A single sperm has 37.5MB of DNA information in it. That means that a normal ejaculation represents a data transfer of 1,587.5TB.

– from Reddit

Of course, one could claim that the majority of that is duplicate data, so really the transfer rate is much lower, with lots of effort to make sure the data is not lost. It’s also encoded information, so with the right algorithm one could decode it and get a lot more data out of it. Of course, one usually doesn’t think of a fertile woman and 18 years of child-rearing as an algorithm, but there you have it.

-c

16 years ago I got my account with you, and it took me 10 minutes waiting on hold to break that relationship. Good bye, and good riddance. You won’t be seeing my business ever again.

Piss off and die, you financial rapists.

-c

Just a quick update to an old article on Why Hotmail Must Die- today our mail servers at work got hit with the lovely Hammer ‘o Hotmail and all email from our domain to any Microsoft email server (hotmail.com, msn.com, MS Live, etc) is now being rejected. Not that it is exactly the same as the predicament I found myself in last year, but similar enough that I decided to play around and implement DKIM at home to see if that made any difference in deliverability from my domain to Hotmail. All testing was done with SPF records in place, FYI. Here are the results:

1. No DKIM, no rewriting of headers

   Result: email sent from my domain to hotmail.com addresses would just disappear…or if you were lucky would wind up in the Junk folder.

2. DKIM, no rewriting of headers

   Result: email sent from my domain to hotmail.com addresses would just disappear…or if you were lucky would wind up in the Junk folder.

3. DKIM/No DKIM, but postfix configured to nuke any User-Agent: header and to set the X-Mailer: header to read Microsoft Office Outlook 11

Result: email sent from my domain to hotmail.com addresses would arrive just fine.

So, what’s the conclusion my fine friends? Well, industry-standard anti-spam measures like SPF or DKIM seem to have no affect on mail delivery to hotmail.com address. However, telling Microsoft that I’m using their product seems to do the trick. Is there any doubt left that Microsoft’s main business model is bullying?

Somehow, I don’t think this is going to do the trick at work, but hey, it is at least worth a shot. If anything interesting pops up I’ll let y’all know.

-c

-c

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.
…show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not.

Well, Mr. Obama, you have my vote. Use it well. May you ride this groundswell and help tip our country, poised so precariously, towards a better future.

ps- I had an interesting moment this morning while voting. When I was done I asked to speak to the head electiony-dude at my voting place so that I could complain about the Deibold machines being used (yay for Utah). As soon as I started speaking he rolled his eyes and said, “You and me both, my friend.” We had a short, but heartwarming conversation about our fears, not of a computerized election, but of a poorly and secretly computerized election. Please, dear readers, remind me to get involved in local elections, not for running for office, but running elections. This good man I met this morning could use some help in doing the right thing.

Please, please, people. This is a credit crisis, not a stock crisis, and perhaps we should focus on addressing those issues, not just bailing out Wall Street. Wall Street is not the same as the American financial market, or the credit industry.

-c

What is wrong with this picture?

-c

Now one of Clinton’s Laws of Politics is this: If one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think; if one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope. That’s the best.

Huh, given the tenor of Hillary Clinton’s campaign these days, I have a feeling this new Clinton is writing her own rules. Me? I support what Bill said back in 2004, which is why I am not voting for fear-mongering Hillary.

-c

Today’s adventures in How-The-World-Sucks is brought to you by Microsoft, the evil-doers of the computer world. The latest example of how corporate greed is destroying America came across my plate after a few friends, who use Hotmail for their email provider, mentioned that they were not receiving email from me. Given that this was multiple people, I figured that there might be something wrong with my email setup. I just so happen to have a Hotmail account (that I never use) and I used that for my testing. Once I started poking around, here’s the evidence that I gathered:

• Email sent from my personal domain would not be delivered to hotmail.com email addresses. However, I could reply to email messages that originated from hotmail.com, just not send new email to Hotmail.
• Email sent from my work (a domain I help administer) to hotmail.com email addresses would go through, but it would take upwards of 3 hours for email to come through, and they would appear in my Junk folder, marked as spam.
• Email sent from my Gmail account would go through immediately.
• Email sent from several domains run by friends of mine would either never get delivered, or would take ages and ages and then finally appear in my Junk folder.

Weird. According to my mail server logs, and those at work, the email messages destined for hotmail.com addresses were delivered to Hotmail’s servers without any errors, and according to the SMTP protocol Hotmail is then required to either deliver the email, or bounce it back (neither was happening). Now, in today’s spam-filled world this is not always the case, so I was going to give Hotmail the benefit of the doubt for now, and try to figure out what was going wrong. I started poking around on the net, and found zillions of references to people that were having awful problems with mail delivery to Hotmail. Some mentioned issues with Microsoft’s implementation of SPF SPF, so I removed my entries from DNS, with no change in functionality (yes, I waited for DNS caching to time out). Some mentioned spam filtering issues on Hotmail’s end, the only solution to which seems to be paying a 3rd-party corporation $1400 and up, per year, to be whitelisted by Hotmail. Uh, no thanks.

Then, I stumbled across a grammatically awkward but information-rich post by an administrator who ran into similar problems. His post made me try a few things:

• I sent email from work to my hotmail.com address using Outlook and it went through immediately.
• I then configured Thunderbird, my email reading program, to set the User-Agent header to read “Microsoft Office Outlook 11″, and sent email from work to my Hotmail account, and this went through immediately. However, email sent from home with this trick did not work- email would still not be delivered.
• I then configured Postfix, which I use as my email server, to remove any User-Agent header, as well as inserting X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11 as a header (which is what Outlook does). This seemed to be the magic fix, as email sent from my personal domain would now go through immediately.

Wow. In my professional opinion, this clearly says that Microsoft is going way out of its way to make people using open source software suffer when dealing with people that use Hotmail. Just another way in which Microsoft is trying to eliminate competition for its market, not by innovating and producing good products, but by using their market share to fight dirty. Who suffers from this? We do. The people out there on the streets. Corporate greed at its finest.

The net result? Well, I strongly encourage everybody out there that has a Hotmail account to immediately switch to another provider. Gmail and FastMail, among others, would be good choices. In the meantime, I will keep my domain configured to fool Hotmail into thinking I’m a nice little Microsoft drone, using its crappy products, so that I can send email to my friends. That is, until they all switch to a better email provider.

-c

ps- For those of you out there using Postfix, here are the lines I added to my header_checks file to remove the User-Agent header and add in the Outlook header:

/^User-Agent:/ IGNORE
/^To:.*hotmail.com/ PREPEND X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11

A life-like two-headed dragon. On a key chain.

My life is now complete.

-c