Today’s blog is a follow up to email 101 – The Basics This is a subject often overlooked by those who don’t understand the mechanics of the email system but it is critical for proper email transport. The reason it is overlooked is that it is really considered part of the TCP/IP network that forms……

I work in the field of high volume mail delivery and I get a lot of questions about how email actually works. Actually, more often I am presented with a statement that is inaccurate and have to correct someone who thinks they know how it works. So to save myself from more ad-hoc explanation and……

There is a revolution happening planet-wide – unfortunately the message is getting mangled. I was in Manhattan during the Occupy Wall Street rally on October 5th (have the flyer to prove it) and the message at that time seemed clear – enforce fair taxation on the uber-rich so “they pay their fair share” into to……

The recent passing of Steve Jobs jarred open a lot of memories and emotion for me. While Jobs and I never actually met in person, our paths crossed numerous times and he had a profound affect on my life. Like many IT professionals my age, the late nineteen seventies was fertile ground for new inventions,……

I was already a fan of The White Stripes, but I have just finished watching “Under Great White Northern Lights” and am now completely over the edge. If you have an hour and thirty five minutes to take in this great rockumentary, I highly recommend it. If you are Canadian and love music, it is……

I did not realize how particularly unique my skill set was until I started the search for more people like me to help spread out work load. Before you think this is going down the line of an arrogant “I’m so awesome” rant, you should understand that I really don’t think so and I am……

I saw this on the Colbert Report last night (thanks Stephen) and I have to (*have to*) have one! I can not believe I have not seen this in my news feeds yet. Every robot building shop needs one of these. What am I ranting about? The Maker Bot Thing-O-Matic! [http://www.makerbot.com/] This thing is tres……

Ah… Yes… Spring!… Birds are singing , plants are blooming, snow is melting, and robots are roaming. Robots? Really? YES! May 14th 2011 will mark the 22nd Western Canada Robot Games and will be held at the Calgary AeroSpace Museum. I am so excited. Young and old robot enthusiasts all over western Canada are gearing……

Every year I enter the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. This is a writing competition where you are pitted against other writers around the globe in 2 rounds. Round 1 gives you 8 days to write, edit, and submit a short story where the genre and subject are picked randomly. The winners of each genre……

Do you use ClamAV in a Linux environment? I do, and if you do then you know every once in a while you get the following alert: ClamAV update process started at Fri Mar 4 08:52:27 2011WARNING: Your ClamAV installation is OUTDATED!WARNING: Local version: 0.96.5 Recommended version: 0.97DON’T PANIC! Read http://www.clamav.net/support/faqmain.cld is up to date……

Print media is dead – let’s give it a decent burial and move on. It’s confounding to me that daily newspapers still exist in this day of instant information. How can a daily printed newspaper possibly hope to deliver any relevant information when the news is already old by the time the presses are fired……

I awoke the other day with five words rambling around in my head.“Be awesome – Change the world”. It probably comes from several conversations I have had lately with friends about the state of the universe, and my own disappointment over some of the technical progress we have made (or not made) as a species……

Happy Hanukkah, festive Pancha Ganapati, contemplative Eid ul-Adha, joyous Yule, eventful Saturnalia, but most of all… Merry Christmas to all my friends, colleagues, associates and readers. Yes I said “Christmas” – go ahead and call the authorities, write me up, throw the cuffs on. You can haul me away in irons if you want to,……

I am not usually one to jump on “the band waggon” and parrot what every other blogger is saying, but I am going to make an exception in this case because it is important – really, really important. Within the high volume mail industry there are companies known as ESPs or Email Service Providers, who……

If you are reading this then there is a fairly high probability that you were a teen in the eighties and survived to tell about it. If so then you were born in the late sixties or early seventies and most likely just barely remember the fall of Saigon in April 1975 that signalled the……

Last year we had a huge crop of raspberries. Large, juicy, tart raspberries by the bucketful. These are great berries and taste incredibly good with ice cream. The berry patch is all mature plants and they have produced volumes for years… except this year. This year we collected five, and I don’t mean buckets, I……