robertliu.com

Well, one week back in the UK so let’s see what I’ve achieved. I’m temporarily back in my own room now that my brother and his girlfriend are on their holiday somewhere on an island in Spain. It really does seem that we have overgrown this little house of ours. I suppose now that all three of us brothers are now studying at uni it won’t really matter for a few more years, and then we should be in the position to “move out” – even if mum says so otherwise.

I’m still slowly getting through papers that I need to read for my project, and hopefully sometime this week I can start writing up a literature review for it. But one minor achievement is that I think I’ve managed to reduce my spam in my Yahoo Mail account by over 80%. The 10 days I was on holiday in Croatia, with absolutely no access to the internet, I received 2000+ junk messages in my “bulk mail” folder. Given that Yahoo automatically erases them after 7 days, it works out at approximately 300 spam messages a day – which seems about correct given the rate at which I usually delete them when I do have access to a computer. Now, I seem to receive less than about 50 spam messages a day. How did I do this? After painfully recording every email address used by the spammers over a period of a week, I collected the most frequently used domains, and blocked no less than 499 of them. The 500^th being just a plain email address that I wanted to block (no one personal btw). However, I know this is only a short term measure to tackle spam, since spammers will normally change their email addresses, or even mask it with someone else’s. At least I have less spam now.

As with my new laptop, everything’s installed and working great. Well pleased with it and I think money well spent. Haven’t managed to find any problems with it yet and no complaints so far. Since dissecting my previous desktop computer, and getting my brothers to sell bits of it on eBay, the only useful bits I kept were my hard drives. It’s taken quite an effort to sort everything and reorganise all my data. I’m gonna keep my 250gb drive and use it as extra storage for my laptop. Seems like a lot of space, but I do store a lot of digital photos (as well…ahem…other things). My other 80gb drive has now been reserved by Katja. I’ll try to get that review done on the laptop within the next couple of weeks, for those contemplating purchasing a W3V.