Email Sub-Address Spam Frequency
My email server is configured such that email to ry4an-anything@ry4an.org gets correctly delivered to me. The dash and whatever is after it are retained but ignored completely.
When I give an email address to a company, say Northwest Airlines,I'll give them an email address that shows to whom it was given, say ry4an``-nwa``@ry4an.org. By doing this I'm able to check which companies are giving/selling/leaking my email address to spammers. Some of the leaks are surprising -- just a few weeks after giving out ry4an-philmont for the first time, giving it to the Boy Scouts, I started getting porn spam on it. When I called to let them know about the leak they assured me it was impossible.
Last month I decided to save all of my inbound spam and run some totals to see which sub-addresses got the most spam. Here are the counts:
- 6427 total spam messages to ry4an.org in 34 days
- 679 spam messages to plain ry4an*@*ry4an.org
- the 10 most spammed sub-addresses were
| Received | Address | Given to |
| 2542 | ry4an-slashdot | Posted to http://slashdot.org |
| 252 | ry4an-dip | Used in the Diplomacy community |
| 159 | ry4an-resume | On my resume |
| 141 | ry4an-yahoo | Given to yahoo.com |
| 125 | ry4an-cnet | Byline for some articles I wrote |
| 98 | ry4an-oldenburg | Defunct Oldenburg project |
| 88 | ry4an-poker | Used at https://ry4an.org/poker/ |
| 84 | ry4an-tclug | Given to the Twin Cities Linux Users' Group |
| 62 | ry4an-dns | Used for all my domain registrations |
| 44 | ry4an-keysigning | Posted at https://ry4an.org/keysigning/ |
So it looks like the worst offenders aren't comanies to whom I've given my email address, but rather letting them get posted to the internet for automated crawlers to harvest.
Gmail users: You can do the same thing using the plus sign.
Comments
Yeah, the one I gave to United actually garners me the most spam. I emailed them to complain but was brushed off relatively quickly. -- Anonymous
Pocket Pair Palsy
A little googling shows I'm the first person to (publically) coin the phrase pocket pair palsy to describe the adrenaline powered tremors poker players get when they've got a good hand. Dibs.
Comments
I would argue that palsy is not the best condition to compare this to. While involuntary movement is occasionally the result of palsy, paralysis is more common and likely. Some definitions of palsy do not even include tremor-like movements.
I know that we both know people who have dealt with Bell's Palsy, which is indeed primarily paralysis, but most people still associate palsy more with tremors than with paralysis. Besides, St. Vitus's Hole Cards just doesn't have the alliteration thing going for it. -- Ry4an
Novelty Keg Scale
At the haloween party we got a keg of New Castle, but most folks went for the mixed drinks or the bottled beer. We kept trying to steer folks toward the keg, but it's hard to get people behind a project that's not providing good status reports.
That got me thinking that one could make a simple scale showing a gas-tank style empty to full scale for a keg of liquid. Googling for keg scale turned up some products for bar owners, but nothing consumer focused:
If instead you could start with a mechanism similar to that found in these scales:
you could provide interchangeable faceplaces for the standard keg gross and tare weights.
People rally around steadily progressing meters -- ask anyone who's been involved with a funraiser/telethon. I suspect produced cheeply enough something like this will sell to frats and the like.
Using Mutt to Automate Mailman Message Rejections
Since this post I've upgraded my mailman installation to a newer version, which allows me to automatically reject messages from non-subscribers without having to resort to external scripting.
However, some of the mailing lists I run are subscribed to by a significant number of members who can't be counted on to post from the email address with which they subscribed, or indeed to even understand what that means. For those lists a policy that automatically rejects messages from non-members is just too draconion. Unfortunately, that means the few spam messages a day from non-members which make it past my filters but would normally be automatically rejected due to their non-member origins have be manually discarded so that I can approve the few non-member messages per month that really do belong on the list.
Relying on mailman's email control interface (as differentiated from its web control interface) I was able to craft the following mutt macro to make the rejecting of undesirable non-member messages a single keystroke affair:
macro index X ":set editor=touch^Mv/confirm^Mryqd:set editor=\"vim -c 'set nocindent' -c 'set textwidth=72' -c '/^$/+1' -c 'nohlsearch'\"^M"
When the 'X' key is pressed the message editor is set to the UNIX 'touch' command which represents absolute minimal message editing. The rest of the macro replies to the confirmation subpart of the mailman message, which indicates rejection to mailman's email control interface. After the reply is sent the message editor is set back to it's usual value (vim).
