I’m dedicating this journal entry to my wife, who keeps getting upset when I tell her I have no money – and I keep getting frustrated not only because I feel as if she’s blaming me for holding out on her, but because if I did have it I wouldn’t think twice about giving it to her (I feel bad that I can’t.)

• All of my pay cheque goes towards the mortgage and our condo fees. I don’t get any of it.
• That, in itself, is not enough to pay everything – so Michelle has to contribute another $100 out of her pay to make up the difference. That lets us keep a roof over our heads.
• I don’t actually owe my entire pay cheque towards the house, but it’s simply easier to deal with if I just have my employers direct deposit it all into the “mortgage fund” right away.
• Since I’m over-paying my contribution of expenses by $150 (based on our incomes), Michelle’s got to pay me back that difference. (This is actually “my” money which, normally, I’d be able to spend on whatever I wanted although, in reality, it doesn’t work out that way.)
• Michelle’s portion of paying for the house, plus the amount I get back, is $250. So she just puts all of that onto my credit card. (This ended up being the easiest way of transferring money from her pay to me.)
• That money breaks down in the following way: $100 – to the remainder of the mortgage / condo fees; $100 – towards my monthly GO pass and Mississauga transit; $50 – towards our Internet connection.

All of this leave me with $0. However – I also have other expenses which are not covered by any of the above and which I still need to come up with:

• $20 – local Burlington transit.
• $20 – cell phone.
• $10 – payment towards my MasterCard which still has about $400 on it despite our recent refinancing.

Which means that I’m actually going into debt by $50 every month – assuming that I spend money on nothing else at all. In all likelihood I’ll get something of a personal nature in a month – whether it be picking up a movie, a couple of drinks, a pizza, or whatever. So let’s say that, realistically, I’m really going into another $100 of debt every month.

The only way that this balances out is if I can make some extra income through Inferno or in other methods. Such as a recent rebate cheque I just got for a small network switch I purchased last year. That means that I only went into debt by $60 for April.

Now. Sometimes I put in extra hours at work and since I get paid on an hourly basis, rather than being salaried, that come through as “extra cash”. Just last week I put in an extra 5 hours – which means I’ll get to see about $50 (after taxes). So, this month, I think I’ve actually broken even. (Previously I haven’t drawn from that overtime pay, rather I’ve kept it as a “buffer” against future needs and emergencie, but I think I’ll have to be taking out that $50 this month.)

I love my wife very much. However, I do get frustrated when she spends money on getting her hair cut, taking us out a couple of times a week (which I readily admit I enjoy and benefit from), and so on – all combining to make me jealous of her “readily disposable” cash because she’ll have spent more money in a week than I’ll even have the hope of having access to in a month or two.

I keep trying to explain that as much as I appreciate going out – we really need to do so in a way that doesn’t spent quite so much money. We can actually eat at home and just have a beer or two out, for instance. That could save us $30 for that week – or half the amount we need to spend on groceries. Which is relevant here because I’ve just been asked if I could by the groceries this week. Sure, I can do that. If I get a cash advance on my Visa. While it’s true I did just get $40 back for that network switch rebate – see the above breakdown of my finances. It’s all going towards paying off the slight debt for the past month I’ve already incurred. Cash in hand isn’t the same things as cash you can spend on things.

And there’s more to my frustration than just that. I assume that when Michelle does take us out it’s because she’s able to afford it. I trust her to know her own financial situation. So it came as a bit of a shock to me when, after having a nice lunch out with our friend Andrea, she told me just before going to sleep that she couldn’t really afford to buy groceries this week and could I do it for once. Which tells me that not only does she still not understand my own financial situation – but now I’m actually getting worried that her own is a bit out of control too. Expenses (like groceries) simply have to come first. Take your available money, subtract from that the things that you need, and then only whatever’s left over, not more than that, should be spent on what you want.

The fact that we don’t have enough money for what we want sucks. However, if we manage it properly we can still get by until things get better. And even with scrimping and cutting back a bit from what we’re used to now, we can still enjoy ourselves – even if the instant reaction is to protest. Four months ago we were on the verge of selling our house and being out on the street, $60,000 in debt, with me out of a job. Now things have turned around. We’re making it.. But we simply can’t afford to enjoy the same lifestyle that we did before. Which is not to say that everything should or must be abandoned – simply that we need to make some changes in how we go about things.

I also understand Michelle’s frustration. From her perspective, she’s now putting more towards expenses than she did before I got this job. She’s also, in appearance, forking over $250 every 2 weeks into my pocket, and she’s seeing me get rebate cheques and income from Inferno. On top of that, she buys the groceries, the beer, our meals out, and so on. It seems, on the surface, perfectly reasonable that I’d be able to pick up the tab for something like groceries – and unfair that I “never do anything” while she’s the one constantly getting things for us. However, that’s just the way that things appear to be. In point of fact, I do just as much to contribute to everything as she does – I just do it in a less visible way. (Because everything I make goes directly into our mortgage account – and everything she gives me goes out again immediately into that same account and to pay other bills.) Perception, in this case, is a killer.

So the whole situation is frustrating for both of us – in different ways.

On the bright side, the hedges on our 3rd floor terrace were trimmed down, so we can now finally see the Burlington skyline from our window and soon-to-be setup patio table. Hopefully this will encourage us to stay at home to play cribbage rather than going out.

I’ve just implemented ASSP (which stands for Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy) on my Linux server. This replaces the custom spam rules I’d rolled using postfix host / sender / recipient checks, and procmail, along with SpamAssassin. All of that is now mostly ripped out, with ASSP in its place.

I’d originally become so fed up with spam and viruses that I decided I wanted to switch to a whitelist only scheme. Glen, however, indicated that he would not be interested in that and he pointed me in the direction of this alternative. (Which also does whitelisting only, if you configure it that way.) I was skeptical at first, but, after configuring it and seeing how well it works, I’m now a convert.

It’s much easier to use than SpamAssassin and, right off the bat, it’s shown itself to be far more accurate.

Right now it’s running in test mode. All messages detected as spam are being allowed through (although marked with “[spam]” in their Subject: line) but being shunted to a special spam account that I can check.

I need to get an equal number of spam messages to regular messages in order for the Bayesian learning algorithm to work. Since my server is inundated with spam (at least 80% of all messages) I need to wait until I get 14,000 (the optimum) of both types before reporting things. (I could just delete a ton of the spam messages at random until their number comes down to that of the legitimate messages – but I’m not going to find the time for that sort of thing for a while.)

I’m still using postfix to bounce “helpful” messages from virus checking programs – since these messages are all unrequested and mostly originate in response to bogus messages in the first place, I consider them to be spam also. (When I say “bounce” I don’t mean I send an actual email back, rather a simple “rejected” / 550 message to the originating SMTP server.)

We recently bought a really nice wrought-iron wine rack, which will hold 24 bottles. This was done because we’ve put in an order for 60 bottles from one of those “brew it yourself” stores. Although, they actually brew it for you – you just bottle it yourself.

The quality isn’t as good as what you’d get in the liquor store, but, for the price, it’s really not that bad. At least that’s what I’m hoping. I guess we’ll find out when it’s time to open the first bottle.

I have yet to sample a really expensive bottle of wine. (Say, $150+ in the store.) I’m not sure if my palette is even now good enough to be able to distinguish something like that from, say, a $10 bottle. I’d like to hope so. I’ve certainly tasted a much wider variety now than I’d ever had when I was younger. So, when the time does come around that I have that kind of disposable cash (!) it would be nice to know that I could actually appreciate the investement. Rather than, say, wishing I’d simply bought another 60 bottles of the brew it yourself variety…

This month is half over and I haven’t posted anything yet.

Once again, time slips aways from me at this job. I just don’t seem to have the opportunity / initiative to come up with something to say while I’m busy with other things.

Still – I wanted to have a “March” buttton. Ideally, I should post a couple of times a week. If nothing else I need to post at least one thing every month.

Does anybody know what an “Ide” is anyway? Some kind of doom or foreshadowing? (Or maybe just a general prediction of such.)

Later: Yes, I’ve actually read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which made this line famous, but I’m still not entirely clear on the exact meaning. Also, I updated this entry to capitalize the term. Apparently it’s a “proper name”…

I’ll confess that I was rather stunned to discover the existence of both of these items:

Personal submarines.

You always think of submarines as belonging to the navy or to oceanic research outfits. I never would have thought that individuals would own one, designed as their own personal pleasure vehicle. But, in hindsight, why not? Of course, you have to be one of those incredibly lucky individuals who can actually afford the expense that, to mere mortals, is completely inconceivable. If you have that kind of money, you’d probably want to escape to the depths of the ocean in one of these anyway – just to avoid all of the people who want to shoot you on principle for being so much better off…

3-D printers.

No, I’m not making this up. Some bright bulbs (more people gifted with envious abililities beyond us mere mortals – maybe they should hook up with the owners of one of those submarines and go on vacation together) have come up with a way of “printing” 3-dimensional objects. Now if they could only attach some basic miniaturized kitchen appliances to the thing, so that it could mix and match ingredients and produce food to any given recipe, we’d have a fully realized version of Star Trek’s replicators. Somebody beam me up.

I’ve been using a freeware utility on my computer for a while now called Glass2K that lets you set the transparency on any window – from 0% to 100%, and also to set a window to be “always on top”. It’s come in useful from time to time, and it was the only (free) one of it’s kind that I’d been aware of. But it did have some annoyances – like always showing a splash screen at startup, requiring a slightly unintuitive Ctrl-Alt-Shift key combination as you right-click in the title bar of a window to activate it, and, sometimes, “going nuts” while doing this and setting a transparency seemingly automatically and against my actual desire – causing me to have to go back and fix things.

