January 2020 – Something Odd!

Did E.T. come to Ireland?

I don’t remember E.T. making a big impression on my life in 1982. I never saw the movie back then, and a couple of years ago watched half of it before falling asleep in front of the telly. I guess you had to be there when it was first released?

Ireland in the 1980s was a country in recession. I certainly knew nobody with a 2600 console so we were spared the abomination that was the official game of the movie. While we had some sort of Pong clone in the early ’80s we moved away to “proper” computers like the Speccy and C64 after that.

Nonetheless, it was an important game. It helped bring about the collapse of Atari and the video game market in the US!

99% Invisible just featured an episode by podcast Sidedoor about E.T. The Videogame and it’s enthralling. You can hear all about how bad it was, the story of it’s development from game developer Howard Scott Warshaw, and finally to his reaction that people are still obsessed with the game all these years later.

Opt-Out of all the spam!

I’ve been getting a ton of CBD expo spam for months. Spamassassin picks up most of it, and Gmail collects the rest in the Spam folder.

However, today one got through so I scrolled down to the unsub link and saw it was sendgrid. I recognise them from previously reporting spam. I have no idea if it made a difference but I like to think it did.

So, despite the prevailing advice that you don’t unsubscribe from spam I clicked unsubscribe. I opted-out of that email, and then I saw the greyed out “View Opt Out Preferences” button.

That’s not exactly the friendliest thing to do, making it look like it isn’t active but I clicked on it and discovered a treasure trove!

This spammer has been busy, but Sendgrid allows you to unsubscribe from them all in one click.

“But Donncha, now the spammer knows your email is real!”

Yeah, it’s been inundated with spam for years already. I’m planning on shutting it down sooner or later anyway because I’ve moved most of my logins to service specific email aliases for easy tracking of spam sources. It’s paid off a couple of times too.

RIP Marian Finucane

Veteran Irish broadcaster, Marian Finucane died suddenly this morning. She was only 69.

I rarely listened to her during the week but I did catch her sometimes on her weekend show in the last few years.

Time marches ever on but with the passing of Gaybo, Niall Toibin, and now Marian Ireland is saying goodbye to voices and faces that generations knew well.

There are still podcasts of her show on the RTÉ website but you’ll have to go back to the start of December as Brendan O’Connor presented the show for the last few weeks.