A catch-all, catch-up post
There are 1,132 posts filed in Checking In (this is page 51 of 114).
Tuesday is Election Day, where Raleigh will be voting for candidates for mayor and city council. I’m taking the day off to work the polls for Rodger Koopman and Russ Stephenson. Then afterward I hope to celebrate some victories at some downtown establishments.
You won’t get much blogging from me for the next 24 hours. Hopefully the next post will be a positive one!
You know the scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life where Mr. Creosote bursts at the seams when offered a “wafer-thin mint?” That’s kind of what it’s like to serve as a baking contest judge: after a while you think the next “wafer-thin mint” might be the one that does you in!
I wasn’t sure what I was getting into when I volunteered to act as a judge for the first-annual Mordecai Historic Park baking contest. I was told there would be forty cakes and cookies to judge. I figured that wouldn’t be too bad – until the day arrived and the number of entries had jumped to 62!
Continue reading
About four o’clock yesterday I’m staring at my computer screen, helping a coworker with a server issue. Suddenly I’m feeling nauseous and thinking it wise to head home. I felt strange when I stopped by the pharmacy on the way home, wondering if anyone noticed I was starting to feel sick.
At home I had a little while to eat dinner before heading out to the East CAC meeting. I skipped all handshaking and sipped water the entire meeting, walking out at one point to (attempt to) empty my stomach.
Then in a freak accident on the way out of the meeting, the city representative who helps me with the CAC slipped in the dark parking lot, broke her leg, and fractured her ankle! Though I was woozy myself, I stayed with her until the paramedics arrived to take her to the hospital. Then I drove her car back to our house, fetched Rocket, and he and I walked back to the park to drive my car home.
Continue reading
I’m done with judging the baking contest and lived to tell about it. Lots to blog about but we’re stepping out for the They Might Be Giants show at the art museum.
More blogging tonight.
I was late for work this morning but I still had to spend a minute or two juggling. Am I obsessed or what?
Also, is it too early to consider getting a unicycle?
Like a lot of American Express customers, Kelly and I receive email notifications from the company. Most of the time, these emails arrive with no trouble. Occasionally, though, they mysteriously fail.
We run our own mailserver, so I checked the log files to find out what might be happening. I found Postfix logging this message (and highlighted the important part):
Aug 17 01:23:45 maestro postfix/smtpd[22090]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from localhost[127.0.0.1]: 450 4.7.1 sppim501.ipc.us.aexp.com: Helo command rejected: Host not found; from=sppim504@welcome.aexp.com to=blahblah@blah.edu proto=ESMTP helo=sppim501.ipc.us.aexp.com
You see, I’ve configured Postfix to reject incoming email from servers that do not properly identify themselves. It’s been my experience that 99.9% of the time an email arrives from a server that doesn’t identify itself, the email is spam. American Express’s servers are part of the few legitimate servers which do not properly identify themselves as required by the email RFC. The host sppim501.ipc.us.aexp.com does not exist in DNS and therefore email from this server gets flagged as suspicious.
I’m hoping American Express gets its servers fixed but in the meantime I’ll have to create my own hostnames to keep their emails from bouncing.
I’d been holding off on doing much with our yard as I was thinking we’d be getting zoysia grass put in this week. When the landscaper I’d been talking to about zoysia suddenly pulled out of the project, I decided to take advantage of today’s gorgeous weather to make the weedy mess that is our yard look like something special.
After mowing the lawn, I edged it and blew the clippings off the sidewalk and driveway. Then I got out the hedge clippers and trimmed the woodsy cut-through between neighborhoods next to our house, which was something I’d been meaning to do for weeks. Once the clippers were in my hands, it made sense to turn them on the overgrown vine quickly enveloping our front porch. Now the yard and the porch both look awesome!
And in the middle of all that, I still found time draw with the sidewalk chalk with the kids, Rollerblade (and bike) around the neighborhood, shoot a few baskets, practice juggling, help a neighbor move furniture, take home a free bed, and visit with the neighbors.
It was a very full and productive day and I made the most of it!
Where to begin? Friday night we saw MikeMickXer play at Seaboard Music, keeping the kids up way too late. Saturday we paid the price with two grumpy, squabbling kids. I got some time with Hallie downtown at the Raleigh Times coffee shop but Hallie got bored when I ran into a friend.
Sunday we split up and I took Travis to New Hope Valley while Kelly and Hallie had some time together. T and I didn’t get to ride the train but we did have fun looking around at stuff. Later, I got some things done around the house, finally hanging things on walls in every bedroom. Travis and I also fixed the screen in our screen door and put a wire cable on it to keep it from sagging. In between we spent a little time playing on the driveway and visiting with our neighbors. I spent time shooting baskets during the talking, and especially enjoyed handing the basketball to our two-year-old neighbor, Noah, who seems obsessed with it.
Continue reading
I’ve been tinkering with Event Calendar 3, a great WordPress iCalendar server plugin so I can easily serve up important community events to my neighbors. Part of this is testing it with various calendar clients like Exchange. Since I don’t have Windows running anywhere in the house, I thought I’d try the next best thing: Kelly’s Mac with Microsoft Entourage 2004 installed.
Entourage suffers from Microsoft’s peculiar habit of putting all its eggs in one basket. All Kelly’s email, events, tasks, and contacts live in one big file called (wait for it!) “Database.” If anything happens to that one file, you’re screwed. Back to that in a moment.
Continue reading
You know it’s a good weekend when two days seem like five. We got in a movie, some swimming, game time, a bike ride, a bluegrass concert, and juggling class. That’s a pretty full weekend!
