A grammatical analysis of Russian email spam

As part of my recent migration from Gmail to FastMail, I’ve been going through my Gmail Spam folder to check for any non-spam emails that were mistakenly filtered away. In doing so I noticed the following set of emails:

Here is an example of what one of these emails looks like:

These emails are all slightly different, but follow a very similar format:

  • All but one comes from — what I imagine to be real — Yahoo! accounts, that have probably been hacked.
  • They all ask me to reply to a variety of Russian-based email addresses.
  • They all use a series of similar phrases to try to engage with me

It is the last point that amuses me. The ‘little girlie’ who sent these emails uses the following variations to tempt me to reply to her:

“I love your page”
“I enjoy your user profile”
“I like your user profile”
“I like your page”
“I enjoy your profile”
“I love your profile”

And it almost worked. I was just about ready to reply — and hand over my credit card information for good measure — when I noticed this email:

“Most”?!? You only enjoyed most of my user profile? If you are trying to tempt me (and scam me in the process), you’d better work on your flattery skills.

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail: part 3

I promise that I will get around to explaining the gory details of my Gmail to FastMail migration (and also how I’m finding FastMail as a service), but one final post before then. This time I want to talk about ‘preparation’.

If you are thinking of taking FastMail for a test drive, you can of course do this as a 60 day free trial (no credit card needed as well[1]). If you do this, then you don’t need to do much preparation other than set Gmail to forward your email (and keep a copy in the inbox or Archive folder):

Something else to bear in mind is that Gmail applies spam filtering rules before email gets forwarded. I’ve had issues where Gmail routinely flags some emails as spam (even though I’ve set up filters to tell it not to[2]). This is where I’ve found the SaneNotSpam tool by SaneBox to be really useful.

Michael Crusoe gave me a useful tip on twitter about this. Simply make a filtering rule in Gmail to forward all spam email. I did something slightly different and made a rule to not move any email to the Spam folder[3].

If you set up forwarding like this then you can continue using Gmail as before, but everything will also end up in FastMail. To be able to send from your Gmail address within FastMail, you’ll need to set up a Gmail personality. FastMail also allows aliases, but these differ somewhat from personalities[4].

Go on a Gmail diet

My final preparation tip — for those who are considering a permanent migration to FastMail — would be to slim down your Gmail archive. The much-touted advantage of never needing to delete emails when using Gmail is great…except for when you want to switch providers.

Although FastMail has a decent IMAP migration tool, it can take many hours to migrate thousands of emails (and I’m assuming that most Gmail users have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of emails). When I first started thinking about leaving Gmail (over a year ago now), I realized that I should probably start slimming down my Gmail archive[5].

It wasn’t until I completed the migration to FastMail that I realized that Gmail’s Archive folder also contains all of your sent mail. Initially I thought that the FastMail migration tool had made an error because I was missing about 6,000 emails. Turns out these were all of my sent messages, which FastMail — like other email providers — only keeps in the Sent messages folder.

Coming next

In part 4 I will explain a bit more about how the actual migration went for me, and what other things I needed to do in order to use my custom domain with FastMail.

  1. I wish more services would let you try them without having to hand over credit card details  ↩

  2. In particular, emails from Amazon often end up in my Gmail spam folder.  ↩

  3. Though this is only catching spam email that is directly addressed to me. I’m still seeing some spam email where I’m presumably bcc recipient. But I can live with this.  ↩

  4. I now have a personality in FastMail for each account that I want to be able to send email from.  ↩

  5. Over the course of the last year, I’ve shed about 3,000 emails from my archive. This might seem like a lot, but my starting point was about 18,000 emails so I’m not sure how much time this saved me during the actual migration.  ↩

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail: part 2

In my last blog post, I explained the complexity of my email setup before I began the migration from Gmail to FastMail. Although I will move on to explaining how I did the migration, I thought I should briefly touch on why I did it.

Gmail is powerful, full-featured, very robust, and most importantly…it is free. Why would anyone want to move away from this premium email service?

Support

When you don’t pay for a service or app, you can’t necessarily expect any problems you encounter to be dealt with any sense of urgency. It is true that Gmail doesn’t exactly break very often, but what if you needed help or feedback on a particular issue that might only be of relevance to you? If you pay for a service like FastMail, then you get fast and effective support [1].

Privacy and security

It is no surprise that Google’s business model relies on advertising. They not only want to generate revenue by putting ads across all of their products, they also want to benefit from all of the information that they have gleaned about their users.

Although you may never notice or care about the personalized adverts that can appear in Gmail, since last March Google has effectively started sharing your personal data across all of their products and services. Although their privacy policy initially suggests that they do not share this information without your consent, they allow sharing to ‘affiliates … and trusted businesses’ for the vaguely defined category of ‘external processing’:

Privacy concerns such as this are among the chief criticisms of Gmail.

The future

Google experiments with lots of different products and increasingly they are honing down their portfolio to a smaller number of (revenue-generating) services. They have discontinued more services than most companies will ever launch. Many of these are products that you will have never heard of, but closure of services like the popular Google Reader sparked outrage across the web[2].

Although it seems unfathomable that Google would kill off Gmail, it can’t be assumed that Google will not introduce changes that limits the functionality of Gmail or annoys users in other ways (e.g. more ads).

FastMail

Companies that charge a fair price for a service can use their revenue to provide you, the user, with all the support and help that you need. They also don’t need to look at your emails to mine personal information for the purpose of selling you stuff.

Also, companies not based in the USA may not have to hand over their data to organizations like the NSA [3].

  1. I’ve already had my first FastMail support request submitted and dealt with…all within 24 hours.  ↩

  2. Though if you don’t pay anything for a product, I’m not sure that such outrage is justified?  ↩

  3. FastMail is an Australian company and have been very upfront about where they stand with respect to situations such as NSA requests for information. This is not a big reason why I have switched to FastMail, but I appreciate their openness on the matter.  ↩

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail: part 1

I have recently migrated my email setup from Gmail to FastMail. This has not been as simple as moving a single email account from one provider to another, so I thought I’d write about my experiences of getting setup with FastMail.

