don’t panic

While I was outside helping my parents to clean up their home, I happened to look up at around three in the afternoon and noticed an orange ball. It was the sun, but there was such an even and thick layer of smoke that it seemed as though someone had simply painted an orange circle on the grey clouds. Then I noticed the spots.

“Hey dad,” I said. “I think I see sunspots…”
“Nah…” he replied, skeptically.
“No really. Take a look.” And he did. And his mouth fell open.

The were sunspots, and you could very clearly see them with the naked eye – unshielded. Later, I read this on CNN.

So in a weird set of circumstances, and for perhaps the only time in my life, I was able to view sunspots with nothing but my own eyeballs. Life is constantly surprising me lately.

I’m over at my folks place. They live right at the edge of Tierrasanta next to Interstate 52. My daughter and I originally came over to get out of La Mesa, both because we were going stir crazy, and because the air quality was said to be better.

I can’t say that the air was better when we arrived, but it seems to be a bit better now. But it’s different. There was a hazy sky when we arrived. My daughter and I walked up to the top of the hill at the end of the street to see all the fire damage. My parents said it was close. All I can say is that between God and the CDF, it’s a major miracle that their house is there at all.

They live on the left side of a street that runs basically East West. The fire came down from the Northeast, jumped the freeway and traveled RIGHT to the houses directly on the other side of the street. It literally took out their fences. There must have been quite a battle line drawn there, and the aftermath is amazing. I’ll post some images at the end of this later.

Back at the house about an hour later, we were all sitting around in the livingroom when it grew quite suddenly dark. Going outside, it felt like someone had commanded dusk. Dark orange grey clouds covered the sky so evenly that you’d think you were looking at everything through a pair of amber sunglasses. It was also abruptly twenty degrees cooler and the smell of smoke was almost completely gone. It was very weird, like the smoke was up higher and the marine layer was slipping underneath.

I feel like I’m on the surface of Mars.

That house in the background is my folks place. (eeek!)

The canyon on the South side of Interstate 52.

Looking North towards 52.

This is an image I took yesterday out of my bedroom window. No, those are not rain clouds.

This one is out my kitchen window this morning…

I hate this time of year. Aside from the fact that it’s a serious bummer for my wife, I also find myself completely disgusted with children’s television.

I can understand the various stations wanting to monopolize on the seasonal events, but it’s no longer an event, now it’s just whatever calendar date comes next. I try not to let my daughter watch too much television, but like most kids her age, she likes to relax after school to a show or two. I restrict her to public television, or the Disney channel, and only specific shows on the later. If it’s on, we would rather sit down to Animal Planet on Discovery, or even some disaster on the Weather Channel.

But lately, even my normally “safe” channels are almost unwatchable due to the constant barrage of Halloween “specials”. Halfway through September, the various stations decided that since there wasn’t anything else they could commercialize, they would skip right to the next major holiday. This is hardly a novel concept. The grocery stores had racks of Halloween candy and fake spiders hanging from the ceiling since Memorial Day. But wouldn’t it be nice if those of us who weren’t into dead people walking the streets and football-sized spiders with poison fangs, could just go about our daily lives without the constant reminder that our world has turned into a commercial free-for-all exploiting all the things that we find the most disgusting and horrible?

It gives me a new perspective on how Jews must feel at Christmas.

I was thinking about SPAM today. I read an article at Salon.com that pretty much depressed me in the extreme. Here were four internet experts basically saying that it was hopeless and that e-mail was a dead ticket. Damn. I LIKE e-mail! I grew up with e-mail back when it wasn’t called e-mail. I still remember dialing into a private Pnet BBS account and checking my “personal messages.” I can’t live without it!

