Thursday, November 16, 2006

There is a nice little thing that you can do with your Gmail address (only) that can help you find out what sites have been selling your gmail address. Kudos to PCBGuy and the post they made on Hedir Review here. But here is the post if you don’t want to traverse the net to get there:

When you give your email address to a website, you hope that they don’t sell or trade your address to a bunch of spammers. Well if they do, here is a simple way to see what sites are responsible for what particular piece of email. This requires you have a Gmail account.

If your Gmail login name was username@gmail.com and you went to samplesite.com to fill out a registration form, instead of just entering username@gmail.com as your email, enter it as username+samplesitecom@gmail.com instead. When Gmail sees a “+” in an email address, it uses all the characters to the left of the plus sign to know who to send it to. In this example it would still send it to username@gmail.com.

Now whats cool is if you search Gmail for username+samplesitecom, you will see all messages that were sent to that email address.

To see who is responsible for sending a specific message click the Show Details link and you will see the complete address.

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IQ Test

by Michael Sheehan on November 16, 2006

in General

A coworker sent me a link (and his results) to an IQ test online. It is called IQtest.dk and it claims to be a “Culture Fair” test. According to the site, the test “minimises the effect of cultural variables, such as language, mathematics, etc. The test is based on logic, but is furthermore designed to test learning capability, memory, innovative thinking and the ability to simultaneously address several problems.”

The test is Flash-based program that takes 40 minutes to run. The answers are not published anywhere. The questions all are around understanding patters as define in examples. You get 2 listed patterns of 3 images (e.g., 1-circle, 2-circles, 3-circles & 1-square, 2-squares, 3-squares) and then 1 incomplete pattern (e.g., 1-triangle, 2-triangles, [BLANK] ). You have to fill in the blank to complete the pattern.

The questions get increasingly difficult as you near the end of the test. I must admit, I was guessing towards the end. I finished my test with about 3 minutes to spare. It is important to do it without any distractions. (My wife called me at one point…but I still stayed within the time…grin!). What were my results? I captured a screen shot below:

Michael's IQ test results

So with a score of 130…according to the site, I’m borderline insane…I mean Mensa. What will this get me? Well, bragging rights over my coworker (but I’m sure that my other coworkers will beat me out)!

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