Among the things I’m going to miss about Garner is the cheap gas! South Saunders Street south of the Beltline has the cheapest gas in town. At the Racetrac gas station about a mile south of 440, unleaded is selling for $1.84 per gallon. In other areas of Raleigh, it’s averaging about $1.97. Ouch!

The phone hasn’t exactly been ringing off the hook at MT.Net headquarters, at least for job offers. I was thinking the holiday weekend was gumming up the works, but no nibbles came in for my resume yesterday.

I’ve got a few small consulting jobs on the way, though, which could help tide things over. Maybe I should just jump back into consulting with both feet and make something of it? I prefer that course rather than depending on someone else to make a move for me.

My personality is such that I prefer to take control of my destiny. Striking out on my own beats striking out with someone else.

I’ve been noticing a lot of the spam that makes it by my ASSP Bayesian filter-based anti-spam application has been using text from sites selling school essays. The spams will quote a large swath of text from these essays to fool the spamfilters into thinking its legitimate text.

Now all I need to do is to figure out how to use that text to detect spam. Putting it into the spam-text database probably won’t work because the text is too generic. It’s easy for a human to find the source of the text (hint: Google), but how would I create an app to automatically identify the swiped text as essay text?

Ahmad Chalabi, until recently Our Man In Iraq, reportedly told Iranian officials that the U.S. was reading its mail. The dude has been buddy-buddy with Iran for far too long, and he’s strung the U.S. along the whole time.

Iran has been responsible for a large number of terrorist events in the Middle East. Thanks to Chalabi, we may see many, many more.

I thought this was funny. The Pros and Cons of John Kerry’s Vice President Choices. A little light political humor.

We had an important milestone on the way to welcoming our second child in November: picture day! I was convinced it was a girl, though this morning I when I said “she” this morning in conversation it seemed a little forced. I pointed this out to Kelly, who also claimed it was a boy.
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Anyone know of a good place to get moving boxes?

Eric Idle, the nicest member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, has written a “little number while out duck hunting with a judge.” It’s called the FCC Song, and don’t expect to hear it on the air since doing so would cost about $250,000 in FCC fines.

Warning: Contains strong language of which the FCC wouldn’t approve. Not Safe For Work.

I found an interesting job on IBM‘s site today. The official title is Product Information Technical Specialist. I take that as IBM-speak for sales engineer. The cool thing is that I’d be doing demos like I’ve been doing, only I’d be doing them remotely. No commute, no being tied down to a location. Pretty cool.

The other cool thing, of course, is that IBM won’t close its doors anytime soon. Gotta love that.

Now, if I only knew anyone who telecommutes for IBM . . .
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