LJ and mail problems

Apparently I'm one of the lucky folks on the MadCow cluster, the one that was broken more badly than all the others. Oh joy. Glad it's back up earlier than predicted, anyway.

To add insult to injury (well, injury to insult is more like it), my mail provider seems to have stopped receiving incoming mail several hours into Shabbat. After Shabbat, when I discovered the problem, I set up pobox.com to mirror to a second address, but I'm missing the mail that arrived up to that point. I hope it's in a queue somewhere and not gone forever. I also hope they respond to my report soon; while I realize it's Sunday, it's been (at this writing) 16 hours since I made the report and well more than 30 hours since the failure occurred.

A service that I would really like to have, but lack the technical skills to implement myself, is an inbox buffer. The problem with mirroring the pobox redirection to the mailbox that comes with my DSL is that if I don't remember to clean it out periodically, it fills up and starts bouncing. I could use gmail on the theory that a gig is forever, but the vast majority of my mail is spam and I don't want it getting in the way of my real mail if I actually want to use that service for searching. So what I'd really like to have is an email address that receives mail and automatically deletes it a week later; that gives me a backup that I can check if for any reason my primary email is unavailable, but it runs on auto-pilot the rest of the time.

Vaguely on the subject of mail, I got (physical) mail this week from the ACLU telling me it's time to renew my membership. Just one problem: I'm not a member of the ACLU. I really expected better behavior out of folks who claim to be fighting the good fight. Deceptive marketing practices do not endear them to me.

a torah thought (Bo, but plagues in general)

Saturday's torah reader pointed out something interesting. During the description of the plagues, we are told repeatedly that God "hardened Paro's heart". (That's the usual translation, anyway.) This raises all sorts of disturbing questions about free will and teshuvah (repentance). But Bruce pointed out that while the first word used does indeed mean "harden", the words used later in the narrative are "kavod" -- "make heavy" and "chazak" -- "strengthen". (I might have the vowels a little off in the Hebrew.) Bruce's point is that God was just letting Paro do what he wanted to do anyway, not manipulting him. That does lead to a different interpretation!