Ithaca is still a wonderfully remote place, accessible only by a ferry from Patras, which is itself hard to reach. So I spent five days either travelling or resting there, and at the end of that time decided to check the urgent email of the week (sorry. Ros). In theory, there is no difficulty doing this with the palm pilot and a bluetooth phone. In practice, Palm Eudora crashed the whole machine, requiring a hard reset and the loss of five days’ notes on the book I am reviewing. For why? Because there were 643 messages in my inbox at Pair, despite the best efforts of SpamAssassin, which had caught 1432 messages in my absence. This makes me more certain than ever that the answer to the problem is political or social and not technological. Of the uncaught messages, about 15 were really addressed to me. These don’t bother me on the machine at home, because I have about 30 further filtering rules that match all the mail I might want to read, and dump the rest onto a spam folder. Is there no alternative to translating these into procmail and typing them in one by one?
Is there no one I can sue for forcing me to reread 100 pages of dense French philosophical prose because I have lost all my notes on it?
A pal was bemoaning the perils of portable technology for the travelling hack – could he back up the PDA to the laptop, or perhaps just to the iPod, and which was best for the digital pictures? – but I think that any journey which requires the schlepping of more than two power supplies is probably misconceived.
I don’t envy you the review of the book, which doesn’t strike me as likely to contain much by way of pictures or conversations. A small crumb of comfort is hinted at by the Amazon synopsis, which ends “Debray believes that, in order to seek how God’s fire was transferred from the desert to the prairie-from the Ho ” — but if the work really does trace back Jehovah to those Michelin Woman Neolithic goddesses via temple prostitutes, I’ll eat my Wonderbra.
And talking of cups and Tennyson’s musings on life-as-striving (although this is really one for Oliver Martian’s blog), my Hancockian heart leapt on discovering the existence of the the Elser-Mathes Cup.
R
I recommend SpamSieve for the Mac – it uses Bayesian filtering algorithmns and is very accurate. Not much good on Palm though, sorry to say. Maybe you better sign up for Accucard to plaxo or something, so only poeple who kow you get through…