Slaughters.com

Interesting fact of the day. 86% of my mail for the month of May was spam. I've had the same email address for about 7 years. And I've made almost no effort to prevent it from appearing on public webpages, newsgroups and message boards, so I'm a bit of a spam magnet. But thanks to my elaborate home-cooked filtering system (consisting of fetchmail, procmail, and perl), only a couple dozen of these spams landed in my inbox.

Doing a little web-surfing, I discovered a picture of my house (sorta) here:

California Coastal Records Project - Image 5916 - "Town of Pacifica"

At the bottom-center of the picture, you can see beach side facilities. My house is directly across the street and to the right 2 houses (the one mostly covered by trees).

It's very difficult to explain to people why Microsoft is such a bad company. In a nutshell, there are several main reasons why I personally hate them with inordinate passion:

1) Crappy software: M$ has gotten most people used to software that doesn't work, OSs that consistently crash, user interfaces that are clunky and ineffective. By doing this, they ensure that folks will continually need to upgrade to the next less buggy release of a piece of software. In fact, software should not crash at all. If it does, it's not finished. M$ software is never finished and users of their software are in effect beta testers (who should probably be getting paid :)

My father and I flew back to Nebraska last weekend for the marriage of my cousin and his bride. I haven't been back to that part of the country since the marriage of my friend JD several years back in Yankton, South Dakota. That was another trip worth a note in my journal, though I didn't make it.

The wedding was perfect. It took place in a town between Omaha and Lincoln, Ashland. There's no motel in Ashland, so we stayed in a motel off the 80, just between two dirt tracks (which were running full schedules this weekend).

So, blah, blah, wedding stuff and so forth, on Saturday, we got away from the reception in time to catch the last 5 laps of what we believed to be the modifieds. No need to go into detail for my audience here, as you can imagine the frenetic and explosive finish of this un-mufflered dirt-track roster on this mid-western flat track. It was raucous and pleasant. I didn't note the car that won, but I did note that he cut off his follower late into turn four to take his victory.

And after a Sunday afternoon of skeet shooting off my cousin's back porch, we caught the end of another flat track schedule on the other side of the 80. These were late models running balls to the wall to a nearly full crowd on a beautiful Nebraska evening. Again, we caught only the tail end, but it was loud as all hell and beautiful to watch.

And some people got married this weekend too.

That was my brief vacation.

I feel guilty blogging, and I feel guilty not blogging. I don't really have anything to say, yet having access to the web makes me feel obligated to keep some sort of log of something on the web. Then I go and see other blogs and how assuredly dull they are...

Anyway, I've gotten myself employed again. I'm working full-time at Epsilon Systems as a programmer. I've begun the process of selling my house in Pacifica so that I can buy another down here in San Diego. It's a decent enough town. And I'm much more comfortable in a military town near battleships and marines than in a town overrun with whacko liberals who are offended by the American flag and want to "understand" the terrorists.

That's all for now.

Harry