The Opinionated Bastard

I get 125+ spam messages a/day. Most of them get filtered by SpamSieve on the client side.

In theory, my hosting provider uses Spam Assassin, but dialed down so high its been mostly pointless.

Meanwhile at work, we had no spam filtering at all, other then this TDMA challenge response system that I immediately disabled.

So when I looked into spam solutions for work I was intrigued by spamstopshere for my own use. It has the reputation for being the most accurate, and additionally, you can actually tell how much it will cost you by browsing their website, something that isn’t true for BrightMail or Postini.

Server-side spam filtering is far superior to the client-side spam filtering I was using previously, SpamSieve. The server do a lot of things to make sure that its really talking to a real mail server and not a spam blaster. That can help you filter out 75-80% of the spam immediately, with _zero false positives. Additionally, with client-side filtering when you have spam that are really obviously spam you still have to review them. With so much volume, you eventually stop bothering, which means any false positive is a bigger deal. If the server can dump all the obvious crap up front, then you only have to review 1-2 “possibles”/day, which I can easily deal with. 125/day was too much though, so I wouldn’t do it and soon I would have 2000 spam messages to review. I’d try to review them, but I’d get frustrated and give up…

Note that I don’t really consider Spam Assassin “server-side” filtering, because it filters the Spam AFTER the mail server has accepted the spam, which means its missing the filtering you can get practically for free.

So a spam filtering service was the way to go. And SpamStopsHere looked the the best of them.

The road wasn’t perfectly smooth however.

Technorati Tags: spam, puppy

Technorati Tags: 300, puppy

Assuming they live within a reasonable distance of an Apple store.

Here’s a Fortune Article talking about how great the retail experience is an Apple Store.

But I’m going to talk up one thing in particular I’ve noticed.

I’m a computer guy. So people who aren’t yet computer literate are always talking to me about how they would like to learn, but…

What I now tell them to do is go to their local Apple store. Once a week, the Apple Store has a class on getting started. Its free, they don’t have to buy anything, and they can come back EVERY week until they’re ready to buy a computer.

After they buy a computer, they can pay an additional $100/year for “Pro Care”, which means that they can make an appointment, and someone will sit down with them and go over any problems they’re having.

Can you think of any other company that does this for ANY product?

Apple seems to be the only company in America that actually supports it products these days…

Money made from my blog to date: $1600

Money made from non-nekkid-women on my blog: $40

Money made from nekkid-women: $1560

Sign Up Here if you want to make money on your blog as well. After you’ve signed up, email me and I’ll send you the HTML for your own site if you like.

Here’s the interesting part.

When I get a Instalanche, I don’t see an upsurge in revenue.

It seems that the people who are willing to signup for the pretty high-quality stuff at the Digital DreamGirls site aren’t the same people that read Instapundit. Rather, its the casual web surfers who end up subscribing. That is, bored web surfers are more likely to buy porn then Instapundit readers.

Who knew?

Also note that my wife, who gets to deposit the “Porn Checks” as she calls them, heartily approves.

Technorati Tags: blogging, money, porn

So here’s an editorial from the Washington Post. It’s pretty much bashing Pelosi’s Iraq Plan.

Yes, the Washington Post is bashing the Democratic Speaker of the House.

The media are know-nothing critics. They do a slightly better job bashing Republicans vs. Democrats, but at the end of the day, its all about the money, and they feel the best way for them to make money is to stir up every controversy.

Of course, this makes them totally fookin’ useless as a source of information. They’ve been saying Iraq is in a state of “Civil War” since April 3, 2003. So for 4 years they were wrong. Even now “Civil War” in Iraq would probably be an improvement. From reading what Iraqis say about the situation in their country, there are so many factions in Iraq that there effectively aren’t any sides. Civil Chaos would have been a better term.

I have a dream. It’s a fantasy really. I want to be able to pick up a newspaper and, after reading it, be more informed about what’s going on in the world rather then less informed.

My Neighbor, who teaches English as a First Language at the local Community College uses the local paper as a grammar quiz. Every day, she sits down with a red pen and circles grammar errors in the articles. Then she hands that out as a test at the beginning of class.

The New York Times may get the grammar right, but they have a harder time getting the facts right.

Technorati Tags: Democrats

Is your mac acting flaky?

9 times out of 10, I’ve been able to cure flaky macs by using the Combo installer to update why Mac. This is because of two reasons:

1. Using the Combo installer essentially refreshes everything in your operating system that’s changed since the .0 release. So anything that’s gotten corrupted is suddenly brand spankin’ new!

2. While developers get seeds of the .x releases, those are only delivered as Combo updates. There’s no way for them to test the Software Update delivery method, so basically, any compatibility problem between the Software Update version and any 3rd party software you have the won’t show up until after the official release. This happened to us at work today. Our software works fine with the Combo update, but not with the Software Update release.

