Remember a few weeks ago when I lamented the dramatic uptick in the amount of spam I was getting. Well I got rid of it. All of it. Here’s how.

First, I modified the procmail settings on our mail server to redirect all of my incoming email to my Gmail account, except email coming back from Gmail itself:

:0
* !^X-Gmail-Received: .*
! XXXXXX@gmail.com

Next, I modified my Gmail account so that under the “Forwarding and POP” section it’s set to “Forward a copy of incoming mail to…” my actual address, and “archive Gmail’s copy.”

The effect of these two changes is that all incoming email gets redirected to Gmail where spam is stripped out (very, very effectively) and non-spam is forwarded back to me where, because of the procmail rule, it’s not forwarded to Gmail and I pick it up from my IMAP server, using my regular old mail client.

In addition to the spam that Gmail’s filtering out, I’m also running Spamassassin locally, and using Apple’s Mail.app anti-junk mail features.

In addition to the spam-fighting properties of this solution, I also get a searchable backup of all my incoming email at Gmail.

This has all been in place for 3 days now, and I haven’t seen a single spam message in my inbox yet.

Longtime readers will recall that our little family spent two very pleasant weeks in Portugal this spring, a trip you can read all about if you weren’t here earlier.

Somehow, however, I’ve managed to have several hundred conversations about our trip after the fact during which I referred to the great country as “Portugo.”

Oh course I know that it’s spelled Portugal, and I’ve always written it that way. But for some reason for as long as I can remember I have pronounced this with a “go” at the end instead of a “gal.”

Fortunately my brave English-major brother [[Johnny]] finally held an intervention one night this week over dinner, and put me on the course towards overcoming my disability.

As a first step, let me formally apologize to the people of Portugal for unintentionally maligning their country through mispronounciation. You have license to refer to Canada as “Cnda” or “Canadoo” or “Candanga” when in conversation with me, and I promise not to take offence.

Well, actually not so many tales to tell.

Johnny and I arrived here Sunday night, very late. The past three days we’ve spent in meetings with our colleagues at [[Yankee]], dreaming up all sorts of interesting new projects.

On Monday night we managed to steal away into Nashua to visit the L.L. Bean outlet store; last night we were both dead tired, and we repaired to our room at the [[Jack Daniels Motor Inn]] early after an overly hearty meal at Harlow’s Pub (wherein I ate more meatloaf in one sitting than in the previous 5 years combined).

Tomorrow morning we’re up at the crack of dawn to visit Yankee’s Boston office. If we play our cards right we’ll have some time free in Boston tomorrow afternoon, and then it’s home to PEI, via Montreal, arriving on the Island just before midnight. Promises to be a very, very long day.

The last time I tried to use my Rogers Wireless “Pay As You Go” pre-paid mobile SIM on my phone here in the USA, it didn’t work: any attempt to use it resulted in a “No Service” message, even if the phone found a local GSM network to connect to.

This wasn’t a surprise, as the Rogers website made it clear that the pre-paid plan didn’t support US roaming.

Imagine my surprise today, then, when I noticed I had a Cingular signal here at [[Yankee]] in New Hampshire, made a call back home to [[Charlottetown]] and the call went through.

I talked to [[Catherine]] for 31 seconds and then checked my account balance on the Rogers website to see what the charge was: it cost me $4.98. I assumed this was the per-minute charge, as the pre-paid charges in Canada are traditionally billed to the nearest minute.

Turns out that this is a new pre-paid feature of Rogers Pay As You Go offering, something they’re promoting on the front page of their wireless site with a big banner ad. Here’s the rates page for US roaming; they quote $2.49/minute, which suggests they mis-billed me for a two-minute call. That’s the rate for making or receiving calls, both local and long distance.

I called Rogers customer service number (using my own hint to talk to a real person) and found out that the billing actually starts when the phone starts ringing. Turns out that my call was actually a 62 second — aka “two minute” in mobile phone math — call and hence that’s what I was billed for.

[[Johnny]] and I are headed south today to visit our colleagues at [[Yankee]] for a few days. You can follow our progress on Plazes and, true to form, I’ll be sure to regale you with exciting foliage tales from the New England frontier.

Episode 8 of The 3LA Podcast is about PEI.

It’s no secret that this year’s race between incumbent Clifford Lee and former Mayor Ian ‘Tex’ MacDonald for Charlottetown Mayor is a street fight. But last night saw things reach a new low, with allegations, aired on [[Compass]], that Lee is involved with the nuclear weapons industry. The closed captioning tells the story:

Watch the video [1.6MB MPEG] for the full story.

Here’s the situation.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, an NBC show that concerns a fictional late-night TV show at a fictional network, has a stellar cast, great writing, excellent provenance, and slices of some of the best TV of the year. And yet, despite all that, seems to be floundering. It just doesn’t hold together, and if it continues like this, it might not last until Christmas. Maybe Sports Night plus The West Wing isn’t actually a good idea?

Meanwhile, 30 Rock, an NBC show that concerns a fictional late-night show at an actual network, with a rag-tag cast that includes Alec Baldwin, seems like a show that should fail — a Saturday Night Live spin-off that should see Tine Fey, actor/writer of the moment, finally fail. And yet its debut episode had an odd brilliance, and there’s a remote chance it might be the next Seinfeld.

Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live itself, an actual NBC show actually at NBC, two episodes into this season has failed to produce a single sketch that’s anywhere near funny. It’s not that they’re aiming too high, or too low: they’re just not aiming. Everything dies. And the cast seems to know it.

