Enrico reported this morning that liferea dies on Sam’s entry about file parsing vulnerabilities (talk about irony). So, what does silly me do almost right after? Well, I went and read Planet Debian on liferea, of course. And, behold, liferea 1.2 doesn’t crash! I really must finally get my experimental packages ready and uploaded. Update (5 seconds later): Nope, I was wrong. It does crash.

I will take part in a round table on Women and Technology at the Free Software World Conference 3.0, on the 9th of February, at Badajoz. If you intend to attend, register now!


I will then attend FOSDEM at the end of February and will then take a week off in the biggest port in northern Germany, I think that s Hamburg, to get away from the stress of Madrid and to hopefully get a taste of a decent winter Schei wetter.

In April, I will attend DudesConf (formerly known as Debconf-es) in A Coru a.



And in June... Debconf7 in Edinburgh! That s the most important event in the whole year for me. I will get there on the 8th of June and leave on the 24th.

I expect some resistance at work, yes, this job I am both so paranoid about loosing and at the same time not worried about anymore, but it would not be the first time I am fired because of attending a Free Software event that meant a lot to me, Debconf4 in Porto Alegre, to be more specific, and I am not scared. I will survive. I have lost jobs before, and I have had much better and much worse jobs. A job is a job is a job is a job.

At this moment of my life, mentally troubled and physically ill, I am still painfully aware of my priorities, specially (the small amount of) stuff that I am doing to at least try to change a world that disgusts me in so many ways. Happily trying to change this world, for the ones to come, including the kids of the people that have fired me (or will ever fire me) because of it.

And, for a change, I feel my family backing me up, fully supporting me in my quijotada, which makes me the strongest and most determined person you have ever met.
Be very, very afraid ;)

If the manual of your access point tells you to not place it next to a metal surface or an electronic device, there is probably a reason for that. Moving it by a mere two meters has made the number of missed beacons drop below 1% (before: 80%) and the throughput rise from 20kB/s to 1.5MB/s. I'm still not happy as this is way below the theoretical maximum, but it's better. Interestingly enough, the glossary in said manual includes the terms "warchalking" and "wardriving", even explaining the historical precedent of using chalk marks to inform others about hospitable houses.

Several people have wondered why were Nadezhda's and my site offline this weekend. Well, it surely raised my ego ;-) What happened?
As many of you know, this blog is hosted in my home machine - A Mac Mini connected by DSL. A couple of weeks ago, my ISP announced the doubling of our connection speed (it was 512/128k, it got increased to 1024/128, so it's not exactly doubled, specially if you are used to saturating the upstream channel... but anyway). From then on, we started suffering all kinds of connectivity problems. The connection would drop several times a day, it would be sluggish at times... I decided to wait a bit, to let them upgrade their whole network.
Anyway, it didn't happen. Nadezhda was pissed at it, as she is our main user - And just to make sure I was not doing NAT wrong in my server, I decided to set up my DSL modem (a SpeedStream 5200) as a router instead of a switch. Yes, Ta^3, some people never learn ;-)
In short: I hosed the connection, and had to work with Prodigy Infinitum's staff on getting it back online. Contrary to the popular belief, Infinitum support is up to the task, customer-friendly and helpful (although they insisted on me shutting down my Linux server and configure it from MacOS - I don't blame them, after all. Thank $deity I didn't have to set up a Windows machine after all!).
But after recovering connectivity, the speed still sucked.
I was prompted to use a temporary account, which they provided me, and the connection was just perfect, 10KBps upstream, 105KBps downstream. WTF?! Well, the girl told me that my login/password pair had a problem (?!) and I needed to change them. Ok, no sweat, we changed them, so I'm no longer gwolf_at_prodigy - I had not even used that mail address, so no worries.
What happened? Well, as my username/password is the same for all of Prodigy's services (dialup, Wifi hotspot and DSL), and as I have lent it to a couple of people over the years, I just guess they penalized me :-/ But... Why wouldn't they tell me about that? Not even after changing my login/passwd (no, they would not keep even the old login) Why wouldn't they request me not to share my credentials? Go wonder.

Firstly for smooth running of the presentations it would be ideal if laptops were provided for displaying all presentations (obviously this wouldn't work for live software demos but it would work well for the slide-show
presentations). Such laptops need to be tested with the presentation files that will be used for the talks (or pre-release versions that are produced in the same formats). It's a common problem that the laptops owned by the speakers will have problems connecting to the projectors used at the conference which can waste time and give a low quality display. Another common problem is that laptops owned by the conference often have different versions of the software used for the slides which renders them differently, the classic example of this is OpenOffice 1.x and 2.x which render presentations differently such that using the wrong one results in some text being off-screen.

