Welcome to Drew Hevle's Page

Click on the Site History to see what this site is about. Read the legal Disclaimer and agree to all my terms. If you’ve been here before, check out the What’s New? link to see, well, what’s new. And, if you’d like, write me a quick note here to let me know that you’ve visited.

Enjoy,

Drew

Saturday, January 21, 2006

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.

posted by Drew at 3:41 PM | 0 comments

Friday, January 20, 2006

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.

posted by Drew at 11:56 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, January 19, 2006

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.

posted by Drew at 3:17 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

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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posted by Drew at 11:59 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

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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posted by Drew at 11:59 PM | 1 comments

Last updated 4/5/05

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