There's no place like home

Keith Olbermann on MSNBC delivered one hell of a blast at Donald Rumsfeld.

Crooks and Liars has the transcript and the video.

Olbermann closes with this quote from Edward R. Murrow:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who fear to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

Man, they don't make hood ornaments like this anymore. This is the hood ornament from a 1956 Nash Metropolitan that I saw in Hinckley, MN the other day.

What a cool little car.

This photo was taken on my trip to Duluth on Tuesday. Here are the rest of the photos.

Sadly, this strikes pretty damned close to how I think Bush would talk about Global Warming.

Wow. That's quite the statment. I agree 100% too.

But we already knew that. Here is a nice video clip that adds further proof.

From the Aristocrats blog.

You will probably want your head phones.

This is Hidden Lake at the top of Logan Pass in Glacier National Park.

Here are some desktop wallpaper sizes for you if you like:
1600x1200
1280x1024
1024x768

Coop over at Positive Ape Index points us to a nice collection of Glam Rock videos over on YouTube.

Although always appreciated by record nerds such as myself, it seems like the Glam Era gets short shrift in the consciousness of the general public. Everyone pays attention to the Hippie era that preceded Glam, and the Punk that followed, but that thin sliver of cool in between doesn’t get its due, except maybe as a point of origin for David Bowie.

Too bad, because this is the shit. Enjoy.

Way too much fun.

Bruce Schneier has an excellent post up on his blog about What the Terrorists Want.

I'd like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.
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Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists' actions, and increase the effects of their terror.
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The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.

Go read it. Now.

With my new server, I switched from sendmail to postfix. I also upgraded spamassassin.

The spam count dropped quite a bit, but I was still getting a heck of a lot of it.

Then my friend Bil told me I should be greylisting.

Greylisting is a pretty simple concept. When an email server contacts my server to deliver an email, my server tells it that it is busy and to come back later. It then stores the email information in a database and waits for the originating server to come back.

If the server comes back again, the database gets updated and then the mail is accepted.

The trick is that most spamming engines are fire-and-forget. If they get told to come back later, they don't bother.

So I setup SQLGrey on my server.

Ho-ly Shit!

The spam has dropped to almost zero. Before I switched to my new server I was getting between 50 and 100 spam messages a day.

Now with the new server and using greylisting, I get maybe 5 a day. And spamassassin is catching 99% of the ones that make it though.

I also installed the sgwi web interface to SQLGrey that lets me look into the database. There are currently around 1100 emails that are waiting for the originating server to make a second attempt. Of those 1100 - 100% of them are obviously junk!

It's a beautiful thing.