But SPAM has made e-mail like drinking a diet soda when you were expecting the fully leaded version. The next time you get a drink, you stop for a moment and steel yourself in case you got cheated again. That’s SPAM. Today when I open my e-mail client, I have to steel myself for the deluge of penis enlargers, Viagra products, cheerleader bestiality sex, and (most ironically) anti-spam products. I can’t enjoy it anymore. I used to look forward to checking my mail each morning. Now, I think of it as something that just has to be done in case there happens to be something really important there. It’s not like I’m expecting an urgent message from the president, but it would be nice if I could get a letter from mom without worrying if I’m going open it only to find a graphic sex act staring me in the face while my five-year old daughter looks on and says, “Daddy, what are those people doing?”

So what can be done? The best experts in the industry say that authentication (which seems to be the only real way of figuring out if mail actually comes from who it says it does) is a pipe-dream. Filtering content helps, but isn’t ultimately the answer.

Here’s what I have set up now.

My mail host has a built-in “Vipul’s Razor” anti-spam system, which is the forward-most defense against crap. Next, I have a series of content-based filters that I have set-up on my mail host to kill some of the worst abusers. These filters are unfortunately very specific and become mostly unused after the spammer changes systems.

The next line of defense takes place when I actually check mail from my local email client. I use the basic Mail.app provided by Apple in OS X (I love Eudora, but until they can access my address book, it’s a waste of space) which has it’s own built-in system using a “training mode”. After that, I have another series of filters to catch still more specific offenders that might have slipped through the cracks. These are usually the spammers that have used some loophole trick like encoding the email in base-64 or whatnot.

Finally, I do something that gives me perhaps the greatest relief from unwanted dreck. I prioritize my incoming email.

Say what?

It’s like this. Provided that a given mail has made it through all my automated defenses so far, it is then run through a series of filters that sort it into an appropriate mailbox folder depending mostly on who it’s from. For example, messages from my wife go to a folder just for her. Mail from mom gets it’s own place as well, and so on. Lastly, if no personal folder was found for the sender, it checks them against my address book. If they are there, then they get dropped into my golden INBOX. If not, they are quickly sifted into an “Unlisted” folder. The later I only check now and then because i know that 99% of what goes in there is (surprise!) junk. Anything labeled as SPAM by my other filters is marked as “read” and moved to the “Junk” folder, which is emptied daily, both locally and on the mail host.

And this system works pretty good. Not much gets to my inbox that I don’t want. Any crap that makes it to my system is handled in such a way that I’m certainly not surprised by it. I simply don’t check the “Unlisted” folder when my daughter is around.

I suppose, that if I REALLY wanted to be sure something gets to me, I could tell people that write to me to include a code sequence in their mail content, that way it could be sorted to a “For Your Eyes Only” folder or something.

The big problem I have with all of this, is that I am having to use my time (you have to update those filters every now and then) and emotional energy because some unethical prick has got it in his head that it’s okay to waste millions of other people’s man-hours so that he can make a few bucks selling something that 99.99% percent of the population thinks is repulsive in the extreme. And worse, he’s doing everything he can to look like legitimate mail. Most of the spam that gets through these days is so vague that you can’t even tell what it is specifically that they are offering. They use a rotating series of headers like, “I finally found you!”, or “re: Open house” so that I almost HAVE to open them to be sure they aren’t from a real person instead of some jackass’s computer system overseas who says he can give me a fantastic rate on a mortgage loan. Who in their right mind would actually buy a house with a loan from someone who goes out of their way to deceive you?? Whatever. People continually surprise me in the multitude of ways in which they can be complete idiots.

As I see it, the problem isn’t with our e-mail system, but with the people who send the crap. The solution is remarkably Swiftian. Any human caught sending SPAM is taken out and publicly hanged. Or maybe we could be merciful and just chop off their hands. The fact that these human leeches even exist should be a big red flag to those watching for the end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it. Digital anonymity is about to get sucked away my friends. As sure as the word “Viagra” will get your e-mail bounced into the cyber dustbin, our digital selves are going to be registered and tracked just so that we can open our mail without wondering of we’re going to be able to start-up our computer the following morning…