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Archives for December 2010

Please Reply with Remove in the Subject Line IS INEFFECTIVE

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Spam is a serious problem.  If you send bulk e-mail to people who have never heard of you, nor expressed an interest in your products or services, then you’re simply being a pest, and you’re breaking the law.

I’ve seen on more than one occasion someone implement the old “reply with remove in the subject line” method.  The problem with this is that the e-mail address that your “remove” system is going to verify against is the one that I’m sending my reply from.  In many cases, it’s not the e-mail address that you used to send the message in the first place, because I’ve chosen to forward mail from multiple addresses to one location.

The “remove” method is ancient in digital years.  It’s also impossible to know if you’re actually using an automated script to remove addresses, or if you’re manually removing them when you get a message that says “remove” in the subject line.  The latter method is a joke.

The Right Way

Whatever you’re using to send bulk e-mail should provide a link at the bottom of your messages that allows for single click un-subscription.  When you send me something I don’t want, I should not be expected to do any work to eliminate future mailings.  I shouldn’t have to be inconvenienced by your system’s antiquity by forcing me to write YOU an e-mail to ASK you to stop sending mail that you weren’t supposed to send me in the first place.

If I can’t one-click unsubscribe from your message, I can guarantee I’ll never use your services.


Shredded

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At the age of 8, my uncle, Steve Griffith, purchased the one gift that my parents had me believing I would not be getting for Christmas that year.  Quite honestly, I don’t remember wanting it so much as I do the blisters that I would soon have on my left thumb.  It was roughly 1979.  My family had moved a few times by then, and I remember that we were living in Moon Valley, a subdivision in North Central Phoenix, Arizona.  Actually, it was north of Shaw Butte, near the current site of the Point Tapatio, which had not yet been built.  Only two short years prior, my grandparents had graciously bestowed upon us the ever-so-popular Atari Pong.

The Atari 2600 Home Gaming Console

Atari 2600 had invaded…along with one game, Space Invaders.  Needless to say, this began my real gaming fascination.  As someone afflicted with A.D.H.D., and someone with good hand-eye coordination, video games were the perfect fit.  And fit, they did.  Over, and over, and over again.

When ColecoVision was released, it propelled the home console industry in a new direction…

Fast forward through years of arcade credits and Pizza D’Amore, through Nintendo (never owned), Super Nintendo (also never owned), and all other gaming consoles (also never owned), and you’ll find a trail of PC gaming experience.  When I was 14, I was given a new Apple IIc,

and my gaming days on the console were over.  Infocom text games, Ultima, Lode Runner, Pinball, Super Pinball…you name it, I was playing it.

I was never upgraded from the Apple IIc to another computer system until I was given an IBM 8086 with a 5MB hard drive.  No games.  Now it was about sequencing music.  The gaming was on hold through high school, for the most part, because of skateboarding, girls, and homework.  Oh, and I didn’t have a gaming console.

When the push towards “Multi-Media” came out, I was thrust through the new interactive Zork and Myst games, also on the PC.  From there, Castle Wolfenstein, and others like that.

The real gaming began in 1997 when I discovered Quake and local network connectivity.  My free time was gone.   Rounding out my favorite games were the first person games like Quake, Quake II, Quake Arena, Ultimate Tournament 2004, and other such games.  Somewhere in there I dabbled with the first Starcraft, but I don’t remember it as much as I do Total Annihilation, which dominated my home network.  I had 4 computers at the time, and had people over frequently to waste time on them.

I was turned on to Call of Duty by Carson Joyner when he was my roommate (as well as UT2K4.)  I got really good at both of them.  It was at this point that I quit playing.  That was 4 years ago.  I thought I would never play again.

I was wrong.  Last July, when I discovered that Starcraft II had been released 13 or so years after the original, I couldn’t resist.  I had to see it…I needed to see what had changed.

Shredded

Last night, on December 4th, 2010, I deleted Starcraft II from my computer, then I shredded the CD (I had deleted it 5 times prior…but kept re-installing it as I learned new strategies.)  I found myself spending my free time playing.  Then I found myself getting better at it.  When I learned that the best players are paid very well, just like any pro circuit tour sport, I also learned that those players play 10 hours/day, and they’re mostly South Korean.

I’m never going to be that good, and the game just makes me lose time and become frustrated.  Even though it exercises some key areas of my brain, it’s not worth the compromise.  So, I’m done with it.  And that’s why I’m writing this post.  After all, I have more time to do more creative things now :).

Outsourcing

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In 1994 I traveled the nation with a company called Camfel Productions. It was a fantastic experience. During that time I journaled every night. Every once in a while I type up a page and add it to the blog here, and that’s why you’ll see some posts dated pre-blog era. The problem I’ve faced is the amount of time it takes to re-type them. Even at 80+ wpm on a good day, it just doesn’t make sense for me to re-type the entire 80 pages, single spaced, when I already spent 10 months night after night typing it once.

So, I decided I’d dive into my first elance.com experience. I’ve outsourced the work to someone in Canada, as here profile seemed to be the most impressive. I thought at first I could just scan the documents and have OCR convert the scan to text, then just copy and paste the results into my posts. Unfortunately OCR doesn’t do very well with faded dot-matrix print.

The total cost? $50.00. I figure it represents about 10 hours worth of my time, and that’s not what I want to be doing, so, why not? I’ll let you all know how it goes…and in fact, you’ll see more posts with 1994 dates on them soon :).

Introducing, Mirowww

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Let me be blatantly clear. I am a dog person.

About 7 or 8 years ago, I had a roommate, a female roommate. She liked cats. She wanted to bring a cat home with her. Home to my house. It was a foster cat and she asked me if it would be okay. I said, sure, “as long as the cat doesn’t destroy my carpet.” 2 cats were introduced on that day…she snuck a kitten in. How can you say no to a kitten?

The cats destroyed the carpet.

The kitten massaged my back.

The roommate moved to Germany.

Sometimes Mirowww brings birds into my house and kills them and eats them.

The foster cat had 6 toes on its front paws. I didn’t want that cat. It was freaky. It looked like it had already been buried in the Pet Semetery. Thanks a lot Mr. King.

Did I mention the kitten gives good massages? Well, that’s the cat that I agreed to “watch” for a month, “or so.” Like I said, this happened about 7 or 8 years ago.

This is Mirowww. That’s her name. For real. It’s Mirowww. Every morning Mirowww wakes me up with her name, which basically translates to, “let me out human, I have to shit, eat, then beg for attention again.”

Every night, when I jump under my covers, Miroww creeps up to my pillow (I don’t use pillows like you do,) and paws her way under the covers, then snuggles up against me and falls asleep. She’s never there when I wake up. It probably has to do with how far I throw her in the middle of the night.

Mirowww runs back and forth sometimes…for no reason at all. She chases nothing. If I have a laser pointer, she goes nuts. If I wrap her up in my sheets and poke her head, she bites me. Mirowww leaves gifts around the house sometimes. On occasion, she’ll produce a ball of … never mind… it sounds, and looks like spilled coffee with drain-hair.

Miroww lets me hold her and clip her claws. She can’t reproduce, but she can climb things if I let her front claws grow too long. Mirowww drinks out of my toilet less often than she laps up the shower water. She’ll sit on the edge of the tub and wait for the water to drain (as she believes there’s something in the drain and wants to be sure the water has left) and then jump into the tub and lick, and lick and lick until she’s had enough.

Mirowww has her own door. She can come and go whenever she pleases. She eats whenever she wants. Mirowww also rubs herself against every outside corner of every door, wall, and cabinet, leaving greasy cat dirt that I have to clean up. Oh, and she also sheds the equivalent of 3 kittens-worth of fur per week. I’m considering knitting a cat-hair beanie for my morning walks.

She talks to me. That’s all.