Email Reply
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Tag: email
Pay To Post
I see that Facebook is experimenting with allowing you to pay a nominal fee to make sure that your posts end up “highlighted” over those of your friends’ other friends. That’s a whole new level of crazy… or is it?
I’m not on Facebook, but I think that this is a really interesting piece of news. The biggest thing that makes Facebook unusable (and which also affects Twitter) is that people will post every little banal thing that comes to their mind. I don’t care what you’re eating for your lunch. I don’t want to read the lyrics of some song that must have been written for you. I really can’t stand your chain messages (for a while there, after I hadn’t received any by email for a few years, I hoped that they’d died out… but it turns out that they just moved to Facebook instead). If you’re among my friends, I know that you have some pretty smart and interesting things to say… but unless I’m willing to spend hours sifting through the detritus it’s buried in, I’ll never find it.
But this might work. If the price sweet spot can be found, and it’s marketed right, then this kind of feature might make services like Facebook more tolerable. When you’re writing about a cute picture of the cat you’ve seen, that’s fine. And when you write something I might care about, you can tick the “this is actually relevant” box. You’ll have to pay a few pence, but at least you know I’ll see it. And if I want to churn through reams of “X likes Chocolate” (who doesn’t?) and “Y is… in a queue for the bus” then I can turn off the “only relevant things” mode and waste some time.
The problem is that the sweet spot will vary from person to person, and there’s no way to work around that. Big Bucks Bob can probably afford to pay a couple of pounds every time he wants to push some meme photo to the top of your feed, but Poor Penniless Penny can’t even justify ten pence to make sure that all of her friends hear about her birthday party.
It’s a pity that it won’t work, because a part of me is drawn to the idea that economic theory can help to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our information-saturated lives. Turning my attention to email: of all the cost-based anti-spam systems, I was always quite impressed with Hashcash (which Microsoft seem to be reinventing with their Penny Black project). The idea is that your computer does some hard-to-do (but easy-to-verify) computational work for each and every email that it sends. But in its own way, Hashcash has a similar problem to Facebook’s new system: the ability to pay of a sender is not directly proportional to their relevance to the recipient. If my mother wants to send me an email from her aging smartphone, should she have to wait for several minutes while it processes and generates an “e-stamp”, just because – if it were made any faster – spammers with zombie networks of computers could do so too easily?
Yes, I just equated your social network status, about what you ate for your lunch, with spam. If you don’t like it, don’t share this blog post with your friends.
hashcash token: 1:20:120511:https://danq.me/2012/05/11/pay-to-post/::UVHo081pj6bSDWkI:00000000000001sxI
HDMI Virus, or How I Became An Old Person
So I saw this HDMI cable online:
Somehow, this triggered a transformation in me. You know how when Eric eats a banana, an amazing transformation occurs? A similar thing happened to me: this horrendously-worded advertisement turned me into an old person. I wanted to write a letter to them.
There were so many unanswered questions in my mind: what is a “virus noise” (is it a bit like the sound of somebody sneezing?)? How a polyester coating protects against them? And what kind of viruses are transmitted down video cables, anyway?
It took them five days but, fair play to them, they – despite Reddit’s expectations – wrote back.
Their explanation? The ‘Virus’ was transcribed from French terminology for interference. It’s not a computer virus or anything like that.
The world is full of examples of cables being over-sold, especially HDMI cables and things like “gold-plated optical cables” (do photons care about the conductivity of gold, now?).
Does anybody have enough of a familiarity with the French language to let me know if their explanation is believable?
Could Be A Lot Worse
At least my week’s getting better towards the end. Extracts from an e-mail from my mum:
…work – complete nightmare, back-to-back meetings most days with no time to implement the outcomes and so much work looming I don’t know where to start… …XXXXX is pregnant and leaving in a month or two (not to be replaced) and XXXXXXX’s contract is finishing soon which leaves….. er…. ME to do Banner support for the University (a task undertaken by teams of up to 20 at other Unis)… …One of the puppies is seriously ill with Juvenile Cellulitis and currently has a head twice the normal size and filled with pus… …antibiotics four times a day…. which means I have to go home every lunchtime… …we were raided by foxes and all the chickens have been taken… …to cap it all XXXXX is terminally ill (cancer) with only a few months to live…
My week seems just peachy by comparison. Hang in there, mum!
Back In Aber
As expected, I had very little internet access over the Christmas period. And now I’m back in Aber. Mozilla reports 688 new e-mails. Joy.
Will say more when I can be arsed. I came back here from Lancashire via Merseyside and Norfolk. That’s a fair journey by anyone’s standards.
Hugz;
Something In The Water
[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004; it was partially recovered on 21st March 2012]
People keep getting together. Kate and Leu, Tom and Liz (now with a journal!), and now: Sian and Andy. Must be something in the water. The latter pair (and the one I most recently heard about) is the most unexpected, and the middle one the most blatant. Sian and Andy???
Well, best of luck to them anyway: a long-distance relationship isn’t necessarily easy, but I’m sure that Sian knows that by now anyway.
I’ve challenged Paul to find the link between Tonari no Totoro, which we’ll be watching next Troma Night, and Troma. There is a link, and it’s a lot less complicated than he’s looking for. He has until Saturday before I tell him anyway.
I tried to send an e-mail to a load of people the other day, telling them about something I’ll later tell to one other person. Unfortunately I accidentally emailed the other person at the same time (was thinking about them … [the rest of this post, and one comment, are lost]
Timewasting
Look what I found while I was wasting time on the ‘net this morning.
Mobile Phone Dangers
I can understand the warnings that you should not drive while talking on your mobile phone, but this extract from a report by the BBC about phone usage in Japan really says it all:
“People in Japan use their mobile phones to do much more than talk… …only this weekend, newspaper ads warned phone users to avoid walking and writing emails at the same time.”
Cool Thing Of The Day
Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #51:
Spend all night playing e-mail tennis with somebody cross-campus, simply because it’s 2:40am and you haven’t got anything you’d rather be doing (except sleeping, but I’m not sleepy, soo…).
The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.
Cool Thing Of The Day
Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #48:
Discover, by sheer coincidence, that one of your more recent aquaintances down here (Claire) went to the same high school as one of your longer-running friends up North (Faye), and that they know one another! Freaky but completely true: the two parties are contactable on storm_lady0@yahoo.com and clb9@aber.ac.uk, for verification!
The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.
Cool Thing Of The Day
Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #38:
Recieve an e-mail criticising the way you send your e-mails. It appears to be from some big-headed student, who thinks they know it all (which they can’t, ‘cos then they’d know that I already knew that they didn’t know <sigh>, which is slightly self-defeating). Set them straight with a well-placed flame, and bite them by e-mail. Later, while filing their e-mail, check their signature, and realise that you’ve just accidently flamed the President of the Students Union!!! AARRGGGHHHHH!
The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.
Cool Thing Of The Day
Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #36:
(1) Recieve an e-mail from your Personal Tutor, asking to see you in his office in ten minutes. He knows I check my e-mail 1440 times a day, but dragging me to this level of nerdity is
ridiculous…
(2) …make it to his office, cross campus, within eight minutes of him sending the e-mail… Okay – so I *live* in my anorak. I don’t care. =o( I’m going to go and sit in the corner and
sulk now.
The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.
Avatar Diary
Didn’t go in to college. Virtually all my lessons have been cancelled anyway. Instead – spend the morning catching up on sleep lost over the last few weeks, and took the afternoon as a chance to deal with my backlog of e-mail in my InBox…