_a_new_country.php on “this village voice article”:http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0409/conaway.php on Bush’s anti-gay constitution ruckus by Laura Conaway.

* “chuqui”:http://www.plaidworks.com has “a rant about the NHL”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001374.html and the whole Bertuzzi thing.

In Personal Spam Volume: over 1GB/year Jeremy Zawodny extrapolates his spam load over a year to 1GB. Curious, I pulled out my procmail logs, which apparently go back to April 9th of last year. They tell me that I received a total of 1.2GB of email in the last year (well, slightly less), of which 100Mb (about 8.5%) was spam.

On the other hand, load for the last three months is 220Mb of email, of which 22Mb is spam. So my total email volume is dropping (I left some high noise, high traffic lists last fall), but the percentage of spam has increased from 8.5% to 10%. A small dataset to be sure, but a disturbing trend.

btw, this does not include spam rejected by postfix; the log analyser tells me that I’m dropping about 10% of the total cfrq.net email before it gets accepted…

“Jvstin”:http://www.skyseastone.net/jvstin/ says it all:

bq. Why aren’t we outraged that we’ve polluted the oceans enough that we have to have our kids and pregnant women limit their fish intake because of an excess of a pollutant?

(from Blog, Jvstin Style: New FDA Fish Guidelines)

Here we sit, teetering on the knife edge between light and dark.

Happy Spring :-)

I snapped this on the way out this morning. Spring is in 3 days!

On the plus side, the weather people are telling us that the next 30 days will be warmer than average. That should make up for the bitter January we had, although I’m a little concerned that everything’s going to dry out too quickly. We still haven’t recovered from the last couple of years of low-precipitation winters, and our holding capacity is way down, since we’ve paved over so many of the forests and wetlands around here…

It’s amazing what happens when you add a banner graphic to the weblog. The banner is larger than the main index page, and certainly larger than the individual pages; bandwidth has spiked quite a bit since I added it.

I did some checking, and noticed a surprisingly large number of clients fetching the .jpg over and over again, instead of pulling it out of local cache; what’s up with that?

So I took a picture of my keys, sitting in sunlight and casting a shadow. And I like the picture, and I wanted to share it. And then it occurred to me that my house key was sitting there, in high enough resolution to be duplicated by anyone bored enough to try… and so I’m not going to share it.

<sigh>

The Oil companies have explained that the variation in gas prices is normal. Gasoline is a commodity, and people are willing to drive a fair distance for cheap gas. So when one station lowers their price, everyone else _must_ also, or they lose all of their business. This process continues until all of the stations are losing money (by selling gas below cost), at which point head office tells them to go back to the regular price. Or something.

This doesn’t explain to me why the price varies by more than 10¢ per litre on a weekly basis, and with predictable regularity. For a while now, Monday evening has been cheap gas night all around this area; then the price goes up significantly late Monday night. It’s been so much of a pattern that it is a ritual for us to pick up the kids from school then go get cheap gas.

This week, however, they messed everything up. Sunday, it was 78¢ per litre; Monday it was down to 66 ¢ (a significant jump down, which is also unusual). Tuesday, it _dropped_ another 3 ¢, and Wednesday it was back up to 70 ¢.

So in 72 hours, gasoline prices dropped $0.15/litre, and then jumped right back up again. The Oil companies claim that the jump is due to demand, but that doesn’t explain the preceding drop. It doesn’t make any sense to me, and I no longer believe the oil companies’ facile explanation…

We shipped our latest version to manufacturing on Thursday, and we all had Friday off.

So of course, I’ve been sick since Thursday morning. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I only started feeling like a normal human being this afternoon…

I haven’t been completely idle; I caught up on some laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, tried a new bread recipe, rebuilt hermione.cfrq.net (disk crash), cleaned up and vacuumed the family room, and probably other stuff too. I also watched way too much TV (mainly Space, HGTV, and DVDs). All in all, a reasonably relaxing time…

world subways – subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale. I’m sure it’ll be depressing when he gets around to adding Toronto…

This book could be an interesting read:

Amazon.ca: Books: Who Really Matters: the Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success

bq. “a depressing number of business corporations have evolved into organizations with one primary purpose: To extract wealth from all constitutions (not just the shareholders, but the employees, customers, and neighbors as well) and give it essentially to the children and grandchildren of some of its senior executives.”

(via “Rodent Regatta”:http://www.rodentregatta.com/archives/005758.php)

Maybe I’m punchy from my deadlines, but I laughed and laughed when I saw this…

Finally, porn that is Safe For Work.

(via “memepool”:http://www.memepool.com/.)

It was so nice out this morning, I drove all the way to work with the windows rolled down and the radio cranked up…

Someone recently recommended that we pull the kids out of hockey, purchase a membership at a ski club, and go skiing during the winter instead. The advantage being that skiing is something that we can all do together, as a family.

I like the idea; I like skiing, and Gareth’s pretty good for an 8-year old. Charlotte has a lot of trouble with skates (she has wonky ankles), so I don’t see hockey in her future. But Gareth really likes hockey, and it’s got all that teamwork stuff going for it :-), so I’m kinda undecided on the whole issue…

This weekend, millions of people around here simultaneously viewed a strange glowing orb in the sky. It appeared in the east, and gradually moved across the sky as the day passed, eventually disappearing in the west. I’m sure there was general panic; human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria…

Even better, the air temperature was above the freezing temperature of water! A miracle!

I think this is the earliest I’ve ever given up on winter (and I have one more ski date planned for Saturday :-). I think it was the ridiculously cold January that we had this year.