Day: May 17, 2004

Had a series of quick calls with Verio this morning about the hosting of this domain, and I ended up agreeing to them moving the site from the original Best Internet servers to Verio servers. I thought this had been done years ago, since NTT/Verio bought Best some time ago, but apparently not. The company’s policy is to send emails confirming the changes to the account… which is fine.

All five emails I received today from NTT/Verio were flagged as spam, one by SpamAssassin at the server (yes, their server), and the other four by Mail.app. My own hosting company can’t send me e-mail anymore, even when they configure SpamAssassin. And yet the spammers get up to 1,000 messages/day through SpamAssassin, most of which are caught by Mail.app… but not enough, honestly. It’s getting worse, not better.

Just like the last time I read Dick Francis, I flew through Wild Horses this weekend. I needed a quick, fun read, and that’s what I got.

Francis didn’t leave horses out of the picture in any of his mysteries, and Wild Horses is no exception. He employs a racing film set in the heart of Newmarket as the backdrop for an unplanned investigation of a decades-old murder which stirs the pot, with the film’s director as the protoganist. I appreciate Francis’s routine of diving into a vocation for a book and teaching his readers (as he probably taught himself) quite a bit about how that part of the world works, at least superficially. Francis doesn’t make it tangential to the tale, either. I’m not out to make any films myself, but at least I feel I have a dim understanding of how the endeavor comes together. In this case, the sausage-making appears as interesting as the sausage… but I know Francis can gloss over a boring afternoon of re-takes in a sentence or a paragraph. And he does, thankfully.

I think I need one more fiction book before I dive into a non-fiction volume once more.