I’ve noticed recently that there’s a common theme that occurs in life, or at least, my life. I’ll do something really expensive, e.g. move house, go on holiday, walk past a chocolate shop etc. and then be completely surprised when something necessarily expensive happens soon afterwards. This appears to be happening at the moment, where most of the expense of moving house, sorting out bills etc is hitting my just at the time when I want to start thinking about saving for Christmas. As a result, I’ve worked out how much I can allow myself to spend in November and it’s got a minus sign in front of it. Not good.

Still, this time of year does have various pleasantries that make it worthwhile. I went to Alexandra Palace last night to see a rather good fireworks thingie. Being billed as “the biggest display London’s ever seen”, it was a little amusing that during the display, you could see the slightly bigger and more expensive display going on at Victoria (I think) in the background. At least I know where to go next year.

I’ve also been having email issues. A while back, I decided that running my own email server-thing was far too complicated and that I should just leave it down to Google. No more having to back up email, no more playing with spam filters, GMail would sort everything out for me. This was especially attractive given the rumour that Google were soon to provide IMAP capabilities to GMail. I was happy, for about a month. Then the spam started to roll in. I eventually arrived at the conclusion that GMail’s spam filtering is crap. I get a lot of spam per day (about 3,500 messages in a last few days alone) and evidently GMail isn’t good enough to be able to filter out really obvious stuff. So I packed it in, and gone back to running my own server. I might have to spend more frustrating time fixing it when it breaks, but at least I can tune the spam filter once and then forget about it.

On another note, I’m doing some research into Lighttpd. I’m using that at home on virtual boxes with practically no memory and it’s hugely faster than apache. Might try and host this site on there and run some tests.

I’m now off to spend no money in Waitrose.