Best of Drew's Blog

You know how TV shows, when they run out of material, will have a "Best Of" show, or better yet, a "clips" show. Well, this is the "Best Of Drew's Blog" post. I've been blogging for about two years (my second anniversary was in October, 2005).

Humor
I'm special
Military History of France
Latest scam
Virtual Stapler
Drummer Jokes
More Drummer Jokes
Words to use on your resumé or performance evaluation

Informational
10 Albums You Don't Have - But Should
10 things every traveller needs
How to Avoid Spam (10 part series)

Drew milestones
Passing the NACE Coating Inspector Peer Review
My fantasy football team wins the 2003 KFFL championship
My 40th Birthday
I closed on my house
I bought a vehicle on eBay
Job change

Hevle.com
Chinese Spam
Redesign Drew 2.0
First confirmed blog reader
Redesign 3.0

Pictures
Inbox
First Anniversary of my blog
Attraction
More camera phone
Denise and me, 20 years ago
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

The Deep Blue Alibi by Paul Levine

The Deep Blue Alibi by Paul Levine

Words to use in your resumé or performance evaluation

There are a lot of sources for "action words" that are effective in resumés or performance evaluations. Here's one list, here's another. I've been collecting some words that don't appear on most of these lists. These words will sound great, and while they are not exactly flattering, at least you're being honest, right? And if your manager is as lazy and dimwitted as mine (just kidding, Carl, if you're reading this [not kidding if you're not]), he'll never know what your saying or bother to look these words up in the dictionary.

callipygous - adj. Having beautifully proportioned buttocks

omphaloskepsis - n. contemplation of one's navel

agelast - n. Someone who never laughs.

oscitancy - n. yawning or drowsiness

opprobrium - n. Disgrace; infamy; reproach mingled with contempt

soi-disant - adj. Self-styled; so-called.

hebetude - n. Mental dullness or sluggishness.

balneal - adj. Relating to baths or bathing.

mucophagy - n. The practice colloquially referred to as picking one's nose and eating it.

defenestration - n. An act of throwing someone or something out of a window.

Cool Sites: Travel

I travel a lot, Monday's and Tuesday's posts got me to thinking, I've found some sites that have proven invaluable when traveling.

Online travel agencies - There's lots, and I use a lot of them. Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz are the big ones. I also go directly to the airline, hotel, and rental car websites to check prices.

Most flights allow you to check in up to 24 hours in advance. That's a particular advantage for Southwest Airlines flights, since they don't have assigned seats. If you check in early, you get an "A" boarding pass, and you get on before the other losers.

This link will show you the up-to-the-minute status of any airport. Great if there's bad weather.

This link will show you the up-to-the-minute status of any flight. Super cool.

This link shows you your rights as a consumer.

And once you get there, you can use CitySearch to find a restaurant near your hotel, or find the best Thai restaurant in town.

Down Here by Andrew Vachss

Down Here by Andrew Vachss

Tampa

I flew to Tampa today to attend the PACE conference (Paint And Coatings Expo), pretty exciting. Apparently this weekend is the Gasparilla Festival, which I had never heard of until I came down here a year ago for a friend's birthday party.

In Tampa, Florida, the legend of the Spanish pirate José Gaspar is the basis of a colorful festival every February. Members of the local business elite, disguised as pirates, arrive on a galleon, land, and take the city to sack it. The festival ends with a parade in which all the authorities of the city escort King Gasparilla and his Queen. The royal couple is elected for the occasion by members of Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla, a very exclusive club which organizes the festival and the social activities that revolve around it. On the route of the pageant, the pirates of Gasparilla's crew, cigars in mouth, openly drinking and firing thousands of blank shots in the air, throw handfuls of fake gold coins, plastic pearl necklaces, and empty cartridge shells among the spectators at the parade. Children and adults alike jostle each other to get hold of these mementoes. Behind the festival lies a recurring debate about the historical authenticity of the pirate José Gaspar.
From the Tampa Bay History Center

So, it's a festival that lets you dress up like a pirate and drink rum and go to parades and throw plastic stuff. Kind of like Mardi Gras for pirates. Arrrrrrrrrr!

My pirate name is:

Dirty Davy Cash

You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You're musical, and you've got a certain style if not flair. You'll do just fine. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Sites I check every day

Here's a list of the sites I visit every day. There are others that I may like better, and check regularly, but they don't update every day.
Fark.com - I'm a farker.
MSN.com - There's always at least one headline on the front page that piques my interest.
Gizmodo - a weblog of gadgets
Dictionary.com (Word of the Day) - Word of the day
Wordsmith.com (A Word A Day) - these words are usually tougher than at dictionary.com, but there's a weekly theme, which is fun
Blogger - I've been blogging pretty regularly, lately. I need to buy a digital camera, though.
Google - for lots of reasons, but I use other search engines too. I like AltaVista for literal searches, Yahoo! for categorized.
Enbridge - it's my home page

Sites I visit weekly
Amazon - usually to get the info to update my website
Google Maps - This is new and not completely accurate yet, but the interface is much cooler than MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps (see here for a satellite view of ground zero)
Dilbert - I like to read a week's worth at one time

Some cool blogs I llike to check out:
Bad News Hughes, a Florida
New York Hack - A hot cabbie from New York City
Scobleizer - A Microsoft employee tells all
Pathetic Geek Stories - People send in their pathetic geek stories, and she makes them into a cartoon. Some of these are quite close to home, I mean, for geeks they might be.

