Some well-meaning, albeit uninformed soul (who just got Dugg) came up with what he believes to be a great way to combat spam. The idea is to “bounce” the spam messages back to the spammer — presumably so that you don’t exist.

Interesting. So the best technique for fighting spam is to send a message to the spammer saying,

Hi, this is a valid email address (they can tell it’s not a real error). Do me a favor and don’t spam me. Oh, and one more thing — don’t spam me using the address I’m sending this from.

Outstanding. I’ve got another great idea: let’s make a list of dates of birth and social security numbers to put online that’s part of a “Identity Theft Prevention List”. This way the identity thieves can have one place to go to ensure they don’t steal the identity of someone who doesn’t want theirs stolen.

Use some logic, people. If they were willing to spam you the first time, do you really think they’re going to stop because you ask them to? Here’s another stellar crime fighting technique: go up the the friendly neighborhood rapist and say,

Hey, do me a favor, don’t ever come to 135 Elm Street where my wife’s often home alone while I’m on business. M’kay? Thanks.

Genius.

** It’s not quite this bad since it’s made to look like an error rather than a reply, but to a spammer this is a trivial obfuscation. Things like the time the spam was sent vs. the time it was bounced (as well as mail headers) illustrate very clearly whether something was actually bounced or was made to look like it did. Spammers tend to react negatively to the latter. Plus, a good portion of spam comes from spoofed addresses anyway, and responding just clogs bandwidth and freaks out the spoofed users. Don’t waste your time.

Watch this movie within one week.

An Inconvenient Truth

Collect

Capture everything that you need to track or remember or act on in what Allen calls a ‘bucket’: either a physical inbox, email inbox, tape recorder, notebook, or any combination of these. Get everything out of your head and into your collection device, ready for processing. All buckets should be processed to empty at least once per day.

Process

When you process your inbox, follow a strict workflow:

• Start at the top.
• Deal with one item at a time.
• Never put anything back into ‘in’.
• If an item requires action:

• do it (if it takes less than two minutes),
• delegate it, or
• defer it.

• If not,

• file it for reference,
• throw it away, or
• incubate it for possible action later.

The 2-minute Rule: If it would take less than 2 minutes to do something, just do it right away. Two minutes is a guideline, roughly the time it would take to formally defer the action.

Organize

Allen describes a suggested set of lists which you can use to keep track of items awaiting attention:

• Next actions - For every item requiring your attention, decide what is the next action that you can physically take on it. For example, if the item is ‘Write project report’, the next action might be ‘Email Fred for meeting minutes’, or ‘Call Jim to ask about report requirements’, or something similar. Though there may be many steps and actions required to complete the item, there will always be something that you need to do first, and this should be recorded in the next actions list. Preferably, these are organized by the context in which they can be done, such as ‘in the office’, ‘by the phone’, or ‘at the store’.
• Projects - every ‘open loop’ in your life or work which requires more than one physical action to achieve becomes a ‘project’. These are tracked and periodically reviewed to make sure that every project has a next action associated with it and can thus be moved forward.
• Waiting for - when you have delegated an action to someone else or are waiting for some external event before you can move a project forward, this must be tracked in your system and periodically checked to see if action is due or a reminder needs to be sent.
• Someday/Maybe - things that you want to do at some point, but not right now. Examples might be ‘learn Chinese’, or ‘take diving holiday’.

A calendar is also important for keeping track of your appointments and commitments; however, Allen specifically recommends that the calendar be reserved for what he terms the ‘hard landscape’: things which absolutely have to be done by a particular deadline, or meetings and appointments which are fixed in time and place. ‘To-do’ items should be reserved for the next action lists.

A final key organizing component of GTD is the filing system. Getting Things Done says that a filing system, if it is to be used, must be easy, simple and fun. Even a single piece of paper, if you need it for reference, should get its own file if it doesn’t belong in a folder you already have. Allen’s suggestion is that you keep a single, alphabetically organized filing system, in order to make it as quick and easy as possible to store and retrieve the information you need.

Review

The lists of actions and reminders will be of little use if you don’t review them at least daily, or whenever you have time available. Given the time, energy and resources that you have at that particular moment, decide what is the most important thing for you to be doing right now, and do it.

