Author: Paul Tomblin

National “Destroy Your Productivity Day”

Today is “Destroy Your Productivity Day” aka “Half Your Cow Orkers Are Unavailable Because They’re Entertaining Their Children Instead of Working Day”. I think it’s officially “Bring Your Son or Daughter To Work Day” in other quarters.

My Clearcase view is pooched. I can’t see any files below src/, even if I leave the view and come back into it, or doing a “ct setview -cs”. The last time I saw our Clearcase administrator, he was running around the building with his kid on some sort of scavenger hunt. I will probably have to create a new view in order to do any work, which is a pain.

At lunch, though, I got my own back. One of the older kids, a teenage boy, was eating with us and his dad. His dad said they’d seen some digital movie trailers this morning as part of the company activities. I said “So, are they going to show the secret digital print of the new Star Wars movie this afternoon”, and then quickly acted like I shouldn’t have said that in front of the kid. We don’t really have such a print, or if we do, nobody’s told me about it. (We do have a digital print of “The Village”, but only our testers are allowed to show it, we can’t show it to potential customers or even projector vendors.) But the seed is sown. Bwah hah ha.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Spammers are the scum of the earth!

In the last 24 hours, there were 2541 attempts to deliver mail to xcski.com.

Of those, 1871 (73%) were rejected by the mail server because they came from known spam sites, or because they gave an invalid “HELO”, or various other spam symptoms.

56 messages were to non-existant addresses, either old addresses that were retired (I use temporary addresses when I’m dealing with merchants and retire them when I don’t need to talk to the merchant any more) or spammers with bad address lists (people have been spamming 5bptomblin for over a decade now).

4 messages were to deliberate bait addresses (addresses which I put on comment on the main page of my web site), which are redirected to a spam reporting system called Vipul’s Razor.

311 messages (12%) were caught by SpamAssassin or bogofilter.

Of the remaining 299 messages (12%), at least some of that was uncaught spam, but I don’t know how much because I’m not the only person who gets email at xcski.com. I tune and train my spam filters, so yesterday only one piece of uncaught spam got through to me. But the others here do not train their spam filters the way I do, so they probably get more uncaught than that. But that means that at maximum, 12% of the email xcski.com gets is real, legitimate mail from people who have a reason, possibly a bad one, to send us email. I know for a fact that at least some of that email is from mailing lists that my step-daughters never bothered to unsubscribe from, but which they never read. So the real percentage of wanted email is lower, possibly much lower.

What spammers have done to the wonderful medium of email is criminal.

And now the details

Edit: Vicki didn’t think we should link to the page directly, because it would give too much away. So here are some links to some pictures:
Front view
Living room
Kitchen (yes, it’s small)

It’s 2700 sq feet, including a finished attic with two bedrooms and a full bath in it. The tree arching over the front entrance is a magnolia, and it was in full bloom when we went to see the open house yesterday.

The owners were out of town all weekend, so they won’t even see the offer until this evening.