deja vu

In the early days, email was unreliable and slow. We had to route messages by hand, and each machine in the network might process its UUCP queue only once or twice a day. It could take days for a message to get to its recipient, and sometimes it didn't get there at all.

Then, the ARPANet became dominant and email was faster and more reliable. Most people using it were "practicioners" of various sorts; the average guy on the street didn't yet have email.

Then two things happened: spam, and widespread email access (making spam even more profitable). Now, almost 10 years after the green-card lawyers created the first piece of spam and AOL sent out its first mass (physical) mailing of software, we're all swimming in spam, and virii, and lures (for the unsuspecting) to "just click here", and the attendant side effects. So we have filters and auto-processing of various sorts, and this month most of us aren't inspecting bounced-message reports because of all the SoBig-generated false ones, so we don't even know if we're seeing all our mail or if the mail we send gets through. Sometimes we have to send messages several times, or actually tell someone "I sent you email", before the recipient actually sees it.

25 years after the rise of UUCP, email is unreliable and slow again. Oops.

short takes

Seen in a .sig file: "What did cured ham actually have?"

Ambiguous spam of the day: "Indulge your Java passion". Oh, they meant coffee.

Understaffed, but no budget for hiring? Try Primate Programming Inc. "Humans and higher primates share approximately 97% of their DNA in common. Recent research in primate programming suggests computing is a task that most higher primates can easily perform. Visual Basic 6.0 was the preferred IDE for the majority of experiment primate subjects."

I happened to notice the feeding instructions on a package of cat food recently. They started "For average adult cats (6-8 pounds)...". Since when is 6-8 pounds average? (Granted, they didn't say "healthy".) I know a lot more 10-pound adult cats than 4-pound ones. In fact, I don't think I've ever met an adult cat under 5 pounds. What do these guys think the standard deviation is?

Speaking of cat food, I found this prominently displayed on a package of cat treats: "tuna is the #1 ingredient!" Well sure, but ingredients order doesn't really tell you anything about absolute volume, only relative volume. To make tuna beat grain, all you have to do is separately list flour, corn meal, barley, etc etc. Makers of kids' breakfast cereal do this sort of thing to prevent sugar from being the first ingredient. (Sugar, corn syrup, succrose, marshmallows (consisting of...), etc.) So why stop with tuna? Throw in enough assorted junk and you can advertise caviar or filet mignon as your #1 ingredient!

I got a call from a surveyor a couple days ago. I enjoy trying to figure out who's sponsoring the survey based on the questions. This one asked about the types of charitable organizations I support, then zeroed in on animal-related charities (scripted, not prompted by what I said), then asked specific questions about two organizations (after claiming that those two had been randomly selected from a list). So I think either the ASPCA or HSUS was trying to see how they're doing and whether the public thinks they're interchangable. The decoy was that early on they asked for strength of reaction (positive or negative) to a bunch of organizations, ranging from these to PETA and WWF. They were completely uninterested in reasons for strong reactions, though, and their questions didn't capture them for me. (HSUS no longer gets my money because they persist in sending me trinkets, WWF doesn't get anything from me because they're spammers, and PETA is IMO wacko. ASPCA is ok.) Well, whoever they were, good luck interpreting the best data I could supply for the questions they actually asked...

Bah.

Two identical VCRs, two shows to record. One records Enterprise just fine. The other records less than one minute of West Wing and then stops. Naturally, the one that failed couldn't have been the one picking up the show with a rerun later this week. Bah.

No idea what happened. It's not a programming glitch, and there's no obvious physical problem with the tape.

Last time this happened (cable outage, not hardware failure) one of my west-coast friends came to the rescue (because we were within the three-hour window caused by prime-time airing), but I'd feel awfully sheepish about asking again.