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Last Thursday I had a flying lesson at 7am, when I got to the plane my instructor was already there “de-icing” the wings. Freezing temperatures overnight had left a thin, but bumpy, layer of frost across the top of the wing. Understandably, Bob didn’t want to take off with that on there so I spent 15 minutes fetching small cups of hot water from the office to pour over the wing. It was probably 25 minutes later that we got off the ground.

This afternoon I drive to San Diego, get on top of the grade in driving rain, which quickly becomes soft snow falling. All around it resembles an alpine scene – untouched white snow covering the ground and buildings, the road slowly disappearing in front of me as the snow settles where it was only just recently plowed. We all slow to about 35 mph, the temp guage on the MINI says 32F and I can hear ice crunch under the wheels. The dynamic steering control on the MINI even comes on a couple of times though I never felt any loss of control.

I know its ‘winter’, but this is the ‘So’ in SoCal, whats with the snow and ice??

You may have missed Microsoft’s announcement that they have entered the blogging world with their MSN Spaces. However, it appears that Microsoft doesn’t want you to write about just anything, some words are censored and won’t be accepted by their submission form. Maybe this is so that people can’t use their service to write what they really think about Microsoft?!

According to this article at CNN.com :

Twice as many walkers die in traffic accidents in New Orleans, San Diego and Phoenix than in Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Boston.

Apparantly the USA is getting less and less friendly to pedestrians. Well, duh. It always amazes me that there are places you simply can’t get to without a vehicle. When the oil runs out, how will we get from A to B?

Get the full skinny here.

According to this article at CNN.com :

Twice as many walkers die in traffic accidents in New Orleans, San Diego and Phoenix than in Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Boston.

Apparantly the USA is getting less and less friendly to pedestrians. Well, duh. It always amazes me that there are places you simply can’t get to without a vehicle. When the oil runs out, how will we get from A to B?

Get the full skinny here.

Branson vs Trump – no contest!

The sisters are gone from the Amazing Race, thrawted by some lousy hay bails. One to watch now is Hayden who demonstrated a few interestingly timed shirt changes during last night’s episode. Still too many models on the show though.

What was Andy thinking on The Apprentice giving measly $100 ‘tips’ to the design team and denying them food until they were done. His firing was deserved just for that. Although, I really was hoping that the talentless Jen would go this time.

Finally, Ken Jennings. Was he pushed or was he just tired? I can’t believe he didn’t know the final Jeopardy question. I think he took a dive. But he needs time to start spending some of that $2.5M (although the estimated federal and state taxes on that come to $1.04M!).

Ok, my life is sad.

Having suffered the delights of H1-B visa processing before becoming a permanent resident I like to watch the highs and lows of the visa and immigration world. There is a cap on how many new H1-B visitors (specialty workers, such as computer programmers) the country will allow and it is almost always exhausted. For 2005, this cap has almost already been reached and the USCIS is no longer accepting applications for start dates prior to October 1 2005!!!

The financial year for immigration starts October 1st; the USCIS is stating that applications received on or after October 2nd 2004 are being returned as those applications were too late for this year’s processing! Just amazing; it gets harder and harder to work in this country.

I pride myself on having never fallen victim to a computer virus or email scam but I came close to believing a phishing email at the weekend.

The email claimed to be from ebay, the headers were so good that Eudora filed the email in my Ebay folder. It said that they had recently been unable to verify my details and would I click on the link to provide them again. My first thought was to laugh, yeah right someone wants my details. But the URL looked good in the email, and the actual URL behind the link was the same and in the back of my mind was the fact that perhaps my now-closed credit card had been on file with them. So I thought I would click and see where it took me.

First thing that happened is Firefox popped up a window warning me that although the address in the URL was ebay.com, I was actually being taken to a different site and did I still want to go there – score one for Firefox!! I bet Internet Explorer wouldn’t have caught that. Knowing for sure I was being phished I said yes, just to see how good the fake page would be. But instead of getting a page I was prompted to save or execute a dll!! Well, I certainly wasn’t going to do that so I cancelled the link and had a little laugh that I almost, only just, but almost got suckered.

If you’re worried about phishing scams read this page for some sound advice.

I have completed the first step in migrating away from Eudora but some things bother me about how it looks like Thunderbird works so for now I am running the two in parallel for a while (which is probably the sensible thing to do anyway).

In particular, it doesn’t look like the program fetches mail from all my accounts, only the one I’ve deemed the default. I have 8 POP accounts defined, all set to fetch every 10 minutes, but its been 25 minutes since I sent a test email to one of the non-default addresses and it hasn’t shown up. The one I sent to the default account was fetched. I am sure I don’t need to click the “Get Mail” button for every account but right now I don’t have confidence that it will fetch all the emails for every account. Something I will watch for this weekend.

The other annoyance is that it seems like I can’t import my Eudora message filters of which I have probably a 100. I really don’t want to have put them all in by hand but it looks like I have to. And that is made worse by the fact that it doesn’t look like Thunderbird lets you do filters the easy way: in Eudora you can select a message, click on ‘make filter’ and the new filter window appears filled in with all the likely filters from that message pre-populated. You just choose the ones you want and there it is. No such neatness here, it seems.

Well, so far my anti-spam measures have blocked over 100 spam attempts and only 3 comments have made it past. Just this minute I notice another 25 attempts that failed to make it through the Spaminator! I am sure the peace won’t last but it sure feels good to be winning for a while.

Looks like the blog comment spammers were busy overnight, my two sites, eschwa and wtf were all hit by the comment spammers. I had a couple of hundred to get rid of at the MINI blog site. So, since I can’t legally hunt them down and torture them, I’ve installed a bunch of anti-spam plugins to see if that helps any.

Also planned this long weekend is the ‘upgrade’ from Eudora to Thunderbird. I’ve been a Euroda user for over 7 years but I am tired of it crashing on a daily basis (and I have spoken to others who suffer the same) when there are images in an email, or you delete an email ‘too quickly’. Of course, being a good computer guy I’ll be backing up my old email directory just in case and all that good stuff. I’ll post an update as to how well it goes.