Oops

When I quickly configured sendmail to forward my email from my aber account to my Gmail account it would seem that vixie-cron started emailing out the results of the cron job that was being run every 2 minutes. Because sendmail was configured as being on the domain "aber.ac.uk" it was simply appending the username "root" and mailing it to "matt". So in effect is was emailing matt@aber.ac.uk and claiming to be root@aber.ac.uk. D'oh.

No wonder they emailed me, really... The cron runs every 2 minutes. Sendmail has been configured for 3 days and 7 hours, or there abouts. That works out at roughly 2370 emails. Because matt@aber.ac.uk isn't a valid email address the emails were bouncing and going back to the sender: Supposedly root@aber.ac.uk and so in essence my computer has sent root@aber 2370 emails over the last few days. Hmm. How better to get yourself noticed, eh?

Newbury

Well, I wasn't smashed to a pulp by any lorries on the way here and I arrived safely with my only minor concern being that the exhaust sounds like it's got a hole in it again *groan* I'll check it out when I have some time, but there's no way I can hope to afford a new exhaust until I get a job so I'll probably just have to patch it with exhaust tape.

I'm currently in the process of unpacking all my stuff. As you can probably work out for yourselves, I've just unpacked the laptop...

The exam went well yesterday, I wrote furiously for 2 hours - even after they said pens down. My final sentence was an illegible squiggle. My only concern was that it was too easy. Easy exams get marked very harshly in my experience. Not that it matters, even if I completely fail this module it won't change my grade. The only way it could change my grade is if I were to do exceptionally well in it, which I very much doubt I will.

I'm still shattered from the night of revision. Well, sleep deprivation is accumulative afterall. Liz looked exhausted this morning, I was shouting in my sleep apparently :( Hopefully I'll sleep better tonight, I'm guessing it's just a product of the stress I've had lately.

So here I am in Newbury, my new home. I'd better ring various companies and tell them that I've moved at some point, I always forget to do that.

Finished

I've just finished my degree and said goodbye to some of the best mates I've ever had. Now I'm about to move 180 miles away. This is fucking weird. Everything's changing in the space of less than half a day...

Eurgh

To quote Weebl: "I feel like the poop".

This is the worst caffeine come-down I've ever experienced. I feel like my brain has just been put through a mangler. I'm off to get a cup of tea to take the edge off it.

"Insert a valid cup of tea and press any key to continue."

Packing Finished

I've packed almost everything. The only stuff that remains are things going to charity, a load of clothes and my kitchen stuff. I can't take all of my clothes with me as I have only one suitcase; I left my hold-all in Newbury the last time I went down. D'oh. Not that it matters, there isn't really room to safely put another bag in there as I need my rear view mirror and both my side windows clear.

Tomorrow I will have to check the tyre pressures before setting off. I suspect the car weighs rather a lot more than it did earlier.

It's weird, my room echos while I type now :-s

Amazing What You Can Find

...while packing. Earlier I found, in a notepad, a "TODO" list. It was from around the end of January 2004 I think:

I just love the fact that I managed to mix the mundane with the bizarre. The thing about The Bay relates to a drunken night out I had at some point. Something pissed me off in The Bay, but I really can't remember for the life of me what. I forgot all about it, and had no recollection what-so-ever of it the next day. Then about a week or two later, my phone started randomly beeping. It was an alarm I had set to go off as a "reminder" which said, quite simply, "The Bay discriminates against English people". Seems that in my drunken stupor I'd set a reminder to make sure I didn't forget about how The Bay discriminate.

The memories of being angry came flooding back. I can remember sitting in The Bay being pissed off about it, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what had happened that pissed me off. And, as this todo shows, I obviously wanted to try and find out. That item wasn't ticked, even to this day I still don't know how The Bay discriminate against English people...!

Also I love the way I jump from "do laundry" to "build artificial neural network"! Bit of a change of gear there! :)

Happy Birthday

It's Liz's birthday, so a happy birthday to her. Unfortunately, due to having an exam tomorrow, I can't be there. Bah. On the other hand, tomorrow I am moving out of Aberystwyth. Yes, I shall be leaving as soon as I can after I've finished my exam. I've got to revise and pack during today and so far I've managed neither. Bollocks.

Ahhh less than 24 hours now until I leave. I can taste freedom.

