Spam Stats Redux

Position

It appears that the new year is going to bring a lot of new and exciting projects, as I was just asked to take and have accepted a new position as editor of Windows titles at Apress, one of my favorite publishers. I'll still be doing my own seminar delivery, speaking, and writing, but I'll also be part of the Apress team. I'm excited.

Spam in One Day

Over the past 24 hours:

Holidays

We're back from St. Augustine, FL, on a visit to Lisa's parents. It was very nice to kick back and relax for a while, visiting with family members and eating good food. It's back to the grind here, though, and this week is shaping up to be fairly busy.

During the weekend I was staying in touch with e-mail. Each morning I'd set up shop with my laptop at the kitchen table and sort through the overnight e-mail. I was very dismayed when I saw that I typically had 80-90 messages, and of them perhaps five were legitimate e-mail. Now, understand that my primary e-mail address is fairly well publicized and is on my web pages, which are of course indexed by Google and God knows how many other engines. But to have that many messages in my Inbox and to have to spend ten minutes just getting rid of the junk to get to those five legitimate e-mails is frustrating.

So I checked into Symantec's Brightmail AntiSpam product. It looked good, so I got a 30-day evaluation license. I installed in on my server this morning, and so far of 21 messages it has processed since 8:00 am, 14 have been spam.

I'll post more about it later, including some statistics.

This just in - a new bra

Courtesy of Dave Markowitz...

Blog O'Stuff: This just in!

Book work

I'm currently about 60% of the way through the first set of production proofs for Learning Windows Server 2003. Looks like we have a pretty firm in-store-shelves date of December 27. Amazon will probably have it before then. Go get your copies now!

Remembering things for people

I am fed up with remembering things for people.

Are you ever at a party, or a dinner, or other similar occasion and you're talking to a friend about your new builder? "Give me his number," your friend says. You say, "Sure, I'll send it to you in the office."

And then you never do, of course.

Lisa enjoys asking me to remind her to do things at certain times, or to remind her not to forget things two days from now when she isn't thinking of them. I am scatterbrained. I have eight different bosses. I have many times the amount of little stupid things to keep track of than she does. (She is a teacher, and I know it's hard work for her, but at least she remains focused from task to task. I move from article to presentation to edit to figure illustrations to e-mail to proposals with ten different contact points and seventeen different projects at eleven different points along their evolutionary track.)

So, effective today, I refuse to remember things for people. Do not ask me to do something when I am not where I am to do it. If you see me at a party and want a web hosting quote, I will tell you to call me at the office and I can do it there. If Lisa wants me to remind her of something, she can send me an e-mail instructing me to put a reminder in Outlook. If one of my editors wants me to send them a proposal in a month, I will tell them to call me when they're ready for it. It is not my job to remember things for people. I am not their dayrunners.

I'm done.

Drowning woman calls friend, not 911

Let's see:

1) A woman in SUV
2) Out drinking and dancing at party
3) Veers off road
4) Calls friend instead of 911 for help

You do the math.