Nothing smells of sewage. The heating works. My clothes are clean. According to the maintenance guy who fixed it, the water heater is allegedly not going to be exploding as planned. The insurance provider has been sufficiently browbeaten so as to provide coverage for fixing some of this.

It's been nice to visit with friends while I'm here.

I even had some time to comment upon an interesting thread on gus's weblog.

I'm returning on the 2nd: happiness is an empty suitcase.

The heating will be (mostly) out for the rest of my stay here. The repairs will be expensive and time consuming. There are even more problems with the plumbing. What more can I say.

I'd say I'm watching Mrs. Li's house collapse in slow-motion, but it's not even particularly slow...

Now the heating has gone out. Luckily there are enough space-heaters here for all the inhabited rooms.

Anyone taking bets on the next part of the sky to fall? Water and heat have already gone, so ... power? cable?

Last night I had some minor success implementing the "Public Page" in Quotient. Ever the wily adversary, the malevolent universe opted to respond by flooding the Li family basement with sewage.

Does anyone with a karma-meter or whatever know how to measure whatever I've done wrong? Or who among my close associates is bringing all this bad luck? I'm not a proud man, and I'm not above breaking a few kneecaps to make my life more convenient.

Thanks.

I received a most interesting piece of spam today:

Subject: Your IP was logged

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Downloading of Movies, MP3s and Software is illegal and punishable by law.

We hereby inform you that your computer was scanned under the IP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX . The
contents of your computer were confiscated as an evidence, and you will be indicated.
In the next days, you'll get the charge in writing.
In the Reference code: #42106, are all files, that we found on your computer.

The sender address of this mail was masked, to fend off mail bombs.


- You get more detailed information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation -FBI-
- Department for "Illegal Internet Downloads", Room 7350
- 935 Pennsylvania Avenue
- Washington, DC 20535, USA
- (202) 324-3000

The IP number, which was elided to protect whatever poor unfortunate might actually have that address, was elided, but it's outside the dynamic range of my ISP.

Attached to this was a screensaver, "refcode42106.scr", obviously a virus.

The funny thing is, if I found the sender of this particular fraudulent message and hollowed out and bleached their otherwise worthless skull to hold my pencils and other knicknacks in, I'm the one that would go to jail.