Combat spam by highlighting mail from known senders....in Thunderbird

Spammers seem to have been extra-industrious over the past six months. I'm using Thunderbird, whose built-in junk mail filters are catching maybe 70-80% of the spam I'm getting. The problem is that that still leaves me with as much as 30 to 50 spams in a morning's download.

If you use Thunderbird, there's an easy way to highlight the messages that are sent by people who are in your address book. I've posted instructions below. Many other e-mail applications have filters of one kind or another. Here I'm using them to mark matching messages with a color highlight, and taking advantage of the fact that one of the filter options is "in my address book."

Note that the first thing I learned from this was that many of the spam messages are spoofing their sent-from addresses as being MY address. So I had to take my own address out of my address book.

- Create a new filter Tools -> Message Filters
A dialog appears. Click New.

- Name the filter.

- The criteria box has 3 fields.
In the first one, select "From."
In the middle one, select "is in my address book"
In the 3rd one, select the name of your address book. You might have >1 address book.

- At the bottom, in the "Perform these actions" section, select
in the first field, "Tag"
in the second field, choose a tag, such as "Personal"

By default, Personal messages are colored in green. You can change tag color options by selecting

Tools->Options, click the Display button, select the Tags tab

The house of my childhood imagining

When I was a kid, maybe 8 or 12, I imagined what my house would be like when I grew up. And it was a lot like this conversion of a water tower into a house.

What I imagined was a tower filled with platforms that stuck out partway from the walls and overlapped, so that you could move from platform to platform and thus move up the tower, but there was also a lot of open space. So that babies could roll off the edges.

There were bars for climbing, too. It was kind of like an indoor jungle gym, with pillows added so you'd have somewhere to fall asleep after you got tired of playing video games. It was never stated, but I'm pretty sure an awsome game console was included. With a game where you catch falling babies.

See, the incredible unchildproofnessosity of the idea is what impresses me now. My youngest is two right now, and she falls over on improperly levelled floors, or when she steps on a feather.

Note-taking methods

I've been interested in note-taking methods ever since I took a class about Mind Mapping a few years ago. Since that class, I've taken meeting notes and brainstorming notes as Mind Maps, often prompting people to ask about the strange web diagrams I draw.

But there are some interesting ideas I hadn't been exposed to, and LifeHacker describes them in an article here:

http://lifehacker.com/software/note-taking/geek-to-live--take-great-notes-167307.php

The one that interests me the most is the Cornell system, described here:

http://www.clt.cornell.edu/campus/learn/LSC%20Resources/cornellsystem.pdf

I like the Cornell idea because it includes several useful ideas that are similar to concepts Tony Buzan writes about when he writes about Mind Mapping:

- summarizing and distilling what you note
- reviewing your notes on a regular basis

What I liked about the Mind Mapping class, much more than the Mind Mapping technique itself, was the attempt to match note taking and info management to how our brains work. So you write something down, but you attempt to fit it into a framework or model in your brain. If you form a model of something as you note it, it becomes much more than rote learning and you are more likely to remember it. And then you can review it at steadily increasing intervals if you want to remember it.

If you want more about Mind Mapping, look up any of Tony Buzan's books. They're worth a look.

Reading _The Hobbit_ to my kids

This past Father's Day, I started reading _The Hobbit_ to my kids, at Tanya's suggestion. Tanya's dad read it to her when she was little, and we'd talked about it before, but I'd always sort of thought it would take too long to read it out loud.

But it's been a fantastic experience. The book reads well, and I've listened to the wonderful BBC version of it on tape many times, in addition to of course having read it many times, so I can put a little verve into it, and play with some voices. The kids ask for it (perhaps as much so that they can stay up a few minutes later as anything) and seem to enjoy it. It's been more than a month since we started, but we haven't managed to do it every day. We can usually manage to get through a chapter in one session.

Every darn chapter of this book is fun. I'd forgotten just how much fun it is. It's great to reread it with them, and see it through their eyes a little. We're getting near to the end now...we're probably three-quarters of the way through it, at least.

There's a hole in my story

So last night I was trying to tie up the narrative of "Elf and Troll" (stupid name, still need a better name for this story), when I realized that I had completely failed to write part of the middle of the story.

I'm trying to get this one finished so I can send the draft off to Tyson to review, as per our oft-amended agreement. :) We're doing a story challenge, to give each other a deadline.

