Even though I'm quite happy with blogger.de I consider buying a domain and getting a "real host" of my own. The main reason is that I want to get control over a mail-server of my own rather than a web-server. I want to get rid of spam and virus mails before I download them.

Probably my needs will grow with the new possibilities so I'll need administrative access to the machine (SSH, of course). On the other hand I do not want to be responsible for the core OS myself. Sounds as if a "managed root-server" or just a virtual machine (like a Solaris zone or a FreeBSD jail) would be fine. Disk-space requirements are low, but the bandwidth should keep up with new waves of virus mails - something like a few-thousand mails of 10 to 100k each count up quickly.

If you can recommend somebody - preferably in Germany, but any hoster who can deal with German banks and doesn't insist on a credit-card would work - please drop me a mail.

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At least since yesterday Bloglines claims my feed was invalid. Feedvalidator says "This is a valid RSS feed".

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Last week somebody called me on the phone to discuss some ASF topics and wanted to send me an email with details. Unfortunately he forgot to tell me how I could contact him and I never received that mail. It's quite possible that the mail vanished in my spam folder and I just didn't see it.

Maybe you are reading my blog?

The easiest way for a mail to end up in one of my spam folders (unless you are white-listed) is an attached MS Office document, ZIP archive, .EXE, .SCR or similar stuff with a > 99% probability of containing a virus (about 400 per day ATM, has been far worse once). If it gets past this, my statistical spam filter gets a look at the mail and is very likely to flag it as spam if it contains HTML. I'll look through my spam folders at least once per day, but if the mail has a meaningless subject (like "information"), I won't even notice it.

So if you are waiting for a response from me, please retry with a plain text mail and a subject that will stick out of the spam. You shouldn't include the words "Rolex" or "soft tabs" in the mail body either.

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It has been as strange as I expected. Carrying around shelves and washing machines isn't really a way to relax and living between boxes that remind you you need to look into them isn't either. Live is slowly getting back to normal, slowly.

Between all the moving related activities we managed to spend a lot of quality time with the kids. So much they even didn't complain about the lack of TV.

The satellite dish arrived in time to get at least a glimpse of coverage of the Olympic Games and I managed to see the US men basketball team win over Spain (which I didn't expect) and lose against Argentina. I have to agree with Mark Cuban that the main weakness of the US team has been a lack of decent shooters. Stephon Marbury demonstrated this against Spain quite clearly when he started to hit some shots.

We even managed to get our DSL line activated last week and now have to get accustomed to the speed difference after upgrading from a 28.8k modem.

Back from vacation I'm having a hard time to decide which of the mailing lists I dropped last months are important enough to re-subscribe to. I guess Gump problems are going to drive this again.

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Today is my last day in the office before I start for three weeks of vacation, but this time things are going to be different. Instead of going away to the sea (usually here), we'll move to our new house.

We are new house owners, in fact we'll have a house for just the four of us for the first time ever, and things are pretty exciting, not just for the kids. I expect quite a bit of chaos for the next couple of days, but after that everything is supposed to be real fun.

We rushed a few things and as a side effect won't have internet access for a while, we don't even have a phone yet - and no TV either. I think I'll enjoy that as well.

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