Where I don't go at all:
Weather - I like to be surprised
Local news - who needs to know about the day's murders, abused children, and stuff like that?
pr0n - just don't do it
Stock - during the energy boom, I watched the stock daily. Now I look at it once a month. I still have some EP options at $70 (latest price of EP: $13)

Places I really should be going every day:
Slashdot - I should be keeping up with the technostuff
Wikipedia - Lots of great info here

More cool blogs: Gadgets

Gadget blogs are what the medium is perfect for; quickly updated, up-to-the-minute information.

Here are some that I confess that I spend too much time reading:
Gizmodo - This is the one I read every day. Easy to keep up.
Engadget - Very similar to Gozmodo, I like them both
MSN Tech & Gadgets - More like a magazine, not as up-to-date.
The Gadgeteer - Covers just about everything
Ubergizmo - Another nice one like Gizmodo and Engadget, but less funny and more commercial.
Hack A Day - Amazingly cool stuff that I will never be able to do.

Bloggies

One of the ways I find cool new sites is to search for awards. There's a lot of internet awards, and most of them don't last very long. The Bloggies is an awards site that's been around for six years, now, and I've found lots of interesting blogs there. For 2006 in the category of best american weblog the nominees are:

Cute Overload - mostly for girly girls
Postsecret - juicy secrets
Waiter Rant - he's a waiter and a very good story teller
Dooce - a stay-at-home Mom in Salt Lake City who was a journalist
Go Fug Yourself - catty comments about everything

There's lots more interesting sites nominated. Look at the previous years' nominations, too.

10 Things Every Road Warrior Needs

I travel a lot, yesterday's post got me to thinking, I've found some things that I keep in my travel bag that have proven invaluable. This is over and above the basics, like batteries, power supplies, and cables you need to hook up and go.

1) Three-outlet grounded plug - You've probably got several things to charge at night, including a laptop, cell phone, PDA, iPod, each of which has their own power supply. Many hotels you're lucky to get one outlet in a convenient place.



2) Three prong to two prong converter - You'll need this if you're staying at an old hotel that only has two-prong outlets.



3) Extension for power supplies - This is great for plugging all of those AC converters together.



4) Extension for phone cables One of these combined splitters and extensions will work in almost every situation.






Or, you can use this combo:



5) Screwdrivers - These are now okay for carry-on bags.











6) Travel mouse - There's no reason not to have a full-sized mouse on the road, and this one is great. It's wireless, and the little USB receiver fits inside the mouse and powers it off when you store it.







7) USB Flash memory device - Forget floppy drives, zip disks, and IR file transfer. This is the standard now, and you've got to have one.



8) Ear plugs - head phones don't always cut it, even the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones don't do a great job on screaming kids, and you can't wear them (comfortably) to bed. If you've ever had a hotel room next to the ice machine or elevator, or near the railroad tracks or airport runway, then you'll appreciate a good pair of earplugs. Just throw them in your toiletries kit and they'll always be there when you need them.



9) A movie on DVD - great for downtime with a laptop, you'll need to have headphones too, unless you're in the hotel room. All new laptops can play DVD's, so find one that you'll want to see, and throw it in your computer bag. I carried Brazil for a few months, then after I watched it, I replaced it with The Tick. Many of today's laptops have a video out, so with a video cable you could plug it in to the television.



10) Something to read - Not too heavy or bulky, something you can start and stop without too much trouble, maybe a light novel, maybe a magazine or a collection of stories.

My 2005 in cities

Here are the cities I visited in 2005, à la here and here. Criteria: one or more nights spent in each place. Cities marked with an * were visited more than once. Numbers represent the number of nights I spent in each city. Somehow, I did a lot less traveling last year than I had anticipated, maybe the job change had an impact. Cities are in the order that I remembered them.

Houston, TX*
Muscle Shoals, AL (1)
Birmingham, AL* (7)
Tuscaloosa, AL (1)
Las Vegas, NV* (8)
Colorado Springs, CO* (4)
Winter Park, CO (3)
Sun Valley, ID (3)
Nashville, TN (4)
Monroe, LA* (4)
Houma, LA* (10)
New Orleans, LA* (2)
Lafayette, LA* (12)
Calgary, AB, CA (5)
Banff, AB, CA (4)
Longview, TX* (5)
Conroe, TX (2)
Phoenix, AZ (6)
Austin, TX (4)
Corpus Christi, TX* (4)
Victoria, TX (1)
Green Bay, WI (3)

Sites that link to my site

I did a reverse-link thingie here, and found four sites that link to my site:
Sohu.com
Sohu.com (search)
sh.cn
hahame.net

And I used to wonder why I got so much Chinese spam.

Site design

It's been about a year and a half since I redesigned the site, and while I still like the new design (go here to see the progression) I'm getting a little restless. The UT page gave me an idea to experiment with the color scheme. You can see the front page in red, white, blue (old style), and green.

