January 8, 2008.  The holidays are over, and our trip to Phoenix, AZ, to have a "second Christmas" and New Year with the kids and grandkids is behind us.

I can't say that I'm sorry.  Much as I enjoy the holidays and the visits with the grandchildren, it is nice to return to the normal (some would say "slothful" or "boring") tempo of life.  Some people thrive on excitement and anxiety; I am not one of them.  Some people like to dash about constantly as if the clock were always running out; I do not share this preference, even though I am increasingly aware that the clock is running out.  Some people are uncomfortable unless they are in the midst of constant noise and chatter; I prefer the sound of relative silence, at least as much of it as one can get in a world full of machines and electronic devices that, it seems, are rarely turned off.

A preference for a quieter, more laidback lifestyle is undoubtedly a sign of age, but I don't think it's that altogether.  I have never been the type of person who, upon entering an unoccupied house, feels compelled to turn on the TV or radio so that he has the company of human voices.  I have always been uneasy with dashing about.  Experience has taught me that there's some truth to the proverb that "haste makes waste"; rushing is often counterproductive because it causes us to make mistakes, forcing us to repeat or repair whatever we rushed through.  (This is why many forms of multitasking waste time rather than saving it.)  I am not one of those old geezers who drives so slowly that a create a parade of angry and frustrated drivers behind me, but my fast driving is more a matter of self-defense than a preference.  I know that I cannot alter the flow of traffic, so I literally "go with the flow," and it has become a habit.  Nevertheless, after a trip where I have had to drive 20 miles per hour above the posted limit because almost everyone else is speeding, I need several hours for the tension to drain from my body.  It really isn't worth it to get where I'm going a half hour earlier, but I've adapted to the insanity around me.

When I'm in my own home, proceeding through the day at my own pace, I have no need to adapt to the insanity of the rest of the world.  Admittedly, when I make the transition from an environment of collective madness to my more leisurely private world, it is sometimes hard to downshift to a lower gear.  Objects in motiion tend to stay in motion; the treadmill may continue to spin even when I'm not on it anymore.  However, at the end of a day when I have done everything slowly and methodically, I usually find that I have accomplished more than on those days when, compelled by a false sense of urgency, I did everything in a hurry.

January 15, 2008.  Various Thoughts About This Site.

> The Polls page is becoming interesting, with an increasing number of predictions of the party nominees in the presidential election.  Respondents are considerably divided on the Republican side, but Giuliani continues to be the most likely candidate, according to the tally so far.  I think that will change as the primaries continue.  On the Democratic side, the most likely candidates have been Clinton and Obama (no surprise there), with the predicted winner going back and forth.  Currently, Obama has the edge.  It will be interesting to see whether, in the end, participants on The Grammar Curmudgeon are more accurate than professional polls are.  As I recall, in 2004 (the election itself; we did not poll the primaries), respondents hit the nail on the head.

> I suspect that the message boards on this site get more traffic than all of the rest of the pages combined.  That's a bit ironic, since adding this feature was an afterthought; The Grammar Curmudgeon had been running for more than a year before the message boards were launched.  Indeed, I myself spend more time posting on the message boards than I do creating original content.  That's natural because I have more assurance that these posts are read by someone, but I really must stop neglecting other features.  I haven't even written a Grumpy Grammarian column for January.

> Not to toot my own horn, but I think that one of the nice features of this site is that one can come here (and even post on the message boards) without fear of being deluged with spam and adware as a result.  Too many websites somehow provide an open door for spammers and advertisers to acquire e-mail addresses.  For example, any time I access anything on Yahoo, I see a spike in spam.  It's like the way physical junk mail works.  Order something from one catalog, and you're awash in catalogs from everyone.  Give to one charity, and they're all calling you on the phone.

January 20, 2008.  Once more, I want to comment on the apparently hopeless battle against spam.  I don't know why I bother; noobody has yet to find a way to staunch the flow of electronic junk mail.  Filters and blocks can decrease the amount of junk that gets through, but so much of it is launched and the spam generators have so many devious means of bypassing controls that we need to continuously erect new barriers just to reduce the amount of junk that is delivered.

