I receive hundreds of email messages each day. Approximately five of them are legitimate. The rest are what is commonly called spam. I get messages about pills, investing, internet auctions, vacation deals, and countless other things, but none are authentic communications from parties with whom I have any relationship whatever. On the contrary, many of these messages claim to have business with me, but manifestly do not.

Some of these spam messages attempt to deceive me with realistic looking subject titles, like “Student Loan Information”, or coincidentally come bearing the name of someone with whom I regularly engage in correspondence. In this way I sometimes click on a message believing it to be from my friend Anthony, only to find it is not. Sometimes, however, the spammers don’t even seem to be trying. “Follow-up to our talk about refinancing your house” is one I have received. Really? How absent minded would I have to be? One I got today was “Shocking Tim Russert Sex Tape”. Even if this was a real thing, why on earth would I want to see that? I mean, if I got one that said, “Shocking video of you eating cookies in your yard”, yeah, maybe I’d think that was real, and I’d be concerned enough to click a link. But the other thing? No way.

I hesitate to say anything about this here for risk of attracting more attention from spammers, but I assume many of them are robots anyway and don’t know the difference.

Something must be done. I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for a month or so, and I have it set to filter junk mail, but I still have to regularly sift through the junk to see if any genuine correspondence has been misidentified. Every day something is. Is there a better way to handle this?

I will do my best to write a great big update on Thursday, and in it will tell you about school, Sloshball, and the wedding of two dear friends.

Check back again Wednesday night.

Check back after Friday for various ramblings about school and work, a first-time-in-years trip to Epcot, stories about family and friends, and the conclusion to my tale of vacation excitement in New York.

So, thanks, Steve.

I finally ditched my old host and signed up with a new one.  Since I was going through the trouble, I thought I ought to change the appearance of the site, as well.

Intersabre.com is the worst possible web host.  As you probably witnessed in the past, my website was frequently down.  Usually it was just for a couple minutes, but sometimes it was longer.  The worst part was that it was almost every day.  I would write to them to ask what was up, and they’d say something like, “It should be okay now”, but that didn’t change the fact that it was down all the time.

Then, about two or three weeks ago, I was checking my email at home, and I got the typical error message in Outlook that I associate with my website being down.  I tried a while later and got the same thing.  I could get my website to load, and I couldn’t get Intersabre’s website to load either, so I couldn’t submit a service ticket.  Days went by, and by then I thought they’d just closed down and not told anybody.  That would be like them, I figured.

Then some people told me that they could see my website, and I checked at work, and I could get it there, too.  So I realized that, for the second time, Intersabre had blocked me from accessing my own site.  In fact, they had blocked my IP address from accessing any of their servers.  They offer no method of contact besides their own webpage, so I had to write to them from work to tell them to unblock me.  Of course, at work I didn’t know my home IP address, and they don’t respond to emails sent from anywhere other than their own webpage, so I was out of luck and out of patience.

I looked around online for other hosting services, and I settled on the one that had the highest percentage of positive reviews.  Arvixe.com seems to have been around for years, and almost everyone who has used them says good things about them.  Plus, the have a twenty-four hour phone number for technical support.  Also, they are cheaper than Intersabre, and give me unlimited bandwidth and storage.  I could upload huge HD movies to my site now – not that I ever will.

Naturally, there have been the typical challenges associated with moving an entire website.  But, Arvixe took care of the whole thing.  I just gave them my log-in information for my old host, they backed everything up, moved it, and put it all together nice and pretty for me.  Even my email was moved.  Last night, when I needed to ask them a question about resetting my password, I called their number, and, for the first time, got their voicemail.  I left a brief message, and–this is absolutely true–they called me back in less than a minute.  I didn’t even have time to walk out of the room before my phone rang.

So, if you ever need a new web host, Arvixe seems pretty darn good.

Now, I still need to tweak some things with my new theme.  For instance, I don’t like the font at the top, or the way the “D” in my name is capitalized up there.  Also, I don’t know if I like the green hyperlinks.  And sometimes the text doesn’t wrap around the pictures.  I need to work on all that.

Meanwhile, it’s good to be up and running again.  If you feel like it, read my latest post called “Toward Entartete Musik”.  It even has footnotes.

A new site–with a new look–will appear soon, and you’ll still be able to read all the old content you know and love tolerate.

Hard times come again no more.