As I sit here writing Tuesday's journal entry on Friday, I see that once again I'm more than three journal entries behind. This one I'll blame on Strategic Conquest, which I recently started playing again. I'm playing version 3 which I bought several years ago. Version 4 has better graphics and a few more unit types, although I'd get it if it allowed you to move your pieces via the key- board, which version 3 does not. It's pretty annoying to be constantly clicking with the mouse to move each and every unit, not to mention the RSI damage that I'm doing to my hand.

Strategic Conquest 3 is a 16-color game and I'm playing it at thousands of colors (not that I can set my monitor to 16-colors anyway, and I don't like resolution switching just to use one application). On my old PowerMac 6100 playing the game at 256 colors was quite slow, but on my PowerBook it's just as fast or faster as I remember 16-color on my IIsi. And it doesn't run out of memory like it used to do before. Maybe the OS got better at managing bigger color palettes without swamping memory requirements...

I was driving home, listening to the radio. It was one of those 80's retro shows where they play the music of my youth. And occassionally the DJ says that this particular song was from the alternative scene, and it's just a normal song to me. Now, maybe it was just the radio stations I listened to back then, but the "alternative" music wasn't distinguised from other music, and maybe the problem is that the alternative songs being played aren't the cutting edge crap that's played now. :-)

Seriously, nowdays when a song is described as alternative, I'm predisposed to think I won't like it, when I liked the same kind of music 10 years ago (and although all music categories have changed in 10 years, they haven't changed *that* much). Similar situation with country music. These distinctions weren't really emphasized when I was younger, maybe I just didn't notice. Music is music, and I like what I like, no matter what kind of music it really is. Just because I listen to one particular artist doesn't mean that I'll like their genre or another similar artist, doesn't mean I won't like it either...

Something I noticed is that I get a lot of spam nowadays, when I used to get none. And that's probably because I've registered with too many web sites, so they've spreading my e-mail address around. It'd be nice to have the option of saying "this is the kind of advertisements that I'll accept". And although there are some consortiums that do that, it's not widespread enough. Just putting "[AD]" in the subject line isn't enough, as that means I can filter all ads or no ads.

There is legislation that I think was just passed to make sure that ads have the proper return address information. Once you have that then you might be able to tell the agency to not e-mail you stuff, much like you can do with a telephony agency. The problem being that it's easy to start an e-mail agency rather than a telephony agency, there's very little start up cost versus a few hundred thousand dollars. This makes it easier to never receive ads from the same agency, but still get lots of ads each day.

Another alternative is to use black lists or spam filtering services. This has the disadvantage that you may not get legitimate e-mail from some people. But I tend to throw away anything that looks like unsolicited ads so I may already be tossing away some e-mail from an high-school buddy. It's not an easy thing, since mail ads are protected, but that involves a certain cost for the sender. E-mail doesn't have that per e-mail cost, making it more attractive to send an ad to everyone and not try to target your audience like in regular mail.

Oh well. To me it's not an easy problem to solve. How to be able to get the ads that you want without getting a bunch of ads that you don't want?