I like Amazon.com

I like Amazon. I know that some of my friends don't like it, but Amazon, to me, is one of the very first effective commercial web sites. You go there and buy books, and it suggests other books you might like. My friends who don't like it think it's big brother-ish. I found the suggestions useful, and I discovered some authors that I would have never found without them. They are suggestions, not directions, and you can ignore them if you wish. I know there are other web sites that do the same thing, but Amazon was one of the first that I found. There was a toys.com site that was pretty good, too, for gifts. Now every site tries to model itself after Amazon. I buy a lot of books, mostly from Amazon, because they have everything. If you discover a new author that you love, and you want to read his entire life works, but you are limited to whatever the local bookstore or library happens to have on hand. At Amazon, you can see and order every book by that author still in print, and many that are no longer in print. You can free-associate, and search by topic, by genre, by similar author, see reviews and lists by other readers, and find all kinds of new things. The new search feature A9 allows you to search within the content of books, too. There are editor's recommendations. And while they don't always hit, in fact they miss more than they hit, this kind of browsing is the virtual equivalent of walking through the bookstore, perusing the shelves, asking the opinions of the clerks and fellow customers. And I like it.

I tend to keep track of book ideas with my wish list, kind of like a tickler file (I hate that expression, it's always seemed too ebullient to me)and buying in bulk, formerly to avoid the shipping charges, but now that they have free shipping for orders over $25, it's just habit. My most recent order was 16 books and 5 CD's. See my profile here. I just updated it to show recent purchases. You can see my wish list here. This may not be representative of what I’m reading, since I usually bookmark a bunch of books and then buy only a few of them. For example, I bookmarked a dozen or so poker books, but I'm only going to buy one or two.

I've bought other things at the Amazon site, like toys, a wireless mouse, my iPod, DVD's, CD's, and software. I buy all the books for the book club, it's just as easy to get seven copies as one. But the real strength of the site is finding books you want to read. And that's why I like it.

Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

Book lists

Our book club just met, we had a great time. I looked up a couple of book lists on the internet today. This one lists the top 100 Science Fiction books based on a poll that he maintains at his website. I've read all of the top 16, and 24 of the top 25. This one is based on the book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels : An English-Language Selection, 1949-1984 by David Pringle. I've only read about 30 of Pringle's list, and only 5 of the top 25. Granted, this was published in 1987, and the latest inclusion was published more than 20 years ago, in 1984, it leans towards the classics.

This one is the recent Time Magazine list of 100 best novels since 1929. I've read about 30 of the 100, they don't rank them. Overall a pretty good list, only novels written in English since 1923, so there are some missing. This one is a complete list from Random House, and this one is a list from the New York Times, neither of which have any of the best contemporary science fiction. Here's one from the UK.

How to Avoid Spam (Part 10 of 10) - And finally, for God's sake, don't buy anything solicited by spam!

And finally, for God's sake, don't buy anything solicited by spam!


The only reason spammers send out all these messages is because it's profitable. Sending spam is a lucrative business. It costs spammers next to nothing to send out millions, even billions, of e-mail messages. And consider this: If even a tiny percentage of a hundred million people buy something in response to a junk message, that's a lot! According to Pew Internet & American Life Project, five percent of e-mail users in the United States (that's six million people) said they had ordered a product or service as a result of unsolicited e-mail. If people keep buying things from spammers, spammers will keep sending spam.

There's another reason not to send money to spammers: You have no way of knowing if you'll get anything in return. Think about it. If these people go through so much trouble to hide their identity, and are so underhanded about how they market their products, can they be trusted to conduct business honestly? You don't give out your credit card number to someone who calls you up on the phone, and you should be just as wary of someone who contacts you via e-mail. They don't respect your privacy, internet policies, laws, or common courtesy, so why should you trust them? Software marketed is often pirated. Pharmaceuticals are illegal, fake, or worse. Many of the emails are pure scams. It's not worth it to save a couple of bucks, and if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.


Don't give to any charity promoted through spam. Spammers often swap or sell the e-mail addresses of those who have bought from them, so donating through spam may result in even more spam. Plus, spammers can make their living (and a lucrative one, too) on people's purchases of their offerings. Resist the temptation to impulsively donate through spam, and help to put spammers out of business.

Criminals use spam to prey on people's desire to help others. Many charitible are scams, and all of the money goes in the spammer's pocket. If you receive an e-mail request from a charity you'd like to support, contact the organization directly to contribute.

This is the final installment of a ten part article on how to avoid spam. If you enjoyed this article, please let me know. See the first installment here.

Drew Hevle, hevle.com, Houston, TX, January 2006

Viagra photo courtesy howstuffworks.com. Enlargement photo courtesy some scammer. Microsoft Office photo courtesy ConsumerGuide.com. Diploma photo courtesy Continental Auctioneers School.


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Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

How to Avoid Spam (Part 9 of 10) - Hunt down and kill all spammers (metaphorically)

Hunt down and kill all spammers (metaphorically)
So, you've got spam, what now? Optimally, you could report spam email to their ISP or the web cops, and they would be stopped. And killed. Metaphorically. Of course, many providers don't care about complaints, and the majority of spam is sent from zombie computers that have been hijacked. If it's from a legitimate company, you can follow their removal policy, I've had mostly good luck with that, I'm not including unwanted emails from legitimate companies in the list of spammers who MUST DIE (metaphorically).

