Saturday, July 30, 2011

Spam Update

Well, a number of days have passed and I'm still saving my spam. Google is dutifully deleting it after 30 or so days. I say "30 or so" because the spam doesn't disappear exactly on day 31 but usually after a variable number of days, varying from 30 to 33. Anyhow, I calculate the daily rate from time to time and it seems to be stuck around 64/day. I get a nice variety including regular ads, online pharmacies, credit cards, credit help, alcohol rehab, Christian dating, etc. The pron and male enhancement stuff seems a lot rarer these days, though not gone completely. I got an ad from Hooters for

Happy National Chicken Wing Day!

I'll probably continue to keep saving the spam for a while longer and then I'll go back to deleting it with regularity.

Saturday, July 09, 2011

I'm not an Economist, but....

I'm not an economist but I've been watching the economy like everyone else and I'm starting to see something happen that I predicted a while back. Only, no one was really listening. So I'll talk a little bit about it here. It has to do with the nasty loss of jobs coming in the public sector.

Here's a few baseline beliefs that I hold. The housing bubble and sloppy banking had a lot to do with the recession. And no, it's not even close to over. It may never be over. But I suspect that a bigger problem is the two high tech wars that we're fighting. It's just not a very good idea to spend a lot of money making very expensive things and then blowing them up when you could be making other things and selling them. So the convergence of those things got us going downhill.

Unfortunately, to avoid a complete free fall and it's resulting catastrophic crash, the government stepped in and softened the blow with a bunch of money. The problem is that we were spending money like we were getting it before the crash. And now it's coming in a lot slower since fewer are working and they're working for less and the rich are paying less in taxes (Thanks, George). The people working in the private sector took the brunt of the job loss for the first two years. I think that's stabilizing. My prediction some time ago was that the public sector, which was largely spared from job loss early in the recession, is now gonna get whacked big time. I think we're seeing it now, especially in education. We'll probably downsize the postal service soon and a host of other federal, state and local services will start to lose employees. This will stretch out the recession for a few more years.

OK, here's the good news, maybe. I think that as we wind down the two wars and try to avoid getting into any more (think Libya and the like), the economy will slowly improve. I think services will deteriorate to the point that we realize that we're not taxing the rich people appropriately and the tax structure will slowly change back to something reasonable as Warren Buffet suggests. The wholesale destruction of the public sector will allow it to be rebuilt with better efficiency and a lot of useless agencies will disappear or at least get more efficient and do useful things. Maybe we'll actually see the benefit of and be forced to implement universal health care.

Overall, I think that bailing out the country was the best thing to do. It kept us out of a depression but substantially extended the time for recovery. Maybe it spread the pain out a bit more but lessened it's intensity for many. I think the wholesale exit of the manufacturing sector and it's associated support (like R & D) will stop and will return to America, though it will be through a nasty global wage normalization (nasty for us, good for the poorer countries). No more predictions for now. Should be an interesting ride.

Sunday, July 03, 2011

Going in Circles

I am currently working at Duke and so I have a parking place on the Duke campus in a parking deck not too far away from where I work. Of course, I have to pay for it. It seems that everyone who works in our lab rolls into work around 9, and so I do also. However, it also seems that everyone else at Duke gets to work a bit earlier. So I have to drive up to the sixth or seventh floor to find an open parking space. When the weather is nice (i.e. not so hot) I just drive up to the seventh floor. I like the view. The drive up or down can be a bit dizzying. I made a movie of the drive down one day and I decided that I would share it with you. Enjoy. Don't stand up quickly after viewing.

Saturday, July 02, 2011

Spam Experiment



I recently started a spam experiment. I currently use a free email account from a pretty big company that is associated with searching. One of the nice things about this email client is that it allows you to capture email from numerous accounts besides just theirs. So I get email addressed to my accounts from my employer, my small company, my cable company and my primary account along with a few aliases that I've set up. I've had some of these accounts for a while and I've registered on a variety of websites over the years. So I get a lot of spam. The spam filter is pretty good and so most goes in the spam box. The only mail that slips through that I shouldn't get is the stuff where somebody types in the wrong email address. I've written about this on occasion. I usually empty the spam box a couple of times a day with a quick scan first to make sure nothing important shows up there. I did this because I just didn't like the spam in my mail client. It made me feel icky.

Recently, I decided to see what happened if I let it just accumulate. My email account keeps it for 30 days and then tosses it. After 30 days, the amount of spam should reach some steady state and I can watch and tell if there is a spam surge or spam drop by following the total. They say that most of the spam comes from just a few places and if a spammer is shut down, there is a global drop in the amount of spam that one gets. Word is that spam and porn are using about 60% of the internet bandwidth, with spam using about 85% of the email traffic.

I've been doing this for 16 days so far. At midnight, I had 1038 spams which works out to 64.875 spams a day. So I'm on track to reach somewhere around 2000 spams at steady state. I'll let you know when I reach steady-state.

As I was typing this, a question arose in my mind. Should I be talking about "spams" or "pieces of spam." In other words, does the word "spam" describe an individual piece of email or does it describe the entire body of work. If you're down on your luck and eating cheaply, you don't ask for another spam, you ask for another piece of spam. Or not. Anyhow, I leave you with this: