T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m usually pretty good about answering my email, but lately I’m noticing that people are asking me about emails I’ve never seen. Since most people who write probably assume I just didn’t answer, I’m really worried that I’m losing a lot of my email.
I use Mozilla Thunderbird, because it has a built-in spam filter. I get hundreds of spams a day, so manual filtering just isn’t an option. I suspect that the number of spams is so dense and the ratio of spams to real emails is so high that the adaptive filter now thinks that most of the words in the english language are no-no spam words. The spam filter will allow emails from people in my address book, but that just means that my address book is a whitelist. People who email me for the first time have no way to ensure I get the email except to tell me about it elsewhere.
So, if you’ve sent me an email for the first time and I never replied then I apologize. I never saw it.
As I was looking into this, I noticed my spam count is very stable. I took a few random samples from the last month and found I get a steady supply of 383 to 387 spams per day. That’s only a 1% variance from day to day. Strange.
And now as I was doing THAT I realized that I just screwed up my spam filter. I accidently marked all of my spam from the past month as “not spam“, meaning I just taught the adaptive filter that it should allow all of this stuff.
Arg.
Well, I’ll reset the filter. It wasn’t working right anyway, so this isn’t too big a loss. Where is The Broiler when you need him? Oh right… he doesn’t exist.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
What’s The Broiler?
When you’re on the Internet (and sometimes in Word documents) you’ll sometimes find a word in bold blue text. This is a “link”.
This next part is just magical.
You need to CLICK that blue text. It will send you to another “web page” with different information on it. You can tell where you’re going before you click by the other phrases around the link and by the words that appear at the bottom of your screen when you hover your mouse pointer over it.
I assume you need this basic instruction about how the Internet works because otherwise you wouldn’t have asked that question. You would have just followed the link and found out yourself.