mikesoh.com

This is a global e-mail announcement.

As a result of getting so much spam a day (over 300 in fact), I will no longer be sorting through my spam folder. Any e-mails that get flagged as spam will now be automatically deleted without warning. While this may affect a minority of people that send me e-mail, I feel that the number of spam I receive and the havoc that it creates on my server outweighs the one or two e-mails that sometimes end up in my spam folder as a false positive.

You may fall into the category of affective people if you e-mail from yahoo.com, hotmail.com, or other popular web-based e-mails (gmail, for now, seems unaffected). If you are e-mailing me from one of these providers, you may prepend your subjects with "[NOT SPAM]".

If you get a reply, it means that I’ve added you to my whitelist and will no longer have to prepend your messages.

Sorry for the inconvenience folks.

I’ll be updating the site this Thursday so parts of the site will be down.

Things should be up and running by Friday.

I’m hoping that some of my friends can help me understand a trend in politics that I’m seeing. Ever since being a student, people here at the University support or oppose one thing or another. The nature of the liberal arts education, I suppose. The thing that has always interested me is why students get involved in various topics. However, what’s often lacking is any active work to actually help their resolution.

I feel that this can best be summed up in an a T-shirt:

The first time I saw this T-shirt, I stopped the person to ask him why he felt Bush should be impeached. I really wanted to know. After getting his response, I asked him what he has done to get Bush impeached. His response was that he protested, circulated petitions, and talked with other people. Confused, I asked him a question to clarify the situation. I asked him, “So, have you ever called your congressmen to let them know what you’re thinking?” He responded with a half-hearted “no.”

And since that moment, I’ve had a skeptical view of those who broadcast their political, social, economical views. I think, in many ways, this is a good reflection on where we’re at as a society. I’ve written about my personal grips about blogging before. The fact is that it’s getting worse. A recent article showed that the number of Americans that do not talk about things that are important have doubled in the last 20 years. Does anyone else find that troubling?

I almost feel that this ‘instant coffee’ society, that protesting, circulating petitions is a ‘safe’ way to get your point across. Maybe I’m wrong. But it seems that without actually talking to a senator or a congressman, many of the issues that are worth protesting will not really impact the government. I’m not at all saying that protesting is not a good thing. Many country-altering things happened because of protests and petitions. But I often wonder what would have happened if those same people called, sent letters, basically harassed their elected officials personally about the issues near and dear to their hearts.

Now I don’t think Bush should be impeached. But I totally support people’s right and privilege to petition the government. And basically, I was encouraging the man to do something I didn’t like or support. However, I think it was worth the 10 minutes we talked. I don’t know if he ended up calling his officials. I hope he did.

The lottery is pretty much a tax for people who can’t do math. While some people can win out, many do not. In fact, the odds of winning any large substantial cash is so low, that you would have better odds giving me your money than giving it to the state.

If your a starving student like this guy was, you should probably use the $1 to buy milk, not a lottery ticket. Although he won, he could have easily lost and wouldn’t have any milk in the process.