Before I address the question of why I wanted to move away from Gmail, I thought I would first explain my email setup. In future blog posts, I’ll cover the minor hiccups I’ve had as I’ve switched to FastMail and will also talk about my overall experience of FastMail.

 

My email setup: the early days of relative simplicity

Like nearly everyone on the Internet (or so it seems), I’ve had a Gmail account for many years. This has not always been my primary account though and I’ve had an Apple-related email service ever since the days of iTools and .Mac. And of course I’ve also had a work email account plus other unwanted-but-necessary email accounts[1].

For a long time, I had these three main accounts (Apple, Gmail, and Work) all connected to my main Mail client (Apple Mail on Macs) as separate accounts.

 

My email setup: getting more complex

About the time I bought an Android phone[2], I started using Gmail more and more. So that was when I decided to redirect all of my Apple email to Gmail. If you didn’t know, one of the great things about Gmail is that you can connect other accounts to it and send email through Gmail but make it appear that it comes from those other accounts (go to Settings->Accounts):

You can even do this for email aliases. My Apple email account lets me set up a few free aliases. This allows me to have one email address that I can use for me and my wife (emails to this account go to me, but get autoforwarded to her[3]). So my Gmail account contained four accounts at this point.

 

My email setup: fewer accounts, but more complexity

The above configuration works well when using Gmail’s web interface, but initially I thought I had to keep my Work and Apple accounts in my desktop Mail app for those occasions when I wanted to send an email from my Work account. But it turns out, you can have one Gmail account in Apple’s Mail app, and still send from different accounts. You can also do this is in iOS, though you paradoxically have to set up your mail as a non-Gmail account.

 

My email setup: even more complexity

For a year or so, I was happy with my email setup. Everything was routed to one place (Gmail) but on my Mac or iPhone I only needed to have one account set up and yet I could still send email from my Work or Apple email accounts (including aliases).

At some point though I realized that I might not be with Gmail forever. So I decided to invest in a domain name which, in theory, would stay with me forever and would give me the opportunity to have a stable email address for the rest of my life. This email address could be moved between providers as and when I needed to move.

So I bought a domain name with the awesome Hover registrar (please click here to use my referral link if you consider using them). For $5 a month, Hover will forward email from your chosen email address (e.g. greedo@mos-eisley-cantina.com) to another address. So while I could have used Hover as the email host, I decided to stick with Gmail and just forward email to it as before.

So how did I end up being able to send from my new address (greedo@mos-eisley-cantina.com[4]) from within Gmail or Apple’s Mail clients? Well in Gmail, you can add other accounts to your account and either treat them as an alias or make them the default account:

 

So in my case, I made greedo@mos-eisley-cantina.com the default email address associated with my Gmail account. Setting this alias to be the default email address for your Gmail account in Apple’s Mail clients is trickier, especially on iOS. But it can be done.

 

Moving on

Over the last few days I have finally decided to leave all of the above setup behind and move to FastMail. Why and how I did this, will be the subject of future blog posts in the coming days. However, my early experience is that FastMail is excellent and I have no regrets about making this move.

 

  1. Comcast (my ISP) required me to setup an email account. I never use this but forward the billing-related email announcements on to my main accounts. Also, I have a Yahoo email account which is solely because of the Fantasy Football league that I play in.  ↩

  2. My Android experience lasted about a year, I’m now an iPhone user  ↩

  3. You can setup a filtering rule in Gmail to do this  ↩

  4. This is not the address I am using!  ↩

A new type of email annoyance, it's not quite spam or bacn, but what is it?

I understand that companies want to keep in contact with their customers. But the volume of email a company sends should hopefully be proportional to how often you purchase, or use services, from that company. An email every few months is one thing. When you start emailing every few weeks, it becomes bacn, and when you email me every week it is spam and I will delete it, ignore it, or unsubscribe from your emails.

Recently, I've been getting a lot of emails that look like this one:

Ever since Google rolled out their new inbox for Gmail, some companies have started to worry that we might not giving their emails the amount of attention that they would prefer. If I were in charge of a company's email strategy, I would let the customer make their own mind up as to whether the email was important or not. I would not send the customer even more emails to tell them how to prioritize the emails that the company sends.

A name is needed for this annoyance. How about 'facn' for fake bacn?

 

Thinking of migrating your older Squarespace sites to Squarespace 6? A cost-benefit analysis

I have been using Squarespace for a few years now to host the few websites that I maintain. Last July, Squarespace released the latest version of their software: Squarespace 6 (which I will refer to as ss6 from now on). While I mostly prefer the changes that have been made in ss6, I've put off migrating all of my sites. This is partly through laziness, but partly because I've been confused as to how the pricing differences with Squarespace 5 (ss5) will affect me.

Luckily, Squarespace has fantastic support, and so I emailed them and they revealed all. I thought that others, who are also thinking of migrating, might find their answers to my questions useful. My original email is below, and I've interspersed their answers. A brief summary follows that.

My email exchange:

Background

Currently I have one master Squarespace 5 (ss5) account, two Squarespace 5 sub-accounts, and one Squarespace 6 (ss6) account that — if I understand this correctly — remains free while connected to my master ss5 account. I also have plans to start a fifth Squarespace site and trying to decide whether to migrate any or all of them to ss6 is the cause of my confusion. So here are my questions:

Question 1

With the 15% discount I get for the three ss5 accounts, this currently costs me $25.50 per month (the ss6 account remains free). If I migrated all accounts to ss6, would this end up costing me a flat fee of $8 per month (standard accounts, billed annually) for each account? I.e. a total cost of $32 for the current accounts I own ($40 if I create a new ss6 account)? I haven't seen any mention of discounts for managing multiple ss6 accounts.

There are not any special discounts for multiple sites associated with the same email address. You will need to upgrade each account individually. Also when you pay for an annual account you pay for the whole year right away totaling to $96 per account

If you decide to go for monthly billing you will be paying $10 per month

You can refer here form more information on our paid plans: http://help.squarespace.com/customer/portal/articles/1257605

Question 2

Under ss6, I understand that all accounts can be tied to a single email address which is fine, but is all the billing centralized as well, or would this be 4 or 5 separate payments off of my credit card?

