Daily Archives: October 21, 2010

The Advent of Cold Weather

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It’s moving towards the end of October, which means one thing for me: It’s about to get really, really cold.

I hate cold weather. I’ve always hated cold weather. Even as I say this, there’s someone reading this (well, someone imaginary reading this because no one actually reads anything I post) who is thinking: “You don’t know anything about cold weather, warm weather guy. I live in the middle of the Antarctic and let me tell you about cold weather!”

Okay, so I’m sure someone has it worse, but I’ll let you in on another little secret of mine. I hate people who compare their lives to someone else as if to somehow lessen someone else’s experience. We all know these people, too. This is the sort of person who after you’ve just talked about losing your arm in a battle with a raging grizzly bear, tells everyone: “That was nothing. Let me tell you about the time I fought a crocodile, and he took off half a’ my right arm, my right leg and ate half of my skull, forcing me to have reconstructive surgery, bionic implants, years of therapy and…” well, I’m sure you get the idea.

For me, I’ve never liked cold weather. I grew up in California, the nice part of California where the weather was beautfiul, the women even more beautiful and the crack addicts not as much. Okay, I ruined it with that last description, but I’ve always loved the feel of the hot sun on me…while I hide in the apartment and play World of Warcraft with the air conditioner on. Okay, something’s wrong with me, but I still like hot weather.

Michigan is not known for its warm weather in the Winter. As a matter of fact, it kind of sucks here. That was the first thing people warned me about when I came to Kalamazoo a few years back to do graduate work. They warned me that the Winter was going to be the worst thing I’ve ever encountered. And then we proceeded to have the mildest Winter in about half a century. I thought, wow, these Michiganders are wimps. And then the next Winter was one of the worst Winters ever, and I no longer felt like saying the same thing again.

Last year was really bad for me because I had just moved from California after being mugged, so not only was I poor, somewhat destitute, but I was also somewhat scared of interacting with other people. And I had no car. I had sold my car before leaving for Korea the year before, so when I came back, I had nothing to get around with. This meant I had to rely on public transportation, and there are some really scary people who also ride public transportation. Had this been me a year before, I would have been fine, but after getting the crap beaten out of me by total strangers, I had a very hard time that year, constantly convinced that people around me were going to jump me, even if there was no reason to think such a thing.

And I had no jacket. So the beginning of the Winter REALLY sucked. I had to walk half an hour every morning to the bus through the snow (UPHILL BOTH WAYS), and it was freaking cold. Many days there was no sidewalk, so I found myself trudging through the snow, in the middle of the darkened street (it was early morning when I had to walk to the bus), and quite a few times the cars weren’t really all that interested in swerving to miss the stupid man walking in the middle of the street, even though he was hugging what he thought  might have been the curb (as he couldn’t see it as it was covered in snow with the rest of the street and the sidewalk). Those walks really sucked. It wasn’t until December before I was able to afford a decent pair of gloves, January before I was able to afford a decent jacket, and March before I was able to finally buy a car.

This Winter, hopefully will be much simpler and less complicated. But it’s still going to be cold, and I think I mentioned how much I hate the cold.

The last few nights have been getting really cold. I refuse to turn on my heat until I have to, which has caused no fewer than three of my stuffed animals to get really pissed at me. And they have stuffed animal fur, so you know it must be cold if they’re already complaining.

It’s not even Winter yet, and I’m already looking forward to April. If I had four months of PTO saved up, I’d take it all. Unfortunately, I just did the math, and I’m short by about, um, four months, so that’s not going to be an option.

Did I mention how much I hate cold weather?

Is There a Cure for Spam?

Economics, Politics, Social Networking, , , , ,

Years ago, when the World Wide Web was still a few years away, one of the hottest communication tools available was a thing called Usenet. Sadly, some people may not know much about it, know it only from its current, sorry state, or had experienced it and fondly think of all of the potential that was destroyed. It was the forerunner of message boards, in that everyone connected to the Internet was able to go to a non-graphical environment and communicate messages with each other on various topics. There were different boards set up that ranged from soc.tennis (social networking about tennis) to alt.sex.bondage (alternative sex about bondage). Yeah, at one point there was a message board for practically everything out there. And it was showing us that the future of the Internet was going to be place where everyone could discuss things, and the alienation of one’s own desires and habits was no longer going to be a problem in the future.

This worked for several years, and it was a lot of fun talking, arguing, flaming and networking with so many people across the planet that you would never get a chance to meet any other way. The global community was finally upon us.

And then something ugly happened. People trying to sell things, mainly scams, realized that this was a far better (and cheaper) process than sending out letters to people at 23 cents a pop (the price of a letter back then, or at least somewhere back then in the past). Quickly, they started sending out hundreds, and then thousands, of messages to these message boards on Usenet to the point of where people could no longer read the actual messages because there was nothing but spam. The more popular boards were destroyed almost overnight. No one could write there anymore because it was nothing but spam.

So people started moving to moderated boards. But they found ways to start spamming those as well.

This was during the time that the Internet was making its transition from word text to a World Wide Web, and unfortunately we didn’t do anything about the spammers during this period, so they moved along with us. Realizing they could do the same thing with email, they practically have destroyed the very concept of email today, much like they did with Usenet.

Spam is starting to destroy the next frontier of the net as well. I have a blog on my own web site that I maintain. Every day, it receives hundreds of spam comments on every post that I write. I have to catch every message that comes through by a spam filter that makes it really hard for me to even try to read through messages for approving. I do it, and it takes time, but the spammers don’t care that they’re sending fake message in hopes of getting me to advertise their crap for free through my posts and messages. Oh, they think they’re intelligent by writing little comments like: “I really loved your post about a generic topic that I care a lot about, but perhaps your readers should check out my pictures of girls with tits for more information” and they’ll include a link to, yes, pictures of girls with tits (which will most likely lead anyone stupid enough to go there to a site that is designed to try to take over your computer).

Recently, I started posting a lot of my writing on several different mainstream sites that allow you to maintain blogs. A good example is Open Salon (where I’ll probably be posting this as well). Unfortunately, you can’t post a story or article on the site without being innundated with spammers trying to sell crap. The moderators try to do something about it, but they’re overwhelmed, much like the Usenet people were, so the spammers are probably going to win. Eventually, the site will either do something seriously draconian to cut down on spam, or the site will become overwhelmed and people will stop visiting there, causing Open Salon to eventually just close up shop cause it won’t be worth the effort for the eventual non-payoff.

So, what can we do? It doesn’t seem that there’s any way to stem this tide of shit that comes from some really sinister people who don’t care that they’re doing everything to destroy the potential marketplace of ideas by turning it into the marketplace of crap. What’s even of more concern to me is that I don’t think anyone even has the problem in their cross hairs, thinking that eventually the problem will go away, or something better will come along that makes it no longer a problem.

That’s the problem. That’s what we did in Usenet. Those of us trying to fight it were ignored, and then everyone eventually just left, thinking that it wasn’t worth their time. Instead of fighting back, they cave in and lose the very foundation of what brought them there in the first place.

Is that what’s going to continue to happen? Are we going to lose every great thing on the net because some really stupid thinking people feel it is their right to destroy whatever comes along? Why isn’t this a much bigger issue for people? It affects so many people, yet no one seems to give it any real attention. And those that do are completely ignored.

What more must we give up before people finally say enough is enough?