Augean stables? Nah, just my "Inbox"!

Between yesterday and today, I've been taking short breaks to clean the garbage out of my mail system.

The spam situation wasn't helped by some low-level occurrences on my home machine. It turns out, for some reason, that once a file reaches a size of 51000000 bytes, things go haywire. That happened to the procmail log, and the result was a failure, on the part of procmail, to properly sort my mail. The same happened to the file of stuff that my spam-detecting software classifies as spam (can you imagine the wasted bandwidth?), so my spam filter stopped working.

As a result, my default inbox was chock full of a few e-mails that belonged somewhere else, interspersed among literally thousands of come-ons for fake stocks, various drugs, porn... you name the scam, and I'll bet it was there.

And that's a fairly thorny problem. If it takes 3 seconds, on the average, to glance at a message and determine if it is spam or not, then 5000 messages will take 15000 seconds, or a little over 4 hours (with no breaks) to process. The alternative is to skim the inbox index and hit the delete key fairly rapidly (even at 2 per second, it takes about 40 minutes), and risk losing real e-mail in the process.

It was a risk I was prepared to take. In fact, there were times I simply jammed the delete key down, scanned the index as it scrolled up the screen, and kept thinking "if it's that important, whoever it is will call me."

Things are back to normal now, more or less.

Cheers...

Counting down time at the store...

Four of the nine hazard reports are done. I figure it's eminently feasible to finish the job tomorrow, after which I've got a translation lined up. But that's tomorrow.

Equipment at the store has been taking a beating. The fax is not operational (unless held together with one's fingers) and the laser printer (seems like I bought it yesterday) has something wrong with it. I'm going to take it home to disassemble and troubleshoot... just the perfect way to end the day.

For now, I'm going to lock up in a couple of minutes and go over to the kids' place for dinner.

Cheers...

Bob Zangas, USMC(R), RIP

Bob Zangas was a Marine Reservist working in Iraq, blogging about his experiences in that beleaguered country. I followed his posts from time to time, and found them interesting. I felt a connection to the man, although the only thing we actually had in common was our service in The Corps. Zangas was killed last week in an ambush south of Baghdad. One of the first things that stumbled across my mind upon hearing of his death was this, from Theodore Roosevelt:

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."

Semper fi, and rest in peace.

Cheers...

...