Thursday, June 11, 2009

Inquiring Minds

You know how they (meaning "experts") like to say that often, in a marriage, it is the little irritants that cause a breakdown and often, ultimate failure of the relationship? Like one person squeezes the toothpaste in the middle, the other at the end, rolling the tube as he/she goes and this causes all kinds of friction which then causes the communications to cease and the relationship to come to an end, stuff like that. Petty things, for sure, but irritating nonetheless.

Well today, I guess I am having a "petty things that irritate me" kind of day right now.

For instance, I use a sitemeter on my blog. I think probably most every one who blogs has some kind of thing or other and it tells us little things about people who visit our blogs. However, I tend to get a bit irritated at times when I check my stats on my sitemeter and I see virtually nothing there in the way of actual information then about the person visiting my blog. I hate it when it says "Unknown ISP" for instance, or if the person is using AOL, the it doesn't give me a geographic location for the other blogger. Inquiring minds want to know these things ya know, which is why I signed up for the darned sitemeter to begin with, because you see, I have one of those "inquiring minds."

Well, sometimes I do anyway.

I hate it too when I get this stupid spam on my e-mail from these people who are writing to tell me how they have a kazillion dollars and they will share it with me if I help them secret it out of this bank in some place in Nigeria or Kenya or Switzerland or wherever and I know this is all a farce, spam, using up valuable bandwidth or something like that.

Things like this just irritate me and right now, I wish there were something I could get -like a barcode scanner that I could use on my computer to identify the person who is, in effect, spamming me today on my AIM instant messenger.

This person "hit" me first and I didn't recognize the screenname but thought maybe it was someone I do know but who has changed their screenname or some such so I answered and then this fool starts asking me why I am talking to him or her, whatever the case may be and who I am, etc. I responded saying that he/she had hit me first so who are you and so on, so forth.

Wonder if they do make things though that you can use to identify all these unknowns in the internet or blogosphere or Instant Messenger Land?

Again -inquiring minds want to know, ya know.

4 comments:

Rune Eide said...

Those are the kind of irritants that plague the Net - and irritates everyone but the senders. Most ISPs have some kind of filters that can remove most, but not all of it. E-mail readers can remove more. But again not all.

I have never heard of any program that can reliably tell you where the visitors came from and who they are in every case - it is too easy to fake these things. You can invoke the word verification and other systems the Blogger has, but again they are not foolproof and there is a trade-off between that and the amount of legitimate traffic.

So in the end you are back to using what resources you have: Your common sense. Which I think you have in large supply :-)

Alex the Girl said...

Ah, it's the ninjas.

Travis Cody said...

Some spammers have gotten my email address and I'm getting about 5-10 spams a day. I usually just label them spam and don't open them, but it sure can be annoying. Especially since I never used to get spam on this particular email address.

Mrs4444 said...

Hi, Jeni. Sorry I have no answer here for you...just stopped by to say hi and I'm glad it looks like you and yours are enjoying your summer :)