Four for Friday

Last week I neglected to link to belicove.com, where I get these from. Mikal, I apologize.

This week's Four for Friday:

Q1 - Pay E-mail: Starting in April, AOL will charge companies about 1/4 of a cent to send e-mail messages to its users that will bypass the company's filters. E-mails from paying companies will go straight to a user's inbox, while e-mails from non-paying companies will go through a gauntlet of filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and links, even if they're not spam. How do you feel about this? Should companies like AOL be able to put policies like these into place because they protect its customers, or pay E-mail a bad idea because it doesn't account for bulk messages sent by not-for-profits or other legitimate groups who cannot afford to pay the price to bypass the system?

I don't think AOL should be stripping images and links in the first place. I appreciate the spam folder at Gmail, for example, and at home Outlook is getting better at diverting spam into my junk mail folder, but I don't want my ISP keeping messages from me; I want to decide what's legitimate. Putting them in a separate folder for me is helpful, but I don't want them to disappear before I've had a chance to decide what they are. Oops, I think I ranted on the wrong subject. I don't think pay e-mail is a good idea.

Q2 - Weather: Do you check your weather report on a daily basis? Regardless of how often you check, where do you go for information about the weather... newspaper, television, radio, or do you receive your weather reports via the Internet?

I usually listen for the weather report on the radio on my way to work. I sometimes check it online if I think the weather might get in the way of my plans or if I haven't heard a weather report in a couple of days.

Q3 - Sold: What's the last thing you sold (both personally and professionally)?

The last thing I sold personally was a book on half.com. The last thing I sold professionally is harder -- I don't work in sales right now, but my company does sell things. Probably books at the IU Bookstore in 1996.

Q4 - Footwear: How many different pairs of shoes do you own verses how many you actually wear on a regular basis?

I own about 40 pairs of shoes, and some of them are of course seasonal. I probably wear 25 of them on a regular basis throughout the year.