The Real Geek's Blog. Randy Charles Morin blogs for the sake of blogging.
|
|
NYTimes: For the last two weeks, Microsoft has been in talks to buy a private Silicon Valley company, a move that underscores just how eager Microsoft is to catch up with Google, the search and advertising giant. The company that Microsoft has pursued is controversial: Claria, an adware marketer formerly called Gator, and best known for its pop-up ads and software that tracks people visiting Web sites. The Gator adware has frequently been denounced by privacy advocates for its intrusiveness.
Randy: The original source of this story for me was Waxy.org. They linked to a New York Times article. That link required me to log-in. So, I jumped over to kbSearch and found the same link via Moreover that doesn't require me to log-in. Sometimes, it's not who you link to, but how you link to them.
FYI
I have requested that my attorney file suit against you and your obvious infringements.
Best of luck.
Robert Scoble: Dave Winer posted this morning that he's under a denial-of-service attack.
getinternetexplorer.com: Tabbed Browsing - Screw that. It will only confuse basic users, so instead of making it an option, we just didn't implement it at all. Oh wait... there goes our browser market share. Our next release will have tabs.
Jeremy Roenick: We're going to try to make it better for everybody, period, end of subject. And if you don't realize that, then don't come.We don't want you at the rink, we don't want you in the stadium, we don't want you to watch hockey.
Jeremy Roenick: Everybody out there who calls us spoiled because we play 'a game,' they can all kiss my (expletive).
Randy: Jeremy wants the fan who think the players are spoiled to kiss his ass and not to come back to the rink. OK! What a spoiled brat.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: What about Google? [cut] If anyone infringes, it's Google: The company caches millions of Web pages without permission.
Randy: I guess, if you are stupid, then you'll believe that somehow the Grokster decision makes Google illegal. What the author either fails to point out or simply misses (the article is not publicly available), is that Google provides Webmasters with many simple ways of removing their content from the Google index. You can use robot.txt files, HTML meta headers and likely more that I'm just not aware of. Cory does not mention this either when quoting and I'm pretty certain Cory would be aware of this. Of course, Cory has an agenda. Not providing safeguards against the copyright violation was specifically mentionned in the Supreme Court decision. Since Google does this, they are very very safe.
Gmail Team: using certain browser extensions that change the behavior of a website (Greasemonkey, a popular Firefox extension, often interferes with Gmail. We suggest disabling Greasemonkey to use Gmail without any issues.)
Google Earth: Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.
http://earth.google.com/ - Download
Randy: It's free!
Warning: Do not download it and start playing with it tonight. Or, if you can't resist, then send an email to your boss telling him right now, that you were up all night and won't be into work in the morning.
NewScientist: A voice-operated computer assistant is set to be used in space for the first time on Monday – its operators hope it proves more reliable than "HAL", the treacherous speaking computer in the movie 2001.
Thanks Google!
Cory Doctorow: This decision won’t kill P2P sharing.
Randy: Agree. In fact, this is good for P2P, because the Supreme Court drew a line in the sand, so we know where to go from here.
Cory Doctorow: Engineering students write P2P software in 11 lines of code as class assignments.
Randy: Those must be very long lines of code.
Cory Doctorow: Most Internet users use file-sharing software.
Randy: Untrue.
Cory Doctorow: But what today’s decision will kill is American innovation.
Randy: Engineering students write P2P software in 11 lines of code, but law students can't figure out how to stand on the right side of a line in the sand.
P2PNet.net: The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) had settled with iMesh for $4.1 million. [cut] But it's now apparent the new, corporate iMesh had merely been lurking quietly, waiting for events centering on Grokster v MGM to resolve. With that in hand, it today announced, “a fully authorized P2P business model and the upcoming launch of the newly configured iMesh” supporting Windows Media Player 10. To further confirm its absorption into the corporate fold, Robert Summer, ex-president of Sony Music International and president of RCA Records, is the new executive chairman.
Randy: First sue them out of existence, then steal their business model.
News.com.au: Scientists have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans. US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.
