March 3, 2004

00:28

I spent the balance of the night deleting spam.

I hate spam. It clogs my mailbox. I get about three thousand a week, the majority of which get caught by spamassassin, and the minority of which annoy me. It makes me miss e-mails (which is nasty when you have customers trying to reach you). It works something like this:

Day 1: I clean my mailbox. Nice and clean. No spams. People e-mail, and I respond within one minute. Plus or minus fifteen seconds. With differing clocks and all, sometimes it appears I respond before the e-mail is sent.

Day 2: Spams slip in, but in an effort to keep the mailbox clean, they are promptly deleted. E-mail response is about two minutes.

Day 4: The annoying spams get deleted. The "obvious" ones sit around ("I'll delete them in a bunch later."). E-mail response is about two hours. About a hundred spams in the mailbox.

Day 8: Spams start to pile up left and right (about five hundred now). Meticulously picking through the e-mails to find important ones. E-mail response is about half a day, except for the lucky 10% that get lost in the spam.

Day 16: Don't even bother sending me mail.

Please, I don't need prescription drugs, better mortgage rates, get-rich-quick-schemes, or university diplomas. And definitely not help in the bedroom.

After long tiring days of deleting spam, I have no problem sleeping at night. What else were you thinking?

March 24, 2004

00:47

Do you have $999 sitting around doing nothing?

Well, Network Solutions wants you to renew your domain name for 100 years. That's right, 100 years. Because I'm afraid that someone will steal my domain between now and 2104.

Now, most peculiar is how they charge $9.99 per year, should you buy in super-bulk, instead of $34.99.

Let us analyze this pricing strategy. Let us make a few critical assumptions:

• The inflation rate in price, i, for domain names, is likely zero, or very close to zero. Due to a highly competitive market, registrars lack pricing power, and therefore, the price of domain names remains low.
• An adjusted interest rate of 5%, after inflation rate adjustments, is assumed. This is low.

Now.

Investing $999 for 100 years at 5% interest at year 2104 gives you $131,369.76. Not a bad sum. So by buying 100 years of domain name hosting now, you're giving up $131,369.76 dollars in 2104.

Here's the kicker.

Paying $34.99 a year for 100 years costs, in the end, $91,323.90 year 2104 dollars. You could safely invest $694.48 right now, and be able to pay $34.99 for hosting every year for 100 years. (Better yet, for just an extra $5.32, you could pay for your hosting ad infinitum).

So if you're looking to register your domain name for 100 years, let me know. Just send me the $999, and I'll renew your domain name for $34.99 a year. ;)

March 25, 2004

23:38

Tomorrow morning at 10 AM, I'll be strapped into a dentist chair, and some assortment of drugs will make me drowsy and/or fall asleep. Then a dentist will yank 4 wisdom teeth out of my mouth.

So today, at Loblaws, I bought $63.85 worth of liquid and/or soft foods to survive on for the next week: yogurt, milk, jello, cheese, more jello, ice cream, and breakfast shakes.

Oh, and Nestea of course.