All of you accounts would be billed separately

Question 3

If I went ahead and migrated everything to ss6, I guess I'd have to start with my master account. So I assume that initially I'd create a new ss6 account (which would have to have a new name?) and then I would import the ss5 content to it and finally redirect my domain name to the new site. Once I have the new ss6 master account I could connect other ss6 accounts to it, but my one current ss6 account is tied to my ss5 master account. The question here is whether everything will be okay if I disconnect the current ss6 account from the master ss5 account and then reattach it to the new master ss6 account?

There is no such thing as a master account within V6. All Squarespace 6 sites are managed individually. You are, as mentioned earlier, able to have several sites associated with the same email address.

When you unlink your Squarespace 6 site from your old Squarespace 5 account it will now function as its own independent site. You will not need to link it to anything else

So the bottom line is that Squarespace 6 removes the concept of centralized billing for multiple accounts. So this also means no multiple account discount. Without that discount, ss6 sites are 50 cents cheaper per month than ss5 (assuming you pay for a year at a time). But, I currently have one free ss6 account which would no longer be free if I get rid of the ss5 sites.

So if I moved my three current ss5 sites to ss6, I'd end up with four ss6 sites which would work out to $32 per month...a ~25% increase on what I currently pay. Hmm, still not sure whether the extra features in Squarespace 6 will tempt me to switch.

The never-ending quest to rate and organize my iTunes library - part 2 of 2

In part1 of this blog post, I indicated that I had been rating the music in my iTunes library for about 8 years. Having thought about this some more, I think its probably been at least a decade. But after all of that time, I am finally finished! For the last four years I've kept track of how many songs remained in my 'To Rate' playlist, and so I can graphically show you how I finished this very long marathon.

Here is an explanation for the various milestones along the way to having no unrated songs remaining in my library.

a) January 2009 At this point I was only rating music that I had purchased (CDs, iTunes, and Amazon) and had just over 1,500 songs left.

b) August 2009 I tend to buy CDs in splurges rather than regular purchases every week or so. This jump probably represented about 10 new CDs. Most of the small spikes on this graph represent new music purchases.

c) February 2010 Finished! All of my purchased music had been rated...but what about all of the other music in my library which I had legally acquired for free. How much could there be?

d) February 2010 Well quite a lot as it turns out. Since 2005, the South by Southwest festival (SXSW) has provided free torrents of music by people performing at SXSW (one song per artist). If you didn't know, a lot of artists play at SXSW and these torrents are big. You can still get hold of all torrents from this site. The current running total is about 9,000 songs (45 GB!) and every year the torrents seem to get bigger.

These torrents are usually provided as two files, with the second one being smaller (and released a little bit after the first file). So this big spike represents me starting to rate 5 and a half years of SXSW music. Sidenote: a shout out to Danny Novo who had made some cool SXSW iTunes album artwork every year that the torrents have been available.

e) March 2010 I think this smaller spike represented the second of the two 2010 SXSW torrent files, with the majority of the SXSW music included in the previous huge spike.

f) and g) February & March 2011 The two SXSW torrents for 2011. You may note that initially I seem to rate the music very quickly and then it slows. This is because I tend to sort the yearly SXSW torrent by song length. Songs that are extremely short (< 1 minute) or extremely long (>7 minutes) tend to be music that I don't like and I can quickly process these. I have also found that songs that feature 'death' in the song title, or 'black' in the artist name are also not to my liking. Finally, I am not a fan of rap music so artists with 'MC' or 'DJ' in their name can also be quickly filtered.

h) March 2012 SXSW 2012.

i) August 2012 A bunch of new CD purchases.

j) January 2013 I think I had finished all of the SXSW music at this point, but then discovered a whole bunch of previously purchased music that had slipped through the cracks (pretty much of all of my classical music), plus I also had another bunch of new CDs to rate.

k) March 2013 SXSW 2013.

l) April 2013 Each year I get quicker at doing the initial pass of that year's SXSW torrent, and I think you can see how quickly I go through the long/short/black/death/rap songs (see steps f) and g) above).

m) August 2013 Finished. Done. The End. No more rating. right?

What now?

The SXSW torrents represent a real mixed bag of music. If you drove coast-to-coast and kept on randomly flipping through radio stations — preferably college radio stations, there is not much mainstream pop music at SXSW — it would get close to the experience of listening to a SXSW torrent. So unlike the music that I buy, where I have pre-selected albums based on one or more songs that I have heard and that I like, the SXSW music provides no such guarantees.

What tends to happen is that I discover a bunch of new artists through songs that I really love. However, a large swathe of SXSW music is either not to my taste, or is just a bit 'meh'. In fact, I realized that I had ended up with about 1,500 2-star rated songs from my SXSW torrents. While having some 2-star songs in the middle of a CD that own is one thing, these 2-star SXSW songs represent a potential waste of disk space.

As I am a iTunes Match user, I deleted all of these songs from my iTunes library (after ensuring that they had first been matched by iTunes). This frees up some disk space but means I can still play these songs and download them again if I really want them.

However, it still irks me a little to know that these 2-star songs are part of my library, even if they are not taking up any space. So because I am a masochist, and because I can't abide to delete them all in case there are some gems buried amongst them, I decided to re-rate all of these songs. If I decide that I really do like a song, I upgrade it to a 3-star rating. Otherwise I permanently delete it (removing it from iCloud). So far, I've processed about 200 songs and it will probably take me several more months before I finish this.

And then I am done.

Really done.

Until the next SXSW!

The never-ending quest to rate and organize my iTunes library - part 1 of 2

This is a blog post that I've been intending to write for many, many years. The final impetus for getting on with it was seeing David Sparks write about how he rates his music in iTunes. Before I reveal the minutiae of how I rate my own music — a system which is very similar to David's — I should give some background to my music collection and my long attempt at organizing it.

