I should be asleep now.

I've been awake since 8:00 am. I should have fallen asleep hours ago but all my worries are keeping me awake.

Mail Problems.

Something strange is going on in email land. *I* think its something wrong with wiznet.ca's handling of mail. They think its something wrong in my setup. We've both made changes in the last two days. I added a new email account, they've done any number of things. Whats worse is that only *some* of the mail is going missing. I can't figure it out, and they are unsure.  My logs show me The only real info I have is that of the six addresses that resolve from 'mail.wiznet.ca', one times out, one refuses mail and one gives a disk full error. The other 3 seem to be up, so I'm assuming that the mail problem is due to some internal misconfiguration of theirs.

Oh well, they tell me they've opened a trouble ticket with a senior technician, so maybe someone will look into it.

I think that confirms its not MY problem.

I just had a thought and went in and changed one line in my mail server config. Now all mail destined for my LJ notification mailbox gets sent to my yahoo.com mailbox instead of my regular inbox. I just did a few test sendings and they all went through to yahoo correctly. Y'all can try sending a few dozen comments my way, to ensure that the thing works, but for now I think I'm getting comments again.

Only the pronoid survive.

Here's a good article on why 'survival of the fittest' is often 'survival of the nicest'. I was particularly struck by this quote:

At the conference in Davos, Cronin illustrated her point about the power of altruism with an example of the new Darwinism: "In Britain, blood is given free of charge. Donors are proud to be known as good, altruistic people. There is never a shortage, and the quality of blood is very high because the healthiest people give blood. In America, it's the opposite. People are frequently paid to give blood, and so you've got two big problems: The quality of blood is bad, because drug addicts and the poor have an incentive to donate, and there tend to be many shortages of blood.

"Two years ago, there was talk in Britain about selling blood to make money for the new blood-donor service. Immediately, there was an uproar. People didn't want to give blood, even though that money was to go back into the blood-donor service. People felt it was no longer a gift relationship.

"The number of people giving blood dropped dramatically in the weeks following that decision. The currency changed. Therefore, the emotions changed. When someone gives you money, you don't feel the same emotions that you feel when someone demonstrates a kindness. We are too quick to interpret everything as marginal that does not fit our economic model," says Cronin. But the elements of the story of the British blood bank and the essential factors of altruism are starting to show up everywhere in the new economy.

So, setting a price on things can make it less valuable. Something to remember.