20 Aug 2002 Waldo   » (Journeyer)

Travel
I just returned from a week at the beach (Emerald Isle, NC, USA) a couple of days ago, and now I'm leaving for a weekend in Boston this Friday morning. It's a lot of driving, and doesn't allow me to get much work done on software and such. Hypothetically, I could do stuff between now and Friday, but by the time that I get caught up on regular ol' life things, it'll be time to leave again.
Surgery
I went to the doctor today to get an ingrown toenail operated on. This one has been in a bad way since 1997. It's the third operation that I've had on my feet for ingrown toenails. The good news is that my big toes only have a single un-operated-on corner remaining, so I've only got one part left to get ingrown. :) Anyhow, it's quite tender, wrapped up quite thoroughly in bandages. It's on my left foot, making shifting gears on my motorcycle impossible, and so I am without transportation, save for the borrowed kind.
Paul Graham's Spam Plan
Like many others, I'm fond of Paul Graham's suggestions regarding what's to be done about spam. I particularly like the probability basis for ranking, as opposed to the arbitrary numbering system that SpamAssassin uses, though I'm fond of the overall concept of not ignoring the importance of legitimate-mail-recognition. I think that it would be good for somebody with more time than I right now to write a program that could take a mail file (mbox, IMAP, whatever) and run Paul's Bayesian filter on it to extract the hash tables that he describes. Then those hash tables could be sent back to him for analysis. I store all of my spam in a spam folder, as I have for years, so I suspect that data would prove useful. I also have a folder for mail marked "Family," which contains years of correspondence with my extended family. That would surely also prove useful in developing a decent image of what communications look like for people. If I could run a program that would quickly generate some files that I could send to Paul for analysis, I'd be happy to do so.

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