I have quite a few good rants built up, but I’m smack in the middle of redesigning and moving my Six Flags Atlantis Memorial page.

What brought that on was simple: Amazon.com didn’t send me a verification for my sister’s Christmas present.

Then I realized that Amazon was using my old Freenet address, which I rarely check anymore.

Then came the terrible realization that my Freenet account currently had no .forward file, and worse, hadn’t had one for some time.

So I logged in to the Freenet, and sure enough: Twenty-four thousand emails, 99% of them spam, 1% I that I really wanted to keep.

Well, normally this would be simple: use PINE mail to select on certain predictable (and usually naughty) words, and begin the mass deletion, right?*

Wrong.

I’m not sure if they have a governor that restricts cycles, or whether the machine is just so overworked that it’s not stable, or it’s just so slow that the threads are colliding.

But if you try to do any operation too big, it just kicks you out of PINE.

So over the course of performing a very large number of smaller batch deletes, I had time to consider whether it might be time to close up shop on the ol’ Freenet account and migrate the few remaining items (mostly the samples from the languishing but still progressing album Yellow Seven, the Atlantis Memorial, and maybe the Bad Poetry page) over to lucas-photo.com.

And that got me thinking that the Atlantis page is suffering from code rot anyway, and probably needs a complete overhaul in any case, lest someone see it and think I still write code like that (shudder).

So I’m rebuilding it.

So stay tuned.


* Now if you didn’t know PINE could do this, here’s the info:

  1. Press ; (semicolon) to start selecting.
  2. Choose a type of selection (I usually use T for text)
  3. Choose where the text lives (usually S for subject)
  4. Enter a snippet of the identifying text at the prompt (e.g. Prescripti or Cial)
  5. PINE will select them and report how many it found.
  6. Hit A for Apply, D for Delete, and X for eXpunge. Bye bye spam! Terminated with prejudice.