Ed Bilodeau

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This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

More and more email : I keep archived folders of all the email I recieve, dated to correspond with when I started here at McGill. Keeping in mind that there is probably some email that doesn't get archived (like some spam, some listserv posts, etc), it still shows a general trend in the amount of email I receive:

oct 2001 - sept 2002: 3800 messages
sept 2002 - sept 2003: 4478 messages (+678 over prev year)
sept 2003 - sept 2004: 5626 messages (+1148 over prev year)

I'd have to look closer at the actual messages to get a feel for the kind of email I receive, and to see where the email is coming from. I'm fairly certain that it isn't due to spam, since I don't get much of that to begin with, and in any case it isn't kept and archived by my mail rules.