Listening to The Radio Dept.’s Lesser Matters while I watch the streetlights snap on one by one, I’m sitting in the only lit room in my dark house. This album is perfect, a great winter album – cold and rainy. I’ve been alternating between this one and The Dears’ No Cities Left, which does OK as a winter album – but has a more “summer” tone at the core if you ask me. Both are well worth checking out, and as always I’m willing to send copies to whomever asks. The Dears are playing with the Stars sometime in the coming months, and I’ve been debating going more and more as the album latches onto my brain. We’re booked with Noise Pop and there have been rumblings about Coachella… so I’m not sure what the future concert landscape looks like right now. In the coming months, we are lucky enough to be taking in the following: The Notwist, The Unicorns, The Decemberists, Vanderslice, Pedro the Lion, The Wrens, Earlimart, and bunch of openers I’ve never heard of.
An era of sorts came to an end sometime last week. Seems like the spammers finally got ahold of my primary e-mail address. Up until now, all my efforts to keep my address off the web and out of the hands of spammers seemed to be working. Before last week I’d enjoyed three spam-free years of e-mail. I’ve always used my hotmail address for any web-related sign-up or registration, reserving my pharaohweb.com address for only direct communication with known people and places. Whenever I published my address on my websites, I always used JavaScript code to assemble the html mailto: string on the fly from substrings, so that any web-scouring robots couldn’t do a “mailto:” grep and extract it.
While my efforts seemed to have worked for a while, sometime last week my e-mail must have been sold and sold again. I’m now averaging about ten to fifteen pieces of spam per day. I’d like to thank all the webscription shops who are willing to sell me cheap herbal viagra, the online universities willing to grant me an MBA in three short weeks, the testimonials from people who lost 80lbs from some secret Egyptian mineral, and last but not least the well-represented penis-enlargement lobby, who by all means are soliciting the wrong well-hung gentleman. I’ve decided that I will send a grainy black and white photograph of my horse-sized-member to each and every one of these misguided marketeers in the hopes they will leave me alone once they realize they’re clearly barking up the wrong tree. Tree indeed.
Anyway, in an effort to combat the twenty-some pieces of spam I’ve been getting daily, I started looking for some blocker software. I’ve never really looked into it before, because I’ve never had a problem with spam. My Pop had mentioned that he just did a $20 trial of some shareware that was working great – but I’m all about freeware whenever possible. After a relatively short search I landed on Spambayes. It’s a freeware plugin for Outlook that uses Bayesian filtering to identify and trash potential spam. It builds a database and gets smarter as it goes, but I found it worked 100% of the time with little or no “training.” Plus, I like that it’s a simple Outlook plugin and not a standalone app, less overhead. So if you’re getting spammed to death, check it out – took care of my problem for sure.
That’s it for now. Remind me to write down the story of how Sharaun locked me out of the house tomorrow. Dave out.