The easy solution to this is for the conference organizers to provide laptops that have multiple boot options for different distributions. Any laptop manufactured in the last 8 years will have enough disk space for the
latest release of Debian and the last few Fedora releases. As such machines won't be on a public network there's no need to apply security updates and therefore a machine can be used at conferences in successive years, a 400MHz laptop with 384M of RAM is quite adequate for this purpose while also being so small that it will sell cheaply.

A slightly better solution would be to have laptops running Xen. It's not difficult to set up Xephyr in fullscreen mode to connect to a Xen image, you could have several Xen instances running with NFS file sharing so that the speaker could quickly test out several distributions to determine which one gives the best display of their notes. This would also allow speakers to bring their own Xen images.

This is especially important if you want to run lightning talks, when there is only 5 minutes allocated for a talk you can't afford to waste 2 minutes in setting up a presentation!

In other news Dean Wilson gave my talk yesterday a positive review.

I was considering to modify mpd, my favourite music player (using a daemon and multiple frontends, however I usually don't interact much with it anyway except the casual 'skip' button press). I wanted it to support DBus, so I could more easily add e.g. a "love" and a "hate" button, and start collecting data which songs I like. Seaching for "mpd dbus" quickly turned up a proposed freedesktop.org standard by VideoLan people and some discussion by for example the XMMS2 folks. I'm looking forward to that. Right now, my "Multimedia buttons" are bound to some shell scripts that try to find out which media player I'm running and trigger the appropriate command there.

Early this morning we finally had some snow here in Montreal. And now it's coming down like crazy. It's been flurrying all day, and we have about 20cm of snow out on the ground now. My second cousin Micaela came in from Toronto today on the Viarail line. Micaela is 25 and just finished her honors year in university in Melbourne. Now she's taking a little while off for a trip around the world before settling back down for a master's degree in art curatorship. Her father and my father are cousins, and although we don't get to see our Australian family that often, we stay in close touch for holidays and big events. It's nice to know they're down there. I had a crazy time getting downtown to the train station to pick her up, though. The snow was thick in the air and on the ground -- I don't think the snowplows were ready for this storm. They've been unimportant for most of the winter, so I assume they were used as traffic barriers or temporary police cars or something. In any event, getting around Centre-ville today in a car was pretty crap. Once we got home and got settled, though, it was nice to get out in the snow. Micaela has only been in snow once before -- in Italy, of all places -- and was pretty awestruck by the weather. So we piled Amita June onto her sled and walked through Parc LaFontaine down to L'Anecdote, a good diner in our neighbourhood. Amita loooovved being on the sled in the snow -- she was giggling the whole way. tags: montreal snow micaela driving lanecdote

When I was home for christmas there was also a class reunion. As it is with such occasions I had to give out my email address a number of times. Now, when I chose my domain I decided to use my online nick (alphascorpii) since it was adequately unique to be still available and could easily be associated with me. However, my nick is almost only used in writing and thus mostly copy-pasted or entered using tab-completion. Those who do use it in real life too know how it's spelled (or at least pronounced). At the reunion though I had to spell it out for a few people and the 'ph' and even more the 'ii' often caused confusion. As a result of this, alphascorpii.net can now also be reached via a10i.net! I hope this will simplify things for those who are not familiar with Alpha Scorpii.

We have a list of 10 (famous) girl geeks from CNET and one from someone else.

The CNET list has Ada Byron, Grace Hopper, Mary Shelly, and Marie Curie. Mary Shelly isn't someone who I'd have listed, but it does seem appropriate now I think about it. Marie Curie is one of the top geeks of all time (killing yourself through science experiments has to score bonus geek points). I hope that there are better alternatives to items 4, 7, 9, and 10 on the Cnet list.

The list from someone else has 9 women I've never heard of. If we are going to ignore historical figures (as done in the second list) but want to actually list famous women then the list seems to be short. If we were to make a list of women who are known globally (which would mean excluding women who are locally famous in Australia, or in Debian for example). The only really famous female geek that I can think of is Pamela from Groklaw.

The process of listing the top female geeks might have been started as an attempt to give a positive list of the contributions made by women. Unfortunately it seems to highlight the fact that women are lacking from leadership positions. There seem to be no current women who are in positions comparable to Linus, Alan, RMS, ESR, Andrew Tanenbaum, or Rusty (note that I produced a list of 6 famous male geeks with little thought or effort).

