Time spent attempting to get SpamBayes installed: 3 plus days, probably a total of 15 hours or more of research and banging, and no less than 5 extraneous bits of software installed.

Time spent getting POPFile installed and working: 23-25 minutes, including the selection of a pretty stylesheet. One bit of software installed, a simple perl module that for the love of god actually compiled without a hitch.

What do these things do, you might ask? They are email proxies. They're sort of like web proxies, which are sort of like nannies. You ask them to get information, and they go get it for you. Usually somewhere in the process of them getting the information, they decide whether they think its good for you to have that information. That's why hornycoedsluts.com doesn't work on your work computer - for some reason, "the man" doesn't want you to have that sweet sweet porn. Email proxies can do sort of the same thing, only this time I'm actually interested, since I am administering the proxy, and instead of shielding me from the boundless wonders of co-ed porn, I can have it shield me from email spam.

They're both learning Bayesian filters, which use some kind of crazy ass word analysis system to figure out what's spam and what is not spam - or, as I have learned it is called, ham. Yes. Good email that you want is called Ham. Hell yes. If only the good, non-viral attachments were called cheese, I would forgive the techie community for the flogging to death of "w00t" and "l33t."

Anyway, you feed these things a bunch of text, tell it whats spam and what's ham, and it gets really damned good, really damned fast. Here's hoping I can reduce the number of people who are desperately trying to reach me in the hopes of extending my penis a few inches.

Although I will miss the hillarious SPAM email subjects like "I was told you are fat."

Man, that was funny. Well, it's late. I did the herculean and got more than my scheduled schoolwork for the day completed. So my goofing off for a while with linux problems and then a video game was okay. Although it's 5am, so it's possible that once again, I've been had.

Also, you will hopefully notice that this entry has the shiny new "geeking out" category logo, which I designed while continually listening to "Take me Home" by Phil Collins. If anyone's got a problem with that, I will seriously kick your ass.

The alert reader will also notice that if you click that logo, or any other category logo for that matter, it will take you to an index listing only entries of that category. I won that battle. Yeah. So, you know, don't think I won't break your face if you give me shit about the Phil Collins thing.

I couldna ha donneit without the linux sageliness of the Busa. Well, I probably could have done the blog logo part. Definitely not the proxy crap. I'm still reeling as to the seemingly limitless power of the tab key. Anyway, Danke, Herr Doktor. See, if you had a blog, you'da gotten a link there. But nooooooooooo.

Also, Greg gets bonus points for being with me on the Ecto cooler thing. Greg, I have so much to tell you about the free-floating phantasm's elixir of life.

Now I'ma shut up, watch a couple SB Emails, (including the hillarious not-one-hundredth) as a reward for my various victories, and go to sleep.

[take that look of worry, mine's an ordinary life]