Category: Rant

You got on, you can damn well get off

If there’s one thing I hate about the first of the month, it’s the flood of people on my mailing lists who get their monthly mailing list reminder, and rather than reading the damn thing and following the directions, send me email saying “please change my email address” or “please unsubscribe me”. 99% of the time, they don’t even tell me which mailing list, not that I care because I’m not going to do it manually. Today is running true to form – I’ve got 3 of these so far, and will probably get another 5 or so before the day is out, and a bunch more trickling in through the week.

Is it so god-damned hard to read and understand a few simple directions?

And of course, let’s never forget the people with those idiotic vacation messages. You know, back in 1987 I used “vacation” that came with BSD Unix, and *it* knew enough not to send vacation replies back to mailing lists. So why don’t the current crop of GUI-ridden crapware mail programs understand that simple concept?

Man I hate this

Every winter, it seems, I get this cold that never goes away. This one is mostly low level sniffles and a bit of a cough. I can control it mostly with cold medicine and cough syrup now, but so far it’s mostly ruined the last three weekends, and it’s looking like it’s going to ruin this one.

The worst thing is that I really want to finish my checkout in the club Lance. I don’t want to be in a plane if I’m stuffed up – the pressure changes can cause extreme sinus pain if the congestion prevents the pressure from equalizing. And even if I don’t have sinus blockage, I’ve found that flying with a cold can leave me “thinking behind the plane” – not anticipating what needs to happen next, not being ready when something unexpected happens.

As part (or maybe all) of my checkout, I need 6 approaches and holding in order to regain my instrument proficiency. Oh, and my club checkout is due in a few weeks, so maybe I can combine it all into one big thing. I hope I can do it this weekend.

Take that you bastards!

The comment spammers have been having a field day with Maddy’s blog and her memorial. Dammit, I know spammers are the lowest form of life, but spamming the dead is beyond the pale.

Anyway, I just finished installing MT-Blacklist, a plugin that should stop a lot of the more egregious comment spam. I installed it and ran the “scan the list 25 comments” mode, and it found two comment spams. Then I tried posting a spam with a url containing a couple of spammish words in it, and it refused to allow it. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Returned Mail

I just had a check returned as “undeliverable”. It was addressed to the EAA (Experiment Aircraft Association) at a post office box in Oshkosh Wisconson. You’d think that in a town with a population of 62,916 (I looked it up), SOMEBODY in the post office would have heard of the organization that operates the fly-in that attacts 700,000 visitors to the city every year and know how to get mail to them. Sheesh.