At some point, while writing narrative merrily along in bits and pieces, I skipped ahead to the ending without providing the actual scenes that would introduce two key characters or explain how/why they would help the main character achieve the ending.

I think the strategy of skipping ahead is fine, but here it came back and bit me in the ass because of the way I've been working. I've simply done too little overall review of this story, and I thought it was more done than it is. The new scenes probably won't take all that long to write, but there are some possible plot problems in there, and I'm not really sure how to solve them. There doesn't seem to be enough time for the main character to go collect his helpers.

Got some writing done at my parents' house

I went to visit my parents this weekend. I like to complain about how early they go to bed, and how I end up with nothing to do after we put the kids in bed and then my parents go to bed and you can't really turn the TV on or anything. But they don't REALLY go to be all THAT early when my kids are there to play with: the grandparents and the kids both push the envelope a little. And I brought my laptop, and spent about an hour and a half...and got to the end of the climactic scene of my elf/troll story.

I still have to make the MIDDLE work out and support everything that's in the ending, but it's a big step forward, really.

Writing about elves and trolls

I worked on my elf/troll story last night. I actually got to the point where the troll attacks everybody, the final major confrontation of the story. I'm happy about that. Really, every time I seriously sit down to work on this thing I get good stuff done, which begs the question of why I don't spend more time on it and get the thing done.

Anyway, I wanted to mention here that I've noticed that I have several stories/story ideas that I work on that return to a concept of someone, especially a kid, meeting up with a large monster in the woods. It's a theme I have tried out in several different ways. And I see no problem with that...I'm kind of glad to have noticed it, actually. I have no idea where it comes from...probably a wish-fulfilment idea of wanting to be the special kid who has a dragon-friend-sort-of-thing.

In the current story, things turn out much darker. I hope I can pull it off. This month I thought I'd try to blog regularly about my progress on this story as I work toward the ending. I'm actually pretty far along in developing this story. It started out as an attempt to write a very short story, which I began at church one morning during the period when the kids are in Sunday school. In an hour I had hashed out the major components of the story.

The basic idea is that there's a troll attack and some kids are found, one of them killed, others scared or injured, and the adults have to try to figure out what happened. So it's initially structured as a mystery. The main character is a local teacher, whose star student is one of the survivors. It's not an accident these kids got attacked by a troll, and it's up to the teacher to figure things out.

Ah, but it's complicated by the fact that everything takes place in this elf/goblin world setting I've worked out, which doesn't really have a name yet other than "elf/goblin setting."

I've spent a fair amount of time talking about this story. :) I've laid out the whole plotline for some friends, and talked about all the various complications. Talking about it too much isn't necessarily good...it can eat up enthusiasm for writing it. Still, I'm having fun when I work on it. I've got a city filled with elves and goblines, living on the edge of a goblin revolt, sharing space with each other, and looking at each other with some suspicion, but needing to coexist all the same.

Software-company-like deadline slips...in writing

I've been engaging in a little writing challenge with my brother-in-law. We were trying to finish a story each in about two weeks...I think that's what it started with. Only we got to the first deadline and he asked for an extension...then we got to THAT deadline and I asked to extend it another two weeks. ;) Work has been busy and I haven't spent much time on the story. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to stick with it better in the near term, though.

The story I'm working on is called "Elf and Troll". It's a lousy title but it's my working title for a piece about a young elf kid who encounters a troll. Actually that's not much of what it's about, but I don't feel like getting into a long diatribe about what it's REALLY about right now...it would end up being half as long as the story.

I did want to record, though, that I had a nice little session today where I worked on a day in the life of one of my characters. I had a character whom I added to the story, who I didn't know much about yet, so I started working on her day from waking up. In the process I found I had to do a fair amount of worldbuilding...things like what kind of food she'd eat, some information on businesses in this world, and so on.

Another interesting (to me) thing about the world of this story is that I realized this weekend that it's probably the only major world-building exercise I've done that didn't get started from a map of the world. This story is set in my Elf/Goblin world setting, a world distinguished by having two major intelligent races who live in mixed communities...at least until the goblins rebel against elf oppression. (It sucks when The Man is an elf, doesn't it? :) )

Chloe and Ethan catch fish

Back in April, on a cub scout campout, Ethan and Chloe caught some fish...and here's some documentary evidence.