I had a nice weekend with some exploration. We finally had some decent weather, in the mid-forties if that helps you to understand how much my standards have fallen, and so on Saturday we went to check out the Lower East Side since we need to decide on a longer term place to live. On the map it looked promising, since there is a nice long oceanfront park, the part we headed for was not hip and it was a bit far from the subway for Manhattan. So we were hoping it would be decent and cheap, and Zabel could bike to work. Well the park was nice enough, but there were neverending, massive government housing projects as far as we went along the water. These people were getting a really sweet deal, and there were unbelievable numbers of units. 20 stories tall, a few buildings deep, and they went on and on. I just would not be comfortable living next to these, even though the neighboring area looked OK. I think I am just too Orange County to make that transition. So we walked on to explore Alphabet City which is a possibility and then SoHo which is not in our price range.

Today (Sunday) we went to a massive sprawling art exhibition with loads of different mediums and styles and it was just a big free for all. Everyone could find stuff they liked and so we spent a few hours there until it all began to look the same. Reminded me a lot of the art exhibition at Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia, only it was not nearly free.

My computer underwent 3 exciting changed this weekend. I installed half a GB of RAM, which I am not certain if it is buggy or not yet, I am suspicious of a new bug I have during bootup. I got a sound cable from Richard for my TV card, so now I can hear as well as watch TV on my computer. And finally I got finally downloaded a spam killing program. It is called Mailwasher, and can be downloaded free at www.mailwasher.net and let me tell you, it is amaaaazing. I realised on Saturday that I was getting something like 40 junk mails a day, and even with DSL it is very annoying to see you have new mail, only to find out so often that it is spam. So I finally decided it was time to try this program which Katy Pearce had told me about while I was in Armenia.

I did not understand exactly how this program worked while I was in Armenia so I did not think it was appropriate for there, but it turns out it is very appropriate everywhere and absolutely ideal for Armenia. This program goes to your mail account and looks at the messages first, getting the message subject, sender and a bit of text. Then you can decide what is real mail and what is junk. Now here is the beauty of it. The ones you decide are junk mail get bounced back to the sender, who thinks your e-mail account is closed, plus the program "learns" that that message is junk mail and tells you such in the future. It also tells you if a message has a virus, and all these messages get removed from your server and bounced if you like, and you never have to download the actual message! It is just beautiful. So I will let you know how the progress goes, but I am quite hopeful that my problems may be greatly lessened :-)