Dashwire: it’s fabulous
Dashwire is beautiful. It’s basically a way of backing up the entire contents of your mobile phone, the contents of which are stored centrally by Dashwire as opposed to on your hard drive. It syncs automatically using your data plan (via a client-side app. on the phone), and even allows you to send SMS messages or call people "from your phone" directly from your PC via the stunningly beautiful web interface. No PC-based client-side app. necessary.
Spam-a-shedload
Google Mail constantly deletes spam that’s over than 30 days old. In the main, I don’t see any spam, it being filtered directly into the Spam folder. And on the few occasions I’ve checked, I’ve never found anything that’s been placed there by mistake, anything that should have been destined for my Inbox.
The number of unread items in the Spam folder generally hovers around 1,800. (Google Mail kindly tells me the number of unread items therein, as might Outlook.) Given the 30 day rule, that works out at about 60 spams per day. Wow.
Of late, however, I’ve noticed two trends:
- Not all spam is being routed directly to the Spam folder, it instead going to my Inbox, whence I report it to Google Mail (an easy click of a button). On occasions, a glut of spam arrives, and close-on ten spam messages can appear in my Inbox within the space of five minutes—someone out there’s busy! That’s rare though
- The total number of spam messages has increased significantly of late, now hovering around 2,800 every 30 days. This post was prompted by it hitting 2,900 at 21.36 today, courtesy of an email from Mail Delivery System
So we’ve now hit an average of 96 spams per day, so I’m hugely thankful to Google for saving me trawling through all of these. But the increase in the contents of my Spam folder cannot by any stretch be accounted for by the few that have made it there via my Inbox—maybe 30 in the last ten days, so around 100 in total.
While we’re on the subject, here’s some analysis of all that spam. First of all, the most prolific senders:
- Mail Delivery System (339)
- postmaster (305)
- Mail Delivery Subsystem (256)
- MAILER-DAEMON (242)
- System Administrator (24)
- me (19)
- Mail Delivery Service (18)
- Mail Administrator (14)
- (unknown sender) (13)
- Capital One bank (12)
- Internet Mail Delivery (12)
- JobSeeker Weekly (8)
- no-reply (8)
- Administrator" (6)
- Barracuda Spam Firewall (6)
- Chase Online (6)
- The Career News (6)
- admin @ system. mail (5)
- Sara Wilson (4)
- VIAGRA ® Official Site (4)
- Yahoo! Groups (4)
Surprising to see that I’d sent 19 of the emails, nice to know that the Viagra emails are from the official site, and comforting that Yahoo! has been correctly punctuated.
Barracuda and its numerous, less frequent variants were responsible for a further 57 emails.
Senders’ names aren’t as imaginative as they were three years ago, and middle initials are now a rarity, whereas before they were by far the norm.
As for subjects, the focus is very much on tricking people that they’ve sent undeliverable messages:
- Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender (232)
- Returned mail: see transcript for details (217)
- failure notice (207)
- Delivery Status Notification (Failure) (193)
- **Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter** (75)
- Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender (66)
- Delivery Status Notification (26)
- Fw: (20)
- Delayed Mail (still being retried) (18)
- Undeliverable:
(17) - Undeliverable mail: (14)
- Considered UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL, apparently from you (13)
- Delivery Notification: Delivery has failed (13)
Half of all the spam (1,450 messages) shared one of only 93 titles. (Half of the same spam came from only 87 sender names.)
I was offered an Anjelina Jolie XXX Video Free. ten times and Angelina Jolie seen with Justin Timberlake on Monaco yacht three times. I also received 30 emails with Chinese titles that I don’t understand, perhaps offering me more Angelina videos:
- ぉ財布 (1)
- プレゼント参加窓口 (1)
- メーリングリストに投稿できませんでした。 (1)
- メールアドレス反映完了しました。 (1)
- メールエラー通知 (5)
- メール送信エラー (3)
- メルモからのお返事 (2)
- 배달 상태 알림(실패) (2)
- 傳遞狀態通知 (失敗) (1)
- 发信退回: 错误信息 (1)
- 宛先メーリングリストが存在しません。 (1)
- 您在[[雄 (1)
- 未送达: > (1)
- 来自qq.com的退信 (1)
- 邮件投递超时错误 (7)
- 配信不能最終通知 (1)
Quite a lot of spam, all in all.
‘I have never ended on an unstressed syllable!’
A fabulous article articulating the tension between journalists and sub-editors in the newspaper industry. Lots of sweariness, some beautiful humour and some artistically-crafted, unedited prose. Well worth a read.
Especially in Liverpool
“The thing is, everyone in England is so much better dressed than everyone in France.”
Overheard last night in Clapham.
The thin blue line
It seems there is a new underline in Word 2007. Red wavy underlining marks spelling errors. Green marks questionable grammar. Blue, it seems, marks a more certain grammar error. An its instead of an it’s (or vice versa). Or a suggestion that every day should be concatenated. None of the "corrections" I’ve seen on my editorial have warranted acceptance. So far.
Customer service is so overrated
“M’aidez, m’aidez, my blog is down,” I cried to my friend/service provider by email.
“Don’t worry about that. [My blog] was down too which is much more important.”
That’s what you get when you opt for free hosting
[Closing emoticon included purely to annoy Rob. No, not that Rob. The other Rob]
For those interested, apparently there was an issue with a fan in the server and kernel modules. Apologies for the millions of readers that were affected.
Right-click
Overheard in New York: Without right-click, I just don’t know what to do with the world.
It’s a key reason why I’ve so stubbornly refrained from embracing Apple.
