Blogtrek

Send the robots (or rabbits) after them!

Today an unusual thing happened when I tried to call home at lunchtime from work. I got a message saying that the number I called had Call Intercept and that I had to say my name after the beep. Then my wife at home had to press a number to get me. This is my Call Intercept service, which I got to block calls that come from things like "unavailable" and "private". The vast majority of these are telemarketers and junk callers, which is the reason I got the service.

What happened is my workplace changed its phone system so instead of coming up with a trunk number when I call home, it comes up "unavailable". That set off my Call Intercept. Why my workplace would want to identify or confound itself with telemarketers beats me. If I did not have Call Intercept, the call would come up as "unavailable" and the answerer at home would assume it was a telemarketer and not answer. Fortunately, the service comes with a password. I enter it and instead I come up as "priority caller". It still blocks telemarketers, so I am going to keep it.

I have a similar problem with web pages. When I access a web page, sometimes I get pop-up windows. So I obtain Analog-X's Pow! and Pow! those windows out of existence. However, I find that sometimes sites I want to see get Powed too so I have to turn it off. Email is an eternal problem, with its flood of spam. So I get a robot to handle that. That robot is the Rules Wizard of Outlook. I tell Outlook, for example, to delete messages whose subject contains "million", "anyone", "viagra", "credit", and so forth; I did an analysis which shows these words appear much more frequently in the subject of spam than in the subject of legitimate mail. Once in a while legitimate mail gets hit by the Wizard, so I go into "Deleted Items" and rescue those messages.

A woman who I met tonight, who I shall call L, came up with the best solution of all. Send a virtual rabbit after the spam, to nibble on the spam and gobble it up before it hits my mailbox.