At least weekly, the discipline of GTD requires that you review all your outstanding actions, projects and ‘waiting for’ items, making sure that any new tasks or forthcoming events are entered into your system, and that everything is up to date. Allen suggests the creation of a tickler file in order to help refresh your memory each week with your outstanding tasks and projects.

Do

Any organizational system is no good if you spend all your time organizing your tasks instead of actually doing them! David Allen’s contention is that if you can make it simple, easy and fun to take the actions that you need to take, you will be less inclined to procrastinate or become overwhelmed with too many ‘open loops’.

(All Content From Wikipedia’s Article on GTD)

Last night was metal (that’s good). We went to a place called the Playwright in Manhattan (they have Irish accents) to watch GSP fight Hughes and it was completely insane. I knew GSP was going to win; I think he’s a way better fighter overall, but I was very worried that Hughes was going to bust out with some kind of super-human (he’s part god) deathslam or something. That didn’t happen; he was systematically destroyed, and very quickly. I’m very happy for GSP; he deserves to be on top.

I also picked Monson to win over Tim. That one didn’t come to pass, however. I was very impressed with Tim’s ground game; he was amazing. Then I remembered who trains him — the sickest grappler ever, and my all-time favorite fighter — Jeremy Horn.

So then we exited the place at like 1:30am to find ourselves right in Times Square. It was live. If you haven’t been to this place you need to do so. The place is lit up like it’s daylight, and every building has a giant digital display or billboard of some sort. It’s really a shock to the senses.

The coolest thing was that the place was right in the middle of the Wii launch, and there were thousands of people in this one line waiting to get one. These giant screens were playing the full trailers and they even had people dressed up in Wii costumes. There was so much energy. You combine that with like 25 leathered-out, “don’t make me rock you” NYPD officers and you have a definite scene.

[EDIT: I Was Here]

Very cool stuff — can’t wait to show my girlfriend when she gets here.

A while back while in a writing improvement phase a friend of mine gave me some excellent advice. Stop using clichés.

The reason clichés are undesired is because they don’t stimulate people the same way “regular language” does. I initially argued that clichés became so used precisely because they were so succinct and accurate, and that they were therefore useful tools.

His response was that they used to be good tools — the first few times they were used. But after the phrases are processed over and over by someone they cease to have any meaning. They become hollow. All the genius is sucked out of the saying by sheer repetition.

Dead Receptors

Think of your brain as a patch of fresh green grass, with the individual blades serving as sensors for new ideas. Each time the grass is tweaked by someone walking by or sitting in it, new connections are built in your brain. Now imagine that a tank rolls through (a very powerful image or idea). The blades lay down from the weight of the idea, which stimulates the emotions and spawns mental connections within the listener. The tank passes and the grass stands back up.

Well, clichés are like tanks that parked in your pasture. All the grass under the tank is dead. And when the tank comes again later to park in its familiar space, there are no longer any grass blades to tweak. As a result, there is no impact to the listener. It’s like it never happened. The connection fails.

Be Fresh

So the solution is simple — say it another way. Instead of saying, “Every cloud has a silver lining.”, say “Most great things in life come from facing hard times.” Is it sexy? No. But it’s new. It’s something that requires mental processing.

That’s the key: the idea is to make the listener actively process what you’re saying and build new mental connections from your words. This can’t happen if your words aren’t even considered. Clichés are taken as dead chunks of nothingness, not as language. They aren’t even parsed for meaning; they are ignored.

If you want to be a successful communicator, don’t use them.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

As technology continues to be come more compact and more powerful, I think one of the biggest consumer/business breakthroughs is going to come in the form of a personal assistance application with pseudo/quasi AI capabilities.

Imagine an application that spends 24 hours a day optimizing your life. It will probably run from some sort of hosted provider in order to benefit from specialization, but it will be marketed as “living” on your personal system, i.e. the single, mobile device that everyone will have. Let’s call it your “companion”.

The basic functionality will essentially work like this: you start by going through this in-depth enrollment process with the system. It’ll greet you, you’ll skin it (most will likely turn its interface into a beautiful woman) and it will proceed to ask you about yourself. You’ll tell it what kind of news you like, your favorite holidays, your top 10 foods, the kinds of products you care most about, who your friends are, etc.

