General: May 2006 Archives

I am still recovering from bronchitis, which has been dogging me since the end of last week. The antibiotic seemed to keep me tossing and turning. (I'm sure reading the side effects didn't help -- "tendon rupture"?) I was back at work today, but I'm still behind on responsibilities at home and at work.

In the meantime, check out the latest entries to the linkblog (top of the page). Or read the latest headlines from other Tulsa bloggers.

Bobby has audio of last Friday's meeting of the Citizens' Commission on City Government, including my presentation, a presentation by TU Law Professor Gary Allison, and remarks by Chris Medlock. Was the Tulsa Whirled there to get the story? No, but Tulsa Topics was there.

(Urban Tulsa Weekly was there, too. You can read my take on the meeting in the issue that hits the streets in the morning.)

Bobby also keeps a linkblog, and one of his recent finds is this piece in the Muncie, Indiana, Star-Press, an interview with Brookside neighborhood leader Herb Beattie about how to deal with AEP's tree-trimming program.

Chris Medlock has a new entry about Vision 2025 eminent domain in Sand Springs, and some salient facts that the Tulsa Whirled omits.

From the blogroll:

Julie R. Neidlinger has a hilarious Mother's Day video and links to more work by Barats and Bereta. Julie also has some music recommendations: Philip Glass and Samuel Barber.

Marsupial Mom breaks her self-described "blog-slump" with a tale of her most embarassing moment ever.

Wanna buy some movie theatres in western Oklahoma? One is a twin drive-in, another has three screens and a luxury apartment. Okiedoke found the listings on eBay.

I've got a lot in my backblog, but I also have a cold, so I won't be writing any more tonight. Here's what I hope to get to in days to come:

• A tribute to songwriter Cindy Walker, who died in late March;
• A tribute to urban critic Jane Jacobs, who died a week or so ago;
• A personal response to a recent flurry of articles about Christianity and contraception, including one about a Protestant couple (Sam and Bethany Torode) who rejected contraception, wrote a book about it (Open Embrace), but now have become Orthodox and have rethought their earlier rethinking of the issue;
• Recent changes to the Tulsa Whirled's web policy;
• Sen. Tom Coburn's brave and relentless battle against pork-barrel spending;
• Family news, including my daughter's wonderful school program last Friday and a cousin's wedding at Woolaroc;

and much, much more, particularly on the national and international scene, which I've neglected of late.

Freshly relocated to the new hosting provider, my domain didn't have Spam Assassin turned on at first, and the spammers didn't seem to have any problem tracking my domain to its new home. I activated Spam Assassin around noon Saturday. In the ensuing 12 hours, I received over 1350 spam e-mails. Spam Assassin caught over 1250, with no false positives; the remaining messages fell below the threshold.

What the spammers are doing now borders on a distributed denial-of-service attack. Since people are being more careful about putting full e-mail addresses where the spambots can harvest them, spammers are now taking known domain names and matching them with a long list of possible usernames, hoping to hit a working mailbox. While it's good to see Spam Assassin's accuracy and effectiveness, it's disturbing to think how often the SMTP server is getting hit and to think how that may be interfering with the delivery of legitimate mail and the overall performance of the server. However good my spam filters are, the mail server has to handle every single message just to find out i it's legitimate.

For the first two years or so of batesline.com's life, I took advantage of the "catchall" e-mail account. If I had to give an e-mail address to register for a website, I'd make up a username, but wouldn't create a POP3 account for it, knowing that any e-mail -- mainly periodic ads -- to that address would wind up in the catchall mailbox. Now these legitimate e-mails are swallowed up and almost unnoticeable in the volume of spam I receive. The "catchall" account is almost useless, and I've had to create a forwarder to redirect e-mail to each of those registration addresses to a mailbox.

If I had been keeping up with the latest news at the Spam Huntress' blog, I would have known that it was time to give up on catchall e-mail. I see intriguing mentions of a way to reject spam before it even reaches the mail server....

...you're seeing BatesLine on its new server.

It may take a while for mail servers to catch up with the move, so don't be surprised if any e-mail sent to me today goes missing.

I'm switching over to a new hosting provider later tonight, so you may experience some outages and weirdness as it takes DNS some time to catch up with the new location.