Sunday, February 8, 1998

The Most Expensive Chairs in the World

The Most Expensive Chairs in the World (excerpt)
Richard Morin, Washington Post, February 8, 1998

...Our informants discovered two couch chairs: the John N. Couch Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina and the Cortner/Couch Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the University of South Florida. "A love seat would complete the set," suggested Dan Birchall, a computer systems administrator in Moorestown, N.J.

He also said his personal search has turned up "many vice chairs, but was unable to find any 'virtue' chairs." (At Yale, they've come close, reports Brian Bradley of MIT. "I have always held Yale University's Sterling Fellowship in great regard," Bradley noted. "Where else can one be officially declared a Sterling Fellow?")

Monday, February 2, 1998

Junk E-mail jangles nerves

Junk E-mail jangles nerves (excerpt)
Susan L. Thomas, LAN TimesFebruary 2 1998

..."I think the amount of spam continues to increase. There are fewer big-time spammers, but there are a lot more people getting into it on a smaller scale," said Dan Birchall, Internet systems administrator at 16 Straight Communications, a Web-hosting, graphic design and marketing company in Mount Laurel, N.J.

...Birchall said that the number of countermeasures against spam is also growing, and although he receives more UCE, less of it gets into his network and reaches the end user.

...The push now is to get vendors to default rather than relay, said 16 Straight's Birchall. On a good day he spends 15 to 30 minutes dealing with junk E-mail. That means reading it after it has been filtered out on the server and moved to a folder or calling sites whose servers have been unknowingly used for unsolicited mail.

...Although Birchall said he has tried to prevent spam at the end-user level, he has found it is more effective to do it at the server level, affecting hundreds of people immediately. Critics of cutting mail off at the servers, however, point to users losing mail they might otherwise need as well as the administrative costs. Often an administrator will not reject the mail but move it to a folder for closer scrutiny.

..."If there is a solution, it will be a combination of technical efforts, educational efforts, and legislative efforts," Birchall said.

Why I'm leaving Twitter.

I've stuck it out and continued participating on Twitter while Elon Musk has run it into the ground, made it progressively more inhospit...