grids for good

i've been running the UD Agent for 300 days, and wonder if this background task has found anything useful. every few days, i open the status window to watch the molecules spin .. and to see if it's looking for smallpox cures, or cancer cures (it's always one or the other). the grid.org website says it also looks for anthrax cures, although i've never seen that one running. they claim over 2 million devices worldwide are part of this grid. they might get a lot more if the software ran on anything but Microsoft Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0 (SP5+), 2000, XP.

Alas, time for a few minutes of mindless diversion before beginning my work day (well, beginning again .. I nosed around email after bowling last night, and again this morning when I woke). Spam is now about 50% of my work email (Mozilla's Bayesian filters help a lot), and Yahoo! flags so many false positives (over and over and over again) on my home email that I have to wonder what good SpamGuard really is. You'd think that once I tell Yahoo! that something isn't spam .. well, that they'd get the message. Not even.

Anyhoo, mindless diversion == seeing what amazon.com tossed into "Gene's Gold Box" today. I check that out about once every 4.2 weeks and sometimes click on an item for a deeper look, but i don't think i've purchased more than one item from there. My problem is that I like to minimize those shipping costs, so I commonly toss things into my Wish List and then buy them all at once. The Gold Box wants you to buy now so it doesn't fit my pattern.

My tax refund arrived in yesterday's snail mail. I've always chosen to file a paper return; I mailed this year's about April 3rd. So, the IRS held onto my money for about 30 days more. And to think The Boston Tea Party was held when the tax rate was 1%.