Tense moments on a public bus

As I write this, there is a young man sitting next to me, separated only by the thinnest of cultural privacy taboos (and the fact that I can type with the monitor off) who is ranting and raving about how "all the black women ought to move into the social security administration and all the white women ought to move to the employment office, and I bet in a month I'd be turning black myself. Because there are too many black women at the employment office and not enough white women in social security." He is speaking quite loudly, and he goes on for several minutes. A man stands up to move away from him, and he snaps his fingers. I've never heard a snap so effective before. The backs of his hands are scarred and cut, but from what I can't tell. He's wearing a bicycle helmet, a beaten flannel shirt and equally beaten blue jeans turned grey with dust. He's in his late 20's, with blond curly hair.

After this long rant, he settles down to shifting in his seat constantly, and we are all grateful when he gets off the bus. If it weren't so damned cold, I wouldn't need my coffee this morning.

Drizzle's back

Okay, well, I have drizzle back. I'm still a very unhappy Elf. Here's the lowdown: completion on the binary newsgroups sucks. I've tried two downloads and both were incomplete. Both were, admittedly foreign stuff, but I'm still annoyed that I couldn't get in and actually get the stuff I'm used to downloading. I don't know if the completion problem is because I'm on top of the stuff and the files aren't here, only the headers, or if because I'm behind in my usual vacuuming of binaries and some have expired or cancelled.

Okay, here's the low-down: I spend about $220 per year, or about $19/mo, for my Drizzle account, and I like them. They really are the good guys, mostly. And you guys have been the greatest help, keeping the account going, which pays for the webserver and ongoing access to my stories. I really appreciate that.

I'm thinking, however, of registering my own domain and going with blarg. They're $15/mo, which is nice, with a $20 start-up fee that includes registration. They don't support CGI, but if I had 50MB of disk space I wouldn't need the kooky CGI thingy I have on Drizzle; most of the things the CGI tools on Drizzle do support the fact that I have to compress my stories to make them fit inside my 10MB limit. I don't need a dial-up account; just reliable webhosting. If there's a better service out there, anyone know of it?

If I can get it down to $12/mo, I can afford Usenet, too, and do most of my "life" stuff, like surfing, email, and remote access, via speakeasy, which is my family's DSL provider.

---

Not to my kid, you won't: Calvin, 2004.

Ah, let's see what the house wine is...

Thunderbird!

Ah, and it's a good week, too. I wonder if I can make endorsements. Take one: "Hello, Elf Sternberg for Thunderbird Wine." Take Two: "Hello, Elf Thunderbird for Sternberg Wine." Take Three: "Bwahahahahah! My Minions are about to be unleashed. >hic<"

I switched from Evolution to Thunderbird. Evolution is the premier mail client for Linux, but on my tiny laptop it was a complete and utter pig, running multiple processes (including multiple, independent instances of the Perl VM running spamd), and in 128MB there's just no way I could run it effectively without shutting everything else down. So, I tried shifting to Thunderbird. Thunderbird is actually bigger in individual instances, but it's a single instance running multiple threads, so its time management is better. I don't need in a home appliance the "to-do" list (I have DevToDo for that, and Instiki, which I like), or the super-duper address book with contact list, or all of the other features. I just need a reliable mail client. Thunderbird is that client. It's fast, it handles spam very well, and it's much faster and lighter than Evolution, overall. Oh, and it integrates with PGP very well.