Weekend at Mahoney

About a year ago, I made reservations for a cabin at the park for Mother’s Day and surprised Gina when I told her about it last month. On Friday night, we packed up our stuff

Eugene Mahoney State Park, which considered by many to be the crown jewel of Nebraska State Parks. In fact, it’s more resort than campground, which isn’t a bad thing — especially if you have a cabin! The cabin was for sure large enough for us and clean and well-maintained. Our cabin faced the river, though you couldn’t see the river. But we did see about five mule deer walking behind our cabin on Saturday evening. We tried not to scare them, and a couple of them hung around for twenty minutes, calming eating.

Leah loved the indoor play area and took a close look at the horses. Gina and I had the relaxing weekend that we needed. But one bad thing about Mahoney State Park — no geocaches anywhere in the park. Oh well — there is more to life than geocaching.

The Four-Day Week Challenge

My employeer wouldn’t necessarily like me to do a four-day work week, but this entry is worth reading — lots of good ideas.

And why work less? This quote explains it better than I could:

Here’s the problem though: When I’m old, I won’t wish that I spent more time building web apps or organizing events. Spending time with people I loved or helping people is what will really have mattered to me. Working less gives you the time to do it and also rejuvenates the brain cells so that you can come back to your work with a fresh outlook. Variety is key.

A List Apart: Articles: The Four-Day Week Challenge

Wise Words of Don Miller

I liked the post Don Miller had yesterday about George Bush. Here’s a more permanant link.

Bush is not a bad man misleading and manipulating the church in America for a vote. He is actually, in part, a product of the church.

The rest of the world can’t figure out why we re-elected Bush for a second term. In fact, I remind myself that he was a better choice than the other guy. And I still believe it, though I shake my head in shame on what is happening in our country.

Printing from Mac OS X to Linux

I still have my Ubuntu Linux machine with a printer hooked up and I thought that it would be a good idea to setup the new MacBook Pro to print on that printer via Cups and that, in theory, it should be possible. In fact, that’s really what Cups is for! However, I have little luck with printers so I didn’t get my hopes up. And, naturally, it was harder than it should have been.

First you have to set permissions on the Linux machine so other machines. That was easy — I just added Allow from 192.168.1.* to my /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

The next part wasn’t so easy. This page was a major help, and I ended up doing both things. However, that page describes what you need to do, not why you need to do it. What happens is that the DeviceURI that Cups on OSX refers to is ipp://machineIP/ipp/queue name while my Ubuntu machine refers to it’s print queues as ipp://machineIP/printers/queuename. There isn’t a way to do this in OSX besides editing the /etc/cups/printers.conf directly. Once you make both the Cups on OSX point to the device on the Linux side, things start working.

It took me a week to figure this out! I hate printers — have I said that before?

Sending for-sure spam to /dev/null

I use SpamAssassin to find incoming spam on my oldest email address, and then use procmail to send it to the proper place. I seem to be getting more and more spam lately, and if I don’t clean out my spam box, the file gets too big and procmail can’t write it it anymore. So then I get all that spam in my inbox — not a pretty picture.

I looked through my spam today (101 messages — about 24 hours worth) and I saw that a lot of the messages have a score of 10 or over. These are messages that I will never look at, ever. So I decided to throw them in the bit-bucket!

Here is the procmail recipe I came up with, with lots of help from this page:

:0
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
* ^X-Spam-Status:.*score=\/[0-9\.]+
{
     :0:
     * $ -${MAXSPAM}^0
     * $ ${MATCH}^0
     /dev/null
}

MAXSPAM is defined earlier in the file — I have it set to 10, and will adjust it accordingly.