Ah well, the summer Olympics has been launched with a huge open ceremony as always with modern Olympics with well trained athletics just bursting to prove that they’re the worlds best and to set new world records. I have to admit, I’m not overly enthusiastic with this years Olympics, not at all. It might be that I’m a bit superstitious, but I’ve had a bad feeling about this Olympics for a long time, and when I heard news that the Olympic flame went out just a few days ago I became even more “nervous”. I have a feeling that something bad will happen during these games. What it is, I don’t know but it will be something. One thing that it will be remembered for, is the amount of participants that will be proven to have used anabolic steroids.

Another thing is the amount of firepower and security these games have, which I can perfectly understand in these days of modern terrorism. But many of the images I’ve seen published on the net the last few weeks are very disturbing. Right in the middle of urban areas we now see mounted firepower in such masses that it easily could be enough to settle a small war. The amount of money spent on both military arsenal and other security forces, plus the added amount spent on the games themselves (stadiums, advertisement etc etc) are enormous! I don’t know, but I just get the feeling that this money could have been spent otherwise. The way I see it, the last few Olympics has all been about who could build the best and largest stadiums, much like a “I got a bigger penis than you have”-competition. This is not what the Olympics are about, it’s about bringing a diversity of people together to enjoy each others company and to compete on equal grounds. I think this is all overclouded by the commercialism of the modern games, the use of illegal drugs and the massive military presence. Let’s just hope that the future proves me wrong, and that the Greeks have a great event that will be remembered for what it was, a great sporting event, not just a theater for the masses to prove the commercial value of what the modern games has turned out to be.

Ah, it’s good to finally be able to function somewhat after my visit to hospital two weeks ago. Since I came out of hospital last week, I’ve been slowly recovering from a collapsed lung. The medical condition is called pneumothorax and supposedly only strikes tall, slim males such as myself. It’s quite rare too, only happening to nine out of a hundred thousand. Finally it’s been proved that I’m special! :) So last night I went to the doctor to take an x-ray to check up on the surgery that was performed, and it turned out it was all good. Because of this good news, I had to celebrate. As it turned out, luck smiled on my face as my sister was throwing a girls only party and I was rooster invited. So that meant it was time for some beers and firing up the barbecue. Beer has never been that good. But today I suffer somewhat from my choices last night; being a bit hungover on a hot summer day isn’t a good thing. Ah well, you have to sacrifice some things in life to have fun. Without taking some risks, life itself becomes a bit dull. And yes, it was worth it even though I went home as I did, single. I’ll get myself a fish next time!

I just gotta tell you, SpamAssassin rocks! For those of you that don’t know what SpamAssassin is I will give you a short explaination. It’s a program that goes through all the mail you get, and checks if the mail is a spam mail or not. The way it does this, is to do a series of test on the mail. These tests range from looking at what the subject is, to what is actually written in the mail, and to do checks to see if the mail comes from a source known to send spam mail.

Why do I love it so much? Well, when you’re like me and been on the net for quite a while your e-mail address(es) kinda gets around, and before you know it your inbox gets filled up with all these do you want cheap viagra? and do you want free porn?. This is stuff that might be interesting to an impotent old fart, but that’s just not me. I get around 200 to 300 spam mails daily, and since SpamAssassin filters all these mails away I don’t waste time. SpamAssassin also uses an artificial intelligence, which over time trains itself to become better. The result for me? It catches almost everything, I now see an average of 2 spam mails per week. It’s perfect, it’s bliss. So where’s the link? Well, there’s a lot of humour surrounding the topic spam, and here is a lot of examples why. Everything you didn’t want to have to know about spam.

Sometimes you get stuck with some problem that you just can’t figure out. Your server is up and should work perfectly, but does it? Hell no, there is some odd error that you just can’t figure out. In my case, it was a problem with my mail server. I could send mails, but no way in hell was I able to get any mails. At first, I thought the problem was my spam filter that stopped them, but looked through the logs and couldn’t find anything. But then I got to think of something. The domain my private server is on, does not use a real host. It uses what is defined as a CNAME, which means it points to another domain name. So what happened was that whenever someone tried to mail me, the mail got to my server but was rejected as being to the wrong domain since most e-mail clients translates the domain name into it’s real name. So all I had to do to get it working, was to enable my mail server to accept mails for that domain and everything worked like a charm.