June 26, 2007.  We have returned from an absolutely delightful two weeks in Bar Harbor, Maine, and I'm now adjusting to what I call "post-Maine depression," as well as trying to adapt to New Jersey heat and humidity.  Though I'm certain that I would find it very hard to endure a Maine winter, I would, if I were independently wealthy, spend all my summers in Maine, preferably somewhere along the coast.

I wouldn't need a cottage such as some of those we saw from our boat ride around the bay where Bar Harbor is located.  In the jargon of the area, a "cottage" is anyplace that is occupied only in the summer months, and these summer "cottages" along the coast near Bar Harbor and on the fringes of Acadia National Park sell for four million dollars and up (mostly up).  To be sure, there are a few smaller ones, particularly on the islands, but what the locals call "cottages" are a far cry from the one- or two-room places that the tourists rent (though these, too, are called cottages).

A report of our two-week sojourn in nature's paradise is incomplete without photographs.  The beauty of the place – much like that of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa, where I was born and spent part of my childhood – remains beyond my powers to describe.  Fortunately, one doesn't need to be a millionaire to experience the spectacle of mountains, ocean, lakes, and forest.  A short hike can lead to a billion-dollar view, and even less energetic individuals can enjoy magnificant sights by walking along the ocean's edge, driving up Cadillac Mountain, or taking a tour boat cruise in the bay.  The Mudgelog is not a good place for photos, however; as soon as I sort through them, I shall be posting some of the best from this year's visit in my Webshots albums (linked on the home page).

I took lots of photographs – more than 300.  One of the merits of digital cameras is that one can put literally hundreds of high-resolution photos on a single memory card without worrying about running out of film.  It does mean a considerable amount of sorting (and perhaps cropping and sizing), especially when one snaps pictures with rare abandon as I do, but it's worth it.  On the other hand, I sometimes wonder whether I spend too much time peering through a camera when I should just be drinking in the sights.  Sometimes, on a mountain hike when the trail opens up to expose a wonderful view, I have to discipline myself to just look, instead of immediately fishing the camera out of my backpack and snapping madly away.   Be that as it may, I always come home loaded with photos that I can share with those unfortunate enough to have never seen these places.

Among the highlights of this year's trip were the three nature cruises that we took around Frenchman's Bay.  Although we saw some interesting wildlife – seals, sea birds, harbor porpoises, an occasional eagle, and some bipedal hominids on the shore – what fascinated me the most was seeing the familiar contours of the coastline from a different perspective.  Indeed, I came away with some contrasting shots (both still and video) – one set taken from the tour boat as it rounded Great Head and another of the tour boat (on a different cruise) when I had hiked out to Great Head.  When I saw, from the boat, how precipitously the headland descends to the ocean, I'm glad I had the good sense (and fear of heights) to remain some distance away from the edge.

July 21, 2007.  Wow!  I've really neglected the Mudgelog – nearly a month with no entries.  My excuse (I always have an excuse) is that I've spent quite a lot of time posting my Maine photos on my page at Webshots.  To their credit, Webshots makes it easy, but sorting and arranging is time-consuming.  I'm now on the fifth album, and it's a mess.  I uploaded sunset pictures willy-nilly, and now I have to sort through them all.  I also need to take some of them out and find some other photos to insert inbetween sunset sequences.  I don't think anyone wants to look at thirty or forty consecutive pictures of sunsets.

Another reason for the neglect is that July has become my month for technological projects.  Every month involves some kind of puttering about with stuff I only half understand, but it was just a year ago that we shifted to fiber-optic Internet, acquired a new computer, and got my wife's computer online.  Therefore, it was now time to install updated software for antivirus and anti-spyware and to attend to some computer "housecleaning."  While we're both pretty good at doing this on an ongoing basis, my wife and I seem to be as adept at creating "cyberclutter" as we are at creating physical clutter.  As I've said many times, one pack rat should never marry another pack rat.

I'm still amazed that few computer tasks are ever entirely routine – no matter how many times one does them.  One reason is that no two versions of the same software are exactly the same.  Here's an example.  After I installed both antivirus (Norton) and anti-spyware (Webroot Spy Sweeper) on my computer, my e-mail in Outlook was blocked.  When Outlook tried to collect e-mail from my ISP (Verizon), it was shut out of my ISP's server.  Yet I had been using earlier versions of the same software, the same ISP, and the same Outlook configuration for a year.  I'll skip all the screaming and hair-tearing that transpired while I tried to isolate the cause of the blocked e-mail.  It turned out that Webroot had introduced an "E-Mail Attachment Protection Shield," which was activated by default.  Whatever its function is supposed to be, it blocked every bit of e-mail being forwarded from Verizon to Outlook; indeed, it blocked the connection between Outlook and Verizon altogether.  Once I disabled this feature, everything was fine.  However, the only way to locate and correct the cause was to go through a long process of elimination.  It's a classic case of overdoing protective devices, activating them by default, and not telling the user who doesn't want or need them how to turn them off.

