My email server is configured such that email to ry4an-anything@ry4an.org gets correctly delivered to me. The dash and whatever is after it are retained but ignored completely.

When I give an email address to a company, say Northwest Airlines,I'll give them an email address that shows to whom it was given, say ry4an``-nwa``@ry4an.org. By doing this I'm able to check which companies are giving/selling/leaking my email address to spammers. Some of the leaks are surprising -- just a few weeks after giving out ry4an-philmont for the first time, giving it to the Boy Scouts, I started getting porn spam on it. When I called to let them know about the leak they assured me it was impossible.

A little googling shows I'm the first person to (publically) coin the phrase pocket pair palsy to describe the adrenaline powered tremors poker players get when they've got a good hand. Dibs.

Comments

I would argue that palsy is not the best condition to compare this to. While involuntary movement is occasionally the result of palsy, paralysis is more common and likely. Some definitions of palsy do not even include tremor-like movements.

At the haloween party we got a keg of New Castle, but most folks went for the mixed drinks or the bottled beer. We kept trying to steer folks toward the keg, but it's hard to get people behind a project that's not providing good status reports.

That got me thinking that one could make a simple scale showing a gas-tank style empty to full scale for a keg of liquid. Googling for keg scale turned up some products for bar owners, but nothing consumer focused:

Since this post I've upgraded my mailman installation to a newer version, which allows me to automatically reject messages from non-subscribers without having to resort to external scripting.

However, some of the mailing lists I run are subscribed to by a significant number of members who can't be counted on to post from the email address with which they subscribed, or indeed to even understand what that means. For those lists a policy that automatically rejects messages from non-members is just too draconion. Unfortunately, that means the few spam messages a day from non-members which make it past my filters but would normally be automatically rejected due to their non-member origins have be manually discarded so that I can approve the few non-member messages per month that really do belong on the list.

Last weekend Bridget, Joe, and I threw our annual Halloween party. It was well attended and everyone seemed to have a good time. It peaked around midnight with a good 50 people inside and out, which is about the same as last year.

This year we did a little more with the decor including the building of a coffin cut-out and a few corpses. The walls got covered with cheesy off the shelf decorations that drew more praise than anything else -- go figure.

I hacked the MonthCalendar macro for moin moin to include some javascript which includes a sidebar built from a RSS feed. The javascript and back-end Rebol were written by p3k.org. The RSS feed is produced from (a subset of) my links at del.icio.us. All in all a quick, easy addition, requiring just a little Python twiddling.

Wow, this post contains almost no nouns a normal person would recognize.

Comments

Hrm, the side bar stopped working because the http://p3k.org site hasn't been responding for at least 24 hours. I wonder if/when it will come back. If anyone notices it's returned let me know and I'll re-enable the side bar.

That sort of thing is exactly why I don't like relying on external web services be they flickr, gmail, del.icio.us, or whatever. I know in theory google and yahoo can keep those services running with 100% availability, and that they don't want the PR hit that elmininating them would cause, but still if you're not paying someone to store you're data you shouldn't expect it to still be there tomorrow.

Earlier this month some friends and I hiked across Isle Royale in lake Superior. Joe kept his GPS running and produced good track points in an odd export format from his Mac software called "Topo". I created a quick conversion script to produce this GPS format data which can be used with the GPS visualizer website to produce images like this:

Again, it probably doesn't exactly meet the "things I've created" criteria for this website, but I just couldn't help but post this one. A few months ago Kate Bauer and I put together this ring:

Today when it arrived she agreed to marry me, and I couldn't be happier.

Comments

Hey Ry4an, you may or may not remember me, but my name is Brenden Johnson and was in IT at the U with you. We had Serge Rudaz (and FOSSIL) among other classes together. I happened across your blog a little bit ago on GeoURL.org and had to congratulate you on your engagement.

A few months back Kate Bauer and I hosted a BBQ at her place. I wanted to try putting together a fruit and vodka infusion of the sort I'd previously seen at bars.

Kate bought a bunch of fresh fruit and I picked up the vodka (Svedka, the best vodka for the dollar, and damn near the best at any price). We used the same glass container from Pier One I purchased to house pickled eggs for my Moe the bartender Halloween costume a few years back. The infusion came out great, but we learned a few things along the way:

I really need to sleep in once a week, and I actually get to once a month. When I do sleep in I want the ringers off on all the phones in the house, but that's three phones to go find and then to remember to un-silence in the "morning". This past weekend I figured out that by using the call-forwarding feature on my home phone line to route all calls to my cell phone I can keep all the extensions from ringing. What's more by using the timed profiles feature on my cell phone I can have it muted until a pre-set time (say, 2pm) at which time the ringer re-enables itself. Finally I've got a good way to sleep in uninterrupted without forgetting to turn the ringers back on for the next three days.