Kirrily has written an interesting article on potential ways of changing this.

Stefano Zacchiroli said:

To balance this, according to my first read of Ruby’s threading capability, it’s my impression that not only at most one thread can execute Ruby code at a time (limitation shared by OCaml, due to the non-distributed nature of mark and sweep garbage collectors), but also a thread blocked on a syscall will block all other threads to run. Dumb Ruby threads (but I still hope I’m wrong …)

This is not totally true:

• Yes, Ruby threads are user-level: you won’t get speedup from dual-cores or dual-processors system. In python, this presentation claims (slide 39) that python threads are mapped to native threads, but that a giant lock always prevents the execution of more than one thread at a time (so library writers don’t have to write thread-safe code).
• The ruby interpreter tries very hard to map blocking syscalls to their non-blocking counterparts (for example, all I/Os are passed to a select() call). This gets really dirty when you mix I/O and other syscalls. For example, see the strace output the following Ruby code:

  require ‘thread’
  th1 = Thread::new do
    pid = fork   sleep 2  
    Process::waitpid(pid)
    puts “Finished.”
  end
  th2 = Thread::new do
    f = STDIN.read
    puts “Finished2.”
  end
  th1.join
  

  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 349 )        = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 478832 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)
  waitpid(25249, 0xbf926810, WNOHANG)     = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 479013 , NULL) = 0
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 479053 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 59959 )      = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 538971 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 41 )         = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 543017 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)
  waitpid(25249, 0xbf926810, WNOHANG)     = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 543200 , NULL) = 0
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 543240 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 59959 )      = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 602842 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 357 )        = 0 (Timeout)
  gettimeofday( 1168847486, 606842 , NULL) = 0
  select(1, [0], [], [],  0, 0 )          = 0 (Timeout)

Here it’s a top-10 list of really important things, created by M dicos Sin Fronteras in Spanish. directhex, from #debian-offtopic (thanks!), provided a grammar/spelling check on my original English translation.

1. Central African Republic: Resurgence of the conflict. In 2006, its civilian population was a victim of violence again. During these months, confrontations have taken place between government troops and rebel groups. Civilians, suspected of supporting one or the other, have stuck in the biddle. Around 100,000 civilians have been forced to leave their homes. Several children, under 5 years old, have become ill of malaria, worms and serious respiratory infections.
2. Chechnya: Physical and psychologic scars. The consequences of a conflict that has lasted over 12 years so far are still present. Large numbers of Chechens that were displaced during the most serious phases of the crisis have already returned. However, the majority still lack housing and has to live in temporary shelters. Violence, kidnappings and abuses are still rampant. In the rural zones, medical infrastructure is almost nonexistent.
3. Sri Lanka: Civilians caught in the middle. Combat between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have intensified since the summer, causing displacements of tens of thousands of people. Other are still imprisoned and cannot flee.
4. Democratic Republic of Congo: Violence and permanent deficiencies. Deprivation and violence suffered by millons of Congolese is still happening unnoticed by the rest of the planet. Eastern Congo is a battleground for fights between several armed groups, included government forces that use force against civilian populace, leading to brutal living conditions.
5. Somalia: War and natural catastrophes. Even though its current situation has temporarily attraced media attention, the terrible living conditions of the Somali population are still largely forgotten. The country has one of the worst levels of sanitation in the world, and a quarter of the infant population dies before reaching 5 years old.
6. Colombia: Living with fear. Massacres, executions and fear are a daily life of thousands of Colombians. So far, almost three million have fled their homes because of a conflict marked by the drug trafficking that involves government forces, paramilitary groups and armed guerrillas.
7. Haiti: Extreme urban violence. The violence and insecurity is a daily breakfast in its capital city, Port-au-Prince, with confrontations between armed groups, the Haitian police and the UN Stabilization Mission on Haiti. Since December 2004, more than 3,000 people have been registered with bullet wounds, including more than a thousand women and children.
8. India: 25 years of conflict. Confrontations between Maoist insurgents, government forces and anti-Maoist military services have caused the displacement of 50,000 civilans in several areas of the country. The population still lives with fear and violence, with little or no access to sanitary conditions.
9. Tuberculosis: Obsolete and insufficient treatments. Against popular opinion in the West, tuberculosis is not an “obsolete problem”. Each year, it causes the deaths of two million people, around nine million people contract the disease, and new multiresistants variants are appearing.
10. Undernourishment: Thousands of avoidable deaths. Whilst in Spain the Ministry of Health tries to fight one of the major problems of the decade, obesity, millions of children die of hunger around the world and more than 60 million people show signs of acute undernourishment.