My music

I consider that I own a fair amount of music. I think that the new standard to be used when deciding if you own a lot of music, is whether you find iTunes Match's 25,000 song limit restrictive. Currently, I have 13,275 items in my iTunes library. These include:

  • 9,715 songs ripped from CDs I own
  • 2,209 songs from free SXSW downloads (more of this in part 2)
  • 840 songs purchased from iTunes
  • 121 songs purchased from Amazon MP3 store
  • 70 songs that were available as free downloads (predominantly from artists websites)
  • 35 self-recorded songs or musical sketches
  • 23 audiobooks
  • 22 podcasts (I mostly use Downcast to manage podcasts)
  • 2 E-books (I mostly buy Kindle books)

I can be so precise about this breakdown because I use a set of custom 'tags' for nearly all items in my iTunes library. These tags simply consist of adding text to the 'Comments' field of tracks; I use tags such as [CD], [ITUNES], [AMAZON] etc. The addition of square brackets makes it very unlikely that this text will exist anywhere else in a comments field. It also makes it easy to include as part of a Smart playlist. I'm curious whether the tagging feature of OS X Mavericks will allow tagging of songs in iTunes, which might mean I can replace these comments.

An alternative way of categorizing my music is to break it down by decade of recording. I try to change the dates on tracks to the original recording dates rather than the date that the CD/album was issued. This is mostly a problem for older music that only exists on iTunes from compilation albums or re-issues.

I think this represents a good spread across the decades (maybe Jazz fans would beg to differ). Another way of looking at this is that 11% of the music that I own was recorded before I was born (1971).

Rating songs

I've been using iTunes ever since I purchased my first Mac in 2001 (the era of rip, mix, and burn). I started ripping CDs from around this time, slowly working my way through my CD collection. At some point (maybe around 2005) I started to systematically rate my songs as follows:

1 Star - 2.8% of my library

Things I never want to hear. This sometimes include songs that I really don't enjoy on albums that I otherwise like (typical culprits being low-quality live tracks, or extremely long and unfocused instrumental jams). However, it mostly includes things like silent tracks that are used as interludes on some albums, or spoken tracks (think of all the classic radio DJ interludes on the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack). Giving all of these tracks 1 star means I can create smart playlists that will never randomly shuffle between music and spoken word (or silence).

2 Stars - 44.2% of my library

Songs that I am largely indifferent to. On a good day I might be in the mood for a 2 Star song, but on a bad day I might be offended by one. This category represents a large slice of my iTunes library, reflecting my opinion that there are many great songs which exist on largely mediocre albums (and I like to buy albums rather than individual songs). Perhaps my tendency to down-rate rather than up-rate songs is reflected by the fact that out of about 750 full-length albums, I have only 33 with an average rating greater than 3.5 stars (I have a Perl script that generates average ratings).

3 Stars - 44.2% of my library

Currently, I have almost an identical number of 2 star and 3 star songs. A 3 star song must have at least one great quality about it. This could be the lyrics, the melody, or even the performance of a single instrument. Often it is just a good hook in part of the song, or just the energy that the song imparts. I pretty much always enjoy listening to a 3 star song, but I wouldn't want to listen to the same song over and over again.

4 Stars - 7.9% of my library

There is a big drop in the number of songs that make it to this level. A 4 star song must be amazing. It must have at least two or three great qualities about it and I will almost never tire of hearing a 4 star song. The things that stop them becoming a 5 star song could be something minor, but something that might seep through into my consciousness when I listen to it (a song that outstays its welcome, a bad note in one part that can be jarring, or a single line with a flawed lyric).

5 Stars - 1.2% of my library

These songs represent songs that I find exceptional in almost every way. Usually I find them to have a stunning combination of lyrics and music, with fantastic vocal and instrumental performances. Furthermore I find these songs to have superb production values, with great arrangements and pristine sound (letting you hear details of every instrument on the record). In nearly all cases, I find these songs to be flawless. There is nothing about them that I could imagine being improved. It perhaps reflects my overall preferences for what I might broadly define as 'classic pop/rock' that 90% of these songs are less than 5 minutes long. My iTunes library does comprise genres such as Jazz, Classical, and Prog Rock, but they reflect a small proportion of the music that I own.

Finally, I should add that I will often listen to a song 10 times or more before making my mind up as to what the most suitable star rating should be. This, coupled with the tendency to keep on buying new music, is the major reason that it has taken me almost a decade to finish rating my entire iTunes library. My progress in getting there will be explored in part 2, along with a few comments on the challenges provided by the free SXSW downloads, and the question that now looms large on my horizon:

Once you have finished rating the entirety of your 13,275 song iTunes library, what do you do next?

Not So Breaking News

A new idea for some blog posts to single out some examples of 'Breaking News' services that bring us 'news' which is barely worth calling news, let alone breaking news. First offender is from the Breaking News twitter account which today gave us this:

 

 

So Apple is 'evaluating' plans to offer iPhones with screens up to 6 inches. When you click through to the Wall Street Journal story, it reveals the source of this 'breaking news' as people familiar with the matter.

I have no doubt that that might be true, but only in as much that Apple is probably also 'evaluating' iPhones that are thinner, fatter, lighter, and heavier. For all we know, Apple might be 'evaluating' iPhones that come with a free pony as well.

In any case, it is vague speculation from an unnamed source about a possible plan that, even if it happens, would almost certainly not take place until a year from now. Whatever this story is, it hardly seems to constitute 'breaking news'.

 

 

Remembering my father

As of today, I have passed a sad, and unwanted, milestone. At the age of 41 years, 9 months, and 26 days, I have become older than my father was when he died.

I was eleven when he passed away, just a month shy of my twelfth birthday. However, I was probably only ten when he was first diagnosed with cancer, a brain tumour. In many ways, I think we lost the person we knew and loved several months before he actually died. Brain tumours can cause so many different symptoms depending on their location. Increased headaches. Confusion. Memory loss. These were all symptoms which affected him in the early stages...but even then he was still our dad. He could still function on his own, he still knew who we were, and he could still hold conversations with us. This would all change.

In the summer before he passed away, it was decided that it would be better for me to spend some time away from everything. My two elder brothers — three and six years older than me — were better equipped to deal with what was happening, and remained at home. I spent that summer break from school — what seemed like an eternity when you are eleven — staying with two of my aunts. It was during this time that I was told that my father was not going to make it. I can't remember whether I had already reached this conclusion for myself. Probably not.

