Dave Beauvais’ Web Site

Jason Dunn mentions on his site that he’s recently been spammed by Paramount Pictures using an e-mail address he gave to them while requesting more information about the upcoming movie Iron Man. Like him, I use unique e-mail addresses for each company or service I do business with, and like him I’ve had this happen with a few of my unique addresses.

The worst is the address used for my eMusic subscription, which now receives between 20-50 spams each day. I am also receiving spam at the address I used when I was a Sprint PCS customer, as well as addresses used for rebate submissions to Sprint, CompUSA, Micro Center, and Daewoo Electronics. The latter two were separate store and manufacturer rebates on a 17″ LCD monitor a few years back and I used a different variation of the address for each rebate. Both addresses receive the same spam, usually only a few seconds apart. It wasn’t until last week that I noticed the spam at the Sprint PCS addresses; one was my customer address, the other was for a Sprint mail-in rebate.

A search for eMusic spam turned up several people who have had unique addresses given only to eMusic become targets for spam. I complained to eMusic support about about this and actually got a response from a human asking me to forward complete copies of some example spam along with message headers. I sent them twenty samples and a week or two later got the same response others have received: it’s a dictionary attack.

That’s crap. If it were a dictionary attack I would be getting tens of thousands of spams to all kinds of unique words or word combinations. Instead, the spam I receive is targeted at about three or four specific addresses these days. In fact, about 90% of my spam has been stopped simply by blocking about twenty specific addresses at the server; before that, I would routinely receive anywhere from 3,000-4,000 spams every 24 hours. The remaining 300-400 spams I receive each day are sent almost exclusively to my primary e-mail address and my eMusic address.

It’s pretty clear that when executives want some more money, privacy policies can be easily rewritten to permit a company to sell whatever customer data they feel like sharing. One person whose eMusic address has been spammed thought that eMusic’s servers had been compromised. I don’t believe that. Rather, I think one look at their “privacy” policy shows that they are free to share their customers’ personal information with whatever “partner” they wish, making that data subject to some other company’s privacy policy which we, as the customer, have no ability to accept or reject. eMusic itself may not have sold the customer data, but it’s likely that one of their “partner” companies did. (A note for the lawyers in the audience: I’m not outright accusing eMusic or its partners of doing this; it just seems a bit suspicious that this particular e-mail address is now receiving spam.)

As an aside, because I have never used my primary address for anything but personal mail, I suspect the majority of the spam is from well-meaning friends using it to send e-cards or it having been harvested from peoples’ mailboxes by viruses, worms, and other malware. Folks, BCC is a friend and you should use it. It’s simply not a good idea to send a message addressed to tens or hundreds of To or CC recipients. But that’s a different topic.

I recently had to rebuild my XV6700 and while I was at it, decided to check for upgrades for the software I use on it. I remembered that Two Peaks Software’s Personal Vehicle Manager had been taken over by Iambic, so I checked through my e-mail for the upgrade notice that was sent and proceeded to grab the latest version.

I discovered that Iambic’s registration method is rather convoluted. You must first install the software on the device either from the desktop or a CAB installer on the device, get the Device ID from the About box, go to their Web site (on a desktop PC) and enter that ID into a form to generate your registration code. You must then type that code into separate boxes on the device as show here.

I keep all of my software registration codes in another program on my device, so I always have them with me if needed. The annoyance with this registration method is that if I’m installing while not near a desktop PC, I have to switch back and forth between Vehicle Manager and my registration code list. (That’s assuming I already had the code and wasn’t trying to fight with their Web site in IE on the device.) Why? Because I can’t simply copy and paste the entire code due to the separate boxes.

Don’t the developers actually use handheld devices and realize how awkward and inconvenient their registration system is? Sure, it’s a one time process for most people, but it makes the software seem unnecessarily unfriendly.

Yes, another pointless post. I only see Chia Pets advertised during the holiday season but I have never once seen anybody buy one nor seen one sitting anywhere. Does anyone actually purchase these things? I can only assume someone does or they’d stop making them. I’m not linking to the Chia site because of its obnoxious use of Flash and annoying commercial videos with sound that play upon page load.

Why is it that vending machines in the United States will happily give you Canadian quarters as change yet won’t accept the same coin as valid currency when you try to purchase something with one? Sorry, I had a chocolate craving which must now go unsatisfied, and I felt like sharing.

I will be so happy when the next 1-3 weeks are over and the mindless endless chatter about the iPhone subsides. I mean seriously… camping out for days outside a store? It’s a phone! How do you even pitch that to your boss? (I assume these people are employed given the price of the phone, but I could be wrong.)

“Hey boss?”

Yes?

“I need to take a few days off next week.”

That’s short notice. What’s up?

“Well, the new iPhone comes out and I have to get in line for a few days so I can buy one.”

[The sounds of crickets punctuate the stunned silence which follows]

“So, uh… can I have some time off?”

For the next few days I will probably be skipping over a lot of the gadget sites I normally follow due to the amount of iPhone coverage that will be saturating things. Wake me when it’s over.

Back in June 2005, I wrote this post and noted at the end that “these gas prices suck.” Wow. Those sub-three dollar prices seem like quite the bargain today, just two years later!

