Spam 4000

07.06.2004

Last month, Yahoo's mail service upped their storage space from 10 MB to 100 MB, mainly to compete with Google's G-Mail service (which offers 1GB of storage for free). I use my yahoo mail account as a catch-all, really using it more for my day-to-day mail than I do other mail accounts. I've had it longer than most of my other accounts, so it's more of a habit to use it than anything else.

Over the years, being my most used account, the amount of Spam I would get has been slightly growing ever so much. Whenever I would go a weekend without checking my mail, I would get about 100 spam emails, which Yahoo would graciously put in my "Bulk" folder so I wouldn't have to look at it unless I wanted. After the space upgrade, I decided I would would save the spam and see how much I was getting. 4 weeks ago I stopped deleting the spam. Today, the spam folder got spam #4000. (In the 3 minutes I've been typing, it's inched up to 4001).

I'm amazed there's that much spam floating around. What is it people are trying to talk me into? The latest topics are:

• Not enough time, Russ? (Well, lately I've had plenty of time)
• Tqygcsfy Ref1ll Your Rx 0rder (How dare you call me Tqygcsfy!)
• Enter To BE A WINNER Of The Sizzlin' Summer Sweeps (And miss my chance to be a LOSER Of The Sizzlin' Summer Sweeps?)
• Car Quotes - Compare & Save (BMWs are more than Yugos)
• Do you need to fix your computer? (Well, no.)
• Coffee's on! What are u waiting for? (I'm waiting to when I like the taste of coffee)
• Donate a car to improve taxes, reputation, and self-confidence! (I would have to gain the self-confidence to walk everywhere, since I've only got 1 car)

It's shocking, nowhere are there offers to increase my penis size, people telling me there are hot lesbians waiting for my call now, or how to get Viagra online. It's a new age of spam! More topics to ignore! But out of 4000 things I should ignore, shouldn't there be at least 1 that I secretly, really need?

Probably not.

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Happy Birthday Open Bio

07.02.2004

It was 2 years ago (yesterday, I think) that an exodus of about 25 laid-off ResGen/Invitrogen workers made their way down the street to the newly formed offices of Open Biosystems. I was part of that group, although I was the only one going as a "contractor", my job being to make a super cool shopping cart and website.

Open Bio was my first real shopping cart that I made from scratch. It was really more than a shopping cart, because it turned into the core for the workflow process that was being developed. I did a lot of things right, I did a couple of things wrong (I can't bring myself to say "a lot of things wrong"). The amazing part was that the website and cart went from nothing to working and accepting orders in 3 months. Normally something like that would have taken 9-12 months, but those were my early ass-kicking days when I would stick to the keyboard for 12 hours a day.

I stayed at Open Bio for about 9 months before coming to Spiritus. As I was leaving they were getting ready to re-skin the website, which I've got to admin looks a lot prettier. But I still get a kick out of looking at the Open Bio site and seeing that my old cart is still there, just chugging away. Even though I may not be there any longer, and although I was just a contractor and not an official "employee", I think I'll always feel like one of the gang from Open Bio.

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B5 Compressed

07.01.2004

The 5 seasons of Babylon 5 are comprised of 110 episodes, 22 per season. After commercials, each episode is roughly 45 minutes long. For the run of the series, that makes the whole thing last about 82 hours.

Over the past 7 weeks, since my little beach vacation, I've managed to watch all 110 episodes.

I've been wanting to watch the entire series for a while. I had never seen the 5th season, and I was completely wrapped up in the first 4 seasons when they originally aired starting in '94. Watching the episodes again, I'm amazed at how much went on. Wars, conspiracies, more wars, friendships built and destroyed. It had a little bit of everything.

Babylon 5 was envisioned as story that would take place over 5 years, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. Although most of that story was squeezed into the first 4 years (rumors of cancellation made the writer fit everything in), the entire series still holds up. My favorite part of the series are the little seeds planted that fortell what will happen. It may happen in the next episode, it may be 50 episodes away, but it's cool to see it finally come to fruition.

I doubt there will ever be another series to try and take on the scope of what Babylon 5 did, but it would be cool for somebody to try.

The Babylon 5 movies are coming out in August, expanding the Babylon 5 universe. I had missed most of these, too, so it's going to be fun getting one last glimpse into what seems to be my favorite series.

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Carts & Paypal

06.30.2004

A couple of weeks ago I finished up the new shopping cart addition to the Bioventures website. Along the way there have been little bugs, but nothing major (just an added address field here, a credit card validator there). They're even getting orders from it! 8 orders so far, which is about 5 more than I had expected. Biotechs are usually pretty slow during the summer since most of their customers are researchers at schools, so that in conjunction with it being a new cart had me a little skeptical. But it looks like things are moving along!

One thing I've been wanting to do is to integrate my cart better with Paypal. Paypal is better for a lot of small businesses, because it saves the business the money of getting an SSL certificate and all the accounts needed to transact a credit card, while Paypal has enough features and and has been around long enough that most people feel safe using them. While trying to integrate some of their features, I came across the PayPal Developer Network, which is just chock-full of hints and help to get your site running smoothly when integrating with Paypal. After searching the message boards, I found answers to the problems I was having along with a couple more answers I didn't know I needed yet.

I guess I've just been a little cart-crazy of late.

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Some More Links

06.29.2004

I've got so much going on without having much to say, I thought I would share a couple of things I've seen recently:

• Ever wonder if some of the fees added on to your phone bill are what they sound like?
• The first Do-Not-Call case is going to court.
• A cruise ship got reposessed right before a 19-day cruise. Makes me remember all the fun I had on my little cruise.

  
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