no clones yet

So I haven't seen the new Star Wars movie yet.

Jeff and I didn't hesitate to wait about six hours in line for the opening of The Phantom Menace in the rain. I would do the same for The Two Towers. Somehow, though, Attack of the Clones just doesn't hold the same appeal for me.

This is partly because I didn't like The Phantom Menace that much; I found it too heavily focussed on special effects and spectacular settings rather than character development or emotional honesty. Yeah, yeah, I know; it's just a Star Wars movie. But Lucas has all raw materials in his hands already, and has proven he can produce a Star Wars movie with more emotional depth. So why doesn't he?

I didn't find the trailers for Attack of the Clones all that inspiring, which is another reason for my lack of enthusiasm. Reviews from the media and friends who have seen the movie have ranged from "it sucks" to "it was entertaining but that's about it".

Anyway, though I'm not motivated enough to see the movie to battle opening week crowds, I'll likely see it next week. I'm going in with pretty low expectations, so chances are good that I won't be too appalled. Unlike my now astronomically huge anticipation of my first Krispy Kreme experience. :-)





Version 2.11 of Movable Type is now available, by the way. I love MT. My entire archive has been converted over, and I want to convert my other Web projects to Movable Type as well.

I'm also gradually in the process of categorizing my entries. This change will be transparent to users, except eventually you should be able to view Blathering entries by categories like "filk" and "writing", etc.

And for those of you who read online journals on a regular basis, you may want to consider voting in the The 2002 Diarist Awards. You have to have your own online journal or blog to be able to nominate and to vote. You can see the list of nominees for this quarter here (no, I'm not a nominee :-)).

Speaking of awards, don't forget to send in your nominations for the Pegasus Awards! The deadline has been extended to May 31st. You can find the online nomination ballot here.





Went running through a different route yesterday, just for variety. Checked out a golf course area that I've always been curious about. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any interesting running trails in the area, just the road leading into the parking lot. And no, I felt absolutely no incentive to try golf despite the fact that the golf place offers free weekly clinics. :-)





As I mentioned in my Tuesday entry, I was paired up with someone in my WordGoddess group for a collab; each of us was supposed to come up with a list of questions for the other person to answer. I answered mine on Tuesday. Here is Sasha's entry answering the questions I gave to her.

To any German speakers out there: Parki recently introduced me to some instrumental German music I quite like, but I was hoping to get some help translating the album and track titles. Album/group: Einsjager und Siebenjager, Popol Vuh. Tracks: Kleiner Krieger, King Minos, Morgengruss, Wurfelspiel, Gutes Land, Einsjager und Siebenjager. Thanks kindly!

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Today's Blatherpics:

I took these photos during my run yesterday.

	Percussion group performing just outside the Skydome. I ended up leaving the Skydome area because it was unbelieveably windy; my cap kept getting yanked off my head!
	Golf ball at the CityCore golf course just west of Spadina.
	Golf practice. The artificial turf was littered with golf balls.
	A GO train that passed under a bridge I ran over. Headed home after I took this picture.

more Krispy Kreme

Egads, I can't believe it's raining again. What's with this weather? If I was a parent, and a child was complaining about the rain, I'd give them the usual spiel about how the rain's good for all the growing green things bla bla bla. Sadly, however, the only growing green things around here are the feeble-looking office plants you can sometimes see in the windows of corporate high rises around here.

I faxed and e-mailed the latest round of documents for the CCRA yesterday. I've gotten tired of crossing my fingers that this audit process will end soon, so have started crossing my toes as well. People stare when I pass them on the street but hey, but I'll do anything to end this ongoing hassle.

But now to more important topics...

A breakthrough in my Krispy Kreme fantasy: Jeff says he's going to take me to a Krispy Kreme this weekend! Apparently there's an outlet somewhere in Mississauga. When it first opened, the store reportedly did $70,000 worth of sales in the first day of business. Holy cow. What exactly are IN these doughnuts to make them so popular? If I don't end up making it to the Mississauga outlet (or even if I do), Scott and Amanda have promised to take me to one when I visit them in August, yay!

Out of morbid curiosity, I checked out the fat content of Krispy Kreme doughnuts since I'd like to go into this virgin KK experience prepared. Glazed Sour Cream is my favourite doughnut, so I checked its stats.

According to the nutritional information chart provided by Krispy Kreme (the term "nutritional information" is pretty funny, don't you think?), a glazed sour cream doughnut has 280 calories, 15 grams of fat, 23 grams of sugar, and 2.2 grams of protein (Ha! Protein! Like anyone cares!!) Odd. No addictive substances listed.

