Max asked me how I was doing against my target of 1 million metres on my Concept2 rowing machine this calendar year. Well, the marathon helped to get me back to a week behind target, but as I type I am 31,000m behind the “pace boat”. In laymens terms (and at my snail like pace) that means about 2 hours 15 minutes of rowing. So if I do a 10,000 for the next four nights in a row I will be in the right sort of place. But 10,000 is a long way – and three in three days is hard work. Graphical progress against target below (courtesy of my OpenOffice.org spreadsheet):

Standing here, drenched in sweat and barely able to stand straight. Not a pretty site. Why? For some unkown reason I have been posessed with the urge to row a marathon (42,195m) on my Concept2 Model C rower. The first two hours were fine, but I nearly died over the last 90 minutes. My time? A grueling 3 hours, 18 minutes, 43.9 seconds. Believe me, the 0.9 seconds is important.

Thursday morning: I ache all over – the severe buttock pain from last night has lost its edge, but my legs are ruined, and I feel like I have rowed about 26 miles. Funny that. Good preparation for the cricket season on Saturday. Normally the first 45 overs of wicket keeping is desperately hard, but hopefully the 20,000m a week I am rowing will take the edge off that.

I have started playing with PHP-Nuke. I think everyone should run their own portal. In my case I am planning to set it up for my cricket club, and run it from the garage. It looks pretty useful, but with a bewildering array of options. I will work it out, but is a system of this nature overkill for a cricket club with 50 members?

Oh dear. I now have sky+. As if Murdoch wasn’t rich enough already. But, it is a sensational piece of kit.

SpamAssassin Rule Emporium (SARE) Finally I find a site that helps me with my own SpamAssassin rules. I have created the rules below. I have the spam level set to 3.0 on my ClarkConnect box at home which seems pretty accurate. I have it set to 7.0 on the mail server at icdsoft.com.

Of course, my regular expreessions knowledge is woeful, but with Max’s help I have refined the rules a bit. I am getting very high accuracy now, though one did slip through today that was pure HTML and about “reducing debt”. I feel another rule coming on…

header   OldManse_Dodgy_From1 From =~ /@email.com/i

describe OldManse_Dodgy_From1 email.com is dodgy.

score    OldManse_Dodgy_From1 0.9


body     OldManse_Priice /priice/i

describe OldManse_Priice Priice? Only spammers spell it like that...

score    OldManse_Priice 2.0


body     OldManse_Meds1 /meds/i

describe OldManse_Meds1 Meds?  Not a UK word.

score    OldManse_Meds1 2.0


body     OldManse_Meds2 /medication/i

describe OldManse_Meds2 Medication?  Are you sure?

score    OldManse_Meds2 1.0


body     OldManse_Meds3 /drugs/i

describe OldManse_Meds3 drugs?  Are you sure?

score    OldManse_Meds3 0.5


body     OldManse_Meds4 /viagra|vicodin/i

describe OldManse_Meds4 Viagra or Vicodin - might be in a joke.

score    OldManse_Meds4 0.5


body     OldManse_Meds5 /v\.?(.\.|[^i])a\.?g\.?r\.?a/i

describe OldManse_Meds5 Disguised Viagra.!

score    OldManse_Meds5 5.0


body     OldManse_Meds6 /v\.?(.\.|[^i])\.?c\.?o\.?d\.?i\.?n/i

describe OldManse_Meds6 Disguised Vicodin.

score    OldManse_Meds6 5.0


body     OldManse_Purchase1 /p\.u\.r\.c\.h\.a\.s\.e/i

describe OldManse_Purchase1 p.u.r.c.h.a.s.e?  Yeah, right.

score    OldManse_Purchase1 2.0


body     OldManse_Savings1 /s\.aving\.s/i

describe OldManse_Savings1 s.aving.s?  Yeah, right.

score    OldManse_Savings1 2.0


score	RCVD_IN_SORBS	1.0

score	RCVD_IN_RFCI	1.0


# John Bokma's blacklist - use at your own risk

# Last update: Thu Feb 12 19:58:40 2004 GMT

# See http://johnbokma.com/spam/blacklist.txt for the latest version

# See http://johnbokma.com/spam/spamdomains.html for an HTML version



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