So if you’re going to update to 10.4.9 today, grab the combo version instead.

Intel 310MB

PPC 167MB

You’ll be glad you did.

Thanks to Rohan, who gave me this tip about 2 years ago. It’s made my life much easier ever since.

Iraq meets Steve Jobs

That's pretty much my entire blog.

Friggin' Hilarious

Cool Article on the new sanctions regime. Sanctions that take advantage of our position as the leader of the global economy to “bar outlaw regimes from the global ATM”.

Wish we’d had them during, say, the Clinton administration…

One of my constant frustrations is that I’m a big picture guy. So I can see how Bush looked at the set of foreign policy issues on 9/12/2001 and said to himself: “Hmmm… We need to do something about Iraq”.

So I see that France and Russia are thereby as much to blame for the Iraq War as Bush2. For all the flak that Hillary is taking about the Iraq war from the left, I’m sure she’ll say at some point (once she’s cinched her parties nomination), “Hey, Iraq was poisoning the whole region. Remember, I was in the White House for 8 years.”

Then she’ll go on to rag on Bush for how he conducted the war instead of why. Which is fair, Bush is big picture (Can’t fix North Korea without the help of China.) but not enough little picture (need to actually spend those reconstruction dollars…).

Anyways, if we’d had this sanctions regime before, we wouldn’t have had to go into Iraq. So we probably won’t have to go into Iran.

Huzzah.

Hat Tip to Thomas Barnett, the “Pentagon’s New Map” guy.

Good news from the Surge-

The Opportunity In Sadr City:
The sorry state of Sadr City has increased the appreciation of the Mahdi Army’s role in the slums for American troops. What few services the residents received came from the Shi’ite militias — along with protection rackets, violence, and exploitation. These people want to see their situation change, and they will be willing to work with almost anyone who can improve their conditions and allow them to get off of the dole.

General David Petraeus understands this. His strategy of neighborhood-based security allows for close interaction with the residents. He has adjusted the tactics used in implementing security to allow for softer, more friendly approaches to Sadr City residents, who will appreciate the difference between professional American troops and the crime-lord approach of the Mahdis. At this level, it is a hearts-and-minds strategy that Petraeus hopes will pay short- and long-term dividends.

At the same time, the US needs to start getting trash, sewage, and electical services running. Instead of having the Army or American contractors do the work, though, the US should invest resources to help create Iraqi businesses for these tasks. It would help employ thousands who need jobs and jump-start the creation of a Sadr City middle class. Entrepeneurialism will accelerate the process of clearing the trash and cleaning the streets while the sewage and electrical systems get put back to working order.

Security comes first, but efforts such as these have to follow soon after, or security will soon disappear. The US has a chance to make an impact on sectarian animosity by allowing everyone the chance for some prosperity, and to give Iraqis ownership of their own progress. A kick start beats a kicked-in door in the long run, as Petraeus knows. Let’s hope Congress can figure this out as well.

is a completely different country it seems.

Great Article by Micheal Totten

Here are some numbers for y’all.

Total number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention: 4362

Number of delegates needed to secure the Democratic Nomination: 2182

Number of “Superdelegates” that Hillary already pretty much has a lock on because she or Bill raised money for them: 850

Number of delegates she’ll get from New York: 232

Total number of delegates Hillary had lined up the day she announced:

1082 (24.8% of the total delegates)

Hillary was halfway to winning the Democratic nomination the first day.

The only reason the press is writing about Obama is because they have to write about something between now and Super Tuesday.

If you’re interested in the details.

Troops before the surge: 140,000

Troops in Iraq right now: 140,000

We didn’t send more troops to Iraq, we sent more troops to Baghdad.

What’s really going on: Rumsfeld is out, Gates is in, old General is out, Petreaus is in.

That is, we really just changed how we were fighting the war.

Here’s an interesting tidbit about the delegate rules for the Democratic Party:

AF = ½ × ( ( SDV ÷ TDV ) + ( SEV ÷ 538 ) )

What that above equation says is that your “allocation factor” is the average of your state size in terms of the electoral college, and “how Democratic” your state voted in the last 3 elections.

Bottom line: The Democratic Party has a rich get richer rule so that Blue States get more delegates then Red States. The part that bothers me is that because its directly correlated with the states democratic voting record in the previous Presidential election its effectively cumulative, so that means that every election, the Democratic Party moves more and more to the left. It’s also scaled by the electoral college so if a left leaning candidate polls well in a populous state, the effect is super magnified. This explains a lot about the last few elections. If it seems like the Democratic Party is run by New York and California, its because they are!

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