FFM: If Grokster (or future file-sharing technologies) are not promoted as tools for stealing content, and don't go out of their way to invite content theft, then they are protected by this ruling. This is in addition to the earlier protections provided by the Sony case. We have more protections now than we did before.
It's been a long-time since I got one of these. Thought I'd share. I found it very amusing. I XXXed the sender's business names, as to avoid giving them any Google juice or hits whatsoever, but it's pretty easy to figure out who it is.
Dear Mr. Morin:
We are counsel to XXX.
XXX is a global internet communications and educational company that offers a variety of services, including but not limited to, educational resources for children and search engines which provide services to hundreds of thousand Internet users daily.
XXX is the owner of XXX. As you know, XXX is a search engine tailored to children with the goal of providing safe and efficient search results.
XXX has recently become aware of your usage of “XXX” as a site name. Your site, “kbcafe” lists the name “XXX” on the top of your page. “kbcafe” should immediately remove the reference to “XXX” as the title on its title page or any other page. As you are aware, you are in no manner affiliated with XXX, nor does your website have any association with XXX Your usage of XXX in this manner is misleading, misrepresentative of your website and potentially dangerous to children as one may mistakenly believe your website is sponsored by, or approved in some way by XXX. Please cease and desist immediately.
Furthermore, by your own admonition, it is obvious that you are aware that you are gaining a benefit from your use of my client’s name:
You wrote in a blog: “Today is the tenth day of existence of kbSearch and already I'm getting thousands of hits per day. I saw a few people even subscribed to the result feeds. But even better, I'm getting a lot of referrers, mostly in tag-space and much of it in French and Japanese (weird). Thanks!”.
Accordingly, on XXXs’ behalf, we request your written assurances no later than June 30, 2005 that you will immediately remove and permanently refrain from all references to “kbsearch” or any derivation thereof on your websites – as a title or otherwise.
If we do not hear from you by the date stated above, XXX may take appropriate legal action against you without further notice.
Very truly yours,
XXX
Scotusblog: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that developers of software violate federal copyright law when they provide computer users with the means to share music and movie files downloaded from the internet.
Randy: The above quote was on Dave's blog. Here's the full, more proper quote.
Scotusblog: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that developers of software violate federal copyright law when they provide computer users with the means to share music and movie files downloaded from the internet, at least when the software companies take "affirmative steps to foster infringement."
Randy: I often partially quote sentences and paragraphs. I remove the verbose parts, while preserving the meaning. Is this the new media?
Update: Looks like the entire blogosphere is doing the same as Dave. It's funny how the blogosphere will gang up against conventional media when they bend the truth, but are prepared to do the same.
Brock Read: A team of students at the University of Texas at Austin is set to release a software tool designed to turn any Internet-connected computer into a TV station.
Randy: Long before podcasting, there was swarmcasting. Long live Opencola!
I noticed today that Shel Israel quotes me in his upcoming book (chapter 9) called Naked Conversations. The book, still in progress, is available online via the Naked Conversations blog. The quote comes from the Naked Conversations blog where Shel asked the blogosphere who shouldn't blog and I responded jokingly "Sadam Hussein". I notice that Shel is quoting from a wide range of bloggers and linking to their blogs. Clever!
http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2005/06/ch_9thorns_in_t.html
That Obi-Wan Kenobi and Batman were both schooled by Darkman?
TV listings, movie listings, movie trailers.
I started a new blog, where I'll continue my discussion on what I'm doing with Adwords/Adsense and how it's really starting to pay dividends.
It's been 24hrs since my home phone worked. It took almost 24hrs before Bell picked up our service call. My wife was on hold for an hour last night. They can't tell me why the service isn't working and they won't send a technician until Monday.
Listing of top search phrases entered in a search engine that result in a click-thru to my domain.