You can send a copy of the spam email to your ISP's abuse contact, usually the email address is abuse@yourispname.com or postmaster@yourispname.com. Make sure to include a copy of the spam, along with the full email header. At the top of the message, let them know that you're complaining spam email. You can complain to the sender's ISP, if you can find out where it really came from. Run-of-the-mill spam won't usually get much run from these guys, though, unless the emails are blatently illegal, abusive, harassing, threatening, etc..

A large number of spam emails are already illegal, of course, amounting to confidence tricks or illegal selling of prescription drugs. You can report spam messages to the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC):

Send a copy of unwanted or deceptive messages to spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the unsolicited emails stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive spam email.

Let the FTC know if a "remove me" request is not honored. If you want to complain about a removal link that doesn't work or not being able to unsubcribe from a list, you can fill out the FTC's online complaint form at www.ftc.gov. Your complaint will be added to the FTC's Consumer Sentinel database and made available to hundreds of law enforcement and consumer protection agencies.

Whenever you complain about spam, it's important to include the full email header. The information in the header makes it possible for consumer protection agencies to follow up on your complaint.

Or you can report Make Money Fast schemes to the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) at net-abuse@nocs.insp.irs.gov. Mail sent to this address will be forwarded to the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) for appropriate action (I could not confirm this on the IRS website, so proceed at your own risk). The University of Oregon maintains this site that lists other governmental agencies' addresses for reporting spam.

One of the problems is that the spammer is difficult to track down, and when you do, he or his servers may be outside of the US, making prosecution impossible. Because the Internet is a free resource, there are bound to be people who abuse that resource. Regulation can't help because there aren't any regulations on the Internet; who's jurisdiction would it be, after all? So all we can hope for is to catch the incompetent spammers, and try to avoid the rest. Photo courtesy of Native Forest

See tomorrow's posting for Part 10 of How to Avoid Spam.

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How to Avoid Spam (Part 8 of 10) - Change your email address

Change your email address
If your email address is discovered by spammers, there's realistically only one thing you can do: change it. This is inconvenient, you have to send an updated email address to all your friends, change all the places you use it on the Internet, but think how many times you've changed your cell phone number. You haven't lost any friends over that, have you? That issue has been fixed for cell phones with local number portability, but still there's less expectation of permanence with email addresses and cell phone numbers. Changing your email address will help you avoid spam, at least until the spammers get hold of your new email address.

You can use the old address as your disposable address, just checking occasionally, if at all, for legitimate messages. Or, you can cut all ties with that address by canceling it, that way anyone who tries to email your old address will get an error message and know that it's not good anymore. Don't expect spammers to bother to remove your old email address from their lists, though. I deleted my drew@hevle.com account and four months later, I reactivated it for a couple of days, and was getting even more spam than before.

Follow the advice in Part 4 of this article, choose a new email address that is easy for you and your friends to remember, but would be hard for a spammer to guess. And, most importantly, don't give spammers your new email address or sign up for mail you don't want.

See tomorrow's posting for Part 9 of How to Avoid Spam.

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How to Avoid Spam (Part 7 of 10) - Use a spam filter

Use a spam filter
Spam filters are not new, back when Usenet was most of the Internet, there were already spammers, and they were dealt with by killfiles. If you didn't want to hear from a particular person, you added their name to your killfile, and then anything they sent or posted didn't get through to you. The idea that you can identify a particular sender as a spammer and block the spam in that way has had its day in the sun, but is no longer effective. Spammers use aliasing and forged headers to make it appear that their spam is coming from a legitimate user (I've gotten many bouncebacks from spam messages I didn't send), or are using zombie computers or viruses to send spam from other computers than their own.

Nowdays, spam filters use many other techniques to identify spam. Large ISP's can spot multiple instances of the same message to their customers. Spammers get around this by adding in random text to each spam email, from a book or dictionary. Also, sometimes newsletters or other legitimate email can be blocked by mistake. Spam filters look for key words, like Viagra and Make Money Fast. Spammers get around this by varying the spelling of the key words, like V1@gra and M@ke M0ney F@st. Spam filters look at the email headers to see if they are forged. Spammers get around this by using zombie machines or viruses to deliver their spam. Spam filters scan the text of an email and use fuzzy logic to give a weighted opinion as to whether the email is spam. Spammers get around this by including their content in an attached image, or add in random words that might appear to be legitimate email language. This can also occasionally filter out emails that are not spam. This can usually be overridden by explicitly authorizing email from particular senders or domains.

False positives are a big problem. If you have to wade through all the spam to find the couple of legitimate emails that were misidentified, then a spam filter isn't doing much good. And friends get fed up if you don't receive emails from them, or if they keep getting email warnings about their emails being spam.

