Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam...

In August last year I posted something about spam and in the comments section someone put me on to a filtering system called Spamsieve which I've been using to help keep my inbox in order ever since.

But then, at the start of December I started getting insanely large amounts of spam. I posted something about that too. While Spamsieve coped with that influx of spam pretty well it was still hugely disruptive as it sent my computer into a kind of meltdown. It didn't matter that it all ended up in the spam folder, there were still 8,268 e-mails to process and at the very least that's time consuming.

Unfortunately things have spiralled since then. This is what my spam folder looked like one day between Christmas and New Year:



This shower of crud landed in less than 24 hours. I think we can agree that 32,125 e-mails in a day is just silly. That's an e-mail every three seconds. Except it doesn't work like that... it's more like 8,000 arrive in three minutes and then it goes quiet. As they say in the westerns, too damned quiet.

Huge amounts like that have been arriving every couple of days since. I cleared the spam-folder last night and today's total is already sitting at 22,702. Yum. Unfortunately Spamsieve doesn't seem able to cope with these kind of quantities and has crashed a few times under the weight of it all. Now when I check my e-mail I have little choice but to leave my computer to get on with it undisturbed. There's no point trying to ask the computer to cope with a secondary task and it's too depressing watching it collect e-mail number 326 of 16,573. It's even more depressing when I go downstairs, make a cup of coffee, putting my laundry on and then return to find that the computer is still only a quarter of the way through.

All of which makes me think I have little choice but to abandon the idea of a public domain e-mail address. There's simply no point in fighting against the tide. It's not going to go away and I'm not going to devote an hour a day to sorting my mail before I even get round to reading it.

I've always thought that making my address available on my website was the right thing to do on principle. Sadly that's no longer going to be possible. Which is a shame.

I guess I should try and replace it with an e-mail form of some kind... something that will allow humans to send an e-mail without revealing an address to anyone. Or anything. If you know how I can go about doing that do let me know. But don't e-mail me with it. That would be silly.

UPDATE: I'm really grateful for the replies and the advice offered... but it's become apparent that some people are just scrolling to the bottom without reading the other comments. If one more person tells me how to hide my e-mail address on my site, I might just scream. I know already and it is hidden. Part of the problem is that other people post my e-mail address on their sites... and I don't know how to effectively stop them from doing that.

Oh, and I know about Gmail and it doesn't work for me. It's just not effective enough at filtering the spam. When the quantity gets this high, even letting 1% through is ineffective... and in my experience Gmail lets more than that through.

UPDATE UPDATE: Thanks for all the suggestions. I think a solution is just around the corner...

Problem Solving.

I think January 1st is as good a time as any to address some of the issues we have with the calendar and our measurement of time in general.

Here's a list of time units: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. The first few are all very accurately measured. A second is a second and it isn't going to change... it's always going to be 1 Mississippi. There are always 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week. But when we get to months this precision disappears. A month is about 4 weeks. They range in length. 31 days? 30 days? 28? One in 48 of the darned things are 29 days long. That's chaos right there. Ridiculous.

We should sort that out. You should be able to define each unit in a precise number of the smaller unit so a month should be precisely 4 weeks. If we stuck with our existing 12 months that would mean the year would only be 336 days long and that won't work because that would make me 40 and that's simply not on. Besides the planets don't work like that and we need the year to come down at around 365 days.

The solution is obvious: we need a 13th month. In this new precise 28 days per month system, 13 months would give us a year of 364 days. Much better.

Changing the months also gives us a chance to sort some other problems out. In olden days the first month of the year was March. Look at the months at the end of our year: September, October, November, December. They were obviously meant to be the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months. The sequence was even stronger because July and August were originally known as Quintilis and Sextilis before Julius Caesar and Augustus went and got all lah-di-da and had months named after themselves. What egos! The world we live in now, where Dec denotes the twelth month and Oct the tenth must surely offend any linguist. So let's take the opportunity provided by the introduction of a 13th months to sort that out.

I propose we go back to starting in March. I think we should teach those old Roman emperors a thing or two about humility by stripping them of their monthly honours and returning July and August to their former names. I've got no issue with January and February so I think they should just get moved to the other end of things. So the new calendar would start:
March, April, May, June, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, December, January, February and then the 13th month which could be called anything but for sake of argument let's call it Gormanuary.

Now there's still a problem. If we just kept running 364 day years one after the other we'd soon fall out of sync because the planets are working to a 365.25 day year system. But this is easily dealt with. All you have to do is add in a pause before the new year begins. There's no reason why new year's day has to follow new year's eve immediately. We could have a day off first. A kind of intermission or drumroll building up to the start of the year.

