A great big shout-out to reader "some czech guy" who told me, in the comment below, how to get Outlook Express to send mail finally, using my new ADSL Internet connection from Cesky Telecom. Frankly, I was not even aware of the concept of authentication of outgoing emails until now (and for the record, this ignorance was never an obstacle to sending emails with various ISPs).

Here's the amazing thing, though. I spent much of yesterday and today trying to get an answer to this simple question from the Cesky Telecom Internet Express help line. What's with these help lines where they ask for your phone number, tell you they'll call you back ("in ten minutes" or "before five o'clock") and then NEVER call you back? This is not the first time this happened; indeed, I was quite lucky to get an apologetic call back this morning to yesterday's call. He asked me if I was in front of my computer. Since I was still in bed, I replied no, and he asked when was a good time to call back. I said in one hour. He said OK, talk to you in one hour. Eight hours later, he hasn't called me back, and I called once since then trying to get the same simple answer. Granted, I didn't try the "angry foreigner who doesn't speak a word of Czech" routine, which I find generally yields mixed results. Come on, people, it's a pretty fucking simple question, and all I had to do was change one setting in Outlook Express to get it to work.

That's not the amazing thing. In fact, I'm grately that I can pick up the phone here, call an 800 number, and get a friendly (albeit clueless) person on the other end of the line. What's amazing is that I get can better results asking random readers of my blog how to solve this problem.

For The Pilot (circulation 15,000), I guess the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Help. I am surfing from home using Cesky Telecom's Internet Express ADSL connection. What SMTP server should I use to send outgoing mail? "Smtp.iol.cz" does not work.

Some joker put sugar in the salt shakers at Tulip.

I saw Rex-patriats and praised it for at least having some funny moments. But I'm not exactly sure why this is newsworthy.

My life has changed since I last wrote. My girlfriend moved to Dublin, and one month into a new apartment in Vrsovice, I still haven't settled in and I've been living out of boxes. The day basically consists of getting up, drinking tea, reading parts of a long Vanity Fair articles I've been working on (finished it today) and then going to work; then coming home late and going to bed. Occasionally there is a small amount of beer in involved. Occasionally there is a large amount of beer involved, and that tends to upset the routine.

Also, I saw "The Village" last night. Really, really disappointing. In fact, I'm going to tell you the spoiler, that's how disappointed I was. Don't look! The creatures in the forest are a ruse created by the town elders.

I'm glad Matt Welch's web site is working again, but I shore wish I could follow all that baseball talk.

I wrote another thingie for Slate about Turkey joining the EU. It's a good topic I wish I could explore more. Since Turkey-joining-the-EU will be in the news for at least another 15 years, I figure I have some time.

Duck a l'orange tonight.