In comparison, the Tim Hortons Glazed Sour Cream Glazed has 318 calories, 19 grams of fat. That surprised me; I had half-figured that Krispy Kreme products must be loaded with more fat and sugar to have such incredible appeal. Not that either is a candidate for a health-conscious award, mind you.

What I find bizarre is that Krispy Kreme (American) uses the "doughnut" spelling, while Tim Horton (Canadian) uses the "donut" spelling. What gives? I've corrected my spelling to the proper English version.

Calories or no, I must try a Krispy Kreme doughnut sometime soon. I'm sure all of you are hoping I do as well, just so I shut up about doughnuts already. :-)

Online tidbits:

The teaser trailer for Matrix Reloaded is online.

Yay, the courts have ordered ordered VeriSign to stop its deceptive advertising campaign. I got one of Verisign's "renewal notices" recently, which confused then ticked me off. If innocents DO send back the form with payment (thinking they're just renewing their domains), Verisign transfers the domains to their own service.

Today's Blatherpic:

My iBook and a cup of lemon tea at the cottage.

spam assassin

So my sister was telling me about a scene at their dinner table last night. Apparently 5-year-old Annie was pumping her arms in the air yelling, "GO LEAFS GO! GO LEAFS GO!" then added, after a pause, that her favourite player was Cujo. Funny thing is, my niece has never seen a hockey game before. :-)

I thought this was pretty amusing, but then realized that Annie's not much different from her uncle and aunt.

Jeff and I, the bandwagon-jumpers that we are, only watched the last ten minutes of the Toronto vs Ottawa hockey game last night. Within a few seconds of the Leafs winning, we muted the sound and opened the windows; sure enough, the car honking and cheering had begun, quadrupling in volume as hockey fans began emerging (like ants from so many anthills) from the many sports bars in our area.

Neither Jeff nor I are big sports fans, at least in terms of watching it on a regular basis. Jeff did used to watch some golf on television, which baffled me. Golf looks like such a dull sport already (and this is my cue to duck as all the lurking golf fanatics out there go berserk with rage); the idea of watching it on a tv screen has about as much appeal to me as having my teeth drilled without anaesthetic or being forced to watch re-runs of Temptation Island (which would be worse).

On the other hand, it's hard to ignore the overwhelming enthusiasm of the Toronto fans. They poured into Yonge Street last night, celebrating the Leafs' win. According to Canoe, the crowd's size was similar to that when the Jays won the World Series in the early 1990s. About 70 extra police officers were called in to barricade connecting streets to allow fans to walk safely along Yonge.





Many, many thanks to Bryan Fullerton for installing Spam Assassin on his server. Since I began filtering using Spam Assassin's flags, I've hardly had any spam in my in-box. Here's a sample excerpt of Spam Assassin's header output while scoring an incoming e-mail for spam content/format:


X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=19.8 required=5.0 tests=TO_EMPTY,FROM_ENDS_IN_NUMS,
NO_REAL_NAME,PLING,TO_MALFORMED,
EARN_PER_WEEK,NO_EXPERIENCE,EXCUSE_3,
REMOVE_SUBJ,EXCUSE_1,EXCUSE_7,
LINES_OF_YELLING, LINES_OF_YELLING_2,
RCVD_IN_ORBS,RCVD_IN_RFCI
version=2.20 X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Level: *******************
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.20
(devel $Id: SpamAssassin.pm,v 1.77
2002/04/06 1
9:28:30 hughescr Exp $)
X-Spam-Report: 19.8 hits, 5 required;
* 2.5 -- To: is empty
* 1.0 -- From: ends in numbers
* 0.6 -- From: does not include a real name
* 0.5 -- Subject has an exclamation mark
* 0.3 -- To: has a malformed address
* 4.7 -- BODY: Contains 'earn $something per week'
* -1.1 -- BODY: No experience needed!
* 2.7 -- BODY: Claims you can be removed from the list
* 2.3 -- BODY: List removal information
* 2.3 -- BODY: Gives a lame excuse about why
you were sent this SPAM
* 1.4 -- BODY: Claims you can be removed from the list
* 0.5 -- BODY: A WHOLE LINE OF YELLING DETECTED
* 0.6 -- BODY: 2 WHOLE LINES OF YELLING DETECTED


I filter anything with the spam=YES code into a separate mailbox, and check this once a day to see if any "real" mail accidentally got filtered. So far, only a few mailing lists have gotten filtered, but no personal mail.

