Spam

With four main email accounts (for the too-many jobs and personal email) Spam became a real problem for me in early 2003. The number of Spam messages in my inbox(s) everyday out numbered the legitimate mail and I started to delete real email on accident. I started getting more serious about filtering because it became necessary.

In March I started using SpamAssassin and haven't looked back. SA uses several methods of spam detection.

I was "learning" messages today, well SA was... so I thought I'd post my stats for my primary personal (and oldest email account). In the roughly 6 months I've been using SA, its caught nearly 8000 Spam messages. 1330+ Spams a month or 40+ a day for a single account (and I'm fairly conservative about posting my email address online or giving it away).

Advocacy...

An interesting read over at Disenchanted regarding the games of science versus faith and... "the difference between knowing something, and knowing the name of something" got me thinking about advocacy. In creating a metaphor to describe "the game", the author suggests that "it's human nature to advocate your lifestyle".

I guess it is human nature. Recently I've been struck by others' (and my own) urge to advocate a particular "thing" (from a particular ideology to stereo equipment), doesn't matter what "it" is -- we love to talk stuff up.

As much as I can surmise, there's a few reasons we're driven to advocate. Advocating our choices is a form of external validation. If humans find something they believe in, they want to tell their friends about it... and their friends friend's. Their "advocating" is tainted by their own experiences and beliefs -- which, while totally appropriate to them, are very unlikely to be compatible with your own life.

I now find myself more carefully considering the other person's situation before speaking up. If I do open my mouth, I try to give pros and cons as well as set their expectations at the proper place. I basically want a disclaimer card that I can hand to people listing all my biases and points of view, complete with a reminder to take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Morning Beach Trip

Took Tedd down to Saltcreek early this morning instead of going to work. Playing hooky? Not technically hooky, since I'm still on the 80% reduced appointment... no real reason to be there unless they're paying me, right?

Tedd took out his new body board... I gave him a few tips, what I could remember, and he was gone. No fear, just paddled straight out and tried his luck. I'll have to take him back when it's a bit warmer.

Resigned

Trying to get out from underneath this pile of commitments. Finally made some headway today.

Yesterday I sent an email to the CMO at Medsphere letting him know my intention was to resign my position. This afternoon we had an opportunity to chat about things... The conversation went fairly well. He was understanding of my situation and agreed that it would probably be best if we parted ways.

I was upfront about completing one last project that's almost there... I don't want to leave them hanging or hurt them in anyway. I still believe in the concept and vision -- I know they'll do very well. He agreed there was no hard feelings in either direction. I really like these guys.

I know I'll miss working with the team -- I had some good times with them over the last year.

Zombie Programmer

Man am I tired.

In the midst of my effort to not overcommit myself, I agreed to help some friends with a dance studio opening here in Irvine. Given my current work situation(s), I'm not sure what I was thinking. It seemed like a good thing to do at the time.

Wednesday night I worked until 2am, finishing site layout and packaging it into a simple little PHP content management system. Man PHP is simple. I think PERL was a little jealous.

Thursday after work our friends came over w/ all their ideas, content, schedules, images to scan, etc. The timing was key for her, the website needed to go live 8/1. She had prepared to resign from her current studio today as well. Also, auditions would occur 8/15, which was coincidentally her final day with her old studio.

We worked through the night plugging content in, formatting, and writing more content... We'd long since reached that punchy stage of over-tiredness when 6:20am rolled around and with a final flourish of FTP commands the site was live. We joked that it was just in time for the "east coasters" coming in and hitting up the website. We thought we were hilarious.

Of course promptly after launching the site, it was my normal wake-time to get ready for work. I did make it in to the office in time for the Friday morning breakfast run..., April walked into my office as I started to doze off -- sitting in front of my PC, hand on the mouse. Gah... pretty embarrassing.

Despite the coffee, same thing happened a couple of more times on Friday, almost falling asleep at the wheel, er mouse. If anyone walked into my office while I was dozing, they were polite enough to quickly back out.