All posts by rbowen

charging for email? yeah, right.

why is it that every few years some yahoo thinks that it’s a good idea to charge for email? I’ll give you a clue. It’s not out of a sense of civic duty and doing the right thing. It’s because they think that they have the corner on the market.

So here’s a clue. SMTP, for all its shortcomings, is an open standard. That means that anyone can write mail clients and mail servers. That means that, whatever pay service you may set up, there will always be free email delivery over the Intenet.

If your model is wonderful enough, sure, you’ll get customers and make a few bucks. Are you going to reject email coming in from the open internet? That could have some rather serious repurcussions to your business customers, dontcha think?

And who gets the penny per message? Surely not the recipient, which would make sense given the claim that this is for the customer.

No, whatever Mr Gates may say (and says every few years, ever since he discovered the Internet) some things have been free from the outset, and without very unpleasant legislation to the contrary, are going to stay free.

Hmm. I wonder if someone can figure out a way to classify unsolicited email as terrorism?

Not-so-super bowl

I watched the first quarter of the Superbowl, and was less than thrilled. Apparently there have been a few scores since then, but … *yawn* … I’m not sure I care.

i saw the commercial in which the kids sued by the RIAA for downloading music (losers sued by losers, apparently) are promoting Pepsi, which is promoting iTunes. It’s all rather convoluted.

It seemed kinda cool at first, but after reading the Tune Recycler web site, it appears that there some rather significant misinformation floating around about this whole situation.

Sure, the RIAA are slime, but it’s not entirely clear to me that iTunes is much more than the RIAA’s sexy marketing arm. Kinda like the Microsoft Booth Babes.

But, given that I seldom buy music anyway, I can’t say I’m too terribly concerned one way or the other.

But, if you do drink Pepsi, consider giving your bottle caps to the Tune Recycler. It seems like a Good Thing to do.

Bookcase

I went over to help Basil move some stuff, but ended up having not nearly as much time to help as I thought I would have. He gave me two book cases. One of them was too long to fit in the Jeep, so I had to take the top down. So, there I am, 3 degrees below zero, driving the Jeep with the top down and a bookcase sticking out.

I can now say authoritatively that it is a Bad Idea to drive with the top down when it is below zero. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Fortunately, I didn’t have very far to go, and stashed the bigger bookcase in my Dad’s garage.

The other one, I brought home (having replaced the top on the Jeep) and it is already full.I’m glad I got two. But for the first time in more than a year, I have no books sitting on the floor. Just barely.

Statistics

As some of you may know, I graph statistics on all sorts of things.

This morning I discovered that my temperature graphs don’t know what to do when it gets below zero. Which is just as well, since I don’t either.

I’ve added a new measure to my stats page. Up until now, I’ve been graphing email/spam as a cumulative for the month, which completely fails to reflect the seriousness of the latest flood of spam.

Although, on the graph, you can very clearly identify where the flood started, and although the spam percentage gradually creeps up, it has an entire month worth of 62% spam that is has to offset to make any changes. However, from watching the logs, I felt that spam levels were much closer 90%.

Turns out I was right. In the new graphs, you can seldom see any daylight between the spam graph and the total email graph, and spam levels are right around 91%. At my peak, I’m processing about 60 email messages in 5 minutes, but only 3 of those made it into anyone’s inbox.

Given that email is such an important part of what the internet carries, 90+% of it being essentially stolen resources is pretty serious. I’m hoping that the courts will authorize public floggings of spammers and virus authors.

Henry Clay

After wasting an inordinate amount of time, I discovered that Henry Clay high school is not where I thought it was. So, in addition to having to pay to go to a concert I didn’t want to go to, I missed the part of it we were presumably going to see. And Sarah was asleep anyway.

In all, a thoroughly wasted evening.

Bah.

Ken’s books

I discovered Ken’s List o’ Books today. Like I need anything to add to my list, which isn’t even complete, since I got that 13-volume set of classic literature last year. Sheesh.

I suppose it’s ok to be doomed never to finish my reading list. I suppose that’s better than the alternative, which would be having to read every piece of tripe that makes it onto the New York Times list.

Sarah’s fish

I was really hoping that I could have Sarah’s fish here for her birthday, but after getting it almost close enough for me to go get it, someone took it back another 92 miles further away. That makes it a little far to go get on a weekend. It has travelled more than 5000 miles, and is getting pretty close, but I don’t suppose there’s much way for it to get here in the next 2 weeks.