Woohoo! As most of you know already, I despise spam with a hatred that gnaws at my soul. It wastes time and resources. It's obnoxious. It's insulting. I've alternated between investing way too much energy into trying to rid it from my mailbox, and steadfastly ignoring it. This Spam Assassin software is the first solution that actually seems to work.

At least it works for now, until spammers figure out how to work around the "spam scoring rules" built into the software. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will be a long, long time.





Here's a fun review of the recent "Spider-man" movie by James Lileks, for those interested.

Today's Blatherpics:

	Our friend Helen.
	Helen, Jeff and Craig in Serra restaurant last night.
	Craig.

poll: star wars movie?

Jeff and I are back home. Back to audit stuff for me, woo boy. It looks like I'm going to have to approach Xlibris for at least one document that the CCRA needs; we'll see what happens with that.

I've finally managed to get through the 1300 e-mails that were stagnating in my Eudora inbox. Deleted a lot of old ones, deleted a lot of spam, filtered about 150 of them into a "still needs to be answered" separate mailbox. According to my Eudora stats, I get about 45 e-mails a day, send about 15 e-mails a day. A far cry from the 300 e-mails/day that I received when I worked on Inkspot, but I'm still trying to figure out a way to keep up, especially when I'm out of e-mail contact several days in a row. Lately, most of my e-mail correspondence has been with accountants and my tax lawyer. :-\

Partly because of my Market Watch column, I'm starting to get more and more of the "do you know what's happened to editor xxxx or publisher xxxx" or "where do you advise that I send my manuscript for publication" message from strangers.

A lot of my incoming mail is spam. Spam is a constant thorn in my side which I've alternately ignored or raged about, as most of you already know. I'm going to try a new spam-filtering system option that Bryan Fullerton set up for Samurai customers. I had originally asked him to take off the old filter since it was filtering out important e-mail that I wanted to see, but this new one looks more forgiving. The main problem I find with spam is that it's intermingled with my regular mail, so sometimes I miss seeing personal e-mails (or worse, accidentally delete them along with the spam).

Today's Poll: Star Wars movie?

How many of you are planning to see Attack of the Clones on opening day? Or even this week? Jeff and I have mixed feelings about this. Phantom Menace was such a resounding disappointment that it's hard to work up any real excitement for another Star Wars movie. On the other hand...it's STAR WARS. :-) Answer in Blatherchat.

Looks like two more Spider-man sequels are coming out, according to Reuters. The next one is scheduled for release on May 7, 2004.

And here's another Reuters story about the Attack of the Clones bootlegs that are already circulating online.

Today's Blatherpic:

I took this photo yesterday morning at the cottage.

sauna shower

After an ambitious of 'bout of napping yesterday, I actually did some productive cottage work by stacking firewood, moving some birch logs from a pile behind our cabin to a pile closer to the boathouse, and stacking cedar logs against the outside of the boathouse:





I also washed my hair in the sauna by heating up some water in a big pot on the electric coals, mixing it with cold lake water in a portable shower bag. Those shower bags are wonderful on camping trips; I remember some of our campmates on the Nahanni canoe trip had a bigger version that could hold more water. The plastic is black, so on a good day you can just leave the filled bag out on a rock to heat up in the sun.

I used biodegradable Camp Suds from Mountain Co-op; just a small amount will produce a LOT of suds! The most awkward part is holding the bag above your head with one hand, washing with your other hand. Jeff and I usually take turns doing this, but he was busy at the time.

The effort is well worth it, however! Even on camping trips, I start feeling really grungy if I don't get to stick my head in water once a day. This was more of a challenge on the Nahanni trip because of the glacially-cold water, but some of us still did it (screaming lustily in the process, of course).





Jeff and JBR put in the water system later in the afternoon, however, so now we have running water. The only thing better than a sauna shower is the outdoor shower. Too bad we can't have that back in the city. :-)

Ginny arrived around dinnertime, with dinner. In celebration of Mother's Day weekend (and because Ginny had had a pretty stressful week at the restaurant), Jeff made some yummy salmon and cream cheese appetizers:





Jeff and I are heading back to the city this afternoon. Hey, I (finally) updated Waiting For Frodo yesterday. Click on the image below to get the full cartoon:

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Today's Blatherpics:

	Jeff patiently let me decorate his knee last night.
	Woodpile I stacked.
	JBR in his comfortable cottage gear.
	Jeff made these appetizers for his mom's arrival: smoked salmon, onions, cream cheese, capers, onions.
	My most recent Waiting For Frodo strip.