Returning home I was shocked to see how much his condition had deteriorated. He could no longer speak, but what hit me the hardest was that he no longer seemed to recognize anyone. I don't think there is anything that could have ever prepared me for that day. To an eleven year old boy, it made no sense at all. He was my dad but he no longer knew me. As summer drew to a close, so did my dad's fight against the cancer. Despite the immediate sadness at losing him, I think we were all glad that he was no longer suffering.

On the one hand, I am grateful that my memories of my father are all good ones. It's possible that I could be looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but I don't think so. I can't recall him ever being angry with us, or disappointing us in any way. What more could you ask for? But at the same time these memories are the memories of a child. I'm jealous of my brothers. Not just because they have more years of memories, but because those memories were from a time when they were able to not just talk with him, but converse and more fully interact with him.

As today's date has approached, I have been surprised by how many feelings it has stirred up from the deep. It has made me reevaluate many aspects of my life. I have only just become a father — of a wonderful 5 month old boy — yet my dad had already helped raise three kids by the time he was my age. It has made me think about the preciousness of life and about how we only have so much time on this planet to do the things we want to do.

I'm sad when I think that my dad never got to see how we all turned out — I like to think that he'd be happy with what we have all made of our lives. I'm sad that he never got to see his four grandchildren, and that they will only have passed on memories by which to know him. I'm sad that I never got to discuss 'grown up' things with him, such as talking about politics or even football (he was a huge Arsenal fan). But mostly I'm sad because I miss him.

Love you dad.

My father and me, 1972

Fruit of the Month Foolery inspired by the USDA

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), August is Get Acquainted with Kiwifruit Month. This amuses me for the implication that the USDA doesn't necessarily want you to eat any Kiwifruit...just become 'acquainted' with them.

This makes me wonder what other fruit-related months the USDA will endorse in future:

  • September: Become Vaguely Familiar with Mango Month
  • October: Stroke a Strawberry Month
  • November: Make Eye Contact with an Elderberry Month

Fly me to the moon...or maybe just take a train to Birmingham instead

The UK government has been planning a new high-speed rail network known as HS2, the first phase of which will connect London to Birmingham (the UK's second city).

I was shocked to discover that the planned timetable for this initial phase spans nine years (2017–2026). The surprise is because the distance for the London to Birmingham route is only 119 miles. Less surprising — but sadly more predictable — is the recent news that the planned costs for the first part of this project are now projected to be 30% above the initial budget (up to £21.4 billion, ~$32.1 US billion).

This seems a lot of money to connect two cities that are not so far apart. I'm sure that this budget has to cover lots of other things besides the actual construction (e.g. purchasing land). But even setting the cost aside, will it really take almost a decade to construct the line? This is the best-case scenario of course, and pessimists among us no doubt imagine that there will almost certainly be delays (assuming the project is not derailed — metaphorically, not literally — by opposition campaigns).

We are not talking about building a railway line across mountainous terrain or having to circumvent huge lakes. However, any route built in the UK does have to face the twin forces of nature that are leaves on the line and the wrong type of snow.

How did things get so bad? After all, we are the country that introduced the first public passenger railway (1825), the world's first intercity railway (1830), and we also have the world's oldest continuously working public railway (since 1758). We used to be good at building railways!

So just to summarize the costs, timetable, and distance of this rail route:

  • $32.1 billion
  • 9 years
  • 119 miles

If we convert this into a cost-per-year-per-mile, we get a figure of $29,971,989. How does this compare to some other public transportation projects? Well, the new Eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will hopefully open this year. It is running over time and budget, and still keeps running into problems. How does this project compare to the UK's HS2 line?

  • $6.3 billion
  • 11 years
  • 2.2 miles

Cost-per-year-per-mile: $260,330,579 (almost an order of magnitude worse than HS2).

One final comparison. Between 1969 and 1972, the Apollo program put 12 men on the moon. This is, as you might imagine, much harder to work out the total cost of this massive project. There are some estimates that try to allow for inflation, and these put the final bill of the Apollo program between $153 and $422 billion. Let's go with the upper limit of this estimate. That gives us:

  • $422 billion
  • 13 years
  • 239,000 miles

Cost-per-year-per-mile: $135,822 (a bargain!).

Of course these very fickle calculations make no effort to factor in how many people make use of these routes. The Apollo missions only took a grand total of 24 people to the moon (and of course not all of them got there), whereas the Bay Bridge carries 280,000 vehicles a day. However, I still can't get past the fact — and again this assumes that the project won't overrun at all — that the 1st phase of HS2 will see an average of just over 1 mile of the route completed per month of the nine year construction phase. British Rail — the former nationalized rail company that ran the UK's railways — once had a series of TV adverts that ended with the proclamation "We're getting there". A modern day update to this slogan might be "We're getting there...slowly".

Frustrating web design #1: AT&T

Earlier today I was trying to see whether the pre-paid phone plan that my inlaws are using during their visit here would allow them to send texts to the UK. A quick trip to a page on AT&T's website almost, but not quite, revealed the necessary information. 

The box highlighed in red says Text to Mexico, Canada & 100 countries. In order to find out what those other 100 countries are, I tried mousing over the question mark symbol. This short video shows what happened next:

 

That's lovely AT&T, make me have to copy a URL by hand and type it in. Because the web is much more efficient that way. 

Heinz tomato ketchup...not as nature intended?

I just noticed that on the back of our bottle of organic Heinz tomato ketchup is a slogan that reads:

Just as nature intended...

This raises two issues:

  1. Do Heinz really think that nature "intended" for tomatoes to be smushed together with vinegar, sugar, and various flavorings?
  2. Does this imply that Heinz's regular — i.e. non-organic — ketchup is not as nature intended? Perhaps the best selling ketchup variety in the world was an unintentional accident, and is secretly loathed by Mother Nature as the black sheep of the processed-tomato-products family?

A quiz about Davis

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Reposted from my older blog that is about to disappear.

The following is a quiz about Davis that I made for a party where we said goodbye to some close friends who are leaving Davis after living here for the last six years. I think 12 was the highest score out of 20. If you use the internet, then you are cheating! Answers are included at the bottom of the post.

