Webmail, timely defenses, dishonorable sellers
News, Technical, Political, Work, Guns, School ·Wednesday September 9, 2009 @ 19:19 EDT (link)
Great (libertarian) article about homeschooling, emphasizing how well homeschooled children do, and how the state hates letting them out of their indoctrinating clutches.
Someone finally came to pick up the side tables/cabinets (from our old bed) that we were giving away via Craigslist (and the MS Free Stuff list); after several people missed appointments to pick them up, a guy named Don that was moving from Boise, ID came to get them in his truck on Monday.
I've installed Horde and its web mail client, IMP, an IMAP client. Wasn't too difficult; I used the Gentoo packages (I hope version 5 stabilizes soon and is available since the UI looks much improved). I use IMAP for authentication, and PostgreSQL as the database for preferences. This will allow me to decommission my oldest machine, running Gentoo and KDE, which Honey used for mail (kmail) and wasn't being used for much else (I've used mutt for a while). I looked at the various web mail systems and found that most of the good ones unfortunately run on PHP. So I had to reinstall PHP, which is sad but perhaps they've worked out most of the security issues by now. Many other clients either don't support IMAP, or are insufferably ugly, or unmaintained. Horde is setup only for SSL (https).
As a University of Washington graduate student I get a lot of emails with the subject "[UW Safety] Timely Warning Notification of Criminal Incident - Seattle Campus":
Timely Warning Notification of a Criminal Incident
09/02/09
Attempted Robbery - Seattle Campus
…
Prevention tips for incidents such as this:
- Be aware of your environment and alert for possible danger.
- Remove yourself from potentially dangerous situations as soon as possible.
- Call 911 to report suspicious activity or persons to the police.
One thing they should add to the list as a last but important resort: arm yourself. Criminals don't like it when their victims can shoot back.
I will not be going to the company meeting tomorrow; I was too disappointed by the last ones (long, boring, and cold up in the nosebleed seats, although apparently we had better seats this time).
Finally, two thumbs down for Mario Kosmiskas of Bellevue, who sold me a Wii Guitar Hero package (drums, guitar, two games) (via Microsoft's Sell/Buy alerts list) with a broken guitar: the strum bar sticks. He refused to do anything about it; I'd've been fine if he'd just taken the guitar back and refunded me the money. It doesn't seem advisable to buy from him.
DVDs finished: Broken Arrow.
