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!

The SF Gate has a great little article on a growing community of people who are leaving books they’ve enjoyed in public places and using a website to track who ends up with their book, and if it gets passed on further from there — shades of a literary Wild Kingdom. Interesting idea, leading no doubt to interesting reading!

We had our company picnic today at West Lake Beach. Maggie won the prize for most garish outfit — a $40 gift certificate for Barnes & Noble, which I’ll happily help her spend, since she’s still preliterate. Emily got second prize in the limbo contest, earning a gift certificate to Amy’s Ice Cream, which she likes, but which I think tastes like licking sugared butter. Kathy got out on the jet ski for a while, and I enjoyed seeing work friends with their families away from the pallid fluorescent lights of the office.

A bit over 2 1/2 weeks into my diet/fitness regimen, and I’ve officially dropped 10 pounds. Things seem to be going better than I’d hoped, especially since I’ve not stuck to either the diet or the workouts absolutely rigidly. Plus, I find lifting weights to be a bit more enjoyable than slogging away on the treadmill was, in spite of the fact that I can’t read while I do it. I do miss nachos, though.

Halcyon Days was published about five years ago, and while it caught my eye at the time, I never did actually get around to reading it. It’s a collection of interviews with the programmers of many of the early computer games, back when they were still somewhat of a niche market and often programmed by a single person, rather than the multimillion dollar projects they tend to be currently (Chris Sawyer’s wonderful stuff to the contrary).

If you’re interested in the subject matter, Halcyon Days is now available in its entirety online.

Warning: this message is pretty geeky.

Neverwinter Nights shipped this week, and my copy just arrived at home. (Unfortunately, I’m at work, so won’t get to mess with it for a while.) Part of the reason I’m excited about NWN is that it’s the most complete computer-based implementation of Dungeons & Dragons ever created. It combines a strong single and multi-player game with some very nice design tools that allow you to create you own adventures for you or your friends to play through.

Though my dad and I had our share (perhaps more) of friction while I was growing up, D&D was something we could do together and quite enjoy one another’s company. Dad encouraged my creativity when I was designing my teen-aged adventures, and the game has fond associations for me as a result. I’m looking forward to having a chance to dig back into that rich gaming system, seeing what can be wrought with the tools Bioware has provided, and maybe even talking Dad into a game somewhere along the way.

It was our friends the Johnsons who first broached the idea of moving to San Marcos to us. It was Steve with whom I went to play a concert at a church in Iowa. Rene has been a great friend to Kathy, and our kids have all enjoyed playing and growing up together for the last several years.

And now, regrettably, they’re moving. Steve has long been frustrated by how difficult it has been to keep their heads above water financially when doing full-time church work, and has decided to find work that will allow him to support his family in the way he’d like. He’s looking at four different opportunities currently, none of which are local, and the closest of which is in Houston, three hours from here. It’s sad to see them getting ready to go, but I certainly understand the decision, and wish them the best. Pax vobiscum, friends.