…and on the road again. Monday afternoon I’m headed to Dallas for a week-long work-related training course. I finally finished unpacking everything from my Vegas trip yesterday; all the clothes from my suitcase went from my suitcase into the washer/dryer and back into the same suitcase to next week’s trip. In the six days I’ve been home since Vegas I’ve been able to catch up with friends and squeeze in quite a bit of family time. One thing I’ve noticed over the past few days is while I missed the kids terribly while I was gone, I also seemed to have lost my tolerance for the continual noise levels they produce. Hotel rooms, while sometimes lonely, are also nice and quiet. While I do of course enjoy being around the kids, I think twelve days was long enough to forget exactly what it was like.
During my Vegas excursion I picked up several videogame-related books and DVDs, most of which I haven’t had the opportunity to check out yet. I’m taking them all to Dallas with me next week in hopes of diving in to at least some of them while I’m there. My buddy Justin only lives about 15 minutes from where my class is so I plan on hanging out with him quite a bit next week, but if I hit any dead time I should have a bevy of entertainment with me to keep me busy.
To follow up on my last post about spam mail … I had as much luck training Spam Terrier as I’ve had with training dogs in real life (which is to say, none at all). After uninstalling and searching the web I found SpamBrave, which essentially promises to do the same thing Spam Terrier promised. The difference being, SpamBrave worked for me the moment I installed it. Immediately after running the program’s setup file, SpamBrave began filtering all my incoming spam into a separate folder. I would estimate that out of the box it’s had a 99% accuracy rate. No spam has slipped through, and the only false positives it’s detected were on messages that, quite honestly, looked like spam (broadcast messages from businesses I’ve bought things from, for example). The free (but time-limited) version of SpamBrave worked so well that it convinced me to pay the $29.95 and get a registered copy. The decrease in spam is definitely worth the price of admission.