Now THAT's something I can help you with. Sombody want to extend the same curtosy to me?

Oh, and while we're at it : I ab-so-lutely HATE it when people can't admit that they're wrong. You know, the kind that will keep on discussing with pointless arguments, when their point has been overthrown already ages ago. I mean, if you're wrong, you're wrong! ADMIT it dammit! There's no shame in that! Otherwise it's just plain pathetic.

Yes, stop arguing when it doesn't matter any more!

I hate it when married friends argue over stupid things in front of other people. A friend of mine and his wife once argued about whether or not it is better to keep the soap in a container or leave it out so it could "breath". This is not something to get in a fight about, much less in front of another couple. The real kicker is that she used to work in costmetics and sold the very soap they were talking about. Now, I don't actually know who was right here, but come on guy, if she used to sell the stuff and it's such a tiny think, she has the right to win! Just get over it. If my wife and I disagreed on which OS, or processor, or graphics card was the best, she would just drop it and let me win even if I was being stupid because I am a programmer and in the end it just doesn't matter.

-Jeff

What I hate: Spam

I keep getting the same spam in my inbox that always slips through my Hotmail junk mail filter:

In reply to:

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U N I V E R S I T Y D I P L O M A S
...
Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited
universities...

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Now there is an oxymoron.

He always comes though different ISPs, so reporting him won't do any good. I really want to get this guy, but what can you do.

oh dear lord. i know what your talking about.
The ones i cant stand are teh ones taht pop up on my desktop. I dont know if any one has seen them. They are always for some little web cam. I swear that microsoft is in on it but i dont know enough to try to stop it. I wish they was some way to stop them. but what can you do

They are always for some little web cam

There was a fairly long discussion of the X10 cameras a couple of weeks ago...

/Michael

unless it's how to get rid of the damn thing i dont want to hear about it.

Yes, it's how to get rid of x10 ads. You can also use your HOSTS file to map different IPs to localhost (127.0.0.1) which will nuke a lot of garbage. Do a search of the BBS and you'll find the thread. One simple click and no more x10 popups.

None of this is SPAM however. SPAM is generally mail and news offtopic and mass postings of some advertising nature. Specifically, ninti was talking about UBE - Unsolicited Bulk Email. It costs your ISP money and it costs you money in the end. Not the same thing as sending junk mail through the post office either.

spamcop.net
http://spamassassin.taint.org

I'm probably going to install Spam Assassin on the colocated server one of my websites lives on. Then I'll use it as a forwarding gateway for all my mail. Should clean things up quite a bit.

Complain to your ISP or other mail provider if you get a lot of junk mail. They can institute all sorts of filters and use all sorts of human-tracked blocking lists to help with the problem. You might also consider a mail account at Spamcop or some other service. You can even go with a place that allows white-lists, so anyone sending you mail for the first time has to manually send it again with a confirmation code to get onto your accepted-list.

Bruno

They can institute all sorts of filters and use all sorts of human-tracked blocking lists to help with the problem.

And they can also end up blocking the spam so effectively that the emails you WANT to get are blocked as well.

Just ask Tony Fabris what happens to email from Alaska...

tanstaafl.

SpamBouncer has been great for me, and I have it set never to automaticially toss mail. It filters my mail into three folders, Bulk, Blocked, and Spam. Bulk is where any mail not directly addressed to me, plus it fell through all my filters. Blocked is where possible spam goes, but it also sees quite a bit of my new unfiltered listservs. Not a huge problem as a quick procmail edit fixes that. And then Spam, that is where I have only had 5 legitimate messages go out of thousands that have hit it. With Bulk, usually it means it's time for a filter. Blocked gets a quick check once in a while to delete the junk, and Spam gets scanned from time to time before deleting it.

If your someone who dosen't run their own mail server, but know your ISP runs a Unix based OS, see if they can implement it with header additions. Before I switched to IMAP mail, I had Spamblocker adding a simple header that my mail program could pick up on.

oh happy day. I might just charge all my roommates for this knowledge. not to mention i can have one less thing to bother my therapist about, now it's down to the real issues like coping with the ex-wife.

If you don't like X10 ads, you guys need to check this link out. It sets a cookie that the X10 ads check for. If it exists, the popups immediately close themselves. The default is for 30 days, but you can change the day variable to anything. I change it to 365 myself. I figure that's enough.

http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=30&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm

Also check out Sneakemail. I use them and it's great. And free. Basically, they generate random email addresses for you. You can block certain addresses, or only allow certain addresses, and create as many as you want, cancel them at any time, etc.

Hmmm - now that's tempting. I have always had nokias, the latest being the 6210. I like the UI, but the build quality sucks. I may just have to get an 8290 then. Correction, the 8290 does not appear to be a UK product - the closest being the 8210, which has no IR so it won't be useful for me.

Quick search - ahh, there's the one:
The 7650 - full colour GUI, joystick, built in VGA digital camera, 4MB RAM, IR, Bluetooth, Java, SMTP&POP, HSCSD & GPRS and dual band.

Coooool!

Ahh yes, they do something I do on my own server as well. I recently converted my server to PostFix, and gained an alias ability that has been handy. Now whenever I fill out a form that I need info from, but am afraid of spam, I do an address like drakino_spamcom@miniinfo.net. It's perfectly valid, and is easy to then filter if that site starts spamming me. I use different ones for different sites so I can learn who sold my info. riocar@miniinfo is an example of this too, as the site uses a few aliases for me so I know what the problem is.

