Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fra Filippo Lippi

Also featured in “Vittorio The Vampire”, by Ann Rice, is Fra Filippo Lippi, a painter who lived in the first half of the 1400’s in Italy. I get the feeling, more and more, from Rice, that she is trapped in this genre by her fans and by her publishers, but that she really wants to write historical fiction about the Renaissance. This book, which I just finished, was really good, except for the parts that were about vampires. Rice is a wonderful writer. It’s quite a shame that she has to spoil it by writing about vampires. Her knowledge of the Renaissance is quite extrordinary, and her descriptions of the period painters are sufficient to make me want to go to see these works in person.

Anyways, Filippo winds up being a major character in the book, although he never appears personally in the action, except by way of a recounting of a glimpse of him by a younger Vittorio.

And, by the way, his paintings are indeed beautiful.

Ouch

Last night, while leaning over the arm of my chair to reach behind it to get a power cord, I slipped, fell on the arm, and I think I cracked or bruised a rib. It is quite painful, but only when I breathe, or lift something, or stretch. So I’m trying not to do that.

Spam and junk mail

After several weeks in which I’ve received one desired mail message (ie, snail mail) and drifts of undesired, and downright objectionable mail, I am finding, increasingly, that I am glad when I receive junk mail. At least it’s not a bill, or a letter from the IRS, or yet another letter from a lawyer. This is in sharp contrast to email, where I am getting increasingly angry with junk email, which has moved from a minor annoyance to a major source of indignation. How dare these folks waste such a huge portion of my bandwidth for their highly objectionable advertising campaigns? And why is the system set up to permit them to do this with impunity. It really steams me. But, of course, you’ve heard all of this before.

But when I go to the mail box, and can discard every item that I pull out, I sigh with relief that there’s nothing more that I have to deal with. Perhaps if I checked my snail mail every 6 minutes instead of once a day, I’d feel differently!

… And whether pigs have wings

I got my new wax seal from DesignStation, and it’s pretty cool, in the form of the logo from RCBowen.com. I tried to take some pictures of it, but the did not turn out very well. It’s hard to take a decent picture of something that small. So if you really want to see it, then I suppose you’ll have to persuade me to write a letter to you.

More spam stats

As I was watching the mail logs this morning, I realized that a substantial portion of the spam I receive gets dumped by the MTA before it even has a chance to reach my spam filters. Now, I’m not sure if this can really rightly be called spam, but perhaps attempted spam. So, I added these numbers to my spam stats, and it added at least another 20% to the figure. Seems that about 63% of all the email that my mail server receives is rejected. Most of this (apparently about 40%) is dropped specifically because the content identifies it as spam. The remainder is sent to bogus or no-longer-valid email addresses, or is sent from faked addresses. And, even after that, I still get a significant number of junk messages in my inbox every time I check my mail. When will this nonsense end?

Quotes

If you’ve seen my book, or if you’ve looked at this site much, you know I have a thing about quotes.

I’ve started working on a site that will talk about some of the quotes in my book, where they are from, why I chose, them, and so on. No, this does not in any way contribute to the usefulness of my book, but I had very little else to do today, so I started on this. And, just maybe it will encourage someone to buy the book. But I doubt it.

Just can’t please everyone

Today on #apache, a charming individual got /kickbanned for calling me a dickhead. I earned this moniker for answering his question not once, but three times. Apparently he was irritated that I did not know what his various TLAs and ETLAs were supposed to mean, and asked him to speak in full words.

Shortly after this, a non-participant lurker contacted me in private message, lecturing me about not being polite enough on the channel. Apparently he thinks that I don’t make beginners feel comfortable with their ignorance. Or something like that.

So perhaps I’m getting just a little too self-righteous, or something like that, but it seems to me that when I offer what amounts to unlimited free technical support, that it behooves them, not me, to be grovelingly polite. If folks feel perfectly comfortable insulting me after I give my time to help them solve their problems, it would not seem that anyone would be justified to lecture me about how polite I am.

I found both of these incidents to be so completely unwarranted, I was really quite taken aback. I realize that volunteering my time to help these folks does not make me any kind of saint, but I do expect to be treated with a little bit of respect for it. Perhaps this is an unjustified expectation – I don’t know – but I certainly don’t expect to be insulted or lectured for it either.

I guess you just can’t please everyone.

Wok this way

the wok shop: selling woks for 30 years

I’ve wanted a big-ass wok for a while, and all the ones I have looked at have been absurdly expensive. The foodies on #apache directed me to this site.

I suppose I could have asked on the FoodWine mailing list, but, as hard as I try, I just can’t keep up with the volume on that list, so I feel weird asking questions, as I never really contribute any more.