Giving Thanks

Well it's Thanksgiving in the States and even though I am no longer living down there I still think of home and family on this day. I have so much to give thanks for, I am truly blessed. My children are all healthy and heading in the right general direction. My parents are in a new home that they are happy with, thanks to my brothers and sisters-in-law. And of course the ones closest to me who make me thankful to be here in Canada.

And now we are awaiting the birth of our second child together. A new life is always reason to give thanks. We have a fairly good idea as to the sex of this baby, but respecting my mother's wish not to know (she's old fashioned that way), I will not reveal that piece of information at this time. It certainly helps to know this when trying to pick potential names though.

We gave grandma the opportunity to break the news to all of the Western Landi, a task she lives for. So this Thanksgiving should be a little more special for all due to this special little one.

Children are the only miracles that we humans are able to perform.

Canning the spam

I have established a multilayered approach to keeping my spam in line.

Firstly I use my ISP email address in all situations where addresses are likely to be harvested. This gives me an initial filtering point as well as lets me take advantage of my ISP's Yahoo based spam blocking and tagging. I reserve my .Mac email address for friends and relatives.

Next Apple's Mail program applies its teachable filter to put "junk" mail in it's own folder. Then what got past the Yahoo filters is re-directed to my gmail account for later review. Re-directing is not the same as forwarding in that a reply from a re-directed email will go to the original sender not to the re-directer. This setup lets me quickly review my inbox to delete anything that doesn't look important, knowing that a copy is over on gmail if I need it.

I then review my junk folder when I get the chance. There is a lot of non-junk in my junk folder, emails that I might have requested or expect to receive regularly but that I don't need to keep. This establishes a natural order to the lives of my mail messages. If I see something slightly interesting in the junk but can't bring myself to drag it out to the inbox then it just slowly sinks into the mire and is gone in a week. This keeps me from holding on to those "might be useful" messages that never are.

Apple's .Mac mail system has a new alias feature that I will have to try. Its purpose is to give you the ability to create and dispose of email aliases frequently enough to prevent abuse from spammers. With up to five aliases, you could also determine exactly which sites are more likely to leave your address out where it might be grabbed.

What's a lyrix?

As you might have noticed I have posted the lyrics to a few songs here. This came about from my walking to work. I walk one hour each way listening to 2500 of my favourite songs. If you have heard AAC encoded songs then you know that everything is very clear, especially the lyrics. There are songs that I have been listening to for 30 years and only now really heard the lyrics!

In other cases I knew the lyrics but I had never really "heard" them. The in-ear intimacy of the iPod combined with the clear rendering has renewed my interest in some of these tunes.

Anyway, I decided to list select lyrics here along with a link to where you can pick up a copy for yourself. They are mostly selected for the actual words, but sometimes it's just the tune and occasionally it's just a sample from a group whose music really moves me.

Cheers!

MSPatents

Continuing my rant from yesterday...

I can almost hear the conversation between Gates, Ballmer and their newly hired Patent Lawyer:

PL: So guys, what innovations have we got to patent?
Steve: Well, there's was MS-DOS...
Bill: No wait that was just a copy of CP/M and besides we bought it...
Steve: A graphical user interface?...
Bill: No, no we copied that from Apple... hmmm
Steve: Well there's always Bill's BASIC language interpreter, I know he wrote that...
Bill: Yeah! We took a great simple learning language and made it practically incomprehensible, er, I mean we extended it with new and useful features!
Steve: Let's see, how about one of those object oriented hacks we crammed in?
Bill: The IS operator?
Steve: No, there's almost definitely prior art on that one.
Bill: How about IS NOT?
Steve: Cool! We're in!
PL: All that money, all that time... this is the best you can come up with?