Hello subscribers! I’m sorry I haven’t been around, but I had a cold last week, making me feel like not doing anything, and that was sandwiched by two busy weekends. I’ll give you the quick recap, and then fill you on all the little quirky things I really want to blog about.

Last Thursday, the 21st there was an evening storm. That storm took the power out about 1030pm, and it didn’t come right back on. I wandered around the neighborhood, since it was cooler outside than indoors with no A/C or fans, and then made a paper copy of my cell phone phone book by candlelight. When I went to bed, there was a black and white police car outside the house but I didn’t figure out why. I slept with the windows open, and it was quiet, hot, and uncomfortable. Every storm that came through the night woke me, and that reminded me how nasty it was, and then I couldn’t fall back asleep. About 7am Monday morning (power still out) I was awoken by trees being cut down, and found out a power line was downed last night two houses down. (The cop was making sure people didn’t drive over the downed line, which crossed Clover lane.) When I left for work, they were still working on it. The power was off about 12 hours altogether. Marc complained about losing his work Internet/WAN link, but losing power is a much bigger deal.

Last Friday I took off for Chicagoland with Eric and AJ. We met up with Rich and Marc and Tony at Dave and Buster’s – a mix of sports bar, bar, and video arcade with classic games (Skeeball!) and some neato technology ones (virtual boxing/bowling, neat shoot’em-up games.) It was a good time, but the only games I really won was the Bartender game, the Cards/Cubs game (suicide squeeze,) and I lost the remembering-to-pack-underwear-game. I didn’t do well enough at Skeeball or Popaball to win the D&B boxers. This trip to the arcade was to make up for not going out with Rich on Saturday for his bachelor’s party because this was a Dave Matthews Band concert weekend in Wisconsin.

Saturday, we met up with Josh and Andrea and started the trek north. Chicagoland/94 traffic sucks, but we eventually got into the hotel, and into the Alpine Valley parking lot. No sooner had we pulled in and cracked some beers, when a huge storm blew in. This was one freaky, omnious, end-of-days, sky-dark, wind blowing so much it’s hard to close the car door type of storm. In no time, the car was getting pelted with blinding rain. We just sat in the car and had lunch. Later, the storm cleared and we tailgated outside and then went into the show. Andrew, Eric and I had lawn seats, and slide around on the hill during the concert.

Sunday we were back for day two, but the rain stayed away. It was perfect Alpine weather – sun, beers, cribbage (15 two, four, six, pairs makes twelve,) tossing the softball. Stuck and I had pavillion seats on Sunday, and it was an excellent show. A neat mix of old and new; the new songs with good jams, and some really old classics (#34, #40, two step by request…) On Wednesday, I was able to bittorrent both shows and have been listening to them. Monday was the drive home – which took most of the day, and more cursing at lane-shifty Chicago drivers and bad I-94 traffic.

I started feeling sick on the way home, and the rest of the week was in a cold and cold medicine induced haze. Wednesday was a hard day at work, and I took Thursday off and pretty much slept all day. By Friday I was feeling a bit better, and was back up to Chicagoland for Rich and Cindy’s wedding. I hadn’t sat in a long catholic mass in a long time. The reception and dancing was fun, and of course we had 1-800-TEQ-UILA and Beam Black. But even better was the White Castle adjacent to the hotel. MMmmmmmm… I finally got my White Castle fix, which was great, even though I had to tackle a hedge to get the steamed-cooked-on-a-bed-of-onions-goodness. Between the drinking, Nyquil, and cheeseburgers, I woke up around 0430 on Sunday morning with one of the worst cases of dry mouth in recent memory.

Some other points to ponder, so this isn’t a total week-in-review posting:

I can’t believe August is here already, and I filed June away in the Daily Planner binder. Summer is FLYING by.

I rented the first disc of the first season of Roswell from Netflix, and after watching two episodes, I think the rest of the disc is going back unseen and the other discs nuked from the queue. This is a cheesy-WB teeny-bop program, and not something Dead Like Me meets X-Files freaky/eerie like I was hoping for.

Speaking of Dead Like Me, season two is here and I should be watching that instead.

I finally checked my IPASS account online, and found out I have a $14 remaining balance, minus the $0.80 it took out for today’s tolls. I think that means it will recharge another $40 in my next trip to Chicagoland or two. Isn’t technology nifty? Also, after being satisfied with them and documenting them well enough, I committed the new routes I have through Kankakee and Wilmington to my car’s directions book.

I still need to clean the inside of my car, from over a month ago, and scrape the melted-bun-bag off the inside back window from Alpine.

My Champaign library card expired, and no one told me. All I know is I went to add a book to my wishlist and my PIN didn’t work anymore. An email or something would have been nice. Anyone else been hearing a lot about David Allen’s Getting Things Done recently?

I’m working on a computer program that will help us select where we want to go to lunch. I started working on this in PHP, then decided I wanted to use an object model instead of linear programming. Then I decided I wanted to use XML instead of a database. Now I’m leaning towards Java because of better object handling and I want to present this via a website. Any opinions on XML and Java, or applets versus Java WebStart, and AWT or Swing?

I got the framed certificates for completed my Human Resource Development/Training for Business Professionals Professional Supervisors Program and FastTrack Manager Program. They have the Chancellor’s signature on them, and are very official. One of them is made out to “David E. Musselman” The reasons I’m annoyed with this is three-fold. One, I’ve never submitted anything with my name misspelled — people should be more attentive. Two, there were two certificates/plaques… Someone should have noticed they were different and investigated which was wrong. And three, it hurts. Actually, this has happened quite a few times in my life when getting trophies or plaques or awards. At this point, I don’t care anymore, and I find that a little frustrating.

Polling point: Do you prefer these multi-idea posts as a single long post, or would you prefer multiple shorter distinct posts?

For a university study, this one didn’t seem to have the disclaimers/releases I’m accustomed to. (And the badge at the end has nothing to do with how you scored, which makes it lamer than any other blog quiz I’ve ever seen.) Maybe it’s a little more relaxed than some of the social experiments I’ve done at UIUC – maybe for the blogosphere (*groan*) it should be. Remind Future Dave to check back on results later.

I’ll figure it all out.

It should be noted to the world that the Firefox Bloglines plugin is a way better (read: less annoying) than the Windows system tray notifier. Both do the same thing.

The Bloglines RSS plugin that intercepts the LiveBookmark link with a redirect to the bloglines add page is pretty swell too.

I had an impropto meeting with CS Prof. Brian Bailey on 3/21. I asked him about his classes that cross-listed with LIS, and told him I was enrolled next semester, and asked for his feedback. Afterwards, I came back to my desk and scribbled down my notes on a postit until I figured out how I was going to store them. You know, somewhere where I could search for them later electronically. Maybe index them by date, or cateogry. Uhhh, like if I just blogged about it. So this post is for me, gentle readers, not you. I thought about making it private, or adding more categories, but that seems like too much work.

I bought up netflix browsing, sports scoreboards like popup videos, “i wonder what…” conversation monitoring, and museum pda touring.

He mentioned grad school is a lot of work, and working full time and one class might be hard enough. He warned that CS classes can be harder than LIS classes, but don’t let that scare me away from taking stuff that’s cross listed. He said watch as many movies as I can right now, because next fall I won’t have time. He, of course, encouraged me to look into interfaces (because that’s what he studies,) and I think we will cross paths at some point. He recommended professors Twidell and Heidorn.

Hide the kids, I’ve started evangelizing on the blog. Note the spiffy Firefox button in the right column. What’s next? TiVo? Bloglines? Amazon? Who knows.

Note to self: when you want to get out of the office, don’t start a restore from your laptop, because then you need to wait for it to finish before you can go.

So, I’m killing time looking at how I put data into Wordpress. When I imported my stuff from the old blog, I dumped everything in the General category – which doesn’t help to find or categorize anything. I see search requests in the logs all the time that brings up a huge page with hundreds of posts, and I think that’s wasteful. So I’ve been thinking about how to best break up the site (both for blog entries and static information – WP calls the first posts and the second pages,) and I decided on some new categories (they should look familar to board game players.) The categories will also be tied to static content areas of the site – Arts & Entertainment will list the live concerts I’ve been to; Education & Development will have the school links, Sports & Leisure will talk about the IFUND, tailgate group, etc.

I fixed the categories from posts from March and from a few low-post categories, but it was pretty cumbersome. I’ll probably write a tool to help re-categorize WP posts. I also don’t like the way the category list is sorted. I’ll have to look if that’s something I can configure in WP 1.5 when I make that plunge.

While looking through the website, I found that Yahoo is good and actually calls /robots.txt before polling an RSS feed. Somehow, the RSS/blog fad/phenomenon didn’t follow some of the hardfast, Internet friendly rules – like, if a program or script is going to scrape/crawl a website, they should requests /robots.txt first and follow its instructions. I applaud Yahoo for their adherance to things that are supposed to make the Internet a better place, and I’ll ask Bloglines about it (since I’m using them exclusively now for my aggregation.)

Whenever Flickr is down, they pop up a message stating they’re having a massage (for those that don’t speak geek,) and then qualify for those of us who grok webhosting. Their blog mentions how getting bought by Yahoo doesn’t save you from hard drive damage. I think that’s about right.

I also ran across funny video about tape failures, which I understood. I’m really coaxing a few more hours of life out of an old tape library at work, and I never know when it’s going to go up in flames. We don’t do off-site backups, but we have two honkin’ big fireproof safes in different rooms in the building, so things like leaky pipes or 3000 degree rooms doesn’t scare me … I just need to remember to close and lock them before I leave for the day.

These links are me practicing my philosophy that if I try to blog about everything I’m doing, and fall behind, I never will get caught up and I’ll miss posting about the good stuff that currently is happening. I think it’s enough right now to say it’s March, there’s championship basketball going on, the Illini are still playing, and life is good. I was at the first and second round games in Indianapolis last weekend. I’m going to the sweet sixteen and elite eight games in Chicago this weekend. I’m going to Saint Louis next weekend and am going to try to score tickets to the Final Four games. I have to admit it seems like a little over-the-edge fan-dom, but our team, this season, this schedule, these locations… all of them have the chance to be really good to the Illini-nation, and I’m going to enjoy the heck out of it while I can.

In other quicky news, this is the first post (I think) typed from my new computer. It sure is FAST! I’m still installing things, and soon I’ll move the data over from the old system (and make backups of it to DVDR or CDR.) The dnetc on this machine is screaming away. My only complaint/obstacle is the keyboard. I bought one of those split ergonomical keyboards and my wpm speed has dropped a little while I learn new finger positions for some keys. I’ll get better.

I officially accepted the grad school offer, so I’m on for fall. I register in about a month; I need to get assigned and meet with my advisor before then.

I’ve been on allergy medicine for about a month, and besides a nagging cold that hasn’t gone away (especially with the last few weekends I’ve had,) I’m feeling much better quality-of-life-wise than before the allergy meds.

The DVR box from my cable company died this week, and took all the shows I hadn’t watched on it with it. I’m not too worried, because Lost and ALIAS are going to be on DVD before too long anyway.

Ummmm, what else? Gas prices suck, and some of the doomsdays stuff I’ve been reading leads me to think it might never get cheaper. I guess the next car will be a hybrid. Speaking of cars, I’m trying to get everything wrong with it looked at before it rolls over 36,000 miles (probably before the end of the year.) Next week, the radio is getting replaced.

The blogspace has been buzzing about Terri Schiavo and who gets to determine if she can be euthanized or not. I’m really torn on this – everytime I hear something new I don’t know what to think, and I can understand why this is a hard decision for the family, courts, even legislators. I already feel I should have a will drawn up with the house and everything. When I have that done, I think I’ll get a living will and medical power of attorney as well. I’m not sure yet if I’d want to live or die in Schiavo’s state, but I certainly wouldn’t want this much attention, or cause that much strife for my family.

But that’s sad stuff. On to good, happy stuff, like Illinois basketball in Chicago. Wheeee!

I’m going to geek out here, so if you don’t like the data-mining nerd in me, move along now.

Campus is getting close to announcing their spam control solution for @uiuc.edu. DCS is going to mimic something similar to it for mail going to @cs.uiuc.edu. Chuck is upgrading our SpamAssassin installation this week so we get even better filtering and Baysian analysis. So, I figured I would generate some stats to have pre-upgrade to look back on later.

A CITES security brief email Friday afternoon told us their new anti-virus filtering on anything to @uiuc.edu deleted over 13,000 viruses from nearly 800k emails in the 24 hours before that message. This is excellent, and I’m glad to see campus is making progress towards keeping virii out of our mailboxes. (Forget about the few people in the CS department who actually enjoy getting viruses because they analyze them. For everyone else, it’s just mailbox clutter and disk space waste.)