Many ISPs and e-mail services provide spam filtering. While filters are not perfect, they can significantly cut down the amount of spam, and very rarely produce false positives. Check with your ISP to see if they do (AOL, MSN, Hotmail, and Yahoo! do). If they don't or you want more protection, you can get programs, both free and commercial products, to block, identify, or delete spam. Another option is to manually set up filtering in your email program such as Outlook Express or Outlook. Here's an article by Microsoft on how to set up spam filtering in Outlook 2003.

In a single day in May [2003], No. 1 Internet service provider AOL Time Warner (AOL ) blocked 2 billion spam messages -- 88 per subscriber -- from hitting its customers' e-mail accounts. Microsoft (MSFT), which operates No. 2 Internet service provider MSN plus e-mail service Hotmail, says it blocks an average of 2.4 billion spams per day. According to research firm Radicati Group in Palo Alto, Calif., spam is expected to account for 45% of the 10.9 trillion messages sent around the world in 2003. - Business Week Magazine

HTML emails, URLs, and images can expose you (or your kids) to pornographic or otherwise offensive images in spam. In addition, spam written in HTML can contain Java programs to direct your browser to a spammers web page, or to make the spam message difficult to close or delete. In some cases, spam messages can install spyware or viruses. Also, the HTML or images can be used to signal whether a spam message is actually read and seen by a user (see Part 3 of this article). You can defend against these risks by setting up your email software to not automatically display HTML, images or attachments by default. Spam filters are not just good for reducing the tedium of deleting spam. Spam filters can reduce or eliminate risks, too.

See tomorrow's posting for Part 8 of How to Avoid Spam.

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How to Avoid Spam (Part 6 of 10) - Disguise your email address on the web

Disguise your email address on the web
If you have to use your email addres on the web, such as for newsgroups, forums, chat, etc., you should disguise it. First choice is not to use an email address at all (see Part 1 of this article), second best is to use your throw-away email address (see Part 5 of this article), but if you really do want to share your email address with other people on the Internet, then you should make it harder for spammers to get it.

Spammers find a lot of their email addresses by using automated robots (spiders) to search web pages for things that look like email addresses. If I post something here like: notanemailaddress@invalid.com, then you can bet that in a very short time, that (nonexistent) email address will start receiving spam messages. The spammers don't even care that it's not a valid email address, it's almost as easy to send one spam email as a million. They can even find email addresses embedded in the web pages, like the Contact Me link I have at the bottom of every web page.

If you want other people to know your email address but not spiders, one common way is to write out parts of the email address so that it doesn't look like an email address, like: "drew AT hevle DOT com". If a real person reads that, they'll know to change the "AT" part to "@" and the "DOT" part to ".", and to remove the spaces. Click on this Contact Me link to see how I on my web page. You'll see that you have to do a little editing for the email address to work. I also tell people to email me at firstname.lastname at lastname.com. It takes a little more effort than just clicking on a link, but it's a small price to pay for no spam. A spider, unless it's pretty smart, won't recognize that phrase as an email address at all. Another way is to add something to your real address (like drewNOSPAM@hevle.com), and that way, if a human being has to contact me, they can, but the automated systems won't be able to figure it out. This has become fairly common, and I'm sure that the spammers have caught on to this little trick, but by varying it a little bit, drewNO@SPAMhevle.com or drewDELETE_THIS_BIT@hevle.com. Another good practice is if you have a smaller ISP or your own domain, to be sure to put some text in the domain name part (like drew@hevlePLEASE_DONT_SPAM_ME.com) so that the spammers don't find a new domain to start dictionary spamming (see Part 4 of this article).

Another method on a web page is to use an image instead of text, so the spider can't recognize the text, but someone reading it can, like this: . You can also just use the image for part of the email address, like in this case, the @ symbol is an image instead of text:
drewhevleNOSPAM.com. The spiders can't read the images, so they don't know that it is an email address.

See tomorrow's posting for Part 7 of How to Avoid Spam.

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How to Avoid Spam (Part 5 of 10) - Use a disposable email address

Use a disposable email address
Sites like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, and some smaller including Lycos, AIM mail, inbox.com and mail.com all offer free e-mail accounts to anyone. In Part 4 of this article I told you not to use any of the large ISP's, but this is an account that you won't care if you get spammed. Use this account wherever you have to use an email address on the web, like for registering or online purchases. You can check it when you like, to pick up the , but you can ignore anything else that gets sent to this account, and if it gets on the spammers' mailing lists, who cares? You don't have to pick an email address that sounds cool or means anything, since no one will see it. Another advantage is that many companies block personal email but allow web mail at the office, so you may be able to take care of online bills, purchases, etc. during your lunch hour at the office.

I still have an original MSN account, ahevle@msn.com, and it gets so much spam (100+/day) that it is worthless for anything else. I use that when I have to give an address that I don't care if it is compromised. I check it once in a while so it stays active, and delete the spam to avoid going over my capacity (250MB).

If you have your own domain, or if your ISP allows you to create aliases, you might want to create a throw-away email address. The down side of aliases is that most ISPs will forward all the email from an alias to your main account, and don't allow you to set up how each address is treated. I have created a separate email account for each vendor that I deal with regularly, so that I can try to track how my email addresses get into the hands of spammers. I don't forward the throw-away accounts back to my main address, I just periodically delete all the emails.

