Communicating in a networked world
Time to start tracking another one of my interests. Space.
The shuttle crew, being way farther up than usual missions (350 mile orbit), has finished fixing the Hubble space telescope and the telescope is being checked out. The shuttle landing has been postponed to Saturday, May 23rd, 2009. The first photos from the refurbished Hubble – more spectacular photos than ever before – will be released by NASA in September.
See also: The NASA Hubble telescope web site.
Where’s my identity? Well, of course, it’s my brain and body, to be sure, and all of that stuff I’ve done during my lifetime, and all the connections I’ve made, but then again, my personal data is all over the place so who knows how much of me might be scattered around in many places?
The thought occurred because I got out of my car a few weeks ago without turning it off, and when I returned to it several hours later, it was still on.[1] Nobody had messed with it, but it had remained there at the curb completely “on” and drivable. My “identity” as far as the car was concerned was the RFID “key” that I was carrying with me.
Where else have we embedded or attached our identities to physical objects these days? [Read more…]
Robert Scoble just posed this question, “Someone just asked me if there’s a good way to get a holistic look at Twitter or friendfeed followers. I don’t know of any. Do you?”
He was talking about their geographical locations. Among the answers, one person pointed at a Yahoo Pipes application that puts pins (each corresponding to one follower) onto a world map. I‘ve written about Yahoo Pipes before — it’s a web service that lets you “visually” create an algorithm that reads RSS feeds and manipulates them. Pipes can filter, put together, count, limit and obviously do a lot more. I have created a Pipes application that filters several RSS feeds and then makes them available for insertion on a blog.
I am increasingly concerned about the fragility of the Internet. With our data living more and more in the cloud, we are vulnerable when networks fail. Without email, without the documents I’m writing or editing, I have to sit out any network blackout that takes place. This happens to me more often than I’d like – probably a couple of times a month in my home office. I’m on Comcast cable for my connectivity, and though I frequently get 10 megabits/second of bandwidth, and almost always have at least 1.5 mbs, there are times when it gets so unreliable it might as well not be there, and then there are times when it just stops working for a couple of hours. [Read more…]
I’m actually finding that I’m getting ahead of my incoming spam load. I get easily 800+ a day at intake end of my inbox. That is reduced by at least 50% by custom rules that I’ve added to my Kerio mailserver. (These rules have to be updated daily with new phrases, but they are quite effective.) And Kerio mailserver has additional behaviors that it uses to reduce spam – together they either bounce or tag most of the incoming spam.
Then another 50% of those that remain are tagged as spam by SpamAssassin (a server-based solution). And finally, each morning I go to webmail and look at incoming messages there, tagging the obvious spam and deleting it, before I have Entourage [Microsoft Office] pull my mail down to the computer. The personal webmail examination step requires 30 minutes of my time every morning, because I’ve gotta look at every title, but while I’m doing it, SpamAssassin is learning how to recognize today’s spammer tricks.
When Entourage picks it up, it uses SpamSieve (a Mac program that uses Bayesian filtering) to additionally filter the mail, and that catches almost everything else. I probably have to delete another 25 by hand from my inbox during the course of the day, and SpamSieve “learns” how to filter those out for tomorrow.
Interestingly, I miss the spam. The number of actual messages that I’m left with in my inbox to really read is maybe 50 a day. I still triage and only answer those that are ultra important right away, and my average turnaround time to respond is probably 24 to 48 hours for everything else. But I’m feeling like this filtering is finally effective for me.