Chapters

I am $P@m

November 9, 2007 on 11:42 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

I bounced a message yesterday. . When I see messages saying things like “MAIL DAEMON FAILURE” in my address bar I sigh a little. time to rewrite / resend and begin worrying that my message will ever reach the intended target.

This time, the helpful mail failure notice sent my way said that my “user spam score” was -5.9 / 7.0.

Obviously the mail delivery program was applying some heuristics developed for it or that it determined through machine learning.

When I reread the email that bounced, I did so with an eye toward what could cause my email to trigger the bounce.

The email in question was a conversation of consecutive replies between several parties. Due to the esoteric nature of our exchange, the words “chills down my spine”, “moods”, “puppies”, “forceful”, “free” all came up.

I am too creative. the robots are going to win.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)

November 2, 2007 on 12:32 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Is the website of my most comforting radio program.

As a child my parents listened nearly constantly to Public Radio in South Dakota. This is something people do in the midwest- especially the educated people of the upper plains states. Minnesota is probably the lynch pin of public radio in the universe. If you check who writes or calls in to NPR its usually someone from St. Paul, Minneapolis or Santa Barbara.

Anyhow. I remember being utterly bored and suffering terribly from the ultra volume (common talk radio problem on poor speakers: bass frequencies perfectly transmitted, treble not so much. To hear the story you have to crank the volume, thereby subjecting your ears to more damage and so the cycle goes. You can imagine that life-long listeners end up with those ear trumpets, and a chronic condition of the “eh?”s).

As we grow older, so do our tastes tend towards those of our parents. The “right” way to do things was long ago brainwashed into our fragile little heads as we agreed to do anything if the radio was turned down.

Now I listen constantly, as I do spend approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes/day in the car and 88 times longer on the weekends fixing the various 20+ year old parts in it.

At the end of a long drive away from a long day at work, I am usually within 3 miles of home when the programming on NPR switches from BBC world coverage to classical music. At this junction there is a 5ish minute segment called “The Writer’s Almanac” which is spoken by Garrison Keillor and includes brief notes on the day in history as it pertains to writing and writers and a poem.

Garrison’s voice is perfect for story telling (Tales from Lake Wobegon) and more perfecter for poetry.

The combination of truly beautiful images, brilliant speaking voice, time of day and my usual proximity to home and my wife makes this segment reassuring. Coming in from the cold reassuring, parents paying for your dinner/vacation even though you’re old enough to pay reassuring and often makes my day.

And so: “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”