I guess not everything around is a top ten contest on popularity of who’s the hottest, who’s the prettiest, who has the longest penis or the biggest breasts, or whose farts smell better, geek, eh?

Daniel Baumann writing a packaging & sponsoring guide, advertising it on -mentors just after having demonstrated his gaps in basic packaging knowledge on the very same list (not even mentioning the kqemu debacle on -release a couple of days ago). Somebody please tell me it’s only a bad dream. Wait, if this was a dream, I could have kicked his ass already. Damn.

Today I woke up with a strong determination to do some badly needed house cleaning. A series of rushed travels have left a few rooms full of stuff all over the place, after I emptied a bag or two to be able to pack on time. Just before going to Tunisia, I decided my wallet was way too fat so I got rid of shopping receipts and other random shit I had in it. That included quite a few PGP keys from people I had been collecting in previous travels, and I had forgotten about. So, armed with my willingness to get rid of all of those dust puppies, first thing I find in the living room is the pile of wallet papers, and my clever procrastinating mind apparently thought it was time to postpone real cleaning; instead I needed to sit down and sign all of those really old PGP keys. Many of you reading this will have got a few emails from me this morning. It was about time! Some of the silly strips of paper dated back to the Open Source World Conference 2004 in M laga, when a decent group of Debian Developers gathered in a really small hacking room and talked about some Debian topics. Signing the keys has let me identify a few non-revoked ids which really should be, as the accounts are no longer valid, etc.; many others have greylisted me for a while and finally accepted my email. There was one mail recipient which may have gone a bit too far with the anti-spam policies, though:

9323170A74B     4007 Sun Jan 14 17:55:38  jordi@nubol.oskuro.net
(host mail-dtag.reichmann.net[62.104.43.214] said: 421 call 09001000057 for admin support (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
                                         alexander@schmehl.info

Alexander, I'm not doing calls to Germany to send your key, but I can resend if you want, once you open up your mail server... (my tries to knoepix.org also failed). It seems I have misplaced a few keys from the Ubuntu Summit in Sydney, but I think I know where to find that sheet. More in 2 or 3 years! PS: dust puppies are alive and well, they managed to survive yet another tough day.

Just as I was blogging about my trip to Prozac Land and how I got my health back, after working for a week and a half I started feeling sick again. Very sick.

I was having these ups and downs, one day I felt I could fly and the next I felt I was down in a hole. I was throwing up every morning and I had stopped eating anything but fruit already quite some time ago. I was smoking like a truck driver (Spanish saying) and drinking coffee like a mad hatter would drink tea in every Unbirthday Party.





My psychiatrist then withdrew all my medication at once, which was sweet and sour. This crap fucks up your brain chemistry, and on one hand, you feel like yourself again, but on the other hand, the down is scary. I have been dizzy, clumsy and sleepy at all times since I am off the happiness pill.

My endless doctor trips have not finished yet, but I made an unexpected stop in ER last Thursday. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, delirious that I am going to loose my job because of my terrible health and, subsequently, lack of accountability, stressed as hell about it, and physically feeling like crap, I landed in ER Land, and stayed there for 6 hours. I felt frivolous taking this picture, my arm feeling numb and foreign from the Peripheral IV line, which is what I was first given upon arrival, it felt too tight, slightly painful, and I was terrified to move or bend my arm. It just lay there, beside me, as if it were no longer part of me, out of my control.

All kind of tests were performed on me, blood was taken to feed the lab vampires, I don't even want to think about the urine, x-rays documented my piercings locations, physical exploration, endless questions, talking to two different, unfriendly, tired and overworked, doctors, and nothing was found, all looked normal. All but me, I was despaired. If all is fine, and I am not dying from bladder cancer, why do I feel like this? I felt stupid, I was looked at as I was there wasting their scarce time. Nobody could tell me what is wrong with me.

It looks like Prozac played an important role in killing my health completely. My psychiatrist has been on the phone with me all weekend, calling me every couple of hours. Why is he so worried about me? Why doesn't he want me to sleep alone at my place and wants me to sleep at my parents? Is it because of people committing suicide closely related to Prozac? Why, if he is aware of this, which I do not know, did he give it to me? I am not suicidal, dear doctor. I am just feeling very sleepy, very clumsy, I can barely manage to press the right keys in Mutt, my email client of choice since 2000, which I know how to use by heart, my fingers just do their job, but not anymore. But how can I explain that to you?

