I got a letter recently from the Stanford Alumni Association, encouraging me to join. In addition to telling me what activities my membership would support, and what services I will enjoy, the envelope contained a letter telling me how the SAA was founded. Apparently, members the class of 1892, Stanford’s first graduating class, “ponied up $1.25—a considerable sum back then—to support ongoing contact with their fellow grads.” These days, the Alumni Association has an annual membership fee of $75, or $440 for a lifetime membership.

A quick Google search finds The Inflation Calculator, which informs me that $1.25 in 1892 dollars is worth $24.60 today. So, at $75, it seems like the price has gone up a bit. Not to mention the fact that I’m not particularly interested in any of the member services listed in the letter. Everything I care about the Stanford Alumni Association providing seems to be available free on their Web site. I suppose paying for membership would help support those services, but the price still seems a little steep.

To be fair, the inflation calculation above is based on the CPI, which is only one measure of relative value. EH.net tells me that $1.25 in 1892 dollars could be worth anywhere from $22.40 to $904 today, depending on your choice of metric. So perhaps the Alumni Association is a steal after all. I’m still not planning to join.

Since setting up this weblog, I’ve gotten a fair bit of comment spam here and there. It used to be pretty harmless: my entry about Adobe Photoshop Elements got an ad for someone’s book on Photoshop. Delete and move on; easy to identify and less frequent than people who accidentally post their comment or trackback multiple times. Also, easier to understand than the comments in Norwegian, Korean or German.

Recently, though, I’ve started getting comment spam of a more insidious nature:

Very quiet in this thread lately. More comments please.

I got this one twice:

here is a free tip:
if you don’t know what you are talking about don’t post online.
I’m sorry I don’t buy what you said but it’s to cheap.

The trouble with these comments is that they sound reasonable. In context, they’re a little odd, but people are odd sometimes. Maybe it’s just coincidence that the author’s URLs link to sites trying to sell something. Regardless, they felt like spam to me, so I deleted them. My weblog, my rules, right?

I’m not sure what I’ll do if it gets worse, though. I don’t want to spend much time policing my weblog, and I don’t think anyone sells spam filters for Movable Type. I could implement some sort of registration system, although that’s likely to discourage one-time commentors, which I don’t want to do. I could turn off comments entirely, although that would probably discourage them even more…

We got sample ballots in the mail yesterday for the November 4th elections. Didn’t we just have one of these? I wonder if the county deliberately waited until after Tuesday’s election to mail these out—I’m pretty sure they usually send them out more than a month in advance. I expect it would have caused some serious voter confusion to receive information about a November 4th election before the October 7th election. Especially for folks like me who didn’t know we had two elections this fall.

Of course, this time around the ballot items are less newsworthy; I get to vote on a community college board members and a hospital district bond. Important, possibly, but they aren’t going to make the front page of the New York Times. Maybe I’ll get another sticker, though. I got my first “I Voted” sticker last week.