1) Which of these streets does not exist in Davis: 
A) L St
B) M St
C) N St
D) O St

2) Which of these roads does not exist on campus: 
A) N Quad 
B) S Quad
C) E Quad 
D W Quad 

3) The famous ‘Toad Tunnel’ in Davis was built in 1995 to allow toads to cross from south to north Davis. But how much did it cost to build:
A) $1,400
B) $14,000
C) $140,000
D) $1.4 million

4) Prior to prohibition, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Davis tried banning the sale of alcohol within a 3 mile radius of campus. This was to prevent the ‘corruption’ of young farming students. They succeeded in getting the state legislature to enact this ban in 1911. When was this ban finally lifted: 
A) 1919
B) 1939
C) 1959
D) 1979

5) In 1994 a woman was found guilty of violating Davis’ infamous noise ordinance. What activity was she doing that caused her neighbor resort to calling the police? 
A) Sneezing
B) Whistling
C) Snoring
D) Clicking her fingers

6) The name ‘Davis’ wasn’t the first name for our town. It became known as Davis in 1907…what was it known as before that? 
A) Davisville
B) Davistown
C) Davisland
C) DavisDavis

7) Before there was UC Davis, there was the University of California University Farm and then the Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture, but when did it become UC Davis?
A) 1957
B) 1958
C) 1959
D) 1960

8) In 2007, a customer was accidentally overcharged for the Pita that they had bought at Pita Pit. How much was the customers credit card charged with? 
A) $50
B) $500
C) $5000
D) $50,000

9) On 21st July this year, a woman robbed a bank in Davis. However, she then ran into a problem when she tried making her getaway. What happened? 
A) She left the bank to find that her getaway car had been stolen
B) As she left the bank she was robbed by another robber who had independently planned to rob the very same bank
C) Her getaway vehicle was actually a bike and was arrested by the police who found her frantically trying to unlock her bike. Turns out she had forgotten the combination of the lock.
D) She found that she had locked herself out of her getaway car and the police caught her trying to get into it by breaking the window

10) In 1984 the Davis City Council declared the city to be a what? 
A) Beard free zone
B) nuclear free zone
C) Republican free zone
D) Parrot free zone

11) After the toad tunnel was built what problem affected the toads that tried using it? 
A) They were killed from the heat of lights that had been installed in the tunnel? 
B) The tunnel became a home for a population of wild ferrets which ate the toads? 
C) Someone forgot to move a temporary concrete wall in the tunnel, so the toads couldn’t use it
D) A large number of toads that were using the tunnel to reach north Davis encountered a large number of toads that were trying to reach south Davis, and they all got stuck.

12) The Davis Police Department produce and distribute trading cards featuring what?
A) Pictures of local police officers
B) Pictures of cars that have been stolen in Davis
C) Pictures of criminals arrested in Davis
D) Pictures of their pet cats and dogs

13) Picture round. What is the name of this sculpture which can be found on the UC Davis campus

Tumblr mj6cmhnsj01s7a35oo1 1280

A) Stupid pipe thingy
B) Map of Davis
C) Bum, bum. You’ve been here before
D) Cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, dog!

14) Every March 1st, Davis Farmer’s market observes what important day?
A) National Pig Day
B) National Vegetarian Day
C) National Lactose Intolerance Day
D) National Mountaineering Day

15) What is the Social Sciences and Humanities Building on the UC Davis campus better known as?
A) The Moonbase
B) Battlestar Galactica
C) The Death Star
D) The Starship Enterprise

16) David Pyles, is a post-doc in the UC Davis Biometeorology program but how is he better known?
A) Scooby Doo - he dresses in full Scooby Doo costume on the first day of every month
B) Tarzan Guy - he regularly dresses as Tarzan while walking about Davis
C) The Beard - he claims to have the longest beard in Davis (it is below his waist)
D) Fluffy toes - he wears pink fluffy slippers *all* the time

17) In 1870, what was the approximate population of Davis?
A) 4
B) 40
C) 400
D) 4,000

18) In July 2003 what was found in a dumpster at Slatter’s Court Mobile Home Park on Olive Drive?
A) 25 lbs of stolen cheese
B) 58 lbs of stolen bacon
C) 93 lbs of stolen yogurt
D) 157 lbs of stolen human body parts

19) Which country keeps it’s diplomatic mission to the California State Government based in Davis?
A) Mexico
B) Paraguay
C) New Zealand
D) North Korea

20) In 2006, someone erected an April Fool’s Day sign in Davis that proclaimed that *what* was coming to Davis soon?
A) A Super Walmart store
B) A maximum security prison
C) A nuclear waste processing facility
D) An amusement park that would have a Richard Nixon theme

Scroll down to see the answers.





























The Answers

All answers were taken from http://daviswiki.org so I make no claims as to their actual veracity (c) Andy Jones


1) Which of these streets does not exist in Davis: 
A) L St
B) M St
C) N St
D) O St

2) Which of these roads does not exist on campus: 

A) N Quad 
B) S Quad - This side of the quad is flanked by Peter J. Shields Avenue
C) E Quad 
D W Quad 

3) The famous ‘Toad Tunnel’ in Davis was built in 1995 to allow toads to cross from south to north Davis. But how much did it cost to build:
A) $1,400
B) $14,000
C) $140,000
D) $1.4 million

4) Prior to prohibition, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Davis tried banning the sale of alcohol within a 3 mile radius of campus. This was to prevent the ‘corruption’ of young farming students. They succeeded in getting the state legislature to enact this ban in 1911. When was this ban finally lifted: 

A) 1919
B) 1939
C) 1959 
D) 1979 - I guess this is when Picnic Day celebrations started getting a little out of hand

5) In 1994 a woman was found guilty of violating Davis’ infamous noise ordinance. What activity was she doing that caused her neighbor resort to calling the police? 

A) Sneezing
B) Whistling
C) Snoring
D) Clicking her fingers

6) The name ‘Davis’ wasn’t the first name for our town. It became known as Davis in 1907…what was it known as before that? 

