I stayed up late the last two nights reading Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity (which has recently been turned into a movie). Before switching to this book, I had been reading Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule, and was beginning to suspect that having four kids had eroded my attention span to the point where I couldn’t concentrate long enough to read thick novels. Fortunately, it turned out that the Goodkind book was just a stinker; I devoured The Bourne Identity quickly and in long stretches.

The plot centers around an amnesiac who who wakes without any idea of his own identity. As he recovers from the wounds that caused the memory loss, he starts to get clues to his past from his subconscious — unexplained phrases, impressions, and abilities that hint at his life before. The gradual unfurling of his history creates a nice overall story arc, with enough unexpected twists and well-written action to keep one flipping pages well into the night. Well worth a read.

I’ve reached a breaking point with Spam. I signed up with SpamCop, but reporting spams doesn’t seem to be as effective as it used to be. (Or maybe more spammers have my address now.) I’ve been looking at various options for spam management, and have come up with two general classes of deterrent:

1. Client-side tools: these work by scanning your email account and removing spam, and then allowing your mail program to retrieve the remaining mail. The advantage to these is that they’re easy to use. The disadvantage is that they work best with a single email account. Among the most regarded of these for Mac OS X is SpamFire, which I’m currently evaluating.
2. Server-side tools: these run right on the mail server, and filter mail as it arrives. They tend to be harder to configure and use, and you have to administer your own mail server to be able to make use of them. The best tools appear to be UNIX-only, due to the fact that it has a very flexible infrastructure for handling mail. On the upside, they’re more efficient and can handle spam filtering for all the accounts on the server.

Though I really like the ease of use of the client-side solutions, I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that I may be best off setting up a mail server at the house and pointing my domains there. So, technical questions for those of you who are good at this sort of thing:

I assume a Pentium 133 running Linux would be capable of handling mail server duties. How difficult is it to set up a POP3/IMAP server on a Linux box? To get mail delivered to it, would I need to do anything other than altering the MX records for the affected domains to point to the appropriate machine? Can I use DynDNS to resolve that machine’s actual IP address, or is something trickier required? Anything else I should know?

My neighbor Grant Mazak has a band named, oddly enough, The Grant Mazak Band. I’ve sat in with them while rehearsing a time or two before, but it looks like I’ll be starting to play with them regularly. My first performance with the band will be Sunday at 4:00pm at the Cheatham Street Warehouse, a cool little venue in town that has helped to launch the likes of George Strait and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

As you might have guessed, Grant’s band does mostly country, with a bit of Americana and other stuff blended in for variety. I haven’t spent much time with the genre before, so it’ll be interesting to learn a new branch of music. Additionally, Grant & Co. are all excellent musicians, so I stand to learn a fair bit from my time with them. Should be great fun. Y’all come!

Our friends Steve & Rene Johnson have decided that they’ll be taking a job with the Salvation Army up in Kansas. We’re awfully sorry to see them go, but it looks like an excellent opportunity for them. They’ll have a place to live provided, a decent salary, and will have the opportunity to work with the poor and homeless, who have always been close to their hearts. They’ll be moving at the end of the month. Best of luck, Johnsons!

We’ve had a tremendous amount of rain here, due to some very odd storm patterns coming up from the gulf of Mexico. San Marcos has been under a flash flood watch or flash flood warning since Saturday, and the rains were still coming this morning. San Antonio has been hardest hit, with lots of roads shut down, water feet-deep in places, and chaos generally reigning. Fortunately, most of my relatives are on high ground. Stay safe, you guys!