calebbrown.id.au

So while I was carrying out my daily dump-the-junk-mail routine I considered for the umpteenth time buying a 'No Junk Mail' sticker for the mailbox.

Then I wondered: what would happen if 'No Junk Mail' stickers were delivered with the junk mail? What would happen if they were mailed out en masse to every home in Sydney?

It struck me that such a stunt could be very disruptive.

Assuming a majority of people apply the sticker, it could drive the companies that are responsible for distributing the material out of business. It would mean more teenagers hunting employment at the local department store. And they wouldn't be able to employ them due to the drop in income from a smaller distribution of their catalogs.

The upside to this is that families would be less inclined to buy things that don't actually need, but all this would probably result in an increase in prices as retailers try and make ends meet.

The only real winner in the end would probably be the environment.

In an effort to reduce the noise in my inbox I have closed my long standing email address: amnot@hotpop.com.

As far as free email services go it has served me well. It gave me free POP3 email and wasn't hotmail at a time when it was king and free POP3 services were rare. Since then free webmail has changed dramatically. Google came along and gave enormous storage and a good interface and made everyone else pick up their game.

I'm not sad to see this address go. It was always a temporary stop gap until I bought my own domain and it had become so overrun with spam. It has served me well for the nearly 5 years I've had it.

Pictured here is my 3 month old niece, Imogen, looking inquisitively at the camera in the cute way only babies can. Prior to her birth there was much speculation as to what her name would be. And as usual no one who guessed was right. I didn't compete, but I wouldn't have got it anyway. But I think Deb and Pete made the right choice with Imogen.

Anyhow, all this talk about names got me thinking about how people go about deciding what to call their children. Often a family name may be adopted according to tradition, or one significant to either parent. The sound of the name, how it rolls off the tongue, may be important to some too.

The ways the name can be changed, shortened and distorted should also be considered. Children at high school are ruthless, and adults aren't much better, so it pays to ensure they won't face needless ridicule, torment and possible psychological damage.

Another factor that seems to be socially important is uniqueness. Probably because people think there are already enough Michaels, Andrews and Davids. But it's getting to a ridiculous level now where people will deliberately misspell a name so that it's different to the other people with the same name.

The existence of the Internet seems to exacerbate this problem further. I've heard that people will choose names based on the availability of the internet domain name, or on how many results show up in Google (the fewer the better). Which is amusing since the usefulness of any domain will stay limited until they're a teenager, by which time your carefully chosen name, with only 10 results in Google, will have been swamped by every other parent who thought the same as you.

With this trend in mind, I have devised another criteria for choosing names: how easy the name is to type on a computer keyboard. With the proliferation of computers it would seem pertinent to pick a name that can be typed efficiently. With all the typing your child will have to do, think of all the hours they will save across the course of their lifetime by choosing a good, typable, name.

Good names would avoid anything that slows down your typing. Things such as repeated letters, consecutive letters that require the same finger to press the key or having all the letters on one side of the keyboard. Some examples of bad names to type are Aaron, Lloyd, Edward, Jill, Phillip or Fredrick.

Perhaps it will get to the stage where people's names will be shortened and mangled on the internet just as the English language has. No longer will someone's name be 'Eugene', but 'Ujyn'; and 'Michael' would become 'Mykl'.

Either way I'm sure it's going to get weirder.

While trying to get my phone and net transferred I've spent a lot of time on hold to iiNet. To keep you from nodding off, iiNet provides a loop of helpful tips and self advertising while you're on hold.

One of the messages says this in an advertisement for their 'web accelerator'¹:

Dial-up web accelerator is almost 5 times faster than normal dial-up. It really is the next best thing to broadband.

Maybe I'm paying too much for my ADSL2+ service.

¹ - a web accelerator is primarily a cache, storing a local copy of the data you need to download so you don't have to download it again. The smarter ones can also do things like filtering adverts and prefetching content. It can make it feel faster, but in reality everything comes down at the same old 56K. I reckon they're a waste of money - if you want broadband speeds, get broadband.

I wonder if there is a market for an emergency toilet paper delivery service. An 'at call' service where, if you run out of toilet paper, you can give them a call and at a premium have a packet of toilet paper rushed to your door.