Spam sucks, everyone knows that. Ameritech is my ISP, and they use Yahoo's e-mail system, which has a pretty decent Spam filter. It takes care of 95% of the spam for me - approximately 350 messages a day which I don't have to see. The ones that are annoying are the other 5%. At home, I use Outlook, when I travel, I use Yahoo's web client, so I needed a package that would interact direclty with Yahoo to filter out the 5%. I was reading a review in the Wall Street Journal the other day about a product called ChoiceMail. Two things make this unique:
1.For addresses that it doesn't know, it uses a challange and response technique to validate who you are. Obviously a spammer can't/won't reply to these e-mails. There's a little bit of maintenance up front to get this working, but after a while, it works very well.
2. It works with web based mail interfaces - filters out the non-spam even further.

Check this site out for a bunch of reviews on Spam Filters.

I'm in Kansas City this week. Went to the casino last night. Lost. I've never seen so many overalls and Carharts in a casino in my life. It was a late night, and I had to do a big presentation this morning to fifty people, after only about 2 1/2 hours of sleep. Apparently, I do a better job when I'm groggy. I'm back tonight, going to see Buck/Insyderz tomorrow.

This is just weird.

I upgraded my TiVO system with a new hard drive. I'd purchased the 40 hour Hughes DirecTiVO system along with a 200GB drive for $100. I used the following definitive How-To for the upgrade and was successful. The whole operation only took about 5 minutes. It basically goes like this: Take the drive out of the Tivo, Hook it up to a PC, boot from CD, backup the TiVO disk, restore it to the new drive, replace the drive and Whalla! You can put two drives in teh system, and it will recognize up to 137 GB per drive. Each GB gives you about 1.2 Hours of viewing time. My next task is to figure out how to put it on my home wireless network, so I can update the programming and functionality remotely, instead of having to pull the hard drive out everytime.

Friday night we had a meeting about Crossroad's capital fund drive, we went out with three other couples: The Niemis, Girards and Reynolds. It was the women's job to plan the thing out, so they jumped in one car, the guys in another and we followed. We headed down Grand River, and they turned down the seedy eight might strip, keeping us guessing. We ended up back in Farmington Hills where we played Laser Tag. We finished the night up at the Rhino Dance Pub (nice name, huh?) in South Lyon. If you've never been there, it's a nice place. Setup like a martini bar, but with a DJ and dancing on the weekends. The girls had fun dancing (I even got out there a couple times, much to my own embaressment and lack of rythm) while the guys hung out and talked. We got in around 1, stayed up until about 2:30AM and I got up to work out with Kirk at 6:30. Four hours of sleep made for a long day.

When Bob told me he'd found me front row seats for Annie, I figured he meant towards the front. Madeline and I were literally sitting in the very front row at the Masonic temple, watching the musical Annie yesterday. She and I went as a Valentine's day date, and had a great time! We got dressed up in our "fancy" clothes and she couldn't believe how "fancy" the theatre was. If you've never been to the Masonic temple, it's beautiful on the inside, but it's in a horrible part of detroit, with burned down crack houses right across the street. You don't want to park too far away from the theatre if you can avoid it.

I've been listening to the new In the name of Love CD, a U2 tribute album by CCM artists. I like U2 - I'm by no means a die-hard, I mostly prefer the stuff from Rattle and Hum and prior. I've always been a big fan of cover songs - when they tweak the songs, the style, whatever. I'm sure the U2 purists will scream herasy, but I like it.

Interesting excerpt from a review on The Passion:
This is not a movie that anyone will "like". I don't think it's a movie anyone will "love". It certainly doesn't "entertain". There isn't even the sense that one has just watched a movie. What it is, is an experience - on a level of primary emotion that is scarcely comprehensible. Every shred of human preconception or predisposition is utterly stripped away. No one will eat popcorn during this film. Some may not eat for days after they've seen it. Quite honestly, I wanted to vomit. It hits that hard.

Interesting intervie with James Caviezel', the guy who played Jesus in The Passion.

Now that it's February, Northwest resets their Worldperk's program for everyone. It's been nice because having Gold status this year means I get upgraded to First Class just about everytime I fly, at least for now. I'll probalby fly between 50-75k miles this year, most of it with Northwest. Northwest has the most generous of the frequent flyer programs out there, but their planes are the oldest out there, and their stewardeses aren't the friendliest.

I've got some extra spring in my step today. There's a shoe place out here in Kansas City called Bob Jones Shoes Warehouse. These are the shoes I got. Last year, against my better judgement, I bought a pair or dress shoes at Men's Warehouse, after the guy assured me they were a good quality shoe. They blew. These are the nicest shoes I've owned, for darn cheap. I almost bought some pimp shoes, but the guy I was with moved me back towards these

I'm heading home this morning. Our team had a late night, trying to pull together a deliverable that we have to present to our customer this morning. We're on a very tight timeframe, implementing a multi-million dollar system across a large university by June 30th. I've got a great team, managed by a friend of mine Sandy, who used to be a customer of mine. I brought her over about 3 years ago and we've worked together quite a bit. The sales person, her and I all have a great relationship and the additude flows through to the team. She's very organized and helps keep me on task with any details that might fall through the cracks otherwise. We've been on this project together for almost a year and a half, so you get to know a person pretty well spending 12 - 15 hours a day together over that time frame.

I've been reading through the Gospels and it's really stood out to me how much Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God coming, and the tone which he talks about it. Jesus sees it as a huge celebration and the people around him, including his disciples just don't get it. But then again, I'd probably wouldn't of either. I'd of been the one in the back asking the dumb questions after his parables.

I'm very embaressed to say that I watched the Westminster dog show last night. There was nothing on the hotel cable channels, except MSU losing badly to Illinois, so one of my co-workers IM'd me to watch it. I watched the finals, kibitzing back and forth with Gab, one of my co-workers. If you've ever seen the movie Best in Show, it's that much funnier to watch. FYI - Josh won.

I read this article on Who Killed Jesus? while sitting on the can (I love having web access on my phone). I found it to be pretty one sided.

People often ask me what I do for a living. This is probably the best metaphor for my job:
A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud toward him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses, and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?" The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location, which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. Then the young man opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says: "You have exactly 1586 sheep." "That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep" says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man: "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?" "You're a consultant." says the shepherd. "Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answered the shepherd. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I never asked; and you don't know crap about my business... Now give me back my dog."

I'm in Kansas City for the next few days. We've changed over to an Embassy Suites, which blows away the AmeriSuites we were staying at, plus I get Hilton points.

Check out this entry in Noel's blog about churches using The Passion movie as an "evangelism tool".

I listed my old WebTV satellite receiver on eBay yesterday. I figured I'd get about $50 for it, since the thing is four years old. So far the bidding is at about $255 and still going.

It looks like there's a Simpson's Movie in the works!

I just got my new DirecTV TiVO receiver installed today. I had DishNetwork's WebTV DVR (Digital Video Recorder) system for about four years, loved the interface, but it was old technology. I got a dual receiver system, one of them being a TiVO one a standard receiver. The TiVO system is easy to upgrade. I picked up a 200 GB hard disk for $100, which gives me the ability to record about 240 hours of TV, plus there's all sorts of great hacks out there to tweak the functionality and capabilities of the system. TiVO has a very cool home media option that Directv doesn't support yet, which sucks. It allows you to share shows between TiVO's, listen to music, view pictures and schedule shows remotely. I'm working to get mine on the network with the upgraded hard disk and then I'll start messing with some of the other hacks. I'll keep you posted.