NachoWorld

Finally no more interviewing…! I finished on Thursday but didn’t go out because that morning I woke up with a rich head congestion. It’s been a good couple months … a lot of sleeping on couches in order to save money but also a few perks like living on Miami’s South Beach for 2 days and going to the Hotel Delano on Pfizer’s tab. I’m writing a whole bunch of thank you letters so the blog still has a while to go before I can update regularly. Until then, cheerio.

A few years ago I wanted to write a post about how much SPAM I get. Sure, everybody gets a whole bunch of SPAM. Depending on the source you hear from, the average person gets 8 to 13.3 junk emails a day. Depending on the number of legitimate emails one receives, that’s a high percentage of total emails that’s junk.

Now the number of SPAMmy emails I receive is getting absurd. To be honest, I receive every email that’s sent to my domain regardless of whether it has a POP3 account associated with it, because I tend to use email pseudonyms when I register online (e.g. aa@nachoworld.com or crazymonk@nachoworld.com). Pseudonyms work quite well in cases where the evil corporation (American Airlines or crazymonk.org) decides to sell my address. I’ve caught a few unethical email sellers (I get some non-Morpheus related junkmail through musiccity@nachoworld.com) this way. However, even if I did simply get rid of my ‘catchall’ within the nachoworld.com domain, I would still be inundated. Sometimes spiders grab my Tufts email address from the public directory posted at directory.tufts.edu - I have never put my Tufts address into a web form. (Impressively there have been spiders that grab just Indian names from school directories in Boston and New York in order to send Indian party junkmail.)

When I used Eudora, I created a number of filters on my desktop client that deleted those SPAMful nachoworld.com email address messages as they came. The program also had a statistics generator which could tell me how many total emails I was receiving and the projected number for the year. I used to be impressed with that projected number. The problem was that the projected number for the year would rise every month. Now I use the full version of Outlook because it’s faster, but even now after I wake up and “check email” it takes a few minutes for the program to filter.

Now I pose this question to you guys. How many junk messages do I receive a day. I can guarantee no one will come close to guessing the correct number.

I’m on a two week tour of duty in New York City interviewing for radiology residencies. I’ll be back next week.

My schedule for the next few months:

In light of my preparation for the Boston Marathon this April, I present this Boston Running Map.

During my first year of undergrad, I got hooked on Ultima Online, the first successful massive multiplayer online RPG. I remember playing for hours without embarrassment even as my roommate (you may remember him, doorframe) wondered what the hell I was doing. After a few months, I realized even with my massive amount of free time, there were always other people that had more and would power up their characters with 11 hours of day of “playing” (i.e. button mashing to power up). Others took the easy way out and used programs to do the button mashing or cloned special items illegally. I wasn’t that talented nor did I play 11 hours a day (I played 10), so I’d always get my ass kicked.

Near the middle to end of UO’s heyday, I would search eBay and see people selling their powered up account or even individual items for real money. Sometimes even for a couple thousand dollars! REAL money for fake items and intangible accounts (after money was paid through eBay, the seller’s online character would give the buyer’s character the money).

Now I see this item. Double-you-tee-eff-question-mark $100,000?

About a year ago I heard about Project Europa. It wasn’t as nicely designed or had as good graphics as Everquest, which was the new popular MMORPG at the time, but it allowed to you to trade items in the game to a central computer for real money. The exchange rate was atrocious. But it became famous because alot of “celebrities” played the game, including Alec Baldwin and various directors. The gimmick was that you put in a few hundred or a few thousand real dollars and then cull that into hundreds of thousands of Europa dollars by farming or shit. Then you trade those dollars 10:1 for real dollars, netting you a profit.

Basically, after reading up on it, it was the most interesting and complex pyramid scheme I ever saw. People that put in “only” a few thousand dollars would basically lose it. Only the top 100 or so people actually made money. So this $100,000 of real money that this guy put in for the fake space station will undoubtedly net him a few hundred thousand profit off what are basically the indentured servants of the game, the minor players.

Speaking of Andover, I got this in my email about a week ago.

We hope that you will join us as we continue the tradition of getting
together periodically for a few drinks.

Please bring your local Andover friends and come to Young Alumni Cocktails at Clery’s on Wednesday, November 8th.

Clery’s
113 Dartmouth Street
(617) 262-9874
6:30pm - 8:30pm +

It’s literally a straight shot out my front door to an annual high school get together. 30 feet at most across the street; probably longer to walk inside the bar than it is from my apartment to their front door. Yet…I am still ambivalent about going.