Interesting times, as usual.

Lessee now....

Southmoon's condition is gradually improving.

My father's condition is gradually declining, and we keep having to make adjustments accordingly.

The weirdest chicken (which was Joy's favorite) died - apparently eggbound, but didn't show obvious signs in time for us to notice & do anything about it.

We're getting the vehicles in for overdue (by the calendar) maintenance and various repairs.  Another few weeks and they should all be functionally as good as new; the Venerable Prius could additionally use some restoration work, which may or may not happen any time soon.

Spring hath sprung; I need to do tilling Real Soon Now, plus various sorts of spraying.  Got plants sprouting in the basement; it's nearly time to move them out to the front porch to catch some real sunlight (but last night got almost down to freezing, so it's not quite outdoors time yet).  I think the nurseries may be open now; got to go look for interesting vegetable seedlings and whatnot.

Toaster work remains busy, and I'm dealing with a Mystery at this point.  Got some possibly helpful test equipment on order.

I've developed a suspicion that the Gumbyware server's blacklist status in the world of Big Corp Hosted Email may be the result of a policy change: perhaps the late-1990s best practice of rejecting inbound spam during the data phase was reclassified a few years ago as "sending" the spam by ID-ten-T corporate sysadmins at companies that run the servers where a non-trivial amount of spam originates.  Anyway, I commented out that rule in the Exim configuration, and now messages with spam scores of 10+ (highest I've seen so far was 23.2) are turning up in the spam can with the 2~10 scores instead of being rejected.  I'll see if this improves my standing with the ID-ten-T corporate sysadmin community.

(Accepted practice nowadays seem to be to accept all incoming mail from non-blacklisted servers, and, if it looks too spammy, simply delete it with no notification to anyone.  Brilliant.)

I'm preparing once again to muck about with various sorts of wireless networking, the better to upgrade the defense grid, monitor the poultry and their food and water supplies, etc.  Not sure how fast that'll progress.

Comments

[Rob]

It's good to see you're keeping on and I like the delving into the wonderful (back) world of spam. What's your official "last frost date"?

[Eric Wilner]

Not sure about the official last frost date this year, but we did have some frost yesterday and the current 10-day forecast shows lows well above freezing. It'll be a week or so before I have the fields ready for planting, so I'll probably be putting seeds in the ground as soon as I'm done with tilling and whatnot, and putting out pre-started plants a few days after that.