I took my current SpamAssassin filtered spam mailbox and crunched some numbers on it. I flag anything with a SA value over 4 to go to this box. The first messages in this box appeared to be from January 1st, 2005 (the last time I recycled the mailbox.) The first number is the SA spam level and the second is the count. The rest of the numbers look at how that SA spam level statistically fits in with the rest of the values.

Total spam: 2916
2       1       (0.03%)         so far 0.03%    left 100%
3       1       (0.03%)         so far 0.07%    left 100%
4       125     (4.29%)         so far 4.36%    left 96%
5       200     (6.86%)         so far 11.21%   left 89%
6       204     (7.00%)         so far 18.21%   left 82%
7       256     (8.78%)         so far 26.99%   left 73%
8       317     (10.87%)        so far 37.86%   left 62%
9       251     (8.61%)         so far 46.47%   left 54%
10      261     (8.95%)         so far 55.42%   left 45%
11      237     (8.13%)         so far 63.55%   left 36%
12      191     (6.55%)         so far 70.10%   left 30%
13      172     (5.90%)         so far 75.99%   left 24%
14      154     (5.28%)         so far 81.28%   left 19%
15      103     (3.53%)         so far 84.81%   left 15%
16      93      (3.19%)         so far 88.00%   left 12%
17      70      (2.40%)         so far 90.40%   left 10%
18      72      (2.47%)         so far 92.87%   left  7%
19      50      (1.71%)         so far 94.58%   left  5%
20      24      (0.82%)         so far 95.40%   left  5%
21      33      (1.13%)         so far 96.54%   left  3%
22      11      (0.38%)         so far 96.91%   left  3%
23      14      (0.48%)         so far 97.39%   left  3%
24      22      (0.75%)         so far 98.15%   left  2%
25      11      (0.38%)         so far 98.53%   left  1%
26      11      (0.38%)         so far 98.90%   left  1%
27      6       (0.21%)         so far 99.11%   left  1%
28      10      (0.34%)         so far 99.45%   left  1%
29      2       (0.07%)         so far 99.52%   left  0%
30      2       (0.07%)         so far 99.59%   left  0%
31      1       (0.03%)         so far 99.62%   left  0%
32      2       (0.07%)         so far 99.69%   left  0%
50      9       (0.31%)         so far 100.00%  left  0%

I’m thinking of configuring procmail to tell all the spam with levels over 12 to just go to the bit bucket. That would eliminate 25% of my spam. Do any of you do level filtering on SA tagged messages? If so, what are your thresh-holds? If you sort the messages into different mailboxes, what’s your thinking for that, and how often do you review them?

I also tried to look at which email addresses that eventually get delivered to my box (all of the *.uiuc.edu ones, and several service aliases in cs.uiuc.edu) get the most spam. For example, could I block anything to ews.uiuc.edu because I don’t use that address anymore? But, I found that to be a harder analysis and I haven’t finished it yet. If you’re interested in running my script on your email, let me know. It scans a mailbox in mbox format and prints out the data.

I had a plan to fix up a few things around my website, and start a process that would migrate the older static data on the site into newer dynamic tools (like WordPress and Gallery.) So, I put a new version of phpMyAdmin in place. It’s a back-end tool I use to look at the databases that help run the site. No errors or problems with that upgrade.

Then I started on Gallery. I decided to move to the 1.5-RC1 version instead of an older 1.4x release. This upgrade went well enough, but I had a really hard time getting the image libraries it uses (netpbm or ImageMagick) to build properly. My webserver is an old Solaris 5.8 Ultra1, and I couldn’t get the packages to build from scratch or get the prepackaged tools to use. I finally though I found it and got things working, but now it turns out I can’t upload because of a shared library issue… So, I have to look into that. I might just move ahead migrating www-dave to a newer Linux platform that has more things already built in. So, the new Gallery is online, but I can’t upload anything to it. Yet. In the meantime, feel free to poke around the gallery and see the new features. The big requested one: RSS for the galleries. Although, I’m putting more pictures on Flickr now than I am my own gallery. *shrug*

In the not-so-far-away future, I’ll look at upgrading WordPress to 1.5. This seems harmless enough, but will change the look/skin of the site, and I want to get that figured out first. Plus, I think a 1.5 patch level release is coming soon, so I might just wait for that.

Now, to do something more exciting on a Saturday night. I think I’ll finish watching basketball and throw in a moovie.