Tuesday, September 22, 2009

NOW THE TRUTH CAN BE TOLD

I know that there are many of you out in bloggoland who feel that like the pontiff I am infallible and never make mistakes but I am just about to sadly disillusion you. I am rapidly becoming a senile old coot, and although I am a relatively good boy these days, my years of partying hard have probably caught up with me.

When we went to Ireland last week I forgot to take some of my medication with me so for a glorious week I had very little diabetes medicine, and none of my anti-bonkers pills, so I was as high as a kite when I got back, on a mixture of tiredness and blood sugar.

During my abscence Graham retrieved my errant medication from the chemist, and as soon as I returned to base I started taking it properly again. However, the net result of this is that I slept almost incessantly for the next three days, and even now I am still feeling a little groggy. I also had 4,000 emails waiting for me on my return plus a whole slew of other stuff, so please be forgiving if I am a little behind with my correspondence.

To change the subject a tad, your thoughts and prayers are appreciated for Noela Mackenzie, the oldest CFZ member, who - at 87 - is uprooting herself from her home in Kingsbridge to move to Bideford so she can be nearer the CFZ; to Maxy who starts university this weekend; to Lizzy and Dave who are each going through (unconnected) life dramas; to Marjorie Braund, still in Bideford Hospital (I saw her yesterday evening) waiting her final last ditch bout of radiotherapy; and to my brother's family who have kittens each time the telephone rings, and will do until he is safe home from Afghanistan.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:21 PM

    4,000 emails? Really? Do these include viagra promotions and ads for Rolex watches?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1:31 PM

    Personally I've found that a combination of SpamAssassin and Bogofilter works very well in reducing the amount of spam I read, though I do have to remember to clear out the spam folder from time to time. Jon may or may not be able to use these; SpamAssassin probably has a Windows alternative but Bogofilter doesn't.

    As an aside, Bogofilter is a real-life application of the statistical techniques invented by the Rev Thomas Bayes in 1764, which up until a few years ago remained little used until someone realised that they were just the ticket for scoring emails based on the distribution of words in them.

    A trick which I use for email is to have a small Linux system running constantly (I use an Intel Atom system; cheap and frugal on power) polling email servers periodically, and filtering the email thus garnered into folders in a home directory, to be served out by an IMAP server called Dovecot. The advantage to this is that my power-hungry main machine can be left turned off most of the time now, and I can access my email from almost anywhere that there's a net connection now.

    Config files and specifications available on request, if anyone's interested...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jon,

    1,000 of those emails are probably mine reminding you to take your medicine.

    ReplyDelete