A) Davisville - wonder if Vacaville residents ever considered renaming their city to ‘Vaca’
B) Davistown
C) Davisland
C) DavisDavis

7) Before there was UC Davis, there was the University of California University Farm and then the Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture, but when did it become UC Davis?
A) 1957
B) 1958
C) 1959 - Remember those 50th anniversary celebrations last year?
D) 1960

8) In 2007, a customer was accidentally overcharged for the Pita that they had bought at Pita Pit. How much was the customers credit card charged with? 

A) $50
B) $500
C) $5000
D) $50,000

9) On 21st July this year, a woman robbed a bank in Davis. However, she then ran into a problem when she tried making her getaway. What happened? 

A) She left the bank to find that her getaway car had been stolen
B) As she left the bank she was robbed by another robber who had independently planned to rob the very same bank
C) Her getaway vehicle was actually a bike and was arrested by the police who found her frantically trying to unlock her bike. Turns out she had forgotten the combination of the lock.
D) She found that she had locked herself out of her getaway car and the police caught her trying to get into it by breaking the window

10) In 1984 the Davis City Council declared the city to be a what? 

A) Beard free zone
B) nuclear free zone - and there is still no nuclear-waste reprocessing facility in this town to this day
C) Republican free zone
D) Parrot free zone

11) After the toad tunnel was built what problem affected the toads that tried using it? 

A) They were killed from the heat of lights that had been installed in the tunnel? - the lights had to be added to tempt the toads into the tunnel
B) The tunnel became a home for a population of wild ferrets which ate the toads? 
C) Someone forgot to move a temporary concrete wall in the tunnel, so the toads couldn’t use it
D) A large number of toads that were using the tunnel to reach north Davis encountered a large number of toads that were trying to reach south Davis, and they all got stuck.

12) The Davis Police Department produce and distribute trading cards featuring what?

A) Pictures of local police officers
B) Pictures of cars that have been stolen in Davis
C) Pictures of criminals arrested in Davis
D) Pictures of their pet cats and dogs

13) Picture round. What is the name of this sculpture which can be found on the UC Davis campus

A) Stupid pipe thingy
B) Map of Davis
C) Bum, bum. You’ve been here before
D) Cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, dog!

14) Every March 1st, Davis Farmer’s market observes what important day?

A) National Pig Day
B) National Vegetarian Day
C) National Lactose Intolerance Day
D) National Mountaineering Day

15) What is the Social Sciences and Humanities Building on the UC Davis campus better known as?

A) The Moonbase
B) Battlestar Galactica
C) The Death Star - that’s no moon!
D) The Starship Enterprise

16) David Pyles, is a post-doc in the UC Davis Biometeorology program but how is he better known?

A) Scooby Doo - he dresses in full Scooby Doo costume on the first day of every month
B) Tarzan Guy - he regularly dresses as Tarzan while walking about Davis
C) The Beard - he claims to have the longest beard in Davis (it is below his waist)
D) Fluffy toes - he wears pink fluffy slippers *all* the time

17) In 1870, what was the approximate population of Davis?

A) 4
B) 40
C) 400
D) 4,000

18) In July 2003 what was found in a dumpster at Slatter’s Court Mobile Home Park on Olive Drive?

A) 25 lbs of stolen cheese
B) 58 lbs of stolen bacon
C) 93 lbs of stolen yogurt
D) 157 lbs of stolen human body parts - Very gruesome. Stolen from the autopsy department at UCDMC as I believe

19) Which country keeps it’s diplomatic mission to the California State Government of California based in Davis?

A) Mexico
B) Paraguay
C) New Zealand - technically it’s in El Macero
D) North Korea

20) In 2006, someone erected an April Fool’s Day sign in Davis that proclaimed that *what* was coming to Davis soon?

A) A Super Walmart store
B) A maximum security prison
C) A nuclear waste processing facility
D) An amusement park that would have a Richard Nixon theme

The Littlest Birds Sing the Prettiest Songs — or do they?

According to this video testimony from musical performers The Be Good Tanyas, ‘the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs’. If we take their claim at face value, one might presuppose that ‘size of bird’ and ‘prettiness of song’ might be connected in some form of linear relationship where smaller birds sing prettier songs:

Littlest1However, as they fail to clarify the nature of the relationship between ‘size of bird’ and ‘prettiness of song’ one could postulate that the following examples also satisfy their description:

Littlest2


Littlest3


Thus we feel that — in the absence of supporting data — their observation that smaller sized avians produce more pleasing vocalizations, should not be regarded as a relationship which necessarily suggests that larger-sized birds sing notably less pretty songs.

Regardless of whether there is a relationship between these two metrics, we might still expect to find supporting evidence for the notion that diminutive avians produce trillings, warblings, and other chirruping-like sounds that are of a fetching nature.

One might therefore assume that the songs of Hummingbirds should be among the prettiest of all bird songs. However, according to the Hummingbird-themed site World of Hummingbirds:


“the sounds of hummingbirds are not exactly considered music…it would be more appropriate to call them chirps then it would be to call it music.”

This testimony, along with the audio evidence provided on their site, suggests that the claims of The Be Good Tanyas should not be taken at face value. Further undermining their claims is this list of the top ten song birds from ‘Bird On! News’. While some of the entries on this list also feature in whatbird.com’s list of small-sized birds (those birds 5–9 inches in length), the top 10 list also includes the mute swan which can grow up to 1.5 meters in length, a size described by Wikipedia as ‘impressive’.

Without published data in a peer-reviewed journal we find the evidence to support any claim that ‘the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs’ to be lacking and we humbly request that The Be Good Tanyas ‘show us the data’.

Please do not read this

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Reposted from my older blog that is about to disappear.

This is a test, a little psychological play thing. I’m just curious as to how many people will proceed with reading this even though I have (kindly) asked that you refrain from doing so. Most people will come across a link to this blog post from Twitter or App.net and therefore will see nothing more than the following text: ‘Please don’t read this’ along with a shortened web link.

And yet…and yet you are here, reading these very words which I asked you not to read. You disregarded my instructions and if you are still reading this then you have thrown caution to the wind and are willing to risk the possible destruction of your computer in order to see what I had to say (have you people never heard of clickjacking?). From a psychological viewpoint, you might be interested to know that you are now a victim of my (successful) attempt at using the Pique Technique.

