Doubtless I’ll have more to say later, but in the meantime, here are the photos of our weekend in Bathurst.

This year’s exciting destination for “Oliver and Peter Go Away for the Long Weekend” (see last year’s edition) is Bathurst, New Brunswick.

This year we’re attempting to pull of an end-to-end “vacation by public transit.” We’re taking Charlottetown Transit to the bus station, Acadia Lines from Charlottetown to Moncton, and VIA Rail to Bathurst, and then we’re staying within walking distance of the train station and busying ourselves with the maximum fun afforded by Bathurst.

As you may have gathered, we have never been to Bathurst before, so it’s all limitless potential right now. See you on Monday.

I’m a longtime AppleWorks user. For a somewhat clunky all-in-one, it’s a pretty capable piece of software, capable of leaping tall bounds, and its spreadsheet has almost all the functionality you’d ever need. But my shiny new copy of iWork arrived a few weeks ago, so I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Numbers, its new spreadsheet piece.

Yesterday I went looking for how to do a “data fill” in Numbers — I needed a column filled with the numbers from 205 to 386 and I didn’t want to type them all in. In AppleWorks this was done by selecting Calculate \| Fill Special from the menu, followed by entry of a start value and an increment. In Numbers it’s almost unbelievably intuitive (so intuitive I couldn’t intuit it). Witness the following 10-second how-to video (created in the equally too-intuitive new iMovie):

This weekend we started to get alerts from our server monitoring system that our mail server here at Reinvented HQ was timing out. On Sunday I started to look into the issue, and it turned out to be a simple matter of thousands of spam messages suddenly showing up. Looking deeper, it turned out that almost every one of the messages — there were a couple of hundred thousand by the time it was all over — was for an address in the RoyJohnstone.com domain.

Roy is a client, and we host a single email address for him. The spam, however, wasn’t for Roy, bur rather for Alex, Benny, Clarisa, David, Edgar, Felix, and thousands upon thousands of other names — there was obviously a dictionary somewhere that was just churning the stuff out.

It would have been a simple matter of dropping all packets from the offending host. Except that the flood was coming from a seemingly infinite variety of hosts, from Taiwan to Poland.

None of the spam was actually getting anywhere — we have the server set up to automatically drop any email that comes in to an invalid address — but all those connections were taxing our poor old SMTP server to its limits.

In the end I solved the problem by pointing Roy’s email at a new Gmail account through a Google Apps setup for the domain; almost as soon as I changed the MX records in our DNS the spam stopped. Since the switch to GMail, one spam email has made its way to Roy and 75 have been dumped into the Gmail spam folder.

This is a perplexing kind of problem to deal with when you’re running a small mail server like we are: it’s one thing to filter out the spam (and Spamassassin and Apple’s Mail.app do a decent job of that), it’s another thing entirely to deal with the simple torrent of spam flooding into the server. I’ve tuned up Sendmail a little more since the flood stopped, adding some of its own spam-fighting tools like connection rate and bad recipient throttling. But these are all imperfect solutions.

I’m starting to wonder whether, in the spam-drenched world, running ones own mail server will be tenable any longer. If anyone has additional recommendations for fighting this sort of thing, I welcome them.

Searching American Airlines for flights from Halifax to New York I assumed they flew into Newark, so that’s what I searched for. Turns out that they can get me to Newark, but only by flying from Halifax to LaGuardia, then LaGuardia to O’Hare in Chicago, and then back to Newark:

In the non-insane world, LaGuardia and Newark are 43 minutes apart by car. In the bizarro world of American Airlines, things are a little more complex.

My friend Dave got nominated for a Gemini this week, for writing the Saultology of Robson Arms. Hey, Dave, congratulations.

I’ve just released an updated version of PresenceRouter that uses an updated method for grabbing current plaze and status from Plazes.com, and so actually works. Grab yours from the PresenceRouter download page (or just auto-update if you’ve got an older version).

I’ve been spending my time of late completely immersed in the sun and the moon, preparing a new feature for Almanac.com that will be released shortly. I don’t know where I’ve been all my life, but man is this every crazy stuff: once you understand something about the mechanics of all these rotating bodies lots of simple everyday things — from time zones to astrology — make a lot more sense.

My work has been greatly aided by The Old Farmer’s Almanac house astronomer, and when I professed a new-found appreciate for the sky last week she encouraged me to go look up yesterday morning before sunrise to see the full moon and lunar eclipse. So I did:

The eclipse happened as the moon was setting in our hemisphere and as the moon was setting at 6:28 a.m. and the sun was rising at 6:27 a.m. the east coast wasn’t afforded prime viewing for the eclipse; indeed just as things were starting to get interesting in the sky, the moon set into the clouds:

I actually woke up, unaided, at 4:29 a.m. in anticipation of all this. I headed downstairs and opened the door and looked out and saw a beautiful full moon above the St. Paul’s Church office. Faced with the prospect of waking [[Catherine]] up if I went back upstairs and got dressed, I threw on my helmet, grabbed my bike, and headed out into the dark morning still in my pajamas, camera in hand.

It was a perfect morning for riding around the deserted streets of downtown [[Charlottetown]] in your pajamas. I headed down Richmond Street to Charlottetown Harbour, spent some time walking up and down the boardwalk (which was annoyingly completely lit up by bright lamps despite the hour), and the rode around to Victoria Park hoping for greater darkness (it was lit up too, alas).

By 6:00 a.m. the moon had disappeared into the clouds and I turned back towards home. And therein realized that while it’s perfectly natural to be riding around on your bike in your pajamas at 4:30 a.m., it’s a little weird to be doing so at 6:00 a.m. as the citizenry are emerging from their houses and headed for Tim Hortons.

I made it home unscathed, and fell immediately back to sleep for another three hours. Now I’m thinking that it would be awfully cool to be able to see the night sky sometime soon unfettered by the lights of the city. Can telescope purchase be too far behind?

My friends at Plazes have made some changes to the unsupported, not-yet-released Plazes API that have had the unfortunate side-effect of breaking PresenceRouter. This is understandable, and shows what a folly it was to rely on a pre-release API to build the app. I’ve confidence that the functionality offered by the nascent API will return in some form sooner or later, and I’ll update PresenceRouter to match at that time. It was fun while it lasted ;-)

Update on August 29: just released a new version, v1.01, that should work properly going forward. Grab yours from the PresenceRouter download page.

My father has prepared an updated description of the NWRI Sediment Archive, a resource that holds the results of many years of his field research.