March 31, 2005 Archives

A large percentage of my incoming email is spam. Yours too probably. There's not much we can do.

I filter as best I can. I used to use Popfile until I started using Thunderbird as my email client. Popfile was great. Thunderbird's spam sensing is OK - not great.

When you see your incoming spam you probably notice the purposeful misspellings. Often "O"s are replaced with "0"s or "E"s with "3"s. Spammers aren't stupid... well, OK, maybe they're stupid, but they want their stuff to get through.

A company called Sophos, in the business of stopping spam, has figured out that...

And they've also decided to compile the juiciest misspellings... these spammy obfuscations and put out a top-25 list!

I'll quote a few and you can check with them for the rest.

For me, none of these are my most spammed words, though I see them all! Somehow, I've gotten on some strange lists and get dozens of spam emails every week in Russian!

Say nyet to spam.

I remember writing about our first snow this season. I knew what would follow, but the snow was pretty. You give the first snow a little slack.

At this point, it is my hope that the snow season is over. It's difficult, maybe impossible, to predict which snow will be the last. It's like telling someone who's following you to "take a left a block before I do."

With that in mind, I've attached a photo of what I hope is the last snow in my yard. Pretty ugly isn't it?

In the beginning snow is soft and fluffy and light. Toward the end of the season these piles of 'permasnow' take on characteristics not found naturally in the wild.

As December gives way to January and then February, Frank's¹ plow runs through our driveway storm-after-storm. He finds a few favored spots and keeps piling the snow in the same place.

An inch or two of snow here and there adds a foot or two of snow to the pile, which is then compressed, thawed and refrozen, and coated with a lovely, patchy skin of road 'stuff.' This is the snow equivalent of those toothless guys who live in mobile homes in the middle of the desert and talk to themselves (or call Art Bell).

By Monday, this last reminder of the winter will be gone. I will shed no tears.

¹ - Along with plowing, Frank also handles our lawn care and plantings. He is very close to being declared a dependent on my income tax form.