A Hassle Proxy

Using all this information it’ll organize your life. It’ll sit in between you and the digital world — filtering emails, fetching pertinent news for you, organizing it according to your preferences, etc. It’ll learn who you want to be interrupted for when a call comes in. It’ll learn who to put on or remove from your spam list. It’ll learn your preferred way of receiving news. Should “she” read it to you? Send you an email? Build a web page for you to read an aggregated summary from?

Here’s how I see it being put into practice: you wake up in the morning by some sound she makes for you. Rooster, soothing voice, whatever. She proceeds to ask you questions about whether or not you want your news now, do you want to hear who sent you email while you were asleep, etc. At any time you can modify the application’s behavior by giving commands like, “Don’t ask me about news in the morning anymore.”

Based on your tone the app will answer back with stuff like, “Sorry…no need to be grumpy about it.” Imagine the customizations here. This will be THE killer app. The life manager for business people, and the digital companion for consumers. More ideas:

1. “Let’s review my news interest items. I don’t want to hear anything else about the new Playstation 10; I don’t have time to monitor that anymore. Show me everything cool about building patios — and I’m going to use oak, by the way.”
2. “Hold calls from Julie from now on and give them to me in my daily summary.”
3. “Go and collect everything there is to know about spaghetti sauce. I am making it tonight. Focus on the Italian approach.”

You, Times Ten

So the idea here is that this application will then go and run through all these pseudo-intelligent algorithms (that are constantly updated and improved) in order to do what you want it to do, not just what you told it to do. The difference is massive. And as technology evolves, it’ll become better and better at it.

For consumers this will do everything from fetching the best recipes to collecting porn for you for when you get home from work. “Here’s the stuff I found for you while you were gone.” And it will be with you all day as well, chiming in when something major happens. “Breaking news, Daniel…Toyota just bought Ford. You want me to connect you to CNN’s video feed?” “Oh, Michael just sent an invite for dinner tonight, should I voice him or just reply with a yay or nay?”

Humans Are Better, But They’re More Expensive

Personal assistants make powerful people ten times more powerful, but so few people can afford to hire someone to manage their lives in this way. This will be the killer app because it brings at least some of that functionality to everyday people. It’s going to be so sick. Think of the marketing. Japan will have it first (of course), and the major updates to the products are going to be insane.

Imagine the skinning options alone. As the apps avatars get better and better people are going to become “attached” to their companions. It’ll be a new disorder, there will be new experts to talk about how someone’s DC (digital companion) ruined their marriage, etc.

Yeah, this is the future. Hell, I should talk to some people and see if anyone’s moving in this direction yet. I’d love to contribute some ideas to such a product. Not only is it cool to potentially improve the efficiency of millions of people, but the consumer side has billions of dollars of potential. This is the “must have” application.

…or at least it seems that way. You can’t really walk anywhere in this city (this is outdoors, you understand) without walking through a cloud of ciggarette smoke. It’s really quite disgusting. It’s like the thing to do up here. It seems nearly every other person is lighting up, already smoking, or just getting done at any given moment.

The moment I step outside the apartment the smell hits me because someone just walked by smoking, or is smoking a few feet away. And this pretty much continues unless I’m inside somewhere (away from the door). Oh, and in front of our place of business you pretty much have to hold your breath as you approach. There are always like 10 people directly in front of the doors polluting the air at any given time.

It’s very annoying to be constantly accosted like this, and I honestly can’t wait until laws get passed that say you can’t do this in public anymore. I mean, here I am on public property being forced to breath known carcinogenic material. Constantly. Day in, day out. It stinks, it’s known to kill on a regular basis — it’s just not positive in any way. I really don’t understand why it’s permissible to expose others to this poison, and I look forward to when it no longer is.

Have you ever been in Linux and wanted to watch how much bandwidth was going in and out of your box? Most have, and here’s a very simply way to do it without a GUI or installing anything extra:

# watch -n1 "ifconfig eth0 | grep Mb"

RX bytes:105209490 (100.3 Mb)  TX bytes:448524558 (427.7 Mb)

What you end up with is a counter of your current bandwidth usage that gets updated every second. It’s not sexy but it gives you a decent feel for how much action your NIC is seeing.

Just change your network interface in the grep bit to the one you want and you’re all set. Oh, and if you’re using Debian or Ubuntu, you may want to try grepping for “Mib” instead of “Mb”.

Enjoy.: