This vacation thing is upsetting all my routines, and I haven’t been crawling around the Salon blogspace as regularly. Sorry — will catch up with all of you soon. I’ve actually been trying to do some offline reading, including the latest Wired, in which I find this prediction from Marc Andreessen: “All of the technology underneath the Internet is hitting critical mass, at the exact point when people expect nothing. That’s a prescription for the next boom. But I don’t know when.”

As a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian I’m inclined to agree. At the height of the boom, in 1999, no one wanted to hear a voice of moderation suggesting that markets could head south. And today, too many depressed stockholders are so deep in their funks they can’t imagine a scenario in which technology could grow again. It will. Maybe it’s time we simply demanded that every technology-company CEO tattoo on his or her forehead “THIS IS A CYCLICAL BUSINESS.” Always has been. Just remember to sell the next time someone tells you “The business cycle has been rendered obsolete!” And to keep in mind that whether the stocks are up or down, your computer on the Internet can still do extraordinary things undreamed of less than a decade ago.

“All I want for Christmas is … an e-mail program that works,” revisited
Rafe Colburn notes how accustomed to the Microsoft monopoly we’ve become that people don’t expect more from the e-mail software that so many of us build our work lives around. Outlook has severe limitations. “The thing is, though, I don’t even see people clamoring for something better. That’s frustrating.” Some of us have been clamoring for years! My Eudora is much more stable under Windows 2000 and able to handle massive message loads that brought Win98 to its knees, so maybe the problem was with the OS and not the software. Still, Microsoft’s to blame either way. The main problem is that entire continents of end-user software get little attention, development or investment because Microsoft’s tanks moved in and leveled the market.

Today I did the kind of thing you only really have time to do on vacation — cleaned out the basement room and dragged two old monitors, one old CPU and an ancient scanner on down to the Computer Recycling Center in Santa Clara. It’s the third time I’ve had occasion to make this pilgrimage, and each time is eye-opening. I don’t spend a lot of time in the Valley, and traveling past those endless low-slung office parks with interchangeable names always leaves me in a kind of daze: The landscape is impenetrable. You just can’t tell from the outside whether any particular building harbors some amazing new technology on the verge of our lives — or just some dead-end venture-capital mistake.

While there are a lot more “space available” signs in the Valley today than two years ago, the pace of development remains intense. I drove down 237, which once was a quaint cut-over road through the South Bay wetlands and is now a mega-freeway racing past new malls and office complexes, and into the heart of Silicon Valley, past National Semiconductor and down a tiny side road, and there it was: in the back of a prefab warehouse, to the sound of a boombox blaring heavy metal, the folks at the CRC were heaping up mountains of old CPU boxes, stacks of monitors, dumpsters full of the Valley’s detritus. And I was hauling them my own little addition to the mounds.

So much money, energy and talent devoted to inventing, manufacturing and marketing the new stuff. And just one little ramshackle operation to deal with the discards.

Now would be a good time to re-read Jim Fisher’s definitive piece on “Poison PCs.”

.Net continues to be Microsoft’s ball of confusion. News.com reviews the company’s marketing blunders — in particular, the way it rolled out two largely separate initiatives, one aimed at developers and one aimed at consumers, and gave them both the “.Net” moniker. Not since the days of Java and Javascript have people been this confused.

John Robb asks for a tool that would put his most-visited sites into a Web ring and let him click from one to the next. Opera — my favorite browser, hands down — handles this nicely: You can tell it to open all the sites in a bookmark folder in a series of windows, then just click from one to the next.

There are many unpleasant new developments in the world of the Internet to bemoan, but the growing prevalence of spam filters is not one of them. We installed one of the best, SpamAssassin, here at Salon internally earlier this year, and it is a godsend. More recently we installed it on the mail server at the Well so users of Well e-mail accounts could benefit from SpamAssassin’s capabilities.

So why is online-news pundit Steve Outing complaining about spam filters? Outing suggests that spam filters will somehow censor content on the Net because people will avoid using the controversial words that “trigger” the filters. He writes from the perspective of an e-mail newsletter publisher who’s worried that his product is being improperly blocked by the filters, and singles out SpamAssassin as the main offender.

The trouble is, he misunderstands the way SpamAssassin is installed by people who know what they’re doing. One of the great things about it is that it doesn’t automatically delete spam; the way we use it, it tags incoming e-mails as probable spam. The user can then use his e-mail client to filter these probable spams into a separate mailbox for review and deletion. This is, in fact, the way the Well uses it too (Outing misreports this).

A bad spam filter can indeed raise the danger of “false positives” — filtering out e-mail that you wanted to receive. But in truth, there’s little danger of Outing’s newsletter, or anyone else’s, being invisibly trashed by SpamAssassin. You can “whitelist” mail from any recipient you want — basically telling the filter, “Don’t tag this person’s mail as spam, no matter what.”

SpamAssassin isn’t perfect, but it’s a step up the evolutionary ladder. It regularly sifts out hundreds of spams a day from my inbox. And after the first day’s fine-tuning, it hasn’t delivered a single “false positive.” I’m sorry to see it unfairly maligned.