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Out & About

Sometimes it seems like people just don't think, especially when driving.

• People who park right next to the entrance of a store or building because "I'm just going in for a minute." Do these people think they are more special & privileged than the rest of us? Walk your lazy butt the extra 25-50 feet from a parking space!
• Speaking of lazy butts: People who leave their shopping cart loose in the parking lot instead of walking it a few feet over to the cart corral. If it's that hard to put it where it belongs, you'd better apply for a handicapped sticker.
• People who drive too fast.
• People who drive too slow. If everybody went about the same speed there'd be a lot less accidents.
• People who talk on the phone (or read, or do makeup, or shave) while driving! Did you know more accidents are caused by people distracted by cell phones than drunk driving?
• People who brush the snow off their windows, but don't brush it off their headlights & taillights. Hello? Hello?! That thing between your shoulders seems to be suffering from lack of use. Are you really so dumb that you think someone can see your brake lights if they're covered with snow?
• And then there's the folks who leave their cars running to stay warm while they go into the store. First, it's illegal. Second, you're just asking for someone to steal your car since the keys are in the ignition. Third, if your car does get stolen your insurance company probably won't cover it because you were stupid enough to illegally leave it running with the keys in it!
• People who drive in the rain or snow or at night with their lights off. Don't you want to be seen so no one hits you?
• People who stop at the end of freeway entrance ramps instead of working their way into traffic safely, backing up several cars behind them. Are you trying to get rear ended?
• People who throw cigarette butts or other trash on the ground, whether walking or driving.
• People who don't clean up their dog's poop when walking them. No excuses. Sandwich baggies fit in pockets.
• Long lines, especially at the grocery store.

At Home

I have cool neighbors & nothing bad ever happens, so this one is short. New Hope is a nice place to live.

• Unique Thrift Store. It's filthy, messy, sloppy. Garage sales have better quality stuff. It needs to go away, but unfortunately the owner is a wealthy, savvy businessman with a 30 year lease who just became his own landlord by buying the center this rancid store is part of. This store is the poster child for eminent domain condemnation.
• The people (mostly the son & his friends) at the end of the street who drive past at 90 mph. It's a 2 block long dead end, for crying out loud! God help you if a kid on a bike or something gets hit.
• Any sales phone calls. Surveys are ok, just not after 9 or during dinner time.

At Work

I work with a fantastic group of people at First Tech Computer in Minneapolis, so this stuff almost never happens. This is the stuff that would bug me if it did happen.

• People who "borrow" stuff without asking and don't return it.
• Coming back from a few days off to find your workspace rearranged after someone needed some extra room to get some things done.
• People who make promises for me, but don't ask me if I can do it first.

On The 'Net

Two things bug me. The second is popup web ads. How would you like it if you were walking down the street minding your business, then someone jumps out in front of you and shoves a flyer in your face and starts telling you how great this product is. You'd at least glare at them, if not more. This same effect is achieved by popup web ads. Thankfully most web browsers now have an option to block popup ads.

Tops on my list: spam. For those of you who may not know, spam (also known as unsolicited commercial email - UCE for short, and junk email) is the scourge of the Internet. Spam is wrong because, unlike junk mail where the sender buys the postage from the Post Office, YOU and I and others like us pay the majority of the costs through the fees that we pay to our internet service providers for our access. How would you like it if you were charged 5¢ for every commercial you watched on TV? You wouldn't tolerate that, and you shouldn't have to tolerate spam.

Each spam that is downloaded into your email box takes up some space on your hard drive. One email doesn't take up much room, but multiply that by thousands or millions (it's getting worse every year) and you can see how it becomes a problem. At my company, over 70% of incoming email is spam. With that type of volume, internet providers need more mail servers and more storage space to deal with it. Those costs get passed on to US!

I don't tolerate it. I fight back by tracing the email back to its source and complaining to the company or companies who host the spammer. This isn't easy sometimes, because the spammers try to hide themselves by putting false information in the message and headers of the email. It's not possible for all the information to be false, however, so you can always trace it at least part way back if you know how. SpamCop is a big help with this. I have this automated thing set up that files a SpamCop reports. I've learned a lot about spam fighting and gotten hundreds of email accounts, several web sites, and even whole companies in trouble and disconnected from the Internet. I loved the sheriff's report I got once when someone I reported was jailed.

I'm all for freedom of speech, but this is a theft of resources issue. Spammers break into unsecured mail servers and people's home computers and use them to spew millions of messages. Internet service providers must deal with extraordinary volumes of spam, with the spammers using the space on the email server's hard drive for their unwanted junk. Congress failed to pass HR 1748 in 1998, which would have banned spam just like junk faxes were banned in 1991, but unfortunately they passed the CAN SPAM Act in early 2004, which adopted an opt out strategy rather than opt in as was done in Europe and much of the rest of the world. Efforts are still being made to get better legislation passed. For more information, please visit the web site of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.

To bust the spammers that send you junk email, visit SpamCop and follow the instructions.

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