Jason M. Hanley :: Custom Software Developer

SPAM email. Everyone hates it. Company and individuals alike have built various systems for dealing with it, but from what I hear, most solutions are sub-optimal.

I currently receive about 365 spam emails per day. 290 in my personal account, and 75 in my work account.

But I hardly ever have to think about this!

That’s because I use hosted Gmail for both my personal and work accounts. Every time a spam email makes it through. I simply check it, and hit the “Report Spam” button. Hundreds of thousands of others do this every day. Then, the Google algorithm goes through and figures out which emails are spam based on this aggregate result.
It ends up being extremely accurate. I’ve only had 2 or 3 false positives* over the past 3 years I’ve used Gmail.

Because of this, I can confidently ignore the spam/junk folder. Gmail saves these messages for 30 days — just in case.

Yet another reason to use hosted Google services…

*A false positive is a legitimate email that gets marked as spam.

Warning: This blog posting will probably make you mad. If your blood pressure rises in correlation with gas prices, stop reading now!

Gas prices have been increasing over the years, and I personally think it’s great! Don’t get me wrong. I have a car, and I love driving, but I also think people (including me) drive way too much.

Why do we drive so much? Because it’s still too cheap! Even with the price more than doubling in the past five years, there are more cars on the road, more drivers, and people driving further distances each day.

Obviously people need to do a certain amount of driving, but it’s the long distance commuters that really confuse me. Apparently they think it’s more economical to travel hundreds of kilometers and spend 3-6 hours in a car every day than to move closer to their workplace.

I think if you added up all of the costs very carefully (including car ownership and lost productivity due to travel time) you’d find this type of commute is actually way more expensive than moving.

Never mind all of the external costs (ie. costs that drivers don’t directly pay) including road maintenance, emergency services, and environmental impact.

Now, I agree there’s no easy solution to this. City planners need to encourage more mixed commercial/residential buildings. They also need to provide better mass transit.

But nobody is going to bother with any of that when it’s just so darn cheap to hop into the car and drive!

Ok, I think I’ve upset enough people by now At least a few others agree with me:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/hurray-for-high-gas-prices/
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/10/pigou-club-manifesto.html

In the business world, there are phone people, and there are email people. I’ll admit right upfront that I’m an email person. There are situations when phone or face-to-face meetings are necessary or more appropriate, but for most day to day issues, I think email is great.

Consider this scenario: I send an email checking on the status of something. The other person gets the email, and realizes they need to ask me something that basically requires a yes or no answer.

Instead of emailing, they phone me. Naturally, I miss the call and they leave me a long message re-explaining the entire situation, asking me the question, and leaving their contact information and the times they can be reached.

I have to log into my voicemail, retrieve the message, listen to it (possibly more than once) and take down the contact info. Then I call them back — and, you guessed it — they’re not available. By the time I finally get them tracked down and give them their answer, I’ve probably spent a good 10-15 minutes intermixed with other tasks. That’s not that long, you say. Perhaps not on its own, but that’s not the only issue I have to deal with in a day.

Let’s be very conservative and say that I only have 10 such issues per day:

• Email: 1-2 minutes to reply x 10 incidents = 10-20 minutes per day
• Phone: 10-15 minutes to reply x 10 incidents = 1.5-3 hours per day

So with email, I can be about 900% more efficient. Is this a no-brainer, or am I missing something here?

I just read an interesting article in the Star entitled, “North Americans become obese while foreign children starve.”

An interesting figure from the article: “Right now, there are one billion people who are malnourished and nearly one billion who are overweight.”

So basically there’s lots of food for everyone, it’s just being distributed very unevenly.

Raj Patel has been documenting this phenomenon for quite some time over at Stuffed and Starved.

Here’s an idea for word processors and spell checkers. They already underline words in red that they don’t find in their dictionary.

How about if obscure words were underlined in yellow? For instance, I have a habit of typing “manger” instead of “manager” when I’m typing too fast. The word “manger” is probably not used much except around Christmas. It’d be nice if it were flagged in yellow and I could right-click to get a list of more common words with a similar spelling.

Have any spell checkers already implemented something like this? Let me know if you’ve seen it anywhere.