Mike's Page

Today we went to Landsford Canal State Park to see the uncommon Rocky Shoals Spider Lily. These rare white flowers only grow in local rivers with good water flow and shoals for a foothold, and only bloom for a few weeks this time of year.

From what I had read, you could go to the park and hike a short trail to get a look at the lilies. This is true. The trail comes out on a beautiful wide view of the lilies in the river, but unfortunately, the closest of them is like 100 feet away. I really wanted to photograph a few blooms close up, and was disappointed that I couldn't find any like that. I wasn't equipped to wade or swim with my camera gear. It was a nice hike nonetheless, mostly in the shade.

I may return next week with my kayak and get some pictures, but for now here's a link to another site with some nice shots.

Lately I've been playing around with some ideas to limit the spam and viruses that flood my poor dial-up inbox. Since I admin the server that receives boonedocks.net mail, I have lots of control over things. On the other hand, there's nobody to do it for me!

I came across a good writeup from a guy trying to do roughly the same thing. I really like the power of the procmail recipe in Step 2. This short script dumps all the incoming mail containing executable attachments that are usually viruses/worms. I've never been fooled into running one of those executables, but now I don't even have to wait for them to download.

(Recently I've been getting viruses/worms in .zip attachments. Can't really block those since I get legitimate emails with .zip files.)

I haven't really bothered with setting up the realtime blacklists in sendmail yet (just using one so far), but I'll try more of those at some point.

I'm also running SpamAssassin on the server. It has really become less effective in the past year or so. It would probably work a lot better if I used the Bayes features, but I haven't had time to figure out how to setup a good interface for reporting spam from my dialup account. A web interface like POPFile has would be very nice.

Speaking of POPFile, that is a great client-side program. Makes it very easy to classify spam and good mail. I wish I could run this on the server for multiple users and have the spam get canned before I have to download it.

Currently I run POPFile on my system through an Outlook add-on called Outclass. It integrates the POPFile features right into the UI.

With all that, most spam and viruses get deleted before I download them or stuffed into the spam folder before I have to look at them. I hate to think of all the hours I had to put into it, though.

We got back recently from a much-needed but too-short trip to Edisto Beach, SC. Most of the time was spent doing a whole lot of nothing, but I did take a little time to try some poor-man's kite photography.

Kite aerial photography is the art/science of flying a kite, attaching a camera to the line, and taking pictures from up high. I first learned of this hobby when I found some kite photos of a lighthouse I'd visited.

Charles Benton is one of the authorities in the hobby, and has a great website. With big kites, good cameras, and radio control equipment, you can get some excellent images.

Due to lack of time more than anything, I've gone the cheap route. My kite is an 8 sq. ft. flow-form, which needs a lot of wind to hoist anything. I usually just dangle a digital camera from the kite, set the built-in timer, and run like crazy to get some altitude before the picture is taken. My images are usually not level and often blurry, but sometimes you get a nice shot. Here's a link to my small image gallery.

I used my Canon G1 to take the latest images. It was nice to be able to manually set the aperture and shutter speed, but I really wish that I could set some custom mode where I could say "take an image every 30 seconds" instead of having to set the timer and have only 10 seconds to run it up every time.