Weird.

My friend Yvonne visited us this week. This morning I realized that I’ve known Yvonne for twenty years, which is longer than I’ve known almost anyone else.

Yvonne and I have never lived in the same city. We didn’t become friends in the classical way but through a circuitous route that involved old boyfriends and shared apartments and her sister Lori and a green pickup truck.

But somehow in the twenty years since we first met back in Peterborough in the mid-1980s, when we were both in our early 20s, we’ve stayed friends. She has moved across the country several times, from Saskatoon to Halifax and back to Saskatoon. And again. As I moved from Peterborough to Texas to Montreal to Peterborough to Charlottetown.

I’ve seen her through 4 boyfriends; she’s seen me through 4 or 5 girlfriends (depending on how you count). I’ve met her parents, went to her wedding, washed the windows in her apartment off Quinpool Road.

She used to drive a Plymouth Horizon. I used to drive a Datsun 510. Now we both drive VW Jettas, although hers is more of a classic than mine.

Through all this I’ve become good friends with Yvonne’s husband Bob too (who would’ve thought I’d ever meet someone more sarcastic than me!) And her daughter. And her next daughter. And the daughter after that.

And Yvonne has become good friends with Catherine. And with Oliver. She’s met my brother Mike, and spent Thanksgiving one year with my brother Steve.

We once drove from Peterborough to Burritt’s Rapids together to visit her old boyfriend. I ended up sleeping in a room that hadn’t been repainted since 1975, with orange walls and a big purple stripe running around it. In the morning Yvonne headed east to Nova Scotia with my friend Stephen, and I headed west.

In the early 1990s we rendezvoused at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. They I went to Calgary with my girlfriend to meet her parents on the way back east we staying in Yvonne’s apartment; by the time we got there she had left again, off to teach at a summer camp.

My first memory of Yvonne is being at a party in Peterborough at the home of people neither of us knew very well. Yvonne was there with her boyfriend, and I was there alone. The three of us hid out in the front hall and I think I laughed harder that night with the two of them than before or since.

When we’re 21 we take all our friends for granted. We think we’re going to have hundreds of friends over the course of our lives, and we think friendship comes easy.

And of course I’ve met many people since I met Yvonne, and I’ll meet many more. But I’ve come to realize that good friends are rare, and the there’s something special about knowing someone for so long: having a rich shared history, a collection of reference points, the ability to pick up conversations where they left off three years ago — that’s a special, valuable thing.

Three years ago Bob and Yvonne moved back to Saskatoon, and we’d fallen out of touch. They had another daughter in there somewhere and news reached us. But it seemed like maybe we’d fallen out of touch.

But this week they swung over to the Island as part of a week-long visit to Halifax. Last night their family tumbled into our house, and we had dinner and our kids played together and we talked about the old times and suddenly our friendship was snatched back from the brink and renewed again.

I feel very lucky.

Every now and again I get asked to write a “Letter of Reference” for a friend or colleague. It’s a hard thing to do: I’ve never considered it very useful to write complete bullshit, but it’s equally difficult (or at least unhelpful) to tell the full truth.

When putting together my thoughts for one such letter tonight, I dug up a letter I wrote for a librarian friend back in 2001. Here’s the heart of it, with the names changed to protect the innocent:

I’ve not worked with Sergei recently, and my experiences with him largely pre-date his work in librarianship, so I am unable to offer any comment on his specific technical or reference skills.

I can, however, offer you some comment on Sergei’s “interpersonal and communication skills, [and] his ability to work as a member of a team.”

My experience as an employer has taught me that the greatest challenge when staffing a position is to find an employee who will care passionately for the work - a person who will “own” their position, and feel a deep and personal commitment to the work and to the organization. I have no hesitation is telling you that Sergei is such a person.

Sergei is a person of unquenchable curiosity. He has a tremendous imagination, and an ability to look at problems in a novel way. He is a hard, dedicated worker and applies himself to tasks, monotonous or interesting, with equal intensity.

I have always found Sergei to be an effective manager and “team player.” My only caution in this regard is that Sergei can be very direct; he is not a skilled “bullshit artist” and sometimes his honest, straightforward, directness can be mistakenly interpreted. If Sergei is surrounded by a group of equally dedicated team members, effectively led, then he will be an invaluable and appreciated member of the team.

Sergei is theatrical. He certainly doesn’t fit the stereotypic of the “dour librarian” and he has an infectious enthusiasm and a love of life; he is witty and intelligent, and quick to make friends.

I wish you well in your deliberations; please don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance.

Down there in paragraph number five is the kicker: I wanted to be honest about “Sergei’s” inability to suffer fools gladly but I wanted to give it an upside. I always work under the assumption that the reader will appreciate my honesty, and that it will make the rest of what I say ring truer.

The risk is that this will backfire, they’ll read this as “he’s an incorrigible wingnut” and Sergei will be left in the cold.

My inspiration in all of this is the cover letter I wrote to the PEI Crafts Council back in 1993 wherein I attempted to mask the fact that I’d no experience whatsoever in the crafts industry by spinning a yarn about how my experiences hitchhiking across the country afforded me a flexibility that transcended the need for specific job experience. It was a risk, but it worked (and it made for a good story for many years).

Sergei, on the other hand, didn’t get the job.

What’s your take on all of this? How do you write references (or cover letters). And what do you think about those that cross your desk?