My friends, again, are here, close to me, keeping an eye on me, calling me on the phone, feeding me, letting me take a nap in their couch.

Dear doctor, you have mentioned the latest groovy drug to replace Prozac with, I am sorry, it is not going to happen. I am going to deal with whatever is wrong with my brain, mind and body in a natural way, with therapy, and healthy living habits. I trust you and respect you, but I do not trust these drug makers, and they are already making enough money. If it is going to be painful, I want to feel it. Please do not numb me and then make feel it all at once like this. Let me deal with it the way I choose to.

I choose the hard way. Can we agree that I am strong enough?

Uphold, maintain, sustain: life in the trenches Now that I have a baseline filter, how do I continue to train it, without putting too much of an effort? There are two separate activities here, firstly selecting the mails to be used in training, and secondly, automating the training and saving to the mail corpus. On going training is essential; Spam mutates, and even ham changes over time, and well trained filters drift. However, if training disrupts normal work-flow, it won't happen; so a minimally intrusive set of tools is critical Selecting mail to train filters There are three broad categories of mails that fit the criteria: 1. Misclassified mail This is where human judgement comes in, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

• misclassified Spam. I do nothing special for this category -- I assume that I would notice these mails, and when I do, I just save them in a junk folder, for latter processing. The volume of such messages has fallen to about one or two a month, and having them slip though is not a major problem in the first place
• misclassified ham is far more critical, and, unfortunately, somewhat harder to get right, since you do want to reject the worst of the Spam at the SMTP level. A mistake here is worse than a false negative: all that happens with a false negative is that you curse, save to the junk folder for later retraining, and mode on. With missed Ham, you never know what you might have missed -- and hope it is nothing important.
  • If one of the two filters did the right thing, then the mlg script can catch it -- more on it below. The only thing to remember to do is to look carefully at the grey.mbox folder that is produced. While this is not good to have misclassified ham, at least this sub-category is easy to detect.
  • If both filters misclassified it, this would then mean a human would have to catch the error. The good news is that I haven't had very many mails fall into this category (the last one I know about was in the late summer of 2005). How can one be sure that there are not ham messages falling through the cracks all the time? The idea is to accept mail with scores one would normally discard, and treat this as a canary in a mine: no ham should ever show up in these realspam messages. My schema for handling Spam is shown in the figure below.
  I try and keep all the mail that I have rejected in quarantine for about a month or so, and so can retrieve a mail if informed about a mistaken rejection. I also do spot checks once in a while, though as time has gone on with no known false positives, the frequency of my checks has dropped.

2. Partially misclassified mail This is mail correctly classified overall, but misclassified by either crm114, or spamassassin, but not both. This is an early warning sign, and is more common than mail that is misclassified, since usually the filter that is wrong is wrong weakly. But this is the point where training should occur, so that the filter does not drift to the point that mails are misclassified. Again, the mlg script catches this. 3. Mail that crm114 is unsure about This is Mail correctly classified, but something that mailreaver is unsure about -- and this category is why mailreaver learns faster than mailtrainer. Spam handling and disposition . At this point I should say something about how I generally handle mails scored as Spam by the filters. As you can see, the mail handling is simple; depending on the combined score given to the mail by the filters. The handling rules are:

• score <= 5.0: Accept unconditionally
• 5.0 < score <= 15: Grey list
• 15 < score: reject

So, any mail with score less than 15 is accepted, potentially after grey-listing. The disposition is done according to the following set of rules:

• score <= 0: Classify into folder based on origin
• 0 < score <= 10: file into Spam (some of this survived grey-listing)
• 10 < score: file into realspam (Must have survived grey-listing)

In the last 18+months, I have not seen a Ham mail in my realspam folder; chances of Ham being rejected are pretty low. My Spam folder gets a ham message every few months, but these are usually spamassassin misclassifying things; and mlg detects those. I have not seen one of these in the last 6 months. So my realspam canary has done wonders for my peace of mind. With ideally trained filters, spam and realspam folders would be empty. mail list grey I have created a script called mlg ("Mail List Grey") that I run periodically over my mail folder, that picks out mails that either (a) are classified differently by spamassassin and crm114, or (b) are marked as unsure by mailreaver. The script takes these mails and saves them into a grey.mbox folder. I tend to run them over Spam and non-Spam folders in different runs, so that the grey.mbox folder can be renamed to either ham or junk, in the vast majority of the cases. Only for misclassified mails do I have to individually pick the misplaced email and classify it separately from the rest of the emails in that batch. At this point, I should have mail mbox folders called ham and/or junk, which are now ready to be used for training either crm114 or spamassassin or both. Processing these folders is the subject of the next article in this series.

