The upset mind

Sometimes life is just too much to handle, everything at once. When there seems to be no right answers, and nothing to hold on to, everything is uncertain, the knowledge that everything is temporary can be a relief.
When I get emotionally overwhelmed I calm myself by the mantra "It is just a feeling, it will pass" and I thank Philip for reminding me.

Image courtesy: Hold your head up, NYtimes

Scandinavia

I toes curled up as if I was hearing nails on a blackboard when Philip said that you can "...almost count Lithuania as Scandinavian". It made me immediately object and I sought the aid of Wikipedia to clarify and rectify the facts about Scandinavia. The term is used by many and often used wrongly, at least in the eyes of the Scandinavians themselves. Scandinavia is a term for describing collectively the countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which makes it a geographical term although these countries have many other cultural, ethnical and historical ties.

Check out the Wikipedia entry on Scandinavia or
Illustration courtesy: this clickable map of Scandinavia

Sending spam mails

I would classify myself as a spammer now - even if by accident.
I received one of those numerous "Join my network" kind of emails. Curious as I am, I went to the site to check it out, though I knew already that I do not really need more professional networks than LinkedIn. This new network site is called Konnects. As a service, they offer to check if anyone of your contacts are already in their network. I let them check my gmail contacts by using my gmail account login, and I could see that only two of my contacts are presently using Konnects. Then their site offered to send invitations to all the contacts on my list, and I decided "No, I do not want to bother anyone with this new site", so I deselected all from the list. Now at this point I must have made a mistake, or the website has a bug, for what happened is, that Konnects sent invitations to everybody in my contact list. This includes not only emails of my friends, family and colleagues, but also every email address that has ever sent mail to me on my gmail address, including mailing lists and support and no-reply email addresses.
Now you might think that at least it was a single event, no harm done in the long run. But, Konnects did not only send one, but on average three invites to each email address! I felt something had to be done, so I wrote an email to all my contacts, excusing for the spam behaviour of the Konnects invitation mailer. However, it turns out, gmail has a limit for sending emails. If you send more than 500 mails, they will block you for 24hrs! So now I am not only a spammer, I am also locked out of my favourite mail program for 24hrs, making it impossible to reply directly to all the mail I receive for the rest of the day. :(

*Sigh* at least, as Philip says with a smile: "It could be worse!"

Illustration courtesy: Linuxfocus.org

a deamon with OCD

I asked Philip if he knew what this gam_server program does, since it is constantly taking up 100% CPU. He answered "Aaargh, kill all gam_server!". Apparently it does not know when it should finish checking file associations for consistency... a deamon with OCD?