Spam E-mail

Gmail does a pretty good job of keeping spam away. I receive only 1 to 4 pieces of spam per day in any one of my accounts, and it's rare that they go to anything other than the spam folder. These accounts include one posted publicly online that anyone could write to and one I give out specifically "for spam" (you know, when the grocery store, etc., insists on an e-mail address).

By contrast, my work e-mail address is inundated with spam each day, to a point where sometimes I feel like the spam interferes with productivity (especially since, if I'm writing an e-mail at a given moment when new mail arrives, I have to click out of the program and then back in it in order to continue writing). In addition the spam filter seems ridiculously ineffective, this despite the fact that I often mark mail as "junk," which is supposed to help the system learn to recognize such mail. I'm not sure why the ineffectiveness is like so, but here's a typical week.

I say typical, but actually Tuesday and Wednesday of the week featured here were not. E-mail was down completely for much of the day both days; strangely, I didn't have as much spam waiting for me once the e-mail system was back up as I likely would have received had I been in my account.

The amount of spam hasn't always been this prolific. I had fewer junk e-mails when I first started. My years of being in my position have likely added to the amount of spam I get (as they have to other long-time employees). In addition, I've noticed rises and falls in the amount I receive. Right now, I'm at a high level; however, I've also seen times when these numbers dropped to half what they are.

Distribution of Acceptances

Sometimes I begin to feel as if acceptance slips have not come to me in a long time. I was wondering, in this most recent spate of rejections, how accurate my current feeling is. It's been four months since an acceptance slip, and I've gotten over eighty rejections. In recent history, that's closing in on the higher sets in terms of the number of rejections--and give it another month or so, it'll also be up there in terms of time.

The top graph shows the space between acceptances by time (x axis) and by number of submission rejections between (y axis) from the time I first started submitting materials.

I ramped up my submissions significantly around 2008, so the following focuses on more recent years:

Interesting: acceptances do often seem to come in clumps. (Days after I created this chart in April, I received an acceptance, from probably the most prestigious publication I've ever had work accepted by. Since, then, though--two more months--back to rejections.)

Age Difference among Women I've Dated

I was discussing with a woman a few days ago how a certain man she knows constantly goes for women he has no chance with, hotties in their early twenties (he's in his late thirties). It made me wonder, since here I am still single and over forty, whether I have a similar pattern. I suppose it depends on what one views as an unacceptable age gap. A recent survey noted that women want a man, on average, about four years older than they are, with a good number of them accepting men up to seven years older. I can say I've mostly stuck to women within eight years of me (what I've long considered the base norm, one year above that seven years), though most women I've gone out with have been younger than me. As I've gotten older, the age spread does seem to have become more liberal, but it doesn't seem that out of whack, I don't think.

In the chart below, the difference in age is shown on the vertical axis, my own age on the horizontal axis:

The chart above is an approximation, based on memory (I haven't kept a record of each woman I've asked out, so it's likely I've forgotten a few, especially among those who I never ended up going out with). Women closer to my age rejected me just as women farther away from my age did, and women who accepted dates also varied accordingly. There doesn't seem to be an overall trend, outside of the fact that the few women I went out with or asked out in my twenties tended to be much closer to my age for obvious reasons.

Trains, Planes, Automobiles, and Buses

I recently went to Indiana via bus, the first time I've taken an interstate bus since age five, which caused me to ponder how I generally have traveled long distances. Below is the summary of how I've traveled each year, when taking trips (that I remember, sometimes estimated) over three hundred miles and trips over five hundred miles. Train and bus have not been too popular; car and plane have been used the most for between three hundred and five hundred miles, though most of that plane travel was in the early 1990s, when I had a job that involved a once-a-month trip from Southern California to Northern; on my own, I'd usually drive that distance.

Three Hundred Miles

Five Hundred Miles

Phone Calls for February 2013

I kept track of phone calls made to me and returned in February, which renders possibilities for all kinds of charts, some of them quite different from earlier charts regarding November 2012. 

Phone Calls by Gender

Phone Calls by Person

Phone Calls by Relationship

Beard Progression

So I didn't shave for eight weeks. Here were the results by week, for weeks 3 through 8 (unfortunately, I didn't think to take photos of weeks 1 and 2):

 

Beard Comments

I grew a beard about seven or eight years ago. This past winter, I decided to grow one again. There wasn't the same kind of angst as the first time I grew it. I was just being lazy and trying to avoid cold. Still, it's been curious people's reactions, most of whom don't remember the six months I previously had a beard--or maybe they do, since fewer people have commented on it this time around, it seems, as can be seen in the following chart, denoting the first time a given person has made a remark about my beard: