Last October [[Catherine]] and I had the great pleasure of attending a Garnet Rogers concert at the Trailside in Mount Stewart. Doug Deacon just emailed to let me know that he’s been able to book return dates for Garnet: he’s playing four nights, June 26, 27, 28 and 29, 2008. Tickets are $25.

If you have any sense you will immediately call the Trailside and make a reservation (go early for dinner; it’s a nice night out). You will not regret it: Garnet Rogers is a truly gifted musician (listen here) and to see him in a small venue like the Trailside will improve your life immeasureably.

Alas I’ll be in Copenhagen for the duration, so won’t be able to make it out myself. Which means there’s one more seat for you…

Apple announced that the iPhone will be available in Canada on July 11, 2008. The Apple website is pointing people to Rogers when you click “Where to Buy.” At the Rogers website there’s no indication they’ve ever heard of the iPhone, and their site appears to contain no mention of it at all:

In a rare breach of habituality, [[Oliver]] and I went out for dinner to [[Café Diem]] last Wednesday night. It’s under new management this season: Mamdouh Elgharib, formerly of Meeko’s just up the street has take over the reigns (the Meeko’s space has been assimilated into the Murphy Cube — see Which Murphy is Which? for guidance).

The standout item: potato salad. It’s very, very good. The carrot cake, about half the size of a brick, is also very good (although, at $5.95, it’s more expensive than a brick too).

Overall impression: service is as good or better than it’s ever been, the menu is expanded and less panini-centric, and everything else is much as it ever was.

On my last trip home to my parents’ house, I took an impression of the corporate seal of my great-grandfather [[Edgar Caswell]]’s company:

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier. My email is stored on an IMAP server and I primarily used Apple’s Mail.app client to access it there. I’ve got Mail.app set up to store mail it identifies as “Junk” on the server, but until today I wasn’t harnessing Mail.app’s junk-fighting skills to make SpamAssassin smarter.

All I needed to do to make this happen was to set up a cron job to have SpamAssassin learn that all the mail in the Junk folder was spam:

/usr/bin/sa-learn --spam /home/peter/Maildir/.Junk/cur

This simply tells the SpamAssassin “learning” application, sa-learn, to take all the mail in my Junk folder and learn that it’s spam. I run it one a day.

I did an upgrade of SpamAssassin here at HQ yesterday, and I installed sa-stats.pl, a Perl script that parses the SpamAssassin log file and produces summary reports.

I knew that we were receiving a lot of spam here, but I had no idea it was so great a percentage of incoming email. I feel a lot better now about the dozen or so spam that are still getting through the net; at least I didn’t have to see the 681 other ones that came my way in the last 24 hours. Here’s a breakdown, by user on our mail server (with actual addresses blurred) showing the last 24 hours worth of incoming email:

Username:                      Total:  Ham:    Spam:   % Spam:
---------------------------------------------------------------
me                             751     70      681     90.68%
user support                   193     37      156     80.83%
*******                        122     3       119     97.54%
*******                        321     3       318     99.07%
*******                        399     13      386     96.74%
*******                        104     2       102     98.08%

In the chart “Ham” means email that isn’t spam. The overall figure is 93.23% spam over the 24 hours.

I absolutely love the Danish language locale for Denmark, Narrative Cultural Specification page. Full of culture-parsing goodness like:

Denmark has its own cultural symbols in some cases and use of non-Danish symbols as icons can create irritation and - if they are not easily recognized - confusion. Example: The typical suburban American mailbox with the raised flag is unusual in Denmark and hence not immediately associated with mail for most users.

Every country should have a page like this. Oh, wait, they do. At least countries in Scandanavia do. Alas, it says here that “the registry has not been updated since December 2001.” Fortunately the Common Locale Data Repository seems to be taking its place.

Just stumbled across this index of Creative Computing magazine that runs from 1981 to 1985, which were the years I would have been an avid reader. They were also the last fours years of the magazine’s life.

The vicitim of socks that were too heavy for the weather, I mused this morning about whether or not I should reconsider my lifelong ban on sandals wearing. My musing inspired considerable disucssion in the Jaikusphere. I’m sticking with shoes.