So, I flew

I flew out to Chicago tonight. I remembered all the reasons I hated flying (there were obnoxious brats running around the gate area as the flight was endlessly delayed, turbulence shook the plane so much that the attendants had to sit down for about half of the flight, and United seems to be completely incapable of delivering baggage to the carousel they tell you to go to at O'Hare).

I drove directly to the hospital and then around to the end of the hospital since it was after 10:00 and all of the main doors were closed.

It was the quietest, emptiest emergency room I've seen in years. I've frequented this emergency room off and on over the years and have never seen it totally empty as it was tonight.

My mom is in the Surgical Heart Unit, which of course is at the far opposite end of the hospital from the emergency room. I knew this because it's the same unit my father was in after his bypass in 1997.

She's heavily sedated, intevated (someone correct me if the spelling's off). Tonight they are to put in a central or main line. She's in congestive heart failure and also has something called adult respiratory distress syndrome. Basically she can't breathe on her own, her lungs are just not absorbing oxygen. The ventilation is running at high-pressure to literally force O₂ into her lungs.

So, not good. I'm staying at a hotel in town (partly to be on the "right" side of the tracks, since it's possible to be on the wrong side of the railroad when a long train comes through). Pat is here as well, though he's staying at the house.

Hotel WiFi annoyances

So, I'm staying at the Double Tree Guest Suites in Downers Grove. One attaction (a key attaction) was that they have broadband. Now, I interpreted that to mean they had broadbad. What they really mean is that they have slow-speed WiFi access at $10 / day (I knew about the rat). Even with excellent connectivity I'm getting iMb/minute rates.

Also, like the XV Beacon in Boston, the I/T folks here thought they'd be helpful and filter port 25. Port 25 is used by 99.999% of the mailers in the world to transmit (rather than receive mail). Here they intercept it and redirect it to their own mail relay.

The problem is two fold: one, this is an unexpected behavour (it's not documented anyhere that I can find). Two, if you are configured to use authenticated SMTP to send mail, you will get all sorts of errors appearing to be from your mail relay asking you to change your password.

In reality you're getting the error messages from the hotel system. Since the hotel system doesn't known about your userid/password for authenticated SMTP, it rejects the request, but with headers that make the error appear to be from your ISP, not the hotel's ISP.

I managed to create a workaround: I set up an ssh tunnel to the Mac G4 in Brooklyn. I forward localhost:25 traffic to pittsburgh.gothic-egg.net:25 and it seems to work.

Frustration with Outlook XP

I've been using Microsoft Outlook XP since leaving IBM in 2001, for both personal as well as "work" email. Generally I have had no complaints, but I do run it in absolute paranoia mode (turning off most "helpful" features that have turned into security holes).

Oddly, my primary reason for using had been the integrated calendar, though really these days that's not that necessary since I'm the one scheduling meetings, if any, and don't really need to integrate with anyone else's calendar.

Anyway, in an end of year cleanup, I went and moved all of my "work" email into an IMAP setup on artific.com, figuring that 1) I'd be able to access all of the mail remotely through Pair’s webmail setup, and 2) Outlook allows allowed you to keep IMAP folders offline.

Past tense. Outlook 2000 allowed you to keep a copy of IMAP folders offline. Outlook XP has been enhanced to only support this for users of Microsoft Exchange.

Embraced and extended out of use.

So, now I really have no reason to use Outlook since the one feature I'd used and relied on in the past has been enhanced out of the product.

When I have decent connectivity again I'm going to look at Evolution (I think that's the name).