Ryan sent me a link to an eBay auction for the chance to play in a minor league baseball game. And seriously, if I were a rich man, I would pay well more than the $7,100 that the auction is currently fetching to suit up and play pro baseball for a day.

Though, once this one is successful, more teams will do it, and it won’t mean as much. And seriously, I would have to tell the manager that I didn’t really need the one at-bat. Start me in right field for a home game, let me play for one out, and then sit me down. Just an appearance. Let the team have a chance to win the ballgame. Heh.

Pretty sad that my fantasy day on a minor-league baseball team includes being benched for a real baseball player almost immediately. But would you really want to be the chump who paid to be on the team and hamstrung the manager for a full at-bat? Well, maybe if you were a little person.

I let the spam pile up in the Thunderbird Junk folder for a while before I clean it out. When I do, it’s usually a 10-15 minute process– I alphabetize by sender and just glance to make sure that I won’t be deleting anything I need. In the past, PC World updates have wandered in there, and I’ve found one or two messages from friends in there before.

When the computer went kaput in April, I rescued my Junk Mail training data for the adaptive filter in Thunderbird. And once I had put that on the new machine, I thought I was in like flint– I’d just continue along. Imagine my horror when I went this morning to do a cleanout of some junk mail, and found about 30 messages in there– all work related– that shouldn’t have been marked as spam. Including a couple that I had answered from home, but got tossed when I booted up my work machine.

So, I spent more than the usual 10-15 minutes cleaning this junk out– I scrutinized every name and address that I didn’t know and couldn’t eyeball as spam (luckily, the majority was still sent from FreeAssEnlargement or names like that). An hour later, I had rescued another 12 messages or so that weren’t spam– some dating back to April 20. And I spent a good while responding to them, sheepishly taking responsibility for getting back to them so late. It’s no good to blame the technology; I was the one who put old training data on a new machine.

I’ve cleared off the training data, too, so hopefully whatever was wrong is now right. But it does mean I’ll be retraining that adaptive filter for a while, so more spam in the short term. Pfaugh.

All that being said, I’d still rather use Thunderbird than Notes mail or any other client I’ve come across. I would just like to not have to set it up on a re-imaged machine again. That was teh suxx0r.