Just watched Loic's speech at the World Economic Forum: it was quite good. I can't wait to meet him in London.

Tonight Slovenia and other 14 countries will join the UE. I have been living on the border for the last 33 years. Tomorrow the border will still be there but it will be a much different one, easier to cross for people, transparent to goods and services.

Yes, this is a big deal. :-)

It's my birthday. Again. 33. Whew...

This means that it's also the birthday of a lot of other people I know (our parents must have been happy and relaxed on those hot August nights ;-).

Happy birthday to us all.

This trick has already been covered before, but since I forgot about it and you might have forgotten too, it's worth mentioning here: if you use Apple's Mail.app for your email, putting the junk filter back in training mode for a couple of days will significantly improve its performance.

I had noticed that a whole bunch of messages were slipping trough the filter, including many "Check out this document" virus-related ones.

Yesterday I set the application back in training mode (under Preferences > Junk Mail). I manually flagged incoming messages which were not automatically recognized as spam before deleting them for a while.

Now the filter is working much better. I put it back in automatic mode. If you are seeing too much spam in your inbox, it's an experiment worth trying.

I have just installed a beta version of Proteus 4. I did loose a bunch of ICQ contacts but no big deal. The new version is quite good considering it's a beta, definetly an improvement on the previous version.

I have been using Proteus since, I think, version 1.0: it's a very cool too, really.

The application works even if you don't pay for a license (all you have to do is click trough a dialog at startup). I've been meaning to pay for a Proteus license forever, but every time I thought "if only they would fix that little annoying bug..." and postponed. Now we are at version 4, a lot of new features, still are some annoying bugs, but this time I'll pay. As soon as it gets out of beta.

On May 12th I'm going to be in London to attend to Loïc UK blogger dinner.

Unfortunately there's no way to get to Amesterdam from here at a low cost (it doesn't necessarily have to cost 0.01 EUR... I could also spend 10! ;-), so I won't be able to go to Scripting.com dinner.

But with Dave riding around Europe by train there might be other chances...

In the last few months I have been getting more and more interested in guitar playing. It all started with GarageBand: soon after installing the software I realized that I needed to play some instrument to have more fun.

I had already payed guitars in the past, but never studied seriously: as a kid spending all that time exercising is usually not a priority.

But apparently this time the passion is sticking. After buying my first electric guitar back in February (a low cost Yamaha ERG 121), last saturday I brought home the beauty you see here on the right (it's an Ibanez AFS75T, still considered a low cost instrument but a quite beautiful one imho).

I still have to study and practice a lot before being able to publish some music here, but I'm enjoing every little bit of the process. These things are incredibly sexy, the addiction and lust that I knew from electronic gadgets is nothing compared to this.

My mail is out this morning. If you've sent an email and are waiting for a response, well, there's nothing I can do until it comes back on. "It's even worse than it appears." [Scripting News]

I'm more or less in the same situation. And my email works. Well, kinda.

I have spent the last 10 days almost completely off-line. Coming back yesterday I found more than 1000 spam or virus related messages waiting for me in my mailbox.

It's not only that email is broken, it's simply not reliable anymore. I might have missed important messages because they have been killed by my anti-spam application (no way I'm going to go trough those 1000, I have already deleted them) or they might be simply be sitting there, lost in the very loud background noise.

Let's get back to the early email days: if you are sending me an email, call me immediately on the phone to warn me ;->