For anyone out there with a ton of soam, the best thing to do is change your address and start using these services from day one. I still have my @usa.net address, and it continues to get spammed heavially. My new address though has avoided most of it.

The deal with what you call aliases has been available with sendmail for quite a while. The default for the delimiter there was a `+'. I'm using Postfix now, as well, and I use it with the Cyrus IMAP server to deliver mail directly into subfolders of my INBOX, especially for mailing lists and whatnot. Keeps my main INBOX tidy for stuff that was actually sent to me.

The deal with what you call aliases has been available with sendmail for quite a while.

Really? I searched all over for how to do it before finally giving up and going to Postfix.

Yup. Been in there since 8.7, I think. Search somewhere for ``detail'' and/or ``plussed'' in conjuction with ``sendmail''. Regardless, the defaults for generating .cf files allow for it. The local_procmail and cyrus mailers do something intelligent with the detail (what they refer to the local part after the `+'), and the local mailer just throws it away (but leaves it in the ``To:'' header, obviously).

In reply to:

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the closest being the 8210, which has no IR so it won't be useful for me.

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Er... yes it does. I use mine all the time for communicating with my Palm IIIc.

*sigh* You know you're surrounded by geeks when a topic of things you hate, starting off with bad music remixes, ends up talking about sendmail. :P

(Not like I'm anyone to talk, though...)

Just thought of this one: Fade outs at the end of songs. I know everyone does it (even Rush), but to me it always feels like the writer just ran out of steam and could think of a good ending. I hope I never succomb to whatever it is that makes people to decided to do this to their songs.

-Jeff

Fade outs at the end of songs. I know everyone does it (even Rush), but to me it always feels like the writer just ran out of steam and could think of a good ending.

Not usually.

I agree that sometimes a song fade out is done because the artist couldn't write an ending. But more often, the artist fades it out because they deliberately WANTED it to fade out. There is a certain kind of "feel" that you get with a fade out that is usually exactly what the artist was going for.

To use the Rush example, they often write a song with the full intent of fading it out. They've already decided that the song needs the fade out as a proper ending. But as they're recording the ending bars to cover the fade, their playing gets better because they're less stressed about the rolling tapes. So they decide to leave all the good stuff in there, all the way up to the ending, but they still wanted the fade (because they want the end of the song to feel a certain way) so they still do the fade, too. The fade on a Rush song sometimes lasts all the way to the point where they stop playing. If you turn up the volume on some of their fade outs, you'll actually hear them end the song. Examples are "Between the Wheels" from Grace Under Pressure, "Grand Designs" from Power Windows, and "Mystic Rhythms" from Power Windows.

Also remember that most artists (Rush included) need to write "endings" to songs that fade anyway, because they don't usually do fades in a live performance. So most of the time, even a song that fades has a written ending, even if only to cover the live concerts.

More detail straight from the horse's mouth:

"Do you plan in advance for songs to fade out?"

Geddy Lee (Guitar Player, April 1986): "Sometimes. Sometimes we're not sure, so we ride out for a long time, and then end it. We have the option. Invariably, every time we decide we're going to fade out, we start getting into the fade and everyone loosens up and the track starts getting better. That happened with "Mystic Rhythms" [Power Windows]; the fade-out is about a minute long because we liked every little nuance. The end of "Grand Designs" [Power Windows] is also like that. There are about seven phrases, and they're all different. None of that was planned; Neil was doing the drum track, and at the end, the sequencers were going and he just kept punching-in and going, basically flailing and hacking through it. Everybody loved it, so we decided to keep it in. Then we had to learn to play it onstage."

I will give you the Rush does this far less than most bands, and I'll even give you that they do it for "artistic" reasons. I still contend that this technique of ending a song is WAY overused. I just feel cheated at the end of a great song that doesn't seem to resolve. If the intent of the musician is to evoke a certain feeling in the listener by doing a fade out (which appears in the Geddy quote), that makes sense to me. The problem is that there are so many songs that fade out, much to the same effect (IMO), that it makes any songs that truly need a fade out not have this feel. Incidently, I am much more tolerant of fade ins because they are hardly ever used.

-Jeff

Not being respected in a $hitty job due to a $hitty market

I hate running down to the utility room and forgetting what tool I neded to grab or if I even went down to get a tool at all. I hate looking in the refridgerator and forgetting what ingredient or condiment it was that I wanted to grab out of it. I hate going to the store to get just three things and only being able to remember two of them when I walk in.

I also used to hate whan I had one more CD in the car than I had cases to put them in, and everything got put back in the wrong one. But I fixed that one once the empegs went on sale

I hate it when I'm at the music store looking at CDs, and I pick up a potential buy, only to wonder if I already have the cd in my collection. Usually, when I think I already have it, I don't. I hate it when I actually buy the cd only to find that I already have it stashed and hidden away in my collection somewhere. I really hate it when I forget to return that CD within the return period.

This motivated me to create and use a DB, which keeps track of my CDs, and whether or not I have it ripped and stored on my empeg unit.

I'm sure that we all hate getting 0wn3d.

Oh, and I hate ketchup packets. Why can't they put more ketchup in those stupid things so you don't have to open as many?

Yeah, and while we're on that subject, you'd think that Hood would realise that everybody uses 2 or more of their tiny cartons of milk/cream and double the size of them too. And sugar packets.

I hate when people create these stupid spellings of words to be "cool"
and when people can't spell words out all the way...
sure it's the internet but:
You saving time typing = Me wasting time deciphering
how much harder is it to write to instead of 2?