DrBacchus' Journal

By the way, the main reason that I cut my camping trip short was that, on Thursday, the 4-wheelers showed up in their hundreds, and transformed my haven of silence into unending din, and it wasn't pleasant anymore. So I came home.

And while home, I've been spending a lot of time reading Apache web server documentation, and tweaking it. I've found that in the busyness of the last year, I've fallen way behind on improvements/changes to the server, and there's a lot of cool stuff in there that I simply don't know about. So if I want anybody to think that I'm something of an expert on the topic, I really better read the documentation.

** Transcribed from the original manuscript **

Camp, evening 1. Either the coords were about 100 feet off last year, or they are now, but I'm in roughly the same spot as I logged last time.

So far, it has rained twice, but not enough to go inside for. And I saw two wild turkeys, strutting through the trees just at the edge of my clearing.

Finished reading "Quicker than the eye" by Bradbury, and started "Death is a lonely business" by same. Still to read: some Lewis and two books about St. Francis. We'll see how it goes.

This analog blogging stuff has much to recommend it. More time to think over what to say. And the errors are forever preserved. Not that you'll see that in transcription.

Wow, it's quiet out here.

Starting Tuesday evening, I will be incommunicado for a week, or as long as I can stand to be offline. I'll be going way out into the woods, with no electricity, no internet, and probably out of cell phone range for much of the time, although I imagine I'll find somewhere with cell coverage at least once a day.

I expect that when I come back, I'll have roughly 15,000 email messages, of which perhaps as many as 20 will be something I actually want to read. Ok, I'll be generous. 25.

I've been getting more and more spam lately, and nothing that I do to filter it seems to make any difference at all. I'm currently running SpamAssassin, a plethora of Postfix rules, and client-side Thunderbird filtering. Yet still, more than 90% of everything that winds up in my inbox is spam. I'm finally coming around to believing that email is worthless as a means of communication, but I don't know what can replace it. I keep hoping that spammers will collectively realize that they are killing their golden goose, but clearly they aren't that bright.

Also, I've noticed that the spammers who have succeeded in obfuscating their email so that it can get past my filters have finally reached the point where their messages are completely illegible. I have absolutely no idea what most of them are selling, or how to go about buying it if I did understand. And, I'm told, this makes up more than half of all the traffic on teh intarweb. While it's reasonably clear to me that this is criminal, I can't imagine any way that this could ever be prosecuted. :-(

Last sunday, I went on one of my favorite hikes, down a lovely stream that empties into the Kentucky. I had done this same hike about a month earlier, and discovered that the last 50 yards of the stream were completely blocked with mud. This time, with the recent rains, the stream had cut a canyon down the middle of the mud, and was flowing steadily into the River. I kinda wish I had my camera with me - it was a very cool effect.

As I walked back up to the Jeep, I heard a police siren, and as I emerged from the bushes, there was a policeman checking out the Jeep. He seemed very interested in where I had been hiking, and wanted directions for getting there. I asked if I wasn't supposed to be parking there, and he said that it was ok, but that he was checking to see if the vehicle was abandoned. Perhaps I need to find a better place to park next time, and perhaps bike from there.

Shadow and I spent Tuesday night in a tent, in my back yard. I wanted to know how she would deal with sleeping in a tent, before I drag her out into the middle of nowhere and discover that she can't handle it.

She did very well. In fact, I think she did better than I did. I got very cold around 4 in the morning, and she was snoozing quite happily. So I imagine we're going to do just fine.