In conjunction with my upcoming birthday, I went to Medieval Times in Schaumburg, IL with the lady I’ve been seeing now for over a year. It was a decent time, and I’d say anybody should go once. I don’t think any of the upgrade packages are worth their price though. You get to go free in the month of your birthday, so that makes it more worthwhile.

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I started talking to someone new online. She’s from California where I’ll be heading soon. I might even be meeting with her while I’m there. Anyhow, I’ve found her to be quite interesting. She talks quite a bit. She’s also quite flirty. Hard to tell how much of that is genuine interest or not. She seems to have a personality of incorporating what you tell her in her own story. I’ve always found that interesting in someone. Hard to tell what’s true and what isn’t though.

We’ll see where our interactions go. Will she be one that just disappears after a while or will she last?

For whatever reason, I got a mysterious credit on my Amazon.com Visa Card.  It’s only $0.79, and free money is good. However, I don’t want Chase finding out they make a mistake and correcting it with interest in the future, so I’ve been calling them a bit to get them to correct it or explain it if it’s legitimate. I think I finally got them to understand today, so we’ll see tomorrow if the credit gets corrected.

For a few years now, I’ve owned gurganus.name. Over this year, I’ve been changing my e-mail usage to use the e-mail address I have through it. This can be problematic though. Here’s what I occasionally run into. Some sites validate e-mail addresses in various ways. Generally, validating input is a good thing. It’s not a good thing when it is done wrong though. What’s being done wrong? Well, I often see the validation being done with a regular expression that restricts the top level domain to being two or three letters. This is naive and wrong. If you look at the list of top level domains managed by the Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA), you’ll find many two and three letter domain names, but you will also find the “museum” top level domain. Even if you included a check for every top level domain’s length, you would end up with a system that will break when a new top level domain is created.

What should you do instead?

The better approach is simply to follow the e-mail address format specified in addr-spec production of RFC2822. This doesn’t put a length on the domain name. You’ll find out that part is invalid when you look up the domain name in order to send a message.