I was reading this touching account of the recent memorial to television’s Fred “Mr.” Rogers. It sounded like it was a fitting tribute to a man who helped make this crazy world easier for children to understand.

I was getting into the article until I read about an anti-gay group protesting outside. Protesting Mr. Rogers? Excuse me? Who the hell would dare protest Mr. Rogers?

Turns out its the Kansas hate group known as Westboro Baptist Church. Morons like these really give Christianity a bad name. They should be ashamed of themselves.

I have had lots happening on the job front. Last Thursday I stopped by the offices of Etix.com and handed them my resume, out of the blue. The week before I had gone to the Camper Van Beethoven show at the Brewery. The show sold tickets with Etix.com and I was impressed with their product, even though the Brewery didn’t scan the tickets – they just crumpled them up and threw them away.

I walked into their offices in a decrepit office building on Glenwood Avenue. One side of the room had cubicles and the other was empty except for walls lined with computer parts – a makeshift lab. A man strolled up to me from a corner and introduced himself as Josh. I chatted with him momentarily before leaving. He said he’d pass it on.

I found an interesting job at a place I used to contract, GSK. They’re looking for UNIX heads. Hopefully I can get an interview. And I’m talking today with the folks at Oculan about a position there.

I’m still waiting to hear back from Blue Cross-Blue Shield about a cool position I found last month. It would be a very fulfilling job. LDAP and security. Yummy.

As I was filling out my Employment Security Commission forms for work contacts today, I see that out of nine jobs I’ve applied to so far, I’ve gotten five interviews! That’s an incredible rate of return, certainly exceeding my expectations. I think it boils down to my being selective towards which I appllied for. So far I’ve been able to find things that fit my experience (and interests), so I suppose it makes sense that I’d hear back from them.

I’m having lunch with the guys at Celito, a local DSL ISP. It could lead to a job, too. We’ll see.

Anyhow, it looks to be an exciting week. Who knows? I could land a job by Friday. Woohoo!

Last weekend I took some time off from feeling low for a chance to feel high. My pilot friend Googled his way to my webpage while he was looking for info on the old Raleigh Municipal Airport. Anyhow, he invited me up for a flight and who am I to refuse?

We left from Southern Jet at 9 AM last Sunday. The RDU airport, normally a bustling hive of aircraft activity, was still sleeping. Sunday mornings are quiet at most any airport. The sun was blazing and the sky was dotted with puffy clouds as Justin went through his pre-flight checklist.

Justin is fortunate to own his own plane, a 1963 Piper Cherokee. He’s crammed it with the latest IFR equipment and crammed his brain with the skills to use it. Typical for any subject Justin studies, he’s done in two years what some people take decades to do.

Anyhow, we left the ground and decided that our first stop should be for gas. Justin plugged in coordinates for the Siler City airport and off we went. Once out of ATC airspace Justin turned the controls over to me. Though we were skimming over the clouds at 4000 feet, the air was silky smooth. It made me look like a good pilot or something.

As we approached Siler City the cloudcover got a bit more dense. Justin found a clearing and we touched down at Siler City, a sleepy airport with little in the way of attractions other than cheap AV gas. Justin popped his card into the pay-at-pump gas pump and told me how once he was landing there and nearly smacked into a farmer driving his tractor across the runway. Apparently the airport is so quiet, even the locals don’t know its there.

From there it was off to Sanford, the home of the Wings of Carolina Flying Club and where Justin got his training. At the plane’s 120+ MPH ground speed it didn’t take us long to touch down. Justin ran into one of the club’s flight instructors and traded stories with him for a short time. Like fishermen with their fish stories, every pilot has a tale to tell. I’ve never met a pilot who didn’t love to talk about flying.

After Sanford we made a beeline to do a quick flyover of my home in Garner. Well, it would’ve been a beeline if the Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant wasn’t in the way. We passed it in a nice wide arc to keep from getting a not-so-friendly military escort. My GPS led Justin right to my neighborhood and we did a few lazy loops over it while I got some video. Then it was back to RDU for landing.

