Up the Tree

The show went off without hitch. It was the best yet and I had a definite swagger throughout the show. I was even so ballsy as to rock some some accapella. You don’t have to take my word for it, I recorded the show for all my digital friends out there in digital land. While the show was great, the recording is a little quiet, so volume is required.

# Forgive me love
# Can’t Bring Me Down
# When We’re All Alone

My thought is, if you’ve already bought the pint of ice-cream and you know you are eventually going to finish it… it doesn’t really matter if you finish it in a week, or today all in one sitting.

(Another added plus is I have more room in my freezer today.)

So my adopted daughter Pepper had her foot all in her ear on Friday. And while her foot is in her ear, she’s looking at me with this look as if to say “Man I wish I could get my foot further in my ear, but I’m having real trouble doing that right now.” This is when poppa’ is put on *bring Pepper to the vet* duty. This is not how I would usually prefer to spend my Saturdays, but a dad has to do daddy things. If Daddy didn’t Pepper’s ears will eventually resemble cornucopias, but instead of overflowing with natures goodness they will be overflowing with animal nasties!

Onto the vet we go. Pepper, like many of us, is not a fan of being put into a little black bag. I’m sure she appreciates the vents and see-through mesh, but a bag is still a bag no matter how you decorate it. Pepper was crying up a storm, making rude gestures at me every time I looked in the bag, and not enjoying the process of walking 10 blocks under by unwashed arm.

Veterinary Hospitals are strange places. On one hand you have very serious sick animals and on the other you have the cutest little fuzzy faces ever. The feeling is like doing your taxes in a petting zoo, although you know you shouldn’t be enjoying it, you kind of are anyway. Boston terrier puppies, shaggy explosions of fur, kittens, a hound-dog wearing a cone; you name it, it was sitting patiently waiting for the alternative lifestyle doctors to see it. Very well behaved I might add.

Veterinary clinics are definitely different than hospitals. In a hospital you wouldn’t expect your doctors to wear puppy-print smocks, or have lavender highlights in her hair, but at the vets, it’s cool. Cause’ the pet’s don’t care and the parent’s don’t have a clue what’s going on. Do I call them doctor? Have they even gone to college for this? How often do people bring their fish I wonder?

Turns out pep has an inner-ear infection and is requires to have a few drops of medicine squirted in her ears once a day. When the doctor said it I thought “Well, that sounds very reasonable” I wasn’t thinking of course that the minute I tried to get near pepper with the drops she would hide under the couch until I had gone. “This is not helping matters pepper!” I would shout, but she only looked at me with the face she reserves for anytime I make a request at her.

In hindsight I really shouldn’t have fed Pepper the night before the vet. Sure it seemed like a well-natured idea at the time, but now looking back at the situation that could have been averted, I realize that it was stupid. Pep pooped in the bag on the way home. It was very stinky and not particularly enjoyable for either of us. Hopefully pep is feeling better now… hopefully for both of us.

You may have noticed that my while my weblog’s entries are down, my photolog’s entries are… kaput. It’s not that I’m not taking photo’s, but the process of getting them ready to be viewed is a pain in the ass and only allows for 1 photo at a time.

*Untill Now*

Welcome into my life Photostack! With “photostack”:http://photostack.org/ I can create whole albums of photos, upload a few, add to albums… you name it I can do it. So be prepared for some fireworks… or at lead a photo or 2.

For all of those who were in love with the old photos, well I have moved them over into a past section which should supply you with a good 4 minutes of fun. I have edited out the photos that I don’t like anymore and the nude pictures of me.

So, onto the photos!

How many spam messages do I get per week? Hundreds… sometimes thousands and it makes me mad. Very mad. Built in mail filters used to work for me, but then some idiots at some college did some research about how “If you rearrange the lterets in wrods tehy are stlil readable.” Shazam! The flood gates of spam were opened and my poor inbox was flooded. Then came the V1AGRA people and although some people got hard, my inbox went flaccid.

So, donning my military helmet I marched into war to find out what I, a private citizen, could do.

*Don’t give your address out.*

If you have a website, you have probably put your e-mail address on it so nice people can contact you. The problem is there is a multi-billion dollar business that sell addresses like yours to the highest bidders. So take them off an replace them with a link the spammers cant see.

“Encoder”:http://automaticlabs.com/products/enkoderform/ Takes your email address and encodes it so that address harvesters can’t see it. With no exceptions.

NEVER REMOVE!

That’s right, don’t remove yourself from the spammers lists. doing so will only confirm that your e-mail address is “active” and more spam will come streaming in. Spammers are not, regardless of what they say, honest or ethical people. If you push remove you will receive 10 more spam messages.

GA-FILTER FISH!

Good, but what about those of us that have already been sold-out? What can we do? We can add more sophisticated space-age filtering is what we can do, damn it! Filters that learn over time instead of get bypassed by spammers. I am using “SpamSieve”:http://www.c-command.com/spamsieve/ and it is ridiculous how much spam it catches.

Filtered Mail
65 Good Messages
2830 Spam Messages (98%)

SpamSieve Accuracy
1 False Positives
19 False Negatives (95%)
99.3% Correct

Corpus
411 Good Messages
2861 Spam Messages (87%)
62291 Total Words

Showing Statistics Since
6/2/04 9:15 AM

It let 18 spam messages in the first week and since then only one got by. SpamSieve has a complex Bayesian statistical filter (based on an “article”:http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html by Paul Graham) that learns from all your e-mail for words that spammers use and words your good messages contain and figures out mathematically if it’s spam or not. Ss you can see by the “99.3% Correct” it’s doing pretty well at catching the spam. It only once thought a non-spam e-mail was spam and that was because it was from a website that sold sandals and since it had no data on sandals it assumed it was spam. Honest mistake. I mean how many times have you gotten e-mailed about your flip-flops?

PC users can try to use “SpamBayes”:http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ but I have no idea what that does, or how it works.

In the end it comes down to how much spam you have. Most people get a few messages a month and that is alright by them to delete, but for us web old-timers, spam can bring your day to a grinding halt and make you wish you never gave your real address on that contest to win a free iPod the year before.