I, for example, collect mail in Microsoft Outlook from two two e-mail accounts – mail sent to my ISP address and mail sent to my Gmail address.  As a first line of defense, I have established filters in both of these accounts.  On top of that, I immediately mark any junk that gets into Outlook despite these filters with "Block Sender."  Although my "block sender" list contains hundreds of addresses, that is a limited control because any one spammer may send from hundreds of different addresses.  As a third block, I have installed an independent spam-blocking program that runs in conjunction with Outlook.  It dumps spam into the deleted items folder, which is automatically emptied when I close Outlook.  (I could tell it to dump spam altogether, but that risks permanently deleting legitimate mail that the program mistakenly identifies as spam – something that could well happen with, for example, a first-time contact by one of my students.)  Naturally, I also run an up-to-date antivirus program and another program that detects and removes spyware and adware.

Keeping blocks and filters up-to-date is a time-consuming nuisance.  I estimate that, cumulatively, I spend about an hour a week on this task.  Still, most of these blocks do not stop the spam from reaching its destination.  In most cases, it doesn't bounce the spam back to the sender but merely keeps it out of the Inbox.  It's the equivalent of taking physical junk mail out of the mailbox and automatically dumping it in the wastebasket.  From the sender's viewpoint, it is still delivered.  That's all the sender cares about, for spam-generators know that, as long as the mail gets through (no matter where it lands), a small percentage of people will be stupid enough to reply.  Furthermore, some spammers don't care whether they get a reply as long as the message is delivered.  Delivery alone gives them a valid e-mail address to add to a list that they can sell to advertisers, or they are perversely satisfied just to have been annoying.  In this, they are succeeding.

Gmail is a case in point – a surprisingly porous system, considering that it is provided by a technology company as sophisticated as Google.  Virtually all spam sent to a Gmail address reaches its destination.  Although probably 99% of it is identified and placed in the Spam folder, it isn't rejected; there's no way to tell Gmail to completely delete spam automatically.  One can select all spam at any given time and create a filter that tells Gmail to automatically delete all such messages entirely, but all this does is to redirect spam to the Trash folder.  As I've noted, since spammers continuously vary return addresses, the filters redirect only a small portion of spam to Trash – but it's still "delivered" anyway.  Though I have now redirected mail from hundreds of spam addresses to the Trash folder, my Gmail Spam folder collects an average of 50 spam messages a day.  Mail delivered to either the Spam or Trash folders remains there for 30 days unless one physically empties these folders.  The only value of this system to me is that messages marked as spam by Gmail are not forwarded to Outlook.  As long as I access Gmail only in Outlook, spam sits idly in Gmail for 30 days.

It occurs to me that technology geniuses should be able to create a filtering method that creates real problems for the generators of spam.  What if, instead of merely redirecting spam to another folder in the recipient's mailbox, any item that the recipient marks as spam were returned to sender with "Address Unknown"?  This would swamp the senders' servers (no matter how many addresses they have) with returned mail.  It would have about the same effect as if we all took the physical junk mail that we received and, instead of tossing it in the wastebasket, wrote "No such address" on it and mailed it back to the source.  When the generators of junk become awash in returned junk, they might stop sending it.  The best way to stop people from engaging in an annoying practice is to make the practice backfire on them.

I'm afraid this won't happen.  Even the excesses of legitimate marketing have been allowed to proliferate until we take them as a "given."  The more we develop ploys to avoid being affected by these excesses, the more excessive they become.  For example, the DVR and other devices have given us the means to "bleep over" TV commercials, but this has not decreased the proportion of air time devoted to advertising.  Rather, it has increased, and marketers are finding additional ways to promote their wares.  Since people are skipping over the commercial breaks, advertisers are injecting ads into the programs themselves, and expanding the commercial breaks.  They are also finding other venues – for example, our computers and even (the latest target for intrusive advertising) our cell phones.