We spent from last Friday evening to the following Tuesday evening without internet access—so much for trying to post something new on the site every day. One reason we waited so long to complain was that the system was scheduled for an upgrade anyway—primarily, to cope with the ever-increasing amounts of spam I've been receiving. Granted, I was only getting 50 messages or so a day—but it was still awful.

Emacs (and xemacs), the program I used for email for many, many years, was and is wonderful, but written long before spam was a problem. So, I had to delete by hand. For awhile, I did this by flipping through the email, until the horrified wizard discovered this practice and informed me I was setting off traps that triggered more spam. He wanted me to use the summary. This made it more difficult to tell which letter I was on, and I promptly deleted two email, one from a guy I hadn't replied to yet and one from my uncle. I can ask my uncle to resend, but except in the unlikely case that the guy gets back to my website, I'll never hear from him again. I like hearing from people, and hate discouraging them.

But now I have a new program, Evolution, which seems to be pretty slick. Of course, I have to learn a slew of new commands to use it. Well, I was bummed when the firefox/mozilla people changed the keybindings from emacs to windows, too, but I coped. Sort of. [I still miss being able to delete from the url line with a simple [ctrl k, as well as the other two-stroke commands for moving around in xemacs docs, that used to work...]

At any rate, coping with spam should be easier, and as filtering it becomes more automated, I should be making fewer errors of this kind. If only the phone company would stop trashing our internet connection every time they come out to this neighborhood—this isn't the first time SBC was guilty of this, and it probably won't be the last—we'll be all set. The technical support from our ISP (which does not rely upon SBC to provide our access) had a rather telling reaction to my plaints: “Well, officially, I can't comment about—” (or some such) which is as far as he got before I burst out laughing.

C'est la vie.

Oh, and the how not to send email? Well, put something in the subject line that is germane to the content, like ‘I enjoyed your freezing fog pix’ or ‘Q's about bead curtain construction’. If you have a return address that looks like sallysmith@provide.net or even mysticfirefairy@oogabooga.com I'm more likely to respond than if it's that hash I commonly get from spammers, such as jaadwzybjhtloh@onpro.ch.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.