01/03/2005

The end-of-year statistics are in, and it looks like this past year wasn’t quite the work-a-thon that 2003 was. I amassed a total of 2,257 hours. That’s an average of just over 43 hours a week, which I suppose is just about average in today’s work world. Although December was my busiest month (driving me to the brink of insanity, in fact) I suspect the slow summer months counteracted the end-of-year frenzy. It would be nice to have things a bit more balanced through the year, of course.

I also looked at my “Sent” folder in e-mail, and it looks like I sent 10,968 messages during the year. That’s right around 30 per day, which sure seems like a lot. It just goes to prove that it’s my main form of communication.

So now I launch into 2005 hoping for a bit more stability, a bit more success, and of course a maximum of fun.

12/28/2004

I’m working on a web project that requires a little teeny “warning” icon for users who don’t enter their credit card information properly. Lacking such an icon, I did a cursory search of the web and got a kick out of the Big Scary Laser warning sign. Too bad I can’t use it on the site…

12/27/2004

The airlines suck.

Everyone knows that their pricing model is some form of black magic that no mortal can comprehend, and the prices you get for tickets vary based on, I don’t know, rainfall in Peru or something. But this was a first for me: the price of my ticket jumped $25 while I was purchasing it!

I was in Travelocity, making my reservations for a jaunt to a business meeting in California, and got the message shown below. Holy cow.

12/27/2004

Today’s fun spam subject line:

Database containing a list of every registered domain and email in the world for sale!

The message goes on to brag about how they have every .com and .net domain in a big list (generated with their special “whois extraction software”) and of course some 600 million e-mail addresses. Whee!

1) It’s illegal to extract information from the Whois database for marketing purposes.

2) It’s illegal to run repeated, automated queries against the Whois database at all.

3) The 600 million e-mail addresses are undoubtably generated by adding common names to the domain suffix, such as “info@domain.com”, “webmaster@domain.com”, “jeff@domain.com”, and so on. In all likelihood, a huge majority of them are going to be invalid… not that spammers really care.

4) The message comes from someone named Mike Luthan, whose e-mail address is roy.durrands@telinco.co.uk, and who tells me in the message to write to him at sales@bulkemailmarketing.org. Hmm, I wonder if Mike is his real name?

Argh. The whole spam thing is so idiotic, and so wasteful of time and bandwidth. One wonders if these guys really think they’re doing the rest of the world a service peddling their wares. In the end, I suppose the people who we should really blame are the scores of morons who actually buy the stuff… without them, the business model would collapse. But when one of every hundred thousand spam recipients buys the product, the other ninety-nine thousand of us have to suffer.

12/26/2004

Alex got a really cool toy from Aunt Kathy. It’s a set of little colored magnetic rods and a box full of marble-sized steel ball bearings. The fun begins when you take them and assemble them molecule-style into all sorts of fun shapes. The kids and I spent a solid hour tonight building and having fun with the magic of magnetism.

Of course the mathematician in me came out, and I built a little icosahedron. Sweet.

12/24/2004

Last night we went over to hang out with some friends in the neighborhood. Since they live about three streets away, it seemed reasonable to walk (which we always do). Unfortunately it was a bit chilly last night: below zero, in fact.

In scientific circles, this is known as “booger freezing cold”.