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.