Month: April 2006

I am writing this with my hands shaking, because I’ve just recieved The Greatest News ever since Maxim was born.

My naturalization application has been approved. Yeeehaaaa! I am one step away from getting Cyprus citizenship, and that one step is only about paperwork.

I have spent slightly more than 10 years in Cyprus. I’ve passed several stages both mentally and beaurocractically. From – I hate this place to I love this place. From tourist, through student, to employed alien. I’ve seen both old pink slips and new pink slips. ‘Final’ mark was printed on all pink slips that I got since January of 1999. ‘Final. Not extendable’ mark was printed on all pink slips that I got for the last three or four years.

But now, all of it is behind me. I won’t have to worry about being thrown out of this country ever again.

There is a lot to do too. I have to learn Greek now. I have to get Cypriot driving license. I have to study all legal implications of my status change. I have to find out all financial benefits – taxes, loans, mortgages, etc. I have to grow proper roots…

Today, though, I am glad and quietly celebrating. Major celebrations will follow, when I’ll have Cyprus passport in my hands. Thanks to everyone who helped and is helping in the process!

After playing for some time with DNS Stuff, I decided to configure SPF for mamchenkov.net domain.  I don’t have a lot of expectations, but I hope that it’ll help to fight all that SPAM that we have on the web.  As a side effect, hopefully emails to Hotmail and Yahoo! will start working again.  I don’t have a lot of those myself, but a few people who email from my server complain once in a while.

If you are interested, my SPF string looks like this: IN TXT "v=spf1 a ~all".  It was extremely easy to create using this wizard.

This is the first in a row of changes for my mail server setup.  Planned works will cover better anti-SPAM and separation of users and mailboxes into domains (right now everyone can use any hosted domain).

Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements, or if you have noticed any problems.

With every passing year more and more websites participate in April Fool’s Day by publishing fake news, announcements, products, and press releases. There’s lots of fun on the Web on any given day, but twice so on the 1st of April. There are so many of these jokes floating around, that some people even collect them into long lists with embedded ads.

While reading through one of these lists, I came across this joke about WordPress and TextPattern merger. That was a funny one. But it wasn’t the joke that got me thinking, but rather the blog entry in itself. If you scroll down that entry, you’ll see all pingbacks and trackbacks from other sites than linked to it. Not everyone understood that it was a joke. Some people took it serioiusly. And now they look like fools (isn’t it how you’re supposed to look on 1st of April anyway?). Some of them had even deleted posts that provided the pingback, but from the pingback excerpt on WordPress site you can actually see if the joke was understood or not. Morale: if you made a fool out of yourself, and proved so with pingback/trackback – don’t make it worse by deleting the content. Internet forgets nothing.

Gladly, I didn’t spend enough time on the Web yesterday to leave the trail of my stupidity. But I did so last few years, and will definitely do so in the years to come. Somehow, April Fool’s Day always gets me by surprise.

What about you? Have you been fooled? Have you fooled anyone? What’s the best prank you’ve ever pulled?