Tomorrow is also our (Liz and my) anniversary which is part of the reason I am scarpering from Aberystwyth so quickly. We're planning on having a fair amount of beer which will be a suitably fitting end to 4 years of sobriety. Well okay, maybe that's not entirely true. Okay perhaps it's almost an outright lie... Although I've not been wasted for over a year: The last time was on my birthday last year when Burt kept buying me drinks all night and I, slightly stupidly, continued drinking them all night. This resulted in me vomiting blood when I got back to the flat, then passing out on the bathroom floor, and I've had the urge to be much more careful since then... Anyway my point is that I've not drank very much at all while I've been a student.

As stupid as it sounds I'm terrified about the drive tomorrow. It's tough to spend 4 hours driving from Aber to Newbury at the best of times, but with the car rammed full of my personal belongings it's going to be all the more risky. The car will be heavier which can lead to a whole host of problems, the car will become a target for thieves when I stop at the services and I'm just generally scared that after a year and a half of waiting to be in a position where I can actually make the move to Newbury that something could go wrong on the way there. It'd be oh so typical if I got smashed to a pulp by a sodding lorry on the way there.

I'm probably just being paranoid, I'm sure it'll be fine.

Anyway not sure how I got from Liz's birthday to being smashed by lorries on the motorway. Back on topic: Happy birthday Liz! :D

It's working, I ... think

I set up fetchmail, procmail and sendmail in such a way as to retrieve all mail from a given folder and then forward it on to Gmail. It seems to work, although I'm not 100% sure whether all of the emails are making it through or not. I think the Aberystwyth SMTP server limits the amount you can send in any given space of time because they seem to be arriving at the GMail side quite sporadically. Ah well, I'd rather most make it than none of them. Even 50% is better than nothing.

I'm impressed at GMail's thread handling actually, even with all of these forwarded emails it's still managing to get the threads right. Bravo, Gmail!

Anyway this is probably a good time to say that I now consider my @aber.ac.uk address as closed, I've updated my contacts page accordingly. If you normally email me @aber.ac.uk, then please update your address book. I don't plan on getting rid of my Gmail account, so you shouldn't need to update my details again.

I'm Going To Go Postal

I always wondered where that phrase came from and now I know. All I'm trying to do is batch-forward, batch-bounce, batch-redirect (whichever term you prefer) emails from my accounts to my GMail account as my aber account is closing soon, and hosting provider has moved too. But I can't find any way of moving emails without them all being bundled into one big email (I want them as individual emails on my Gmail account) or without them being sent as attachments (which kind of defeats the purpose of moving them to my Gmail account in the first place).

I've even gone so far as to try Pine because I read an article on how to do exactly this with it, but it's now refusing to connect to the server and, after one of these little fits, the IMAP server refuses to let me connect from anywhere. What's infuriating is that it was working for about 5 minutes, and after a lot of blank emails being forwarded I did eventually coax it into forwarding the 4 emails in my inbox. But then it died and I can't even get it to display a list of folders, never mind anything else.

So I tried looking for an extension for Thunderbird thinking that somebody must have already had to do this, but the Mozilla website refused to let me even look at the extensions page because my version of Firefox is 1 minor revision behind the latest update. So I had to resort to looking at some other website that lists Thunderbird extensions which didn't feature any such forwarding extensions.

I've even tried Sylpheed, a GTK+ email client that I installed a few weeks ago when Thunderbird went mental on me, and while it has a handy "redirect" feature which appears to do exactly what I need, it doesn't work on more than one file at a time! The forward options are "inline" and "as attachment". As attachments is useless to me, and "inline" creates one bloody big email from all your existing email which is also no fucking use to me.

I'm seriously running out of ideas now. In fact, I'm on the brink of just writing a fucking Perl script to connect to a server, get each email from each folder in turn, and forward them to my Gmail account.

Gah

I'm sick of the number of people who can't spell. The odd typo here and there or not being able to spell longer, more difficult words correctly is no big deal, but how the hell can someone confuse "wear" and "where"?! And why do people keep writing "ect" instead of "etc"? Do they also say "ectra" instead of "etcetera"?

Sometimes I honestly feel like reading things on the web is making me less intelligent. At some point I'm going to set up a filtering proxy that corrects stupid spelling errors so I don't have to look at them anymore.

4 DAYS!

4 days and then I'm finally out of here and can start living my life. God it's good to know that I'm very nearly finished. It's been hell on earth but it's nearly over. I'm going to get quite drunk on Wednesday.