Back in February I posted about a problem I was having with my XV6700 which was preventing me from dismissing most reminders. In March I found a solution to the problem which did not require hard resetting the device. I used the device for all of March and April and never had a single problem so I feel comfortable posting about it here as a possible solution for others having the same problem.

The solution I found was to disable automatic time synchronization with the cellular network. Apparently every time the PDA is powered up it syncs the time with the network and that process causes an occasional hiccup if a reminder is what woke up the device rather than the user pressing the power button. Disabling the time sync feature has completely eliminated the problem I was having where I could not dismiss reminders and the reminder sound continued to play over and over until I soft reset.

Here is how to disable the time sync feature:

Tap Start, Settings, and tap the “Phone” icon on the Personal tab.

Tap the Services tab and scroll down in the list to “Time Synchronization.” Select that item then tap the “Get Settings…” button.

Uncheck the box labeled “Time synchronize with mobile network automatically.” Note that you can always come back to this dialog any time and manually sync by tapping the “Update Now” button.

After doing this, my reminder problems disappeared completely and my XV6700 has been problem-free for over two months! I don’t know if a similar fix is available for other models. Please report back if you have any luck with models other than the XV6700.

As I was flipping through the absolute crap that is on TV on Sunday afternoons, I came across a poker championship on NBC Sports. When did poker become a sport?

I am writing this (edit: started writing this) on my PDA as I ride a chartered bus to dinner and a Toledo Mudhens game at Fifth Third Field in Toledo, Ohio. I’m up here for a three-day conference with a bunch of other IT people  from various organizations as well as many technology vendors, so I would bet that almost 100% of the people in attendance have at least one mobile phone on them.

What prompts me to write this is the man sitting in the seat across the aisle from me who is speaking very loudly into his phone about clients, meetings that he’s rescheduled for next week, and other assorted things which I guarantee are of no interest to anyone on the bus. And yet we must listen.

I flew to Florida last winter and was seated next to someone who called six people in the span of half an hour while we waited our turn in line for the runway. I know that he spent the night sleeping in and wandering around the airport, that there are exactly seven minutes between automated announcements about no smoking in the teminal, and that he had only one coffee and a donut to eat since last night. I had the luxury in that case to hear both sides of his calls as the volume on his phone was turned up so high that every word the other person spoke was clearly audible.

There is debate now about whether mobile phones should be allowed to be used on aircraft. Whether for technical, health, or safety reasons, I am pretty certain that there will be violence erupting on planes if the use of phones is permitted as passengers become irritated with inconsiderate people carrying on conversations for the duration of multi-hour flights. If you want to check your e-mail, browse the Web, or some other data-related thing that doesn’t disturb others, fine; heck, I do it all the time. When you are speaking, however, you are basically forcing everyone around you to listen to what you’re saying, and that’s a different situation.

Have some consideration for those around you, especially in an enclosed environment such as an airplane, bus, or train, where people can’t get away from you when you annoy them. You may think your phone call is important, but everyone around you probably doesn’t need to hear it. Very few people in this world are so important that they can’t wait until they’re off the plane or vehicle to talk on the phone in a more secluded location. And if you are that important, I feel sorry for you that you can’t get even a little bit of time away from work to sit quietly on a plane and read a book.

Update: I posted a solution to this problem that I discovered. Let me know if it fixes your problem.

I’ll start by saying that this isn’t the reminder problem that many Windows Mobile users are used to hearing about. (You know, the one where your reminders never fire at all and you miss your appointments?) The problem I am writing about today is irritating on the other end of that scale: my reminders do go off, but I can’t see what they are and have no way to dismiss them. I first noticed this about two months ago, and it was very rare; maybe once per week. Now, it’s happening almost every time a reminder goes off and it’s driving me insane.

If I’m looking at my XV6700 when the reminder fires, I can see that the “toast” — the little notification window that slides up from the bottom of the screen — appears for about one second, then disappears. The reminder bell icon in the title/navigation bar at the top of the screen also disappears. The reminder sound, however, continues to repeat and there’s no way to make it go away other than to soft reset the device. Switching from portrait to landscape mode does not help, either.

I did find reference to another person having the exact same problem. Suggestions were to use MemMaid to clean up bogus or duplicate entires in the notification queue, or to hard reset the device. I don’t have any orphaned or other invalid notifications in the queue, and I am really not thrilled about the idea of having to hard reset my otherwise rock-solid device just to fix this infuriating problem. I started Outlook 2003 on the desktop with the “/cleanreminders” switch to rebuild the reminders, made sure it was synced up with my Exchange account, and then synced the PDA. None of that helped.

I don’t understand why reminders continue to be such a problem for Windows Mobile devices. This is such a basic thing that even $15 electronic organizers get right — reliably — and I just can’t comprehend how devices this advanced can get so very wrong.

I’ll post again if I find a solution to this which doesn’t involve a hard reset, but it’s looking like that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend. I’m in a position to make device recommendations to users and problems like this make it extremely difficult to recommend Windows Mobile devices. Imagine having to tell your boss that the reason he missed his meeting with his boss is because his handheld can’t show reminders reliably.