Justin put the plane gently on the ground again and taxied us back to Southern Jet. When the prop was still again he remarked that he couldn’t remember moving his plane through RDU any quicker than he did that day. It was like we were the only plane around, which helps maximize our flight time.

After a great time flying, I thanked Justin and headed for home. On the highway, I realized that I wasn’t in the euphoric mood I’d been other times I’d been flying. This time around, it almost seemed routine. Maybe this attitude was a signal that I’m really ready to take the plunge and become a pilot myself.

Flying is fun and likely always will be. I just feel now like I belong in the cockpit. And that’s pretty cool.

I read that GM has decided the minivan has an image problem. Twenty years of hauling kids to soccer practice, packing in groceries, and being the ultimate tailgating vehicle have left the impression on some folks that it just isn’t cool to drive minivans.

I suppose after twenty years a makeover may indeed be in order. Minivans have obviously found a niche in society – they’re so darn versatile. And nearly every car maker has their own spin on the concept.

So I found news that GM is renaming their minivan the “crossover sport van” a bit amusing. After all, it’s still a dadgum minivan, and all your friends will still call it a minivan. Heaven help you if you dare try to convince them it’s a crossover sport van. The jokes will never stop.

On the other hand, if a name change is all it takes for people to choose a minivan over a gas-guzzling Chevy Tahoe, then I guess its worth it.

I won’t buy a minivan … but I hear those new “crossover sport vans” are pretty fly, yo.

There have been efforts by legislators to ban spam. These efforts are completely misguided since (for some reason) few lawmakers understand that the internet doesn’t stop at the American border! As a libertarian-minded dude, I also have a problem with banning any speech, even if it is considered spam.

For this reason, I’ve always preferred a technical solution to the problem of spam. After all, geeks invented email. We should be able to clean it up, right?

For a while now I’ve been looking for a good spam filter. Siteseers runs its own mailserver, of course. With that freedom comes the potential for abuse (or another way to look at it is that I own my domain, so I’ve kept the same email address for years). Thus, I’ve been getting enormous amounts of spam.

There are plenty of anti-spam approaches and packages out there. When I ran Qmail, I killed 50% of spam by simply blocking mail connections from Asia. However, I moved to Postfix a week ago, and never got around to figuring out how to use tcpwrappers with it.

That one week of not blocking Asian-originating spam was eye-opening. Fifty to eighty percent of my email has been spam. Since I was considering new ways of battling it, I looked into using Bayesian filtering to filter it for me.

The first Bayesian package I tried was from the open-source luminary Eric Raymond called Bogofilter. After finally putting the parts together to compile it, I fired it up on my mailserver, Maestro.

Boom! It segfaulted. Hey Eric, spend a little less time playing “rock star” and a little more time coding, ‘k?

I looked into other packages, like BMF, but none really did what I wanted. Until I found ASSP.

ASSP is short for Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy. It deals with spam in a unique way – stopping it from ever entering my mailbox. It does this by acting as an SMTP proxy between my mailserver and the outside world. When enough of the message has crossed my firewall to make a judgement on being spam or not, ASSP checks it against its Bayesian filters and scores it. If its determined to be spam, ASSP clips the SMTP session right there. The message never gets delivered. Life is good.

If ASSP really can’t tell (and it’s very good. Bayesian filtering is amazingly accurate), it will score it and send it on, letting me decide. I had two spams in my email box this morning rather than two dozen. And I can easily write a rule to check the spam score and deal with the spam accordingly.

ASSP was designed to simply work. Sure, it takes a little prep time to get it going, namely you have to feed it sample emails. Luckily, I’ve been saving my spams since December so I had lots to provide it. Once ASSP learns spam from nonspam, it becomes smart about new messages. The author claims that ASSP could filter spam for a year without updating. Niiiiiice.

All these features, and it also runs under Windows. That’s because it’s written in the ubiquitous perl. So Windows users can get relief, too.

In short, after only twelve hours of running ASSP, I’m in love. I may just keep an eye on its logfile during the day and chuckle at the hapless spammers being stopped in their tracks.