Well – just yesterday I came across another freeware utility that does all of this and more, and which also dispenses with all of the above mentioned annoyances. It’s called PowerMenu. Not only does it let you set a window’s transparency, and make it “always on top”, but you can also “force” an application to minimize itself to your traybar (next to the clock) rather than to your taskbar. In addition, you can change the priority of an application via PowerMenu’s interface (you can do this from the Task Manager anyway, but it’s more easily accesible this way). All you have to do is right-click on the minimize button or the title bar and the options come up as context menu items. You can do all of this without ever having to take your hand off the mouse in order to reach for keys. Best of all, it has no splash screen, and it comes with various command line options for such things as disabling its own tray icon (so it just runs invisibly) and for automating the transparency level, tray icon-ifying, etc., of specific application windows for scripting purposes. As I had with Glass2K previously, I have it set to launch as a System Run process so that it’s always available to anybody currently logged in.

If I have any criticism of it, it’s that I’ve found it doesn’t work with a small number of application windows. So far, I’ve seen this incompatibilty with both DOS boxes and Pegasus Mail (the context menu items simply don’t show up). And, to give due credit to Glass2K, it doesn’t have Glass2K’s ability to remember transparency settings across application sessions. But these are more than made up for by its ease of use and increased functionality in comparison to the other application.

I like this utility so much that I’ve made it available as a download from my own site – this way I’ll never forget where to find it.

If you’re running Windows NT/2K/XP+ Give it a try. It’s cool.

It’s funny. I created my personal Web page, and then this blog, knowing that people might come to it and read all about me. I haven’t put anything on the site that I don’t want people to be able to get to – nor have I said anything about myself that I want to remain private. (To have put something up that I didn’t want to become public would be self-contradictory.)

Just the other day, however, I mentioned “dante.com” to a colleague of mine at work. (Hi, Rod!) Later that day, he came over to my cubicle and starting chatting with me about the stories I’d written, the DVDs I have in my collection, and so on.

I was slightly taken aback. I wasn’t offended in any way, and I certainly didn’t mind that he’d discovered that information. (As I already said, if I didn’t want people getting to it I wouldn’t have put it on my site in the first place.) Rather, I’d simply never had it happen to me before. I suspect it’s the same sort of reaction that budding celebrities (Not that I put myself in that category!) experience the first time that they’re stopped in public and told by somebody about that person’s opinion of their work. It probably just takes some getting used to. It also probably says something that, after all of these years of designing and editing my site, this was only the first time I’d ever found myself in such a situation.

(In the past, I did have somebody send me an email out of the blue about one of the essays I’d written in University, and published in my Philosophy section, and that they’d read there – but that seemed different somehow. Although, I suppose, no less novel in its own way.)

Finally I’ve read some news on what caused the North American blackout last August. According to this news article, it was a glitch in the software running on a GE Energy XA/21 server in Ohio (and, yes, it all did originate in Ohio – and wasn’t the result of some mystical lightning strike just “North of the border”). There was a failure in one of the plant’s systems but, because of the glitch, no alarms went off and the data that the technicians were seeing and thought were representative of the real-time situation were in fact out of date. Had the alarms gone off, and the system shown what was actually happening, then things would have been corrected in time before they got out of hand.

What’s kind of amusing is that when the main server went offline, a backup server came up – but it was unable to deal with the number of unprocessed events from the main server so it, then, went down as well. (I suppose what’s even more amusing is that it was the company that “brings good things to light” that inadvertantly caused the extended period of darkness. I guess that they can now legitimately claim to do both!)

Apparently, the server software’s already been patched to correct the problem. However, the Ohio plant has it on the books now to switch over to a competing monitoring solution – something that had actually been on the books prior to the blackout, but which hadn’t actually happened. (It seems as if this sort of thing – administrative delay I mean – happens in companies all over the world.)

Recently I reported that Kodak was no longer manufacturing 35mm cameras. Now, Philips has announced that they will no longer be manufacturing VCRs because the demand is no longer there.

That’s great if all you want to do is watch movies – but there is still no reliable way of recording shows on TV that you would otherwise miss. Things like TIVO are still in their infancy (and they’re so full of “features” that I’m sure many people, such as myself, don’t want that I don’t think they’ll ever become a permanent replacement) and I’ve yet to see just a standalone recordable DVD solution that you could integrate between your cable connection and TV as you currently can with a VCR. (Okay, actually I think I have heard of them – but they’re so expensive at the moment that it’s just not worth it.)

Okay, it’s been a couple of days now and I’m just starting to get used to the new name of the Mozilla Foundation’s flagship stand-alone browser.

I’ve always used the Mozilla suite, even despite the fact that I only install the browser component. Originally it was Phoenix, then it was renamed to Firebird. Just a couple of days ago, they’ve renamed it again to Firefox. I’m just not that keen on its UI – it looks far too much like an IE clone to me. Plus I miss some of the preferences that are exposed in the Mozilla UI – even though I do know how to set them manually in … Firefox.

Back to the name. It didn’t sound right to me at first. Now, I no longer have to correct myself as often when I think about it. Still, however, I’m constantly reminded of both the Clint Eastwood movie and a certain reference to a female vigilante squad from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. When version 5.0 of Firefox comes out it will be even more reminiscent.

Hopefully they won’t run into even more political / legal problems with their product name. It would be a shame if they had to change it yet again.