6 years ago on that day, I was living in the very apartment that a crane fell on and took the life of 31 year-old Microsoft Attorney, Matthew Ammon. I stayed in this top floor apartment courtesy of AT&T Wireless as part of a relocation package when I moved here from Columbus, OH. During the six months I lived there, I never forgot about that damn crane that stood high in the abandoned lot just across the street but never imagined it would come down like this.

(Photos from King 5 News)

[EDIT: I found a collection of photos of this tragedy on Flickr HERE.]

After some very expensive power outages (lost work days) and a 5 day Comcast outage, I’m back online at 7:31 pm PST. Sorry everyone for not answering e-mails but I’ll get to those as soon as possible.

Ok, it looks like maybe I’m not so crazy after all. Excluding the cluster this site resides on, I manage 13 Unix/Linux servers all of which process mail and since the end of September, spam has been going through the roof. I mean through THE ROOF. I am not alone. In a normal day, my Spam Assassin installations catch anywhere from 10,000-20,000 pieces of spam. Though I’m able to keep it out of people’s mail boxes, spam has a real cost.

For one, CPU power- it takes a bunch to perform bayesian analysis on each message and drop it into the appropriate bucket. Two, disk space. Most of my customers don’t want to see spam but I must leave every message on the server for at least 30 days in case the filter gets overzealous or they think they might have missed something.

Just on this blog alone, I’ve seen a huge explosion of comment spam. Where I normally get 100 spam messages a day, I’m now getting 350-500. Thank god for Askimet! or this site would have been shuddered long ago.

I wonder what the end game is for this situation as it cannot keep growing at this pace. Something’s gotta give…

4:12 AM: Sally wakes us up vomiting large amounts of blood all over the bed

4:51 AM: I try to go back to sleep but abandon the idea at 5:25 and got in the shower

6:10 AM: Arrive at work and find my new cube is not to my liking. It’s fine and all but the location on the floor bugs me.

8:00 AM: Paid close to $10,000 to settle the medical bills from the pneumonia I had in 2005 (I had insurance but they claimed this was a pre-existing condition so they sued me. This was a settlement for quite a bit less than they had originally wanted).

11:30 AM: Go to Fred Meyer to get some headphones for work and take out $100 cash back at the self serve register to pay a friend back for concert tickets. I walked off without the cash.

1:31 PM: I write this post.

Nothing really that unusual, but for some reason, I have this nagging anxiety that I cannot pin to anything. I just feel really uneasy. About everything.

Reminds me of a line from Keane’s Everybody’s Changing:

So little time
Try to understand that I’m
Trying to make a move to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody’s changing
And I don’t feel the same

This too shall pass, however.

Updates will be slow as the usual fall storms bring power outages to Fall City once again. I also had some problems upgrading my LAN to gigabit ethernet (100 mbps wasn’t cutting it anymore- seriously) which required me to do some significant recabling and the installation of two new switches and one router.