Sans Comic Sans
Please would someone pass a law to ban Comic Sans as a font? With immediate effect? There are absolutely no excuses for using it. None.
You can pretty much guarantee that anyone who adopts it as their default email font is bereft of comedy, as the font name so unwittingly implies.
Vincent Connare, its designer, should have his tombstone engraved in it, the sooner the better. Here is a more qualified critique of the font; and here is a campaign I’ll be joining to Ban Comic Sans.
Please delete me, let me go
If I attempt to delete an email from my BlackBerry, the pop-up warning messages defaults to Delete as opposed to Cancel. If I highlight two or more messages and attempt to delete, the pop-up defaults to Cancel. The inconsistent behaviour is off-putting yet intriguing.
Cereal equation
Bran Flakes + milk + 30 minutes = All Bran + milk
It’s not just Calibri
I didn’t think it was. The spacing issue is a Word 2007 one, not one specific to Calibri. The screenshot below is from a document in Times New Roman 12 point. The blue blocks are equal in width, one covering the one space between "-ity" and "factor", the second covering the two spaces (hence the kind grammatical underlining from Microsoft) between "delivered" and "by".
I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
She meant voicebox. I think
I called a lady about work today, only to hear the following voicemail message:
"Sorry. I can’t get to the phone. Please leave your details, I’ll check my box and get back to you."
I was caught off-guard. The schoolboy humour got to me. I had to hang up before getting a chance to leave her a message. Sorry.
Word 2007 spacing
What on earth have they done to word spacing in Word 2007? Sometimes two words separated by a single space appear to be joined; and at other times, it looks like there are two spaces. Not sure whether it’s the default Calibri font that’s to blame, or whether it’s a Word issue affecting the wider set of fonts. I’ll do some research. In the meantime, it’s very annoying.
Glissando
I find it odd that the musical chromatic scale is made up of twelve notes, the thirteenth repeating the starting note an octave higher. And that the major and minor scales are made up of seven notes each. I’m not suggesting that any other numbers would be any more logical; merely that having any number higher than two play such a pivotal role in something as fundamental as music seems bizarre.
I wonder whether relative pitch resonates (in the mind sense of the word) with us as humans more than it does with other animals. And would we find it musically odd our scale were broken into any number other than twelve intervals? After all, pitch is a continuous scale (ask anyone who listened to me play the violin), so have we artificially manufactured the notes that we know and love? (I’m guessing that there is something inherently significant about two notes an octave apart, given the way they resonate with one another.)
Moving up in the world
In the building in which I work, there are three lifts (elevators). Two of them are next to one another and "talk" to each other; the third is on the opposite wall, and is blissfully unaware of its two more salubrious siblings. All three lifs serve the nine floors available to us. (The lonely lift also serves the basement, but that’s not important right now. It’s really not.)
Users’ impatience generally means that when they want to floor-hop, they press the appropriately-labelled direction button on both walls. Whichever lift arrives first will be their mode of transport, the opposite lift usually containing forlorned passengers (for that’s what they are), frustrated at the stupidity of their anonymous colleague, even though they were probably guilty of an identical crime moments earlier.
I’ve often wondered about lift algorithms, a wonder that has grown while working at this office. The wonder increased yet further when one of the twin lifts broke down recently, leaving two independently-controlled lifts in operation. The 33% reduction in the number of lists increased the time taken waiting for lifts by an estimated 60%. (The latter figure is pure speculation but it certainly felt that high.) Lift journey times also increased, with stop-offs at seemingly every floor.
I figured that a more productive approach would have been to disable all up buttons on one side, and all down buttons on the other. If you were going up, you’d go to the salubrious side (after all, going up is more rewarding, so should maintain its glass-encased pleasure); and if you were going down, you’d press the button calling the depressing, steel-encased lift.
When the glass-encased lift reached the top of the building, it would zoom all the way to the bottom to start its journey again, so long as it didn’t shoot out of the roof Charlie-style. And on reaching the lower-ground floor, the steel prison would shoot back up to seven to again begin its descent.
I’m pretty sure that preventing the selfish act would result in quicker arrival at your destination.
Compound interest
I wonder whether the Bank of England decides on interest rates to allow their graph to mimic the silhouette of a specific historic castle.
Maybe in 2094, we’ll be able to see the entire western wall of Windsor Castle, amid an economy that has brought the country to a standstill.
Is that shoe pastry?
A wonderful miscorrection of the Economist by Stephen J. Dubner on his Freakonomics blog on the New York Times website.
In the extract below from the Economist’s London Stock Exchange index, he suggests that pasty should read pastry.
"In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale."
Some research needed before you go correcting people, Stephen.
Paper is the new laptop
I went to a SharePoint forum today. For those unaware, SharePoint is a platform designed for collaborating, sharing and generally working better together online.
I was the only person in the auditorium of around 150 people with a laptop on my knees. Everyone else was scrawling notes on paper, the lady next to me this morning (a journalist) ferociously scribbling shorthand.
It certainly didn’t compare to this recent shot of students in a lecture at the University of Missouri. How do you like them Apples?
Fingerprints can say a lot about a man
Sometimes when trying to use the fingerprint scanning device to log in to my laptop, I’m prompted with the message "Too short". A little harsh; and how can it tell just from my fingerprint?
Bags of cash
I have three bags, each containing 100 coins. I know the coins in two of the bags weigh 10 grams each, but the coins in the third bag weigh 11 grams each.
I have some scales (not a pair of balances) and have one weigh available to me. How do I determine the bag that contains the heavier coins?
Thanks to Lieutenant Columbo for sharing this nice little puzzle.