Never give your main email address to anyone who might spam you or give your email address to spammers. Use your throw-away email address. Never give your throw-away email address to anyone you want to receive emails from, or you'll end up having to sift through all the spam to get their emails, which is what we're trying to avoid in the first place. And don't make any exceptions, in Part 1 of this article I talk about an instance where one slip ruined an email account.

See tomorrow's posting for Part 6 of How to Avoid Spam.

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How to Avoid Spam (Part 4 of 10) - Use a Unique Email Address

Use a Unique Email Address
Your email address may affect the amount of spam you receive because some spammers use "dictionary attacks" to email many possible name combinations at large ISPs or email services, hoping to find a valid address. Don't use the big ISP's (AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, or Gmail) for your real email address, although they're great for your throw-away addresses because they're free, use a smaller ISP. Many of the smaller ISP's allow multiple email aliases (my ev1.net account allowed unlimited aliases). Pick a "strong" email address, similar to a strong password:

1. Over eight characters in length. Short email addresses are easier to guess than long passwords.

2. Combines letters, numbers, and symbols. According to RFC 2822, the local-part of the email may use any of these ASCII characters:

-Uppercase and lowercase letters
-The digits 0 through 9
-The characters "!" (exclamation point), "#" (number sign), "$" (dollar sign), "%" (percent sign), "&" (ampersand), "'" (single quote), "*" (asterisk), "+" (plus sign), "-" (hyphen), "/" (forward slash), "=" (equals sign), "?" (question mark), "^" (circumflex accent), "_" (underscore), "`" (grave accent), "{" (left curly bracket), "|" (vertical line), "}" (right curly bracket), and "~" (tilde)
-The character "." (period aka dot) provided that it is not the first or last character in the local-part.
- "-" (hyphen) "." (period aka dot) "+" (plus sign) and "_" (underscore) are the most common symbols in email addresses.

3. Don't use sequential or repeating combinations, such as "12345678," "222222," "abcdefg," or adjacent letters on your keyboard, like "qwerty".

4. Don't use common words with letters replaced by numbers or symbols, such as "M1cr0$0ft" or "P@ssw0rd". Unfortunately, spammers know these tricks, too.

5. Pick one that's easy for you and your friends to remember, but is difficult for a spammer to guess. Unfortunately, using your firstname.lastname or firstinitiallastname is asking for trouble. Don't use words that could be found in the dictionary, in any language. Hackers use dictionaries to guess email addresses that are based on words in the dictionary, in a variety of languages, and using words spelled backwards.

See tomorrow's posting for Part 5 of How to Avoid Spam.

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How to Avoid Spam (Part 3 of 10) - Never reply to spam, even to request removal

Never reply to spam, even to request removal
Once you are on a spammer's mailing list, you will never get off. If you reply, even if they have a "remove" policy, they won't take you off their list. After all, they're spammers! Most spammers will use your reply to demonstrate that your address is live, and will sell the address to even more spammers. It's much cheaper to simply add more names to their existing list, spammers don't even bother to remove dead or duplicate email addresses. It's no more cost or effort to send a spam message to 10,000 addresses, 500 of which are dead. It's a lot of effort to maintain a current mailing list just for a couple of hundred addresses, I know, I've done it before (for legitimate purposes). Many spammers guess at email addresses, and by replying they'll know that they guessed correctly.

Ever get a blank email from yourself? An error message or bounce-back about an email you didn't send? That's a spammer using your good email address to send spam to other people. Now they think you're a spammer. I got a response from someone who asked me to remove their name from an email about herbal V1@gra. I sent him a nice note telling him not to respond to spammers. Spammers use other people's good addresses to fake out those ingnore lists. More than likely, your spammer has forged headers or provided fake return addresses (aliasing) in his email. My email addresses have been used to sell all kinds of stuff. The messages are full of dubious scams or even illegal claims. So, why should you trust anything else a spammer says?

Don't believe anything the spammer tells you about his offerings. Don't believe that he will remove you from his list if you ask. Don't believe that you voluntarily subscribed to receive his email just because he says you did. Don't believe the email addresses on spam. Even if you really know what you're doing, most of the time you'll trace the spam back to some zombie computer or some ISP in Russia that just doesn't care if their customers are spammers. The majority of spam is sent from computers that have been hijacked by Trojan horses or viruses.

Turn off image display in your email program, too. They can see when your email program downloads the image from their web site, and they'll tailor the image names so that they can tell who opens their emails and who doesn't. Guess which email addresses are worth more to spammers? The ones that people open and read. Outlook allows users to choose if an HTML email should be allowed to access the Internet and download content, and so do most other email applications.

In fact, you should be able to recognize most spam before you even open it. The best way to deal with spam is to just delete it, unopened. Here's an article by spammers (or maybe legitimate email marketers) about how to write subject lines and sender's email addresses to increase the likelyhood of you opening the email and decrease the likelyhood of being blocked by a spam filter.

See tomorrow's posting for Part 4 of How to Avoid Spam.

