What Does Spam Say About Us?

I have just finished cleaning up six email addresses that I maintain for business and personal use. This included filing emails I wanted to keep for future reference (since a number of the email addresses are hosted by Google, there is plenty of room to store emails you want to keep). Once that was done, the time came for me to deal with the spam. One of the advantages of many of my email hosts is that they maintain a variety of spam filters. However, since the hosts don't want to be accused of deleting valid email, they typically (in my case each of my email hosts does so) place suspected spam in a separate folder.

This got me to thinking about who sends me spam and what they are trying to sell me. Therefore, I plan to take about a month's worth of spam and do an analysis of the content.

Stay tuned...

Energy - Time for a Real Change

Since I last posted in March, 2008, a lot has changed. The debate in a Bush press conference about whether gas would go to $4.00 a gallon was settled with Bush looking even more out of touch with real Americans than ever. Oil prices blew past $130 a barrel to peak in the high $140s. It has since dropped back somewhat, but still double what it was a year ago. Congress has responded by...doing basically nothing. They have still not passed an extension to incentives for the development and deployment of alternative energy. The President has responded the way he has for most of his life, proposing to drill more holes domestically.

It is a sad state of affairs that our two presumptive presidential candidates don't seem to realize the criticality of our energy dependence. McCain, like Bush wants to maintain the status quo and continue to drill more holes domestically. Obama talks a good game, but spends more time on global warming than he does on alternative energy, an indication that he doesn't realize they are intertwined.

Interestingly, the only sane ones talking this summer is 1) automotive manufacturers; 2) T. Boone Pickens; and 3) Al Gore. First, the major automotive manufacturers seem to understand the criticality of the situation. With Mercedes importing the Smart Car; with Toyota and Honda flooding the market with hybrids and high gas mileage compacts; with Ford making a major conversion from gas-guzzling SUVs to more fuel-efficient small cars and hybrids; and with GM going beyond Ford to develop and electric car and the infrastructure to support it, it seems that the automotive industry gets it. Hopefully it's not too late.

While I tend to disagree with most everything T. Boone Pickens has to say, I now find myself in agreement on his proposal to convert to wind energy. While he stands to make a bundle on the success of this proposal (he somehow always does), his proposal has merit. With the support of the Texas Legislature and the Texas PUC, he now has the power lines to major cities in the pipeline to make it at least a reality in Texas. Hopefully, other deep-pocket investors will follow his lead and pour money into alternative energy even if Congress is too stupid to extend incentives.

Then there is Al Gore's audacious challenge to the presidential candidates to commit the U.S. to weaning itself from oil within 10 years. The candidates haven't responded. I think it is time they did. It is time for the U.S. to put up or shut up. While going to Mars is a nice challenge that will bring returns in technology and health care improvements, a grand challenge to move off oil within 10 years will bring returns in terms of survival and our way of life continuing for our children and grand children. Oil is in short supply. Regardless of the number of wells drilled, the demand will outpace supply. That's the most optimistic view. If there continues to be de-stabilization in the Middle East, it will be even worse. If the Gulf Coast continues to endure storms damaging drilling platforms and off-loading facilities, it will be even worse. If we continue to wage war on a credit card to the tune of $12 billion per month, the Chinese and Indians will be able to pay cash and it will be even worse.

The fact is, it is going to get worse before it gets better. Therefore, we can bite the bullet and make an all-out effort as proposed by Al Gore, thus preventing the massive transfer of U.S. wealth as forecasted by T. Boone Pickens, or we can continue the status quo, forsaking our position in the world and leaving a much poorer legacy to our children. It is going to be painful for the next 10 years. If we don't do this, it could be we don't survive as a nation.

Weigh in whether you agree or disagree. The need is to have the discussion.

Alternative Power Ideas

I was reading a posting by Scott Adams in his Dilbert Blog about harnessing the power when an elevator comes down (see http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/03/elevator-power.html)and this got me to thinking about a recurring idea of mine: urban wind farms. I live in Plano, Texas. At the present time, there is approximately a 30 MPH wind blowing. This is not unusual for this part of the country. Indeed, it has done the same thing over several days of the past week. We get a lot of wind.

Therefore, if there was some way to economically capture energy from that wind, it would make sense. There are several requirements to have a viable wind farm: 1) you need wind; 2) you need connectivity to the power grid; and 3) you need permit and access to place a wind generator. As stated earlier, we have a lot of wind, so requirement 1 is met. As for the second requirement, a good place to gain connectivity to the grid that is everywhere in an urban area is the standard light pole that dot many streets. As for permitting, the big argument is that the wind generator detracts from the surrounding beauty of the neighborhood. However, since when is a light pole pretty. They are ugly and they are everywhere, so why not make the most of a bad situation and use them for double-duty--light pole and wind generator tower. Since the light pole is tied to the power grid, are typically well-anchored, they would make a great location. A few statistics will demonstrate how attractive this alternative is.

Plano, Texas is a rather spread out city of somewhere around 160,000 people. if we eliminate the residential roads and only concentrate on the main thoroughfares in the city, I would guess that there are 5 running east-west and 10 north-south. From city limit to city limit, I would guess that Plano is 9 miles wide and 7 miles long (main road areas and I want to be on the conservative side). That means there are 45 miles of east-west road and 70 miles of north-south road, for a total of 115 miles of usable road.

Using that number and being conservative using a light pole every 300 feet (conservative because in many places there are two poles on the roadway because it is divided lanes), this would give 2,024 usable light poles. Again being conservative and using a smaller wind generator in the range of 250 Kwh each, this means that putting a wind generator on each pole would pump more than 500 Mwh into the grid!

A good estimate based on some fast research on the Web is that the average home uses 850 Kwh of energy per year. This means that my city-wide wind farm would generate enough electricity to power to power almost 600 homes for a year.

In actuality, there are many more generators that could be installed in a city such as Plano and my guess is that the typical capacity would be more like 500 Kwh. Think of all of the towns across the US in high wind areas (Chicago comes to mind for example, not to mention every city and town in most of the west). I think this idea has merit.

Deming's Critical Mass

I came across an interesting blog post this evening titled, "1,000 True Fans." (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php) The premise is that if an artist--I'll call him/her an Internet entrepreneur--can cultivate 1,000 true fans, the individual can make a decent living. The author, Kevin Kelly, defines a true fan as:

"Someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work."

Dr. W. Edwards Deming often referred to a similar concept when he was talking about organizational change. He referred to "critical mass," and defined an organization's critical mass as the square root of the number of employees.  His reasoning was that if you could get the "square root people" to champion the change, the organization would change.

I suspect that the "1,000 true fans" actually equates to the square root of the market you are trying to penetrate. In lieu of knowing the number of clients in your target market, the number 1,000 is probably as good as any. Either way, given the tremendous reach of the Internet (1.3 billion users according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm), 1,000 true fans does not seem to be a reach for any decent product or service.

Perspective on Internet Time

"Internet Time" is the concept that time moves faster or events compress in time on the Internet much faster than they do in "real life." An interesting event occurred yesterday that brought this home: the YouTube domain was registered on February 15, 2005, making yesterday the third anniversary. In that time, YouTube was purchased by Google a year and a half later (October 16, 2006) for $1.65 Billion (which represented a capital appreciation of $6.8 Million PER DAY by the way); now serves more than 100 million videos per day; has changed the way police departments identify criminals (alleged criminals); has changed the way politicians communicate and are questioned in debates; and has become the 4th most visited Web site in the Internet.

That's hard to compete with using traditional business models.