I would tell Webroot about this, but I don't want to waste my time.  Undoubtedly, since many people use Outlook to manage e-mail forwarded from an ISP, Webroot has had complaints and may even have lost customers because they uninstalled the entire program when they were unable to isolate the cause.  However, Webroot does not address this issue anywhere on its so-called help pages.  Indeed, like most tech outfits, Webroot's idea of "customer service" is to fire out automated boilerplate that does not address the specific problem that the customer has.  Unless one persists, requests for assistance are rarely read by a human being.  This is not to say that Webroot Spy Sweeper doesn't do a good job of blocking adware and spyware; it does, or I wouldn't have renewed it for another year.  Still, given the exasperating experience I had this year and a mountain of evidence that Webroot support ranks as "worse than average," I shall probably try something else next time around.

In contrast, we have Crutchfield, an online and mail-order supplier of audio-video equipment.  One of my other tech projects this month was to switch two CD burners from one system to another.  I hit a snag, however, in connecting one of the burners to a new receiver, which (inexplicably) lacked some of the inputs and outputs available on the older receiver to which the burner had been connected.  Since I was getting a headache trying to find a "workaround," I e-mailed Crutchfield, which had sold me both the burner and the receiver.  The response was fast and gave a partial solution but still left one function out of the loop.  I replied and got a second option, but it was also flawed.  When I followed up on this, a Crutchfield representative telephoned me at home and painstakingly described a hookup that should work with everything I want to do, actually apologizing that "we didn't see this in the first place."  The journey from problem to solution took only two days and might have been even shorter if I had tried the various solutions more promptly.  The final workaround operated perfectly.  Indeed, I'm a bit chagrined that I didn't see it in the first place myself.  I must praise Crutchfield for service that goes "above and beyond" what almost all other companies do.  Once the sale is made, they don't give a damn.  Because Crutchfield does give a damn, I'll be a repeat customer – and I buy a lot of audio-video equipment.

July 26, 2007.  It must be the dog days of summer again because the spammers are out, rabidly drooling all over cyberspace.  I've got to wonder again what kind of perversion causes someone to send out thousands or millions of messages inviting strangers to enlarge their penises or to have a sexual adventure with some concupiscent bimbo.  No doubt, many of these messages reach old geezers like me who long ago lost interest in performing sexual gymnastics.

It's futile to rant about spam, however.  No matter how many filters and blocks we create, the stuff crawls through the cracks like the bugs that inevitably get into our homes no matter how well we seal the entryways and no matter how many traps we set up to kill them.  Like insects, spam thrives, proliferates, and mutates successfully simply because there is so much of it.

Besides my customized filters, I have a highly rated spam-killing program that tosses about 95% of the stuff in the garbage.  Even when it's tossed (unopened), I tag it (still unopened) with "block this sender."  Some of it still gets through.  My spam-killing program keeps a running count of how many spam messages it has stopped – both individually for my computer and overall for everyone who has the program installed.

My personal data, which go back only a year because the data apply only to my current computer, are that I've receive 3,325 messages, of which 476 were identified as spam.  I identified 27 others that got in, for a total of 503 spam messages, or 15% of the e-mail sent to my mailbox.  In addition, the program has identified 8 phishing messages (attempts to steal identity or account information), and I have identified one, bringing the total junk to 512 (around 15.4%).

For the total community (i.e., everyone who has installed this spam-killing program), 1.37 billion messages have been processed.  Of these, 692,459,826 have been automatically identified as spam; an additional 31,211,641 have been blocked by individual users of the software, bringing the total to 723,871,467 spam out of 1.37 billion messages.  Although I'm out of my depth with the math here, I believe that rounds out to 724.8 million spam out of 1,370 million messages.  This means that about 53% of the messages sent to this program's subscribers have been spam.  (I am assuming here that the data presented by the program are using billion in the basic definition of 10 to the ninth power, or 1,000 million, and not in the way the British sometimes define billion as 10 to the twelfth power, or a million million.)

Although my personal data are much lower, my figures represent, as I said, only the past year because they apply only to the computer I bought in July of 2006.  Since then, I have been engaged in a concerted effort to block senders so that they're cut off in cyberspace; none of these messages reach my computer and therefore are not counted by the spam-killing program.  Thus, I have no reason to doubt that 50% of the mail transmitted therough cyberspace is spam.  Bear in mind, too, that the sample represents only people who have gone to the expense and trouble of installing a spam-killing program.  They probably are, like me, individuals who also take pains to block spam before it gets that far and who engage in fewer of the kinds of computer activities that invite spam.  The proportion of junk is therefore likely to be higher, not lower, than these data indicate.

Since one spammer can generate literally millions of pieces of spam in a very short period of time, this may mean that there are not, proportionately speaking, huge numbers of spammers.  They could be (again, relatively speaking) only a small proportion of the population, just as, say, bank robbers are only a small proportion.  The only way to discourage this practice – realistically, it cannot be stopped entirely – is to criminalize it by making the penalty extremely severe.  Although we must have even tougher penalties for phishing / identity theft, those convicted of spamming should receive mandatory prison sentences, not just fines.  Treat spamming as a crime, not just as a public nuisance.