I have Dreams I would be embarrassed to admit in public... that suddenly are not so embarrassing anymore!

I dream of winning 1 million Euros in the lottery, starting a Debian Foundation, buying a whole building in the best area of Madrid, making myself a nice home in the attic, with a huge terrace for Vi and Jazz, and having the Debian headquarters there. With that amount of money it would either be the Foundation or the building... So it really is wishful dreaming.

But sometimes I let this dreaming go on further, and I dream of winning more money, buying a whole island, starting a new country there, and calling it Debian Land, getting all DDs a Debian Passport, sponsoring their holidays with their families there, in the Debian Island, with great Internet connection, sun and wonderful beaches, so that they can gather, without waiting for Debconf, or just enjoy a break.

I learnt yesterday that The Micronation of Sealand is for sale and that the people behind The Pirate Bay want to buy it: With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizien.

So I guess I am not the only one who dreams of starting a country where one can be really free. And Sealand is so close to the Debian Developer Centre of Mass... it s so tempting...

They even have a Plan B: If we do not get enough money required to buy The Micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somewhere and claim it as our own country (prices start from USD 50.000). That s exactly what I was dreaming of, and it doesn t sound so stupid anymore.

I just need to be more constant in my lottery playing, and have some faith.

The other week, I ordered a Microsoft Optical Desktop Elite for Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon. It was actually sold by ComputerGeeks.com (I didn't realise until then that Amazon was acting as a front-man for other retailers for some items). I'd been eagerly awaiting its arrival, and thought that the FedEx package that arrived yesterday might have been it, but that turned out to be the iPod I'd ordered. So today I rummaged through my email and found the email that the Geeks.com people had sent me with a username and password for their website, so I could track the order, and lo and behold, according to the link to FedEx, it had been delivered on Wednesday and left on the front porch! I just popped down to the leasing office to check if it hadn't actually ended up there (they have a very nice package receiving service) but it hadn't. I'm totally miffed that they just left it on the front porch, when the tracking information shows they tried to deliver it at 7:58 PM the day before, and determined "customer not available or business closed" (the leasing office closes at 6:00 PM) and so retried the next day and went for leaving it on the front porch at 5:00 PM, when they could have left it at the leasing office. Anger. It sounds like this happens a lot, because Geeks.com's customer service page even has an FAQ item for it. You'd think that if it happens enough to warrant a FAQ item, and it reads like they have a good policy of reshipping items that go AWOL like this, that they'd just save themselves the time and money and use the shipping service that requires a signature. Pity it's a long weekend and Geeks.com don't operate (their call centre) on the weekends. Patience is a virtue.

Partly in preparation for an upcoming baby, and partly by watching mid, I started thinking about cameras. I’ve decided that my little old Canon PowerShot S230 is getting a little worn out (its second battery can’t hold a charge that lasts longer than a few dozen photos). So, after a lot of advice from mid, I decided to get a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (also known as the EOS 400D). Also, partly on his advice and partly on the advice of a few Amazon reviews, I decided not to get the kit lens (EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6; not the one with the USM), and instead got another lens that sometimes is sold along with the XTi body (EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM). I also got a 2GB compact flash card. As someone who’s always had point-and-shoot cameras, this is a really awesome camera. Part of it is that all of my cameras up until now have been 3.2MP or less and this one is 10.1MP. But a lot of it is that I get to control things like shutter time, and that the lens has image stabilization (IS), so I don’t get nearly as many blurry pictures. But I’ve had the most fun playing with the aperture, which creates some really neat effects that just weren’t possible with my point-and-shoot. Pixel, however, was unimpressed: Anyway, I can see now why people spend so much money on cameras, and especially on lenses. And I can tell already that I’m going to want a tripod. Also, I understand now why mid has a 4GB CF. My 2GB CF holds about 200 RAW images, which would be plenty with a point-and-shoot. But with this camera, it goes quickly, since it’s so easy to take multiple pictures in quick succession. Thus far, I haven’t really run into any problems with the camera itself, other than feeling like I need or want more accessories.