Charles on… anything that comes along

Every so often I disconnect from the network at work - an Appleshare on Ethernet - without doing the rituals of bumping the volumes and making the right incantations as I do so. And sometimes the machine then wakes up fine, and sometimes it then goes into the tailspin of death, wherein apps won’t launch (they just bounce in the Dock, like some sort of accused on speed) and you have to force-quit things and they never quite come back. The only way back is the three-fingered force restart.

Why does it only do it some times and not others? It did it this evening, so I’ve lost a stack of things I’d wanted to post, pulled from the river of news like little minnows. Bum.

Meanwhile, why is it that .Mac has such terrible spam filtering? Gmail, by contrast, which you would think has a smaller user base (though maybe not… are there any numbers?) has excellent spam-chewing; I’ve only ever noticed one false positive. By contrast .Mac, which I don’t use a lot, seems to generate a constant stream of junk.

I think I’ll likely give it up soon. I don’t need the web pages, and the .Mac “your files on the web” thing has always been hopelessly slow (perhaps it’s faster in the US), and I don’t need iWeb - I’ve got a real one, thanks - or, um, is there anything much else that comes from .Mac?

Update: and even though .Mac has had a webmail interface overhaul (mm, stack those adjectives), it’s still not much cop, according to a review by the people at Tidbits:

Also missing from the toolbar is the Junk button, which in Mail can not only move a message to the Junk mailbox but also add a Junk flag and update Mail’s junk mail filter with information about that message. Unlike Mail, .Mac webmail does not have a learning spam filter. You can manually drag a spam message to the Junk folder, but doing so does not set its Junk flag (as that’s something Mail tracks locally, not a message attribute that’s changed on the server) and does not make .Mac webmail more likely to discard similar messages in the future. There’s no way to use .Mac webmail to help train Mail’s spam filter, and no way to affect the way the .Mac mail servers themselves filter out spam.

In other words, they’re junk when it comes to junk. (I got another this morning, which was one of the image spam sort, pumping stocks. WHY are people so stupid as to buy those things??? Why??? It defeats me.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Palm is in trouble - the sort of trouble Apple was in around 1996 (1 June 2005; score: 24.43%)
• New Statesman on broadband infections; and getting bitten by the port 25 bug (27 August 2005; score: 21.82%)
• What we want for 419 spammers: randomly-generated gibberish (11 September 2006; score: 19.4%)