will email die in 2007?

over the past couple of months i've seen a staggering 75-100% increase in email spam on my snowdeal.org accounts which is apparently related to the proliferation in botnets; even with spamassassin filtering on the server side and thunderbird's bayesian algorithms on the client side, automatically tagging and sifting spam into a separate folder, i still have to wade through the 10% of messages they don't catch, which ends up amounting to hundreds of messages a day.

at this rate, if i project out a couple of months my inbox is going to be completely unmanageable ( already if your message gets mistakenly sent into the spam folder i'm never going to see it because i don't have the time to wade through thousands of messages a day to find the occasional false positive ). i have a pretty good handle on the things i could do to help slow the spam including turning of the ability to receive any message addressed to my domain and tuning spamassassin a bit, but if past history is any guide that will buy me maybe 6 months of reprieve. if you have a strategy that seems to have worked well for you, feel free to share it in the comments.

motorola e51 cordless phone - ideal for internet phone services?

tired of waiting for me to make a decision about whether to replace our sole vtech gigaphone that's barely still functioning, she took matters in her own hands and went out and purchased a motorola e51 5.8 GHz cordless phone. always thoughtful and knowing that i use dorky VoIP phone services like skype she was pleased to see that it was "ideal for internet phone services".

but the phone has no wifi capability and there's no alternative way to connect it to a network so it's not like you can switch over to a internet phone service in the way you can with something like DECT DUALphone. there's not a single mention of how it's ideal for internet phone services in the manual and there's no a word regarding the purported feature on the motorola e51 website.

as best as i can tell, you can't use the phone in any with any VoIP provider or even connect it to the internet, so it's hard to imagine on what basis they're making the claim. i suppose because it operates in a frequency doesn't tend to interfere with wifi networks that an overzealous marketer might think it's nifty to claim that it's "ideal" because someone can talk on the cordless phone while someone else is talking on a voip service and the cordless phone won't render the voip service useless. but most normal people like kris will just think that's more than slightly disingenuous. it's odd enough that i'd like to give my former employer the benefit of the doubt and assume that there was a product packaging snafu that nobody deemed was important enough to warrant pulling product from the shelves.

single sex classrooms coming to a u.s. school district near you?

o.k. maybe that title doesn't make sense to readers overseas, but nonetheless having a two year old who seems to be hurtling towards preschool and kindergarten tends to focus one's mind on educational issues, so it's interesting to see that the department of education has eased restrictions on single sex classrooms:

""The research, though it's ongoing and shows mixed results, suggests that single-sex education can provide benefits to some students under certain circumstances," said Assistant Secretary of Education Stephanie Monroe, in a news briefing. She emphasized any single-sex environment would be voluntary, and an equivalent coeducational option would be available."

as the article points out, research is inconclusive and perptetually problematics issues such as race and class will often play a larger role in predicting "achievement" than gender alone. but that doesn't mean that there aren't still tangible benefits for girls and boys particularly at younger ages when the differences in math and reading learning styles can be more easily addressed in single gender classrooms. [ via dangerousmeta ]

a regional radio renaissance?

i don't know how if it's necessary and sufficient to cause it to happen but one can certainly hope that the new that clearchannel has hung out the for-sale sign might lead to it being split up which might lead to a reinvigorated regional radio market.

i can't remember the last time i voluntarily listened to commercial radio and increasingly if a public radio show isn't available via podcast i'm not listening to it on a regular basis.

a hundred mile thanksgiving?

while i'm sensitive to a certain degree that the Smug factor = high, practical factor = low when it comes to 100 mile diet, i think it's still important to think about how far food travels from production to your plate. there's a cost to everything and occasionally it might be A Good Thing to contemplate the oil we eat.

so, while i'm not sure we'll be try to source everything we eat to within a hundred miles, it might be fun to take up the 100 mile thanksgiving challenge.

it might be a little easier for us, living as we do amidst the highest number of organic farms in wisconsin, but still, it might be - well - a challenge.

much, much, much ablog about nothing.

i feel somewhat like les. only a bit moreso. over the past period of blogging inactivity, i've found myself slumping into a fairly boring routine of skimming the pile-ups on techmeme, tailrank, digg and whatnot. and somehow in midst of the passiveness, i started to think maybe i didn't have too much to say. but lately i've taking a peek at the ol' aggregator, hearing individual voices again. and maybe getting a little inspired.

as useful as those new fangled memetrackers and social media sites may be, i think ultimately they lead to a homogenization that's not particularly interesting. no doubt, they server a purpose, but i think it's time for me to the spice back from a rich variety of voices.

arguments older than the oldest profession?

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching:

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

Delusions of faith as a science:

"For me, Dawkins' single good point — the only one in 374 pages of secular sermonizing — is that the creation of the Creator is itself inexplicable. As a person of faith, I feel myself sufficiently humble to accept this, and just leave it at that. Science is meant to be humbler still, to bend its findings with the evidence. So why does Dawkins, the scientist, continue to rail against something that no amount of evidence, no amount of investigation, will ever decide?"

Battle of the New Atheism :

"This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith."

don't call it a comeback, i've been here for years.

/me taps microphone.

is this thing on?

i think it's time to make some changes around here. after 6 years or so of having "conflux" serve as my personal meme tracker, i think it's time to try something new. or, rather, something old. you'll probably find some things similar to what you may have found here before, well, you know. maybe some original writing. maybe some photos of stuff other than the always amazing odin.

sorry if you've been patiently waiting for the tried and true conflux format to come back. a lot has changed in past 6 years and it's time to move on and do something new.

stay tuned!