Recently in Personal Category

Finding the right gym is something of an artform. I'm not sure I've mastered it though. I spent a good week or so investigating the local gyms, ended up joining one in London Bridge and I'm not sure I made the right decision.

Virgin Active - Strand
Very nice. Very shiny. Lots of machines. Has a relatively small pool. Most of the free weights were available. Just hideously expensive, not quite as easy to get to for me as ones near London Bridge and the membership person wasn't very helpful. You also have to fill out a whole lot of forms to even get a trial. Towel service extra. Men's toilets were a bit nasty.

Fitness First - Beckenham
Good equipment. Good use of space. Helpful membership person. Towel service extra. Just a little bit soulless and very hard to get to by train and public transport.

Virgin Active - Bickley
Easy to get to if you're going by train from Victoria, since it's near Bickley station. Great facilities. Lovely pool. Massive number of machines and free weights, including the fabled power plates. Has a good café. Nicely priced too. If it had been better located, I would have joined this one (and still might).

Fitness First - Cottons (London Bridge)
The one I actually joined. Reasonably priced (compared to Virgin Active - Strand anyway). Has a smallish pool. However, it's always busy; the front of counter staff and membership staff don't seem to care; they messed up my health check-up booking so I never got it; the pool flooded the lower levels; I've been turfed out once because they were closing the gym at 3.00pm to connect it back up to the National Gird; almost all the doors have been taken off the men's lockers (I don't know why); they gave me someone to set up a training programme who had never used half the machines; and it closes at 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays (I was turned away at 5.30pm). And all that in only the last fortnight. Towel service included though.

Weather in London

Weather in Wales

What's up there then?

It's Shrove Tuesday today. Does it say something about me that I'm more excited by the thought of Pancake Day than I get about my own birthday?

We went for a short weekend in November before the EuroStar switched over to St Pancras. Here are some piccies:

The Pompidou Centre from a couple of different angles

I went to Cardiff in October and stayed on the bay for a few days. Here are a few shots, cos it's a really lovely place - I can't wait to go back!

I don't get much spam, usually. Through a combination of SpamAssassin on my email server and SpamSieve on my Mac, more or less everything stupid ends up deleted before it comes to me or stashed in my Junk folders in my various email programs.

Yesterday, however, some spammer somewhere decided he was going to send out spam emails using my domain name (the-word-is-not-enough.com). The spams aren't going out from my server - they're probably emanating from some botnet somewhere – but because there are now so many firewalls, invalid email addresses, authentication systems et al, I'm getting a load of messages as bouncebacks.

And when I say a load, I mean 3,800 in the last 24 hours.

Fortunately, I'm on fast broadband, have unlimited email storage (more or less) and have trained SpamSieve to simply junk the bouncebacks, rather than fill up my email inbox, so it's not a huge problem. But it does mean that I'm not going to be able to even think about picking up emails remotely with my mobile phone or webmail any more until the spammer gets bored and moves on to another domain.

I could set up a load of rules on the server to filter the messages out, assuming I could find some sensible definitions that won't stop me from getting any bounceback messages at all from any emails I send out.

But at the moment, I'm cheesed off!

UPDATE: Turns out setting out the rules was relatively simple, thanks to SpamSieve: all I did was check its log to see what things it was picking up on to exclude the bouncebacks, picked the guaranteed indicators of spaminess (a couple of IP addresses in Germany and a certain make of Outlook Express), then set up the corresponding rules on the server. Now, almost everything's getting deleted before it comes to me. Fingers crossed I haven't done something stupid that stops all mail inadvertently.

I've created my first plug-in for Movable Type: MT-MyBlogLog. It allows users to include the MyBlogLog avatars for commenters to their blog without having to include the MyBlogLog widget. It works with both dynamic and static pages. You can get it from my site and there's more about how I created it over on my technology blog.

Isn't this nice?

Rob,

Your article in the Summer 2007 issue of .Net about Google Co-op was terrific, a real help to me. I was going to write a blog post about my experience getting a custom search engine up and running, and I wanted to link back to your article. But I can't find a link online. Can you point me to one?

Curiously, though, I hadn't realised the article had been published for a couple of reasons

1. I wrote it in November last year
2. I wrote it for Practical Web Design, not .net!

Still, it's good that it's seen the light of day, now that PWD has folded. And it's good that I know it's seen the light of day, too! The other missing article I wrote on Movable Type photo galleries has just been published, too, so that's a double whammy from my informative correspondent. Thanks!

I'm on holiday from the 5th to the 19th of August. But if you leave a message on my voicemail(s) or send me an email, I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

I've created a new package of scripts for Entourage X and Entourage 2004 users: Entourage Read Receipts.

Ever sent an email and wondered if it arrived? In this age of dodgy spam filters and abandoned email addresses, the disappearance of emails is a growing problem. Wouldn't it be good if there were some way of finding out?

Fortunately, some clever people have already thought of a solution: the “Disposition-Notification-To” (DNT) email header. What does this do? If you add this, invisibly, to your email message, any compliant email program will send you back an email to tell you the message has been received or read.

Note the word "compliant" there. Unfortunately, Entourage X and 2004 – unlike their Windows-based cousin, Outlook – don't have a facility for easily adding the DNT header to email messages, although you can configure any of your email accounts to add the header to every message you send out; they also ignore requests for "read receipts" in any incoming emails.

This is where this package of scripts comes in. Included is a script for detecting the DNT header in incoming messages and sending back a standards-compliant read receipt that includes both human and machine-readable notifications that you've received the message. There are also two scripts for adding the DNT header to your own outgoing messages: one that simply toggles the header on and off for each of your email accounts (if the account already has the DNT header it's removed, without affecting any other headers you might have; if the account doesn't yet have the DNT header, it's added); and one that lets you pick which accounts you want the headers added to.

You can find out more and download the scripts from their home page.