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How to Avoid Spam (Part 2 of 10) - Don't sign up for email you don't want

Don't sign up for email you don't want
The reason most websites can be free is because they rely on advertising for revenue. Often, you're asked to provide personal information to access some content. Some sites use this for more advertising, and some sites use this information to sell to spammers or "legitimate" marketers. If you have to give them some information, don't give out your e-mail address. If you have to supply one, use a fake email address, a throw-away account, or a service to bypass compulsory site registration (see Part 1 of this article). Then uncheck the box that allows the company to send you special offers. That's what you're trying to avoid. Watch for the check boxes that ask if you want to be contacted by "select third parties" or "our business partners" Never ask for mail you don't want, and read the options carefully, some default to opt-out, some default to opt-in.

Don't sign up for chat rooms, user's groups, warantees, product registrations, mailing lists, newsletters, joke-of-the-day mailings, or anything else that requires your email address, even if they seem to be reliable businesses with good privacy policies. These policies can always change. Remember the Toysmart.com? Their privacy policy stated that personal information would never be shared with third parties. When they went backrupt, that information went up for auction. The FTC decided that anyone willing to buy the entire Toysmart Web site could have the information, as long as they were "family-oriented". Small consolation.

I have set up individual email accouts just for eBay and Amazon, among others, and so far I haven't received a single spam email on any of those. Some sites are very responsible, I would trust Kim Kommando when she says she'll never sell your email address to spammers, but I know for a fact that sites like eVite and Friendster and Classmates either aren't too careful with your email address or sell your address to spammers. Be aware that content you have to register for isn't free, you'll pay for it by sharing your personal information, losing your privacy, and spam spam spam spam lovely spam. And if you don't care about the spam, you shouldn't be reading this article.

See tomorrow's posting for Part 3 of How to Avoid Spam.

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How to Avoid Spam (Part 1 of 10) - Never give your email address to anyone

Never give your email address to anyone. Ever.
If the only way someone knows your email address is for you to give it them, then that's just like having an unlisted phone number. You still may get some calls, but you'll get a lot fewer than if you're listed in the phonebook. I got rid of my drew@hevle.com email address about four months ago, because I was getting too much spam, and I created a new one. I have my own domain, so I can create as many new email addresses as I want. I was very careful not to give out the new address to any of my online bills, site registrations, purchases, etc., except for my bible class at Second Baptist. I wrote it down in a moment of weakness, thinking that it couldn't cause any harm. Well, they use eVite quite a bit, and already I'm getting dozens of spam emails a day on my new address. One slip and you're done.


If you have to register for a site, use a fake email address, if you can. I just add the words NOSPAM to my real address (like drew@hevleNOSPAM.com), and that way, if a human being has to contact me, they can, but the automated systems won't be able to figure it out. If the site requires you to confirm your email address, for example by receiving a password or a key, you can use a throw-away account established just for that (see Part 5 of this article). You can also use a service such as BugMeNot that posts usernames and passwords in order to bypass compulsory site registration.

Never give out your e-mail address indiscriminately. If telemarketers can't get your phone number, they can't call. It's the same principal with unwanted email. The last time I went to [large computer retail store] the cashier asked me for my email address when I was checking out. I told her I didn't have one. They look at you funny, but some people still don't have email addresses, and why does [large computer retail store] need my email address? There's a blank for your email address on almost every form you fill out nowdays, but it's not required or even necessary for everything but purely Internet transactions. Just say "no", or "I don't have one", or "I can't give that out, it's my employer's policy". It should be your policy too.

Once your email address is on a spammer's list, it will be there forever. Spammers sell to other spammers, and they can get more money if they confirm that the address is live, or even more if they have someone who bought something (see Part 10 of this article). Spammers don't even bother to check for duplicate entries, much less care if one of their thousands of emails didn't go through because it is invalid. I recreated the old drew@hevle.com account and checked the email for a few days, and it's getting more spam now (60+/day) than it was four months ago when I turned it off. Every spam email that goes to that address generates a bounce-back error message, but the spammers don't care, most of them don't even receive the errors because of forged headers (see Part 3 of this article).

Never post your email address on the Internet. Spammers search web pages for email addresses (this is referred to as scraping) so if you sign someone's guest book or comment on their blog with your real email address, it won't be long before a spammer has it too. There are websites whose whole source of revenue is getting visitors to divulge their email addresses and then selling those names to spammers. Viruses are now being written to distribute malicious programs (e.g. a virus or a trojan) that scan the victim's hard drive looking for email addresses. So even if you only tell your closest friends your email address, a less discriminating friend could give your email address to spammers just by opening a suspicious email attachment and having your email address in their address book. Those big long headers on forwarded chain letters and jokes are great fodder for spammers, too. Product registration cards collect email addresses for revenue, and so do registrations with web servers. Online purchases do too. Responding only makes it worse (see Part 3 of this article), any email messages you have exchanged with a spammer will just guarantee that you go on more lists. Other forms you fill in that request your email address may add you to spammers lists.

Even if you never tell anyone your email address, spammers can still get you by attempt to guess your email address given a traditional mailing list containing only names, street addresses, telephone number and employer details. Some spammers use these services so they can spam people who have intentionally withheld their email address (like you should). This is especially true if you use one of the bigger ISP's (see Part 4 of this article), they'll guess johnAsmith@aolNOSPAM.com, johnBsmith@aolNOSPAM.com, johnCsmith@aolNOSPAM.com, etc. It's harder if you have a domain like hevleNOSPAM.com. They can still guess webmaster@hevleNOSPAM.com, accounting@hevleNOSPAM.com, sales@hevleNOSPAM.com. I get those all the time. Photo courtesy of Hormel

See tomorrow's posting for Part 2 of How to Avoid Spam.