That way, we'd all celebrate new year's eve on Sunday Gormanuary 28th and the next day wouldn't be Monday and it wouldn't be March 1st. It would just be the intermission. In practical terms it would end up being a great day for a party. Nobody could go to work because it would never be part of the Monday to Friday working week or part of the weekend. It wouldn't be called anything other than The Intermission. "What are you doing for Intermission 09?" people will ask. Of course, every fourth year, The Intermission will have to last 48 hours which isn't a problem because we just get a bigger and better party out of it. Only when The Intermission is over does the next day begin. And then we carry on as normal.

This would solve the problem currently experienced by February 29th babies who only have a real birthday every 4 years. An Intermission baby wouldn't have that problem because The Intermission happens every year. Sometimes it's a 24 hour Intermission and sometimes it's a 48 hour Intermission but it still happens. It doesn't have any other name... it's not a Monday or a Tuesday. It's not the 29th of anything, it's not in any month. It's just The Intermission and because it happens every year, so does your birthday.

How long is a month? 4 weeks. How long is a year? 364 days. Does one year follow directly from the last? No, there's an intermission. Problem solved.

I probably should have brought it up before the diary makers went to print.

Happy New Year

Fireworks, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

Happy Christmas

Christmas Lights, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

BUY THIS!

Okay... here's the thing. There are two sorts of songs that should succeed at Christmas.

Cheesy pop songs are perfectly acceptable if they're Christmas themed and have snow in the video. Wham's Last Christmas - absolutely fine. I'm even prepared to let Shakin' Stevens' Merry Christmas Everyone pass. I think Slade's Christmas song is a genuine classic.

There's a league above these things though... and it's occupied by the very special category of songs called Christmas-songs-you're-happy-to-hear-at-any-time-of-year. Right now, I can only really think of two: Fairytale of New York by the Pogues with Kirsty MacColl and Stop The Cavalry by Jonah Lewie. I love Stop The Cavalry... what a ridiculously beautiful thing it is that an anti-war song can become a Christmas classic.

I was thinking about this because having done my best to avoid the X Factor this year, this evening I slipped and fell on to my sofa and when I looked up I was watching the X Factor final results and saw the start of the campaign to make this year's winner, Leon, the Christmas Number One. I shuddered at the depressing inevitabilty of it all and then flicked channels where I caught the end of the video to Jonah Lewie's beautiful song. "Bada-dada-om-pom, Bada-dada-om-pom, Bada-pom, Bada-pom, Bada-dada-om-pom... wish I could be home... for Christmas", I sang to myself while pining for the days when such a thing could be a chart hit. "Oh well," I thought, "The X Factor has killed this kind of thing off and that's for sure."

But then an hour later I was noodling around online and I found myself reading about the song We're All Going To Die by the brilliant Malcolm Middleton (formerly of Arab Strap). It seems there's a campaign going to see if we can make it this year's Christmas number one I can't think of a better way to demonstrate one's distaste for the X Factorisation of the world.

The thing is, it's not that I think the X Factor should be stopped. It is what it is and it will carry on being an entertaining telly circus, chewing up and spitting out young people for a long time to come. But ignoring it isn't enough. Because in years to come people will look back on the start of the 21st Century and they'll be amazed that we kept falling for the same schtick; voting for people, buying their first single in "record numbers" and then forgetting about them when we realise that they're not as good as we thought they were. "Actually," we'll protest, "some of us weren't doing that at all, we were just ignoring the whole thing."
"No you weren't," will say the producers of a TV show caled I Love the 2000s, "you were all X Factor crazy... look, they kept getting Christmas Number Ones!"

Or alternatively, we could all download Malcom Middleton's We're All Going To Die and make it a Christmas number one. If we do, then in 20 years time when they make that I Love The 2000s telly show, they'll be forced into acknowledging that there were a lot of people who didn't fall for the same schnizzle every year.

Of course some people will suggest that this is just a great marketing scam... a way to boost the sales of an otherwise un-commercial song. To those people I say two things. 1: "Isn't that exactly what the X Factor is?" and 2: "What do you mean 'un-commercial'? It's ace!"
Besides, even if it is the case, I say we do our best to make this marketing scam better than that marketing scam.

If you've never downloaded a single before... make this your first one. Go to i-Tunes now and do it. Do it to show Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh that they can't make just anything happen. Do it so that future generations don't judge us too harshly. Do it to show the children that they don't boss the charts. But most of all do it for Christmas.

Portraits

Yesterday these two men took lots of photos of me.

So I took some photos of them too.

8268

These:

were both empty this morning.

I think my computer must hate me.

A little while ago I mentioned that I was going to redesign my site. I was asking for help because I seemed to be unable to get in touch with the web designer who had originated the current design. For some reason e-mails between us were going awry. I did manage to get through to him eventually though and the new design is now online.

It's not hugely different. I imagine a lot of people won't even notice. If you spot any glaring errors let me know. But not by e-mail. I'm getting enough e-mail.