In order to decease dependence on E-mail, starting today I will have an automated response channeling people to other routes of communication. Here is the template:

From: Roy Schestowitz – Autoreply Message

Re: %subject% – Message Received

%from%,

I am in the process of replacing E-mail correspondence with other, more effective & real-time means of communication. I still read my E-mail, but I do not read it regularly. I will collect messages about once a week, which makes manual filtering of spam a lot faster.

If you are willing to have a conversation with me, please consider creating/using an account in identi.ca < http://identi.ca/ > (or Twitter) where I can be contacted by handle @schestowitz. Alternatively, you can find me on IRC, under the Freenode network at channel #techrights

If the E-mail is urgent, please send mail to [redacted], which I will read more regularly. For an explanation of why I prefer to phase my E-mail accounts out, see < http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html >

E-mail is still necessary for management of online accounts and sometimes passing of files (there are other means for that too). Due to high volumes of spam & phishing, E-mail is also dangerous. I wrote a great deal about E-mail since 2004. 6 years later I’m giving up.

or no apparent reason, I rarely discuss Techrights in my personal Web site. This is not intentional.

The thing is, Techrights is the reason I hardly ever update schestowitz.com anymore. I spend a high number of hours sharing my thoughts over at Techrights, so if you are already subscribed to my personal blog, please consider subscribing to Techrights.org too. It mostly covers software and ethics.

On a separate note, Google has been looking to hire me recently (they do this with a lot of people and they occasionally contact me too), but I am torn between my obligations to serve the public interest and someone’s private interest.

What do you think? Is Google not evil? About 90% of my writings about Google are positive; the rest are not.

I still need to sort out the many photos and upload them at some stage.

One of my favourite sites these days is the Internet Archive, which contains a vast amount of video (films too) which is free to use and to share. Here is one example, “RetroVision Theater Presents The Frank Sinatra Show”

PART from this old page about my family, almost everything is private (ancestry pages too). The next week I will be spending with my mother (shown in the picture above), which is a rare opportunity to take some time off the Internet.

As friends of mine know, I left my parents’ house at the age of 18 and have since then lived on my own, expanding my areas of interest, holding about half a dozen jobs (almost a dozen in total including teenage years), and earning a Ph.D. degree. A lot of my accomplishments I owe to family and friends, but rarely does a person remember to acknowledge this.

So, just before I sign off for several days I wanted to make this post and thank those whom I grew up with. If you too sometimes neglect to thank someone, the summer vacation is a good time to make up for it.

Over the past 3 months I’ve spent close to 50 hours listening to skeptics’ shows and other interesting methods of debunking lies. The poppa of skeptics, James Randi, is certainly the best of all. Here is his very recent debunking of nonsense from the mainstream press.