Yes, I’ve finally reached my limit on spam.

I use Apple Mail, which is a great little program: it “learns” what junk is and stores it in a Junk folder, which you can peruse at your leisure—although, with 300+ messages going in there per day, I didn’t peruse it too often.

(Eventually we’re going to get a more robust mail server, which hopefully will weed a lot more of this crap out, but for the moment I’m relying on other tricks.)

However, I was still getting 100+ messages in my In Box every day, most of which were spam but were, for one reason or another, not getting flagged as such. So I borrowed a trick from Darin’s mail rules and said, If the mail’s sender is not in my address book, put it in the box “Unknown Sender.” I do have to check this box more often, but at least my In Box isn’t quite as heavily burdened.

If anyone is sending me mail about this site (or the Calvin Klein Skirt) though, I may miss it, depending on what the Subject line is. (I suggest avoiding “Hi.”) So I said to myself, “Self, you have as many e-mail addresses as you want. It is time to set up a dedicated e-mail address for people who actually want to talk to YOU but whom you don’t know yet.”

So: if you’d like to drop me a line, please mail it to:

n k a -a t- n o b o d y – k n o w s – a n y t h i n g . c o m

Yes, you have to type it in, and yes, you have to figure out what part of the e-mail address gets replaced by the character found at shift-2. But if you really want to talk to me, this is the way.

My iBook stopped working on Friday evening. Instead of restarting, it would just play three tones and just sit there. This has happened before, and all I had to do was the Power Manager reset combination (on my iBook, shift-control-option-power button, wait 5 seconds, then the power button again) and it would restart. This time however, all I heard was those three tones.

This worked out okay, because Darin was in Los Angeles last weekend, so I just used his computer. Hee.

I finally got the iBook to the Apple store at Valley Fair yesterday, and the guys at the Genius Bar said it wasn’t the Power Manager, no: I had a logic board failure.

Wait…didn’t I just have a logic board failure with this thing? Darin took it to a guy he knew, got it fixed up…and now it’s happening again. Urg. I have had relatively few problems with any of my Powerbooks, and this one has had two serious breakdowns.

Of course, Apple just announced new Powerbooks yesterday. Nice new fast Powerbooks, just perfect for playing World of Warcraft.

Or, as we call it around this house: Warcrack.

Warcraft is a game you can play by yourself at home, or you can link up with friends and play on battle.net. World of Warcraft is the spin-off, an online MMORPG in which you are a rogue, a warrior, a mage, a druid, et cetera, and you run around fight stuff and do quests and explore strange new areas.

Darin has been an alpha and beta tester for them, and his assessment is that this game is a license to print money. He’s let me play one of his characters a little and you know what? He is so right it’s not even funny. This game is fun. This game is seriously addictive. This game will be the only way to get a hold of friends on- or offline.

Since Darin was away this weekend, I played a little. Or maybe for seventeen hours, I don’t really remember right now. (No. I don’t really play that long. I exaggerate for the purposes of emphasis.)

Darin says, “Well, you’ll need a new Powerbook to play this game anyhow.” So, gosh, isn’t it convenient that my iBook has died? Let’s try not to think about the fact that I haven’t backed up recently. And we don’t really have the disposable income for a new Powerbook right now. And that I don’t need any damn excuses to subscribe to Warcrack when it’s finally released. I’m supposed to, you know, take care of my kids and stuff, instead of killing kobolds in Elwynn Forest.

Something odd happened to the webserver part of our server on Friday, which is why this site was down all weekend.

It is to be hoped that it is back for good now.