We are the Master Abators

UT has an intramural football league where law students can fulfill their secret conviction that, had they not chosen to read all day, they could have developed their natural (but undernourished) athleticism into become professional stardom. Of course law students playing ball is not as impressive in real life as you would probably imagine.

At least our logo makes up for it. We are the Master Abators. In our first game on Monday, we crushed the competition. They were unprepared. We, on the other hand, like to practice by ourselves.

Solved the Intermittent ATT/Yahoo Outgoing SMTP Mail Problem

After signing up for ATT DSL, I had intermittent issues sending email, where outgoing mail would infuriatingly take 2-4 tries to send. Downloading email was no problem. I finally figured it out.

Assuming you have correctly configured your outgoing SMTP server (port 465, SSL enabled, with your login and password), the problem lies with Yahoo's spam filtering and your local authentication cache.

1. First, you have to enable each of your mail accounts (in the "From" field) with Yahoo. This is done through the same process by which you can check those email accounts through their web interface. There are instructions for how to do this from Yahoo (link).
2. Next, if you are using the Mac Mail client on OS X, open Keychan and delete all password/certificate entries that are related to your SMTP servers. This is the crux of the problem... if your entries are expired, particularly if they were created before step 1, Keychain will keep the older entries.

And there you have it! I think many ATT DSL customers must run into this problem... hopefully they'll run into the solution on this wonderful blog.

Midnight Ride

Back in undergrad, I never really showed Maggie the UT campus. So last weekend I took her on a midnight tour on bikes. The campus had changed a lot since I last went around.

There were many new buildings, and also I think Moore-Hill, the all-dude dorm that Kunal and Sapun lived at, has become co-ed. Or maybe the guys at Moore-Hill have picked up some serious game.

Maggie Sees Cupcakes

Desert at Hey Cupcake!
Originally uploaded by Jeffypop

After some surprisingly great Bluegrass (The Old Holdouts) and some awesome BBQ (especially the slaw at Green Mesquite), we went on a quest for froyo. Unfortunately, froyo has only started its invasion of Austin. The main truck we were looking for had already packed up and left.

So we got cupcakes instead. Maggie was really excited. This was her reaction when she saw the cupcakes. We had a Red Velvet and a Michael Jackson.

Voter Registration Drive at Batfest

Batfest Voter Registration - Austin 2008 014
Originally uploaded by Jeffypop

Austin happens to be home to the largest bat colony in North America. It's underneath the Congress bridge by downtown. They come out at night after sunset, though sometimes you can't see them (perhaps they slowly trickle out on those days).

Over the long weekend, there was a small street fair on the bridge, with bat-watchers, bands (like the Flobots), and a petting zoo with Kangaroos! There was lots going on. Aside from the UT game, there was the Human Race, some triathlon, and random other street closings for random events.

The Travis County Dems had a voter registration drive at the festival all weekend. We signed up over 400 voters the Sunday evening when I went. Over the entire weekend, we probably hit about 1k registrations (a bat-tastic record)!