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And yet even more drummer jokes

Q: How do you get a drummer to stop playing?
A: Put sheet music in front of him.

Q: How do you know when there's a drummer on your porch?
A: The knocking speeds up

Q: How do you get a drummer off your porch?
A: Pay him for the pizza

Q: What to you call a drummer without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless

Q: How do you know when the drum riser is level?
A: When there's drool coming out of both corners of the drummer's mouth

Quiz of the Day (level: beginner)

Complete the Quote Quiz

Super job, Drew! "Here's looking at you, kid." -- Humphrey Bogart, as Rick in Casablanca. You got 10/10 correct.

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

What's New?

Check out the new What's New page, it now incorporates a Blogger format so that updates about what's new with the site are much easier to add. If you've noticed that the color scheme of the main page has changed, that's because I made the header background burnt orange in honor of the University of Texas Longhorns football National Championship. Click here to see the burnt orange page.

More blogs

I created a blog for this page, the What's New page, so I can more easily add new comments about, well, what's new, and you can more easily navigate amongst the afore mentioned comments. I took basically the same template that I use for the main page and for the Books page and modified it slightly to look like the old What's New page.

It also better implements some of the features of Blogger, like automatic archiving, individual post pages, and RSS syndication. I turned on comments on the blog posts as well. My fear (since realized) in allowing comments was not that I'd receive negative comments, but that I won't receive any comments at all, and at the bottom of every post, you'll see "0 comments".

Texas National Champions

I have to confess, I didn't watch the game. Live. I recorded it, and I watched the first half last night. I'm going to watch the second half tonight. I was too anxious to watch Wednesday night, every time I turned it on, something bad happened. I watched the first series, and then when Texas fumbled the punt, I turned it off, thinking that USC would score for sure. They did, USC 7, Texas 0. Then I turned it back on right when Mac Brown went for it on fourth down and they got stuffed. I turned it off again, thinking that USC would score again for sure, leaving UT in a huge hole at the beginning of the game. I went and worked on the computer for a while, and then turned it on again in the second half, USC 25, Texas 23, right when Robert Killebrew (a fellow Klein High School alumnus) was called for roughing the passer, giving USC 15 yards and a fresh set of downs. At that point, I went to sleep, thinking that UT had blown the game. I didn't find out the winner until I got in the car the next morning to drive to work. When I turned on the radio, I knew that I would be able to tell who won just by the comments, and I was right.

In watching the first half, I realize now that the game was much closer than I thought, and that I just happened to watch most of the low spots in what was a great game. I can't wait to watch the ending.

I don't have a tolerance for suspense anymore, especially when I'm alone. I can't watch horror movies, even the tame ones, and I get very uncomfortable when any movie has a buildup of suspense for more than a minute or two. Not sure if that is some kind of product of aging, or some unique form of Parkinson's, or maybe I've got a brain tumor or some bizarre psychological affect.

Texas wins!

(Donald Miralle/Getty Images)

Burnt Orange

I made the header background burnt orange in honor of the University of Texas Longhorns football National Championship, the first since 1969 (they shared the title in 1970, in 1981 (my freshman year) they finished #2 behind Clemson, and in 1983 they were #2 behind Nebraska before losing to Georgia in the Cotton Bowl, Nebraska proceeded to lose to #4 Miami in the Orange Bowl.

I'm going to leave it this way for a week or so. [You can see the page here.]

Go Horns! Hook'em!

(Photo courtesy University of Texas Spirit Program)

Best. Chicken. Joke. Ever!

A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a satisfied smile on its face. The egg is frowning and obviously unhappy. The egg mutters to no one in particular, "Well, I guess we answered THAT question!"

Domains

I just bought some new domains, drewhevle.com (previously owned by my friend Mike, who used it for nefarious purposes) and andrewhevle.com. I transferred the old domains, hevle.com and hevle.net, to godaddy.com. They've got a much better deal than I was paying before, only $6.95 for transfers (I have seen up to $70)and only $8.95 for renewals (I paid $25 recently). They also have free domain forwarding, ev1servers.com charged $10/month. So all the new domains now point to this website, you can get here by typing hevle.com, drewhevle.com, andrewhevle.com, or hevle.net.

New Year's Resolutions

Today I had to do eight load of laundry (I am exagerating, it was really five, but I was definitely a little behind), pack, and drive to Lafayette, about a four hour drive in my new car. I'm teaching a class all week for NACE, Internal Corrosion of Pipelines. A great way to start out the year, working on a Sunday and a holiday (Monday). I made a couple of resolutions, like to breathe more, to get out of bed every single day this year, and I'm going to try to learn good cusswords in different languages. I'm going to try to gain some weight, and watch more TV, I've probably been missing some good stuff. I've always wanted to grow dreadlocks. And I'm going to pick up a bad habit, something different, like huffing.