Of course it is entirely possible that the brave souls who have clicked on the link to arrive here actually know me (at least in a virtual way) and therefore trust that I would not do something so malicious as to cause them (or their computer/internet device) any harm. However, who is to say that I am not a sleeper agent that has been recently ‘activated’ to carry out a mission of inflicting chaos and mayhem on an unsuspecting world?

Okay folks, here is your final test. If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you will find three words waiting for you. However, I strongly suggest with all of the urgency that I can muster, that you DO NOT READ THOSE THREE WORDS! I can take no liability for what damage, psychological or otherwise, may arise from the reading of those three words. These three words have been carefully chosen for their potential to cause grave offense and so I will end this post by once again urging you that you should not, under any circumstances, scroll down to the bottom of this post to read those three words.











































Moist muffin flaps.

Why I deleted my Facebook account

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Reposted from my older blog that is about to disappear. Originally posted May, 2010.

Tumblr mj6cn7rIMd1s7a35oo1 1280
 
Once upon a time I was a happy facebook user. But that was before the dark times, before the Empire. The first wave of facebook annoyance came with the arrival of applications. Leaving aside the annoying applications where a friend would invite you (and everyone that they know) to be a zombie or a pirate, the arrival of applications seemed to trigger a big switch in how people fundamentally used facebook.  In the ‘post-application’ era, people started writing less about themselves and instead resorted to revealing their personality via applications such as ‘What type of fruit are you?’ or quizzes such as ‘Keith named 4 out of the 26 most popular sexually-transmitted diseases, how many can you name?’.
 
This was a change that I sad to see. In the ‘good old days’, people spent more time adding information to their profile. I could actually learn something about someone’s interests. Now however, people seem to rarely write anything, and the ‘info’ section on people’s profile pages is often a barren expanse of nothingness. There is still plenty of ‘face’ in facebook, but much less ‘book’. Even status updates are often auto-generated via plug-ins from other applications.

The next big set of problems with facebook came with the succession of poorly implemented design & policy changes. I’m not opposed to change but I think that even facebook will admit to having rushed through changes without properly explaining in advance what was going to happen. This seems to a recurring feature and one might depict the facebook development cycle like so:

If you are a recent convert to facebook then you may have forgotten about their first big PR issue over their Beacon technology which tracked your visits to sites outside of facebook. Like many of facebook’s missteps, they had to apologize and backtrack a little bit. It didn’t take long before Zuckerberg et al. created more controversy by silently changing the terms of service to allow them to keep any content you had created (even if you deleted your account). The backlash was swift, as was facebook’s move to revert to the prior terms of service.
 
Hopefully, many of you are aware of some of the latest problems that have arisen from facebook’s changes which are an attempt to let them dominate the entire galaxy be the central hub of all social interaction on the web. On Wednesday April 21st 2010, Mark Zuckerberg introduced facebook’s new Open Graph Protocol. This software makes the outcry over the Beacon technology look like a storm in a teacup. If I visit a site such as Fandango or the New York Times and I haven’t logged out of facebook, then facebook can track my browsing of those sites. In a way, this is not any different to what other web sites do, but the big issue here is transparency. How exactly are facebook and their partner sites using this huge amount of information? Do people realize the consequences of clicking the new facebook ‘like’ buttons that are beginning to adorn web pages everywhere?
 
Of course, if you understand the privacy policy and privacy settings of facebook then maybe this isn’t an issue. Just change your settings to whatever they were before facebook quietly changed them behind your back. The problem is that no-one really understands facebook’s privacy policy anymore. It has grown in size by nearly 600% since 2005 and now contains more words than the US constitution. That factoid is part of an excellent New York Times article which also points out that there are now 170 different options within the privacy settings. If you want to see how facebook has slowly eroded your privacy, then this page has a fantastic graphic on the evolution of privacy on facebook.
What annoyed me more than the new Open Graph Protocol is the change to my profile page. I had written a lot of text in all of the categories so that my friends could get some insights into my personality. The recent changes to facebook now require that this information must be linked to something called Community Pages. It is not enough to say that you work/study at Institute X or like Film Y. Instead, you must now link to a page for Institute X so that everyone can see that you are a member. This may well be a good idea, but I would have preferred a way of opting out of this.
 
There are so many changes that facebook have introduced in the last few weeks, it is a little overwhelming, but this article does a great job at going through them  all and explaining the potential risks. All of these changes had made me consider whether I wanted to stay a part of facebook, but in the end it was reading this article on 10 reasons to delete your facebook account, that persuaded me to commit facebook suicide.
 
I am now cut off from facebook, and am therefore no longer one of its 400 million users. Maybe I will return, but I don’t think so. I feel that I have much better social interactions with people via my twitter account than I ever did with facebook. Indeed, there are many twitterers who I have never met in the real world, but whom I now consider to be more of a friend than many of the ‘friends’ that I had on facebook. Farewell facebook, it was fun while it lasted.
 
 
Update (added 13th May, 2010)

Of course I should have also pointed out that facebook doesn’t make it easy to leave. It’s a bit like trying to leave the clutches of a cult. Here’s a good piece about  what happens when you (try to) deactivate your facebook account.

 

 

10 rival social networking sites that may spell the end of Facebook

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  1. Farcebook - people recount hilarious episodes of their crazy lives
  2. Acebook - Veterans of aerial combat recount their tales of dogfights in the sky
  3. Faceliftbook - exactly the same content as facebook, but with a new, younger look
  4. Twofacebook - sign up to praise your friends (and then bitch about them when they log off)
  5. Plaicebook - where people write their own recipes that feature everyone’s favorite fish
  6. Facecook - only for people who resemble TV chefs
  7. Macebook - people hook up to discuss their experiences with tear gas
  8. Faceoffbook - each week two site members pair up to battle to death in unarmed combat
  9. Visage de livre - Facebook for French people
  10. Face2facebook - people actually leave the computer behind and meet people in real life (not sure if this one will ever catch on)

Reposted from my older blog that is about to disappear.

Alternative Valentines Day Poems

Had some fun yesterday coming up with some alternative Valentines Day poems which I posted on Twitter using a hashtag #altValentines. I have gathered those tweets together here. I think this is a good reflection of how my mind works: