The weather has again been variable, sunny in the early part of the week followed by rain on Friday and the weekend.
Rich was out of town for most of this week, getting home Saturday night. He attended the o'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in San Diego. I've been to that one when it was held in San Jose. Had it not been so far away, I would have loved to have gone this time! This is a fantastic conference with many wonderful talks.
Rich had his PowerBook with him and this is a very connected conference. It was fun to communicate over iChat during the week as he kept me up to date on things he was learning about!
In the meantime, the cats and I had a good week. I did a lot of reading in bed before dropping off to sleep, surrounding by mounds of softly snoozing fur.
This week, when I wasn't Working for Pay, I was struggling with SpamAssassin ;-( SA is an excellent program but it has a few… unfortunate little glitches. It's test for "Mail has come through ALL_TRUSTED hosts" test leaves a lot to be desired (i.e. it can't be "trusted" of the time). The spamd daemon doesn't recognize changes to the global configfile (you have to restart the daemon). I was having several problems that didn't clear up until, in annoyance, I deleted the installed files, rebuilt the program, reinstalled, and rebooted. All in all a very frustrating time was had by me. I think we're doing better now and (after a temporary upward swing) our spam load is greatly reduced.
I have discovered the source of the marvelous delicious perfume we get at night at this time of year. We've always thought it was the camellias next door but it's not. It's the plain old ordinary looking tree next to the camellias – which at night has tiny dark reddish purple flowers all over it!
My iPod froze up on Friday, something it's never done before! I was quite concerned. Some googling took me to a weblog entry posted by another iPod user and from there to the Apple page with techniques for rebooting the iPod. As the original blogger wrote, "Once rebooted, everything worked fine again." (Deep sigh of relief!)
My mother sent me a present, a really cute t-shirt. It's dark red with three yellow bees (two medium, one large) with white wings and the wings are done in shiny paint.
The Chronicle's TwoCents program finally sent a question worth answering:
"What's the coolest thing within a mile of your house (not counting your house)?
I sent in this answer:
The coolest things within a mile of our house are two great trails and the wilderness land between them. The trail head for the Crystal Springs trail is about a mile away in one direction and the San Bruno start of the Sweeney Ridge trail, is in the other direction. Even when we're not walking, driving past the former often shows us deer; Sweeney Ridge has rabbits, sweeping vistas, and coyotes that we occasionally hear at night.
One last most important event for this week. Sunday (today) is the day of the Vernal Equinox.
This week I read Decorated to Death the third Simon Kirby-Jones cozy.
In between and around the rest, I've had almost enough naps and plenty of snuggles with the cats. There have been good meals and interesting conversations with Spouse and friends (the former largely over iChat and telephone). I've had a few chats with my Dad as well and exchanged email with my mom.
Onward and Upward.
Slightly Off KIlter 