Halloween 2005
Last weekend Bridget, Joe, and I threw our annual Halloween party. It was well attended and everyone seemed to have a good time. It peaked around midnight with a good 50 people inside and out, which is about the same as last year.
This year we did a little more with the decor including the building of a coffin cut-out and a few corpses. The walls got covered with cheesy off the shelf decorations that drew more praise than anything else -- go figure.
Photos are starting to get posted by various attendees, and I'll post them here as more appear. Not all photos in all sets are from our party, but a goodly fraction are:
- http://www.livejournal.com/users/soundingsea/184134.html
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/autodidact/sets/1248794/
- http://trogdor.dopp.net/Halloween%202005/
- http://photos.megancarney.com/Albums/2005-10-29%20Halloween/
Thanks to all who attended,
A Cheap and Easy Sidebar
I hacked the MonthCalendar macro for moin moin to include some javascript which includes a sidebar built from a RSS feed. The javascript and back-end Rebol were written by p3k.org. The RSS feed is produced from (a subset of) my links at del.icio.us. All in all a quick, easy addition, requiring just a little Python twiddling.
Wow, this post contains almost no nouns a normal person would recognize.
Comments
Hrm, the side bar stopped working because the http://p3k.org site hasn't been responding for at least 24 hours. I wonder if/when it will come back. If anyone notices it's returned let me know and I'll re-enable the side bar.
That sort of thing is exactly why I don't like relying on external web services be they flickr, gmail, del.icio.us, or whatever. I know in theory google and yahoo can keep those services running with 100% availability, and that they don't want the PR hit that elmininating them would cause, but still if you're not paying someone to store you're data you shouldn't expect it to still be there tomorrow.
The p3k site is back up, but I switched over to using del.icio.us directly for the rendering. I recall they used to request that you not put anything on your webpages that hits their site for every page view, but they seem to be encouraging it now. Their link rolling seems to work that way, anyway (and works quite well, at that).
Isle Royal GPS Data
Earlier this month some friends and I hiked across Isle Royale in lake Superior. Joe kept his GPS running and produced good track points in an odd export format from his Mac software called "Topo". I created a quick conversion script to produce this GPS format data which can be used with the GPS visualizer website to produce images like this:
Engagement Ring
Again, it probably doesn't exactly meet the "things I've created" criteria for this website, but I just couldn't help but post this one. A few months ago Kate Bauer and I put together this ring:
Today when it arrived she agreed to marry me, and I couldn't be happier.
Comments
Hey Ry4an, you may or may not remember me, but my name is Brenden Johnson and was in IT at the U with you. We had Serge Rudaz (and FOSSIL) among other classes together. I happened across your blog a little bit ago on GeoURL.org and had to congratulate you on your engagement.
Hey, Brenden, I certainly remember you and the rest of the physics folks. I've been back on campus a few times lately and even though it's only been ten years since freshman year it's amazing how simultaneously distant and vivid memories of those times are. Nice hearing from you, and thanks. -- Ry4an
Vodka Fruit Infusion
A few months back Kate Bauer and I hosted a BBQ at her place. I wanted to try putting together a fruit and vodka infusion of the sort I'd previously seen at bars.
Kate bought a bunch of fresh fruit and I picked up the vodka (Svedka, the best vodka for the dollar, and damn near the best at any price). We used the same glass container from Pier One I purchased to house pickled eggs for my Moe the bartender Halloween costume a few years back. The infusion came out great, but we learned a few things along the way:
- Pineapple is a great filler
- Strawberries lose their color and look pale and sad
- Kiwi sticks to the glass
- Decant some into a pitcher for easy pouring
Initially we set up a complicated siphon and valve system which worked well enough, but scared people away. Once we decanted the vodka off the drink really went quickly.
As one would expect the final product tasted like candy, but had the potency of hard liquor -- yikes.
Timed Home Phone Ringers
I really need to sleep in once a week, and I actually get to once a month. When I do sleep in I want the ringers off on all the phones in the house, but that's three phones to go find and then to remember to un-silence in the "morning". This past weekend I figured out that by using the call-forwarding feature on my home phone line to route all calls to my cell phone I can keep all the extensions from ringing. What's more by using the timed profiles feature on my cell phone I can have it muted until a pre-set time (say, 2pm) at which time the ringer re-enables itself. Finally I've got a good way to sleep in uninterrupted without forgetting to turn the ringers back on for the next three days.
Comments
Alternatively, you could ditch your land line. That worked for me. --Greg
Yeah, I've considered that but I like having a phone number I can give out to people whom I don't want reaching me on my cell phone -- especially since I work from home. Indeed, that's why I got the call-forwarding initially.
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