Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Easy way of reporting Spam


While reading a consumer message board, I recently stumbled upon Blue Security - a spam reporting tool that does all the work for you. The little blue frog program installed on my computer goes to my bulk folder in Yahoo, GMail and Hotmail and reports the spam all on its own through the web interface! In 2 weeks or so, the little program has reported well over 500 spam messages much of which I had never even viewed myself. That is a very easy way to report spam, instead of reporting emails individually or clicking on report spam options with your ISP. You can sign up to 10 email accounts under one account for Blue Security.

Some users report that the volume of spam they get decreases after using Blue Security. I do not think I have used it long enough to notice.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Stayin' Alive ... but Busy

Staying rather busy with work and having busy weekends. The PCs I use to log onto the Internet have had their share of problems: removing malware and viruses, and dealing with external drive failures. It is annoying this is all going on at the same time, but it is. So I have spent a lot of frustrating time sorting all of that. My family life has kept me busy, too.

In the Blogging World of things, a blogger I enjoyed reading for the past year is moving on. I will miss Brian McWilliams' blogging about spammer news, but lately I haven't been reading any of my regular blogs all that much. And apparently, he has found a great job opportunity, I wish the best for him. I will post later when I feel I have a breather.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

XM Radio vs. Talk Radio

Our family has had an XM radio for a while. The antennae was non-functioning for a while, so I ordered another part for the Roadie unit (the radio you listen to in your car) on the Internet because stores that carry XM radio gear just do not have a lot to select from. XM is great for all kinds of music. Last time I checked, you could get a free listen for 2 or 3 days of XM online by signing up by Email address. Check it out if you haven't.

I listen to all kinds of music that you just don't hear on local radio. In fact our local radio stations, the ones with the classic rock format, have played the same freakingLed Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, and Boston songs going back at least 2 decades now. One definitely does not need any Led Zepplin album if one lives in Atlanta, and listens to rock-oriented commercial FM stations on a regular basis. Plus, one has all those annoying commercials on FM and AM talk radio for that matter. XM radio receivers are not cheap, but the prices for receivers have steadily declined since even 2 years ago when we first bought a receiver. You can easily spend $100-200+ for all the gear just to listen. One has to be careful about where to buy XM radio gear. Sometimes stolen sets show up on Ebay for instance, which is a raw end of the deal because reported stolen sets are nonusable.

Due to the popularity of satellite radio, I know that newer manufactured car models are automatically equiped with satellite radio receivers. That is a good thing to know. However, since we plan never to buy new cars ourselves anytime in the near future; it will be a while before we get such a car with gear built in it. There are just some things that it is best to be cheap about and one of them for us is not buying a new car where the value plummets so quickly once it is driven off the lot. Between my husband and I in our mid 30s owning cars for 3 decades combined in years, we have only purchased 1 new car.

I have been a talk radio junkie since sometime in the 1990s, but over the years, I have grown tired of the shows, just as I have to hearing Led Zepplin on a daily basis on the radio airwaves here in Atlanta. In times past, I would listen to syndicated shows, such as Gordon Liddy, Kim Komando Clark Howard, Dave Ramsey, Neal Boortz, and even on occasion Rush Limbaugh. I am really overall tired of all these shows ( to borrow from Spiro Agnew: nattering nebobs of negativism) and seldom listen anymore. Some shows I listened to have come and gone, such as a local radio talk show Random Access Radio which was about computers and aired on WGST 640 AM. The hosts could take calls on AS 400 or Macs, you name it, very versatile group. One of those hosts had even attended my undergrad college at the same time I had. Random Access Radio is sadly missed. I believe that show no longer aired after 2002 here in the Atlanta AM radio market. I even won a copy of Windows XP from these radio guys when I went to one of the appearances, so I recall them quite fondly. Yay!!!!