It seems automated news scraping splogs are basically tracking back to every single post I make. I get rather sick of seeing them… is there any way to nuke them from outer space?

For those of you disinclined to propeller hats, let your eyes glaze over and for the love of Vishnu, don’t read this post.

• I have so much junk on this computer (at work), it’s not funny. So today before I began working, I started giving it the old clean up, deleting stuff I don’t need. And I found three screensavers, thirteen programs, five drivers, and a bunch of media I didn’t need.
• At work, we use TrueCrypt a lot. I trust you can find the link for yourself. I love the program, actually; especially the fact that they’ve built plausible deniability right into the program in the form of encrypted-volume-within-encrypted-volume. Which is nice when we have financials we don’t want a whole lot of people to see.
• Today I deprecated an entire filing cabinet in the face of scanners and hard drives. An entire filing cabinet! That’s good news, especially when you consider how much physical space can be saved by scanning instead of physical filing. For instance, at work when people pick up parcels, they sign a packing slip which we file in a giant chest of drawers and occasionally empty into boxes. How much easier would it be if we could just run the papers through a scanner, rename them, and be done with it? A lot easier.
• Incredibly, my spambox in my Gmail account has run up above 1k spam now; it’s been hovering at that mark for a few days now, with the occasional dip into the 900s every day. 1k spam. Wow. For spammers interested in making Gmail’s spam filters even better, my email address is scatterfingers@gmail.com and I check it approximately 1k times a day. Speaking of Gmail:
1. Their spam filters have finally decided to catch the Nigerian scam mail I get; absolutely welcome turn of algorithm.
2. If you want to reach me, email me or IM me. Don’t call me.
3. Feature request for Gmail: since you people like search so much, at least let me search by emails with attachments. For instance, it was hard to find a JPEG I wanted the other day. This feature makes sense, because with 2GB+ disk space, you know people are going to be sending around files a lot more than they used to. (Also, yes, I know how to MacGyver this, so don’t give me a workaround.)
• I slept for ten hours last night. I know, not a technologically-related point, but worth mentioning either.
• Why have the innards of a computer not gotten better in the last 20 years? I mean significantly? Why doesn’t the industry form a standards body and agree to follow its recommendations? Why don’t they understand that creating competing standards is zero-sum, but creating competing products is not?
• Internet Explorer 7 takes up too much screenspace with chrome. So does Firefox 2. But at least with FF I can get rid of what I like. Also, IE7 has switched around all the old ways of doing things for no apparent reason. Why must you do that? It was good the way it was, and I was used to it. I don’t like interface changes every few years. My car, for instance, has a steering wheel, three pedals, and a stickshift, much like cars of the 1950s. Because it works.
• Imagine that operating systems were held to the same standards auto makers are. How would the OS arena be different?

My work is done here. Also please notice I fixed the commenting problems; if you have any more issues, do drop me an email, or IM me. Which reminds me, I need to email Vamp and see how he’s doing.

You probably won’t have noticed because you don’t read my email, but spammers have started taking shots at my contact box above. Which is just idiotic, really. I’m running a blog with Spam Karma, Akismet, a spam-blocking shoutbox, and trackback validation: you think I’m vulnerable to spam? Talk about a waste of time!

But then again, I get something like 100 spams a day in my Gmail account (after I posted it all over the web to see what would happen), so I guess my point is if they have a worldwide net of zombie boxes, they’re going to spam anything and everything in sight.

In other news, Gmail is still letting through a great deal of the Nigerian scam type emails that come my way. Seriously. I get three or four every day landing in my inbox. Gmail team: shape it up.

This is oddest thing. Gmail has consistantly caught all spam sent to me, except spam of one type: Nigerian 419 schemes. I don’t know why, but no matter how often I report them, I still get them. It’s annoying. I’m not going to fall for a scam from PRINCESS ASETU MUSA; neither should Gmail’s spam filters, despite the TWELVE MILLION THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND US DOLLARS they speak of over and over again. Gah!