Saturday, July 25, 2009
So far so good—both Time Machine and CrashPlan are backing up successfully and the iMac is no longer hanging. Perhaps the problem was indeed Sophos? Prepared the Sherpaq Oyster docking station for sale. I purchased the Oyster from Amazon on March 18, 2005 for 129 USD, and it served us well for 4 years, though it seems like it has been longer. In dusting it off and wiping it down, I was reminded of how unique a design it is: a visual beauty, configurable and adjustable in many ways, internal metal construction, sturdy and reliable, and a pleasure to use when everything fell into place exactly right. Its few flaws: not all laptops open wide enough for it to work, the back cover was a little tricky to remove and replace, it required a phillips screwdriver to set up, it wasn't ideal for laptops that had ports along the front edge (like our Dell Inspiron 700m but I rigged a workaround out of cardboard), and the website that described it really wasn't very good. (I remember complaining about super tiny fonts.) Upon finding that it's no longer easily available for sale, I quadrupled my anticipated sale price—we'll see if anyone bites. Goodbye, Oyster! Off with you to the home of some aesthetics freak who loves good design so much that he or she is willing to pay my outrageous price. You will be missed. Stretches. Weight training: superslow sidelying inner thigh leg lift, superslow sidelying 90-degree inner thigh leg lift, superslow leg lift, superslow kneeling kickback. Usual oatmeal breakfast. In the Bluehost control panel I think I have finally gotten the spam under control. Ever since I switched away from 5dollarhosting to Bluehost I have been receiving more spam in my inbox. Bluehost offers Postini, which would probably fix the problem, but at a cost of $1 more per month. Instead, I set SpamAssassin's AutoDelete setting to 1 (the most stringent setting), added a lot of whitelisted domains, added a few blacklisted domains, and turned on SpamBox. In Thunderbird, in Tools > Accounts > Junk Settings, I enabled adaptive junk email controls, checked "do not mark mail as junk if sender is in personal address book," checked "trust junk mail headers from SpamAssassin," and moved new junk messages to a folder called spam. Worked on Patrick's website: installed clueTip for jQuery, got it working after some conflict with MooTools—all my variables were showing up as null. Patrick took a nap. Disabled the RSS feed in this Drupal site by adding this code before $head prints in page.tpl.php:
$head = str_replace('<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Front page feed" href="/rss.xml" />', '', $head);
This probably isn't the best way to do it, but it worked for me. Lunch: Joe's Os, ham and provolone sandwich, hot water. Nap. Dinner at home with Patrick: thin-crust pizza, hot water. Watched El Mariachi on Netflix DVD with Patrick.