Discovering Treasures

I wrote about my thankfulness for G-mail's spam filtering abilities earlier this week.
As of 11am Saturday 11/24 there are now 2260 and now G-mail should start deleteing the oldest messages (older than 30 days).

However I first started this G-mail account through the invitation of my son 3 years ago and today I decided to do some house cleaning and discovered this picture of my Uncle Carl and Aunt Lorraine from 2004.

I want my MTV (that stands for Music TV)

I lived in Kokomo twice in my life. 1st time as a single 20 year old. Then again as a young married guy. My two oldest were born there. And this is not the Kokomo that the Beach Boys sang about in the Tom Cruise flick Cocktail.



This Kokomo is located about an hour north of Indianapolis. Besides working on the air at the local Top 40 station, I also worked at Biggs Lounge, first as a disc jockey, then as a disc and video jockey. MTV was playing Music Video's 24 hours a day. And songs by artists such as Dire Straits and the Buggles were popular:





So what's MTV up to these days?

MTV Seeks Poker Players For 'Real Life'
PokerListings.com
MTV is looking for online poker players--and others who may lead alterative lives on the Web--to star in its "True Life" series. "We're reaching out to a number of different online groups and cultures, and we thought it could be fascinating to profile someone who gambles online," says Ben Rosen, whose company, LeftRight.tv, produces the show. Rosen, who has been posting in online forums, including those dedicated to poker, adds: "the key thing we're looking for is that our subject leads a life that is very distinct/unique/interesting when juxtaposed to his or her online gambling activities." The documentary series tells the stories of young people and unusual subcultures they might inhabit. It has featured people with Tourette's syndrome, gay marriage activists and people dealing with pregnancy, debt and other issues. - Read the whole story...

I want my MTV :(

How long until we hit 2000 spam messages?

I got fed up with the poor filtering of my email and decided to filter it thru G-mail. Results have been fantastic. I started this on October 17th, 33 days ago, even though I've had a G-mail account for over three years.

I was deleting the messages the first week then decided to see how much spam I get. Any message 30 days old gets deleted automatically, and I've got until Saturday the 24th before this happens. Right now there are one thousand nine hundred and fifty one messages in the spam folder. I have only had to tell G-mail twice that a message was spam. I predict it will hit 2100 by Saturday. This is better than betting on the Dow Jones. How many do you think I'll have, or when do you think I'll hit 2000?

Wednesday morning update: As of 8:40am, there are now 2032 spam messages caught by G-mail. Add a comment to place your bets on what the total will be on Saturday.... Winners recieve, leftovers from Thanksgiving (if there are any).

Friday Afternoon Update: As of 3:40pm, the total is now 2220 spam messages caught by G-mail. I was not on the internet on Thanksgiving day, so I'm not sure when it surpassed the 2100 mark. And now we will see if it will ever hit 2500?

Family Friends and Frenzy

FAMILY:
It was good to see Josh and Mad Sunday. They have been in Maine going to school since August. Stories will abound in the days and weeks ahead before classes resume in January. Rach came over, and we saw Abby briefly over the weekend without having to leave our home! In a couple of days we will have a houseful.




FRIENDS:
Saturday night we went to a private party hosted by our church that included dinner and dancing (drinking too)! I had previously wondered how Lutherans were supposed to party and now I know. There must have been 40 people on the dance floor doing the electric slide including a brother and sister that were at our table that were in their 80's.


FRENZY:
This past Saturday Kathy, Mike and I did the leaf collection one more time. I'm ready to invent artificial regular trees (not just Christmas trees) that retain their leaves and have electronic technology so we can change the colors without ever having to rake.





The other frenzy I was thinking about was the Christmas shopping frenzy. I recoeved in my email today a list of where folks are planning on shopping this Friday. If you want to avoid the crowds, use the following as a guide:

Planned Shopping Locations (% of all respondents)

Location

% Planning to Shop

Wal-Mart

63%

Target

57

Best Buy

43

K-Mart

28

Sears

23

Circuit City

21

Kohl's

27

Macy's

25

Victoria's Secret

17

Source: MaritzResearch, November 2007