Dissociated Press

Ugh… I’m all about the “social Web” when it’s voluntary — love reading my friends’ blogs and being able to peruse other people’s bookmarks with del.icio.us, but I’m getting heartily sick of being spammed by services like Evite.

For the past couple of days I’ve been getting spamvitations from Evite, from some PR firm that’s throwing a party in California. Here’s a thought, why not confirm that someone actually lives in California before spamming them with invitations for events? I get a lot of email from PR folks asking me to attend events in California, but they’re of the one-off variety. Evite, apparently, keeps bugging you until you confirm whether you will attend or not.

Just the tool the doctor ordered for clueless people who can’t be bothered to see if I even live in an area or not — an automated means of pestering me until I have to take some action to unsubscribe myself from their damn list.

The first rule of any social Web services should be that you cannot send out automated messages, or invites for the service in order to try to expand the usage of the service. If someone really thinks that [insert service name here] is the coolest thing since sliced bread, they can damn well send me an email manually. Ugh…

The Google Blog has a post about the first email, or at least what is arguably the first network email with an address with the ubiquitous @ symbol. Sent way back in October 1971. I’m just a smidge older than email, apparently, though I don’t think I actually found out about email until I was in my late teens or early twenties.

I wonder how old spam is?

It’s the little things that can make a big difference…

Case in point, I was noticing that damn my secondary desktop with the fresh Breezy install seemed really slow when I was grabbing updates … like there was something wrong with nameserver resolution.

After three or four incidents, waiting forever for my machine to grab updates, I wondered if it might be possible that I’d mistyped my nameservers when I’d configured networking… sure enough, that was the problem. It hadn’t surfaced when the machine was grabbing network information via DHCP, but after I set the IP address to static and put all the information in by hand, I managed to change the last octet of the first nameserver from 68 to 168. (I wonder sometimes if I’m number-dyslexic or something…)

All better now…