- myspace layouts
- parishilton
- catfish noodling
- bangbus
- six flags commercial
- yahoo photo mail
- wasaga beach camping
- msn myspace
- rmail
- pimpmypage
- six flags tv commercial
- david koch missing
- bla trojan horse
- sory.exe
- wix tutorial
- buggatti
- myspace editor
- filipino friendster
- layouts for myspace
- search engine
- buggatti veyron
- slime basketball
- javascript exceptions
- sports by brook
- base64 encoding
- angelina jolie nackt
- my space layouts
- paris hilton commercial
- hot chics
- paris hilton new commercial
C2: JimCoplien wrote the first Organizational Patterns, and is running a project at http://i44pc48.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/cgi-bin/OrgPatterns to collect and organize them.
Randy: My favorite are, of course, the anti-Patterns.
Elle Cayabyab: In an effort to achieve Bill Gates' promise to end spam by 2006, Microsoft sent a message to several large ISPs saying that any e-mails sent to its Hotmail and MSN services without a Sender ID would automatically be marked as spam. [cut] With technologies such as Yahoo's open-sourced DomainKeys system emerging as a competing verification scheme, e-mail authentication may not remain optional for much longer.
Randy: Is this the end of SPAM? I think not and hope so!
BetaNews: Google on Thursday launched its latest mobile search effort that links users to sites that have been designed specially for smaller screens. To enable such a feature, Google has crawled the Web for pages built using XHTML and compiled a separate index from its standard search engine.
Randy: Hmmm! A reason to convert your Website to XHTML?
I find a lot of people have a hard time getting there message out into the blogosphere. The thing is, it's not really that hard. Here's five seven ways of getting me or for that matter any bloggers attention.
- Send me an email. Simple.
- Include my name (Randy Charles Morin) in a blog entry.
- Include my blog name (iBLOGthere4iM) in a blog entry.
- Include one of my x-company names (Lemontonic) in a blog entry.
- Include one of my existing product names (Rmail) in a blog entry.
- Post a comment on one of my blogs.
- Link to one of my blog entries.
If you do, then it's pretty much a garantee I'll read it and repost it to one of my blogs, most likely my linkblog.
Today, I got my reading list (blogroll) down to 204 feeds. I was up over 500 a few days ago, but purged most of the garbage.
Bobby Henderson: You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s.
RedFlagDeals: Starting tomorrow (June 23rd), tickets are FREE through TicketMaster.ca as of 10am, but there’s a limit of two per person and you have to answer a skill-testing question first. The [cut] answer is: d) all of the above.
http://www.redflagdeals.com/deals/main.php/weblog/tbp_jun_22_live_aid/
I wouldn't call it a limitation, I'd call it a feature.
Hublog: A Greasemonkey user script that prefetches pages linked from Google ads, so that they load faster when you decide to look at them: google_ad_prefetch.user.js.
Randy: Let me point out that this is definately click fraud. Further, this is easily detected and Google could code around it. Multiple near simultaneous hits from the same session over and over, with no misses. No threat to Google, but still, it's click fraud.
Tony Perkins: AlwaysOn and Technorati are pleased to present the first annual "Open Media 100," the power list of bloggers, social networkers, tool smiths, and investors leading the Open Media Revolution.
Randy: Congrats to everybody! And you could easily add Tony Perkins and David Sifry.
Bram Cohen: First of all, I'd like to clarify that Avalanche is vaporware.
Today, I noticed that I'm using 325MB of my 2318MB limit on Google. About half of my used storage is the 10k SPAMs I receive on a month basis. If I flushed the SPAM folder, I'd have more than 2GB of room. I've been using Gmail almost exclusively for over a year and the empty space in my Gmail storage increased from 1GB to over 2GB. I even email myself large (10-100KB) code drops on a weekly basis. And since the limit is increasing, my current usage pattern could never fill this space. I guess the solution is to start sending myself high-res digital pictures.
More Star Wars than Star Wars? Check out this movie trailer.
Terry Moran: Scott, is the insurgency in Iraq in its 'last throes'?
Scott McClellan: blah, blah, blah.
Terry Moran: But the insurgency is in its last throes?
Scott McClellan: blah, blah, blah.
Terry Moran: But they're killing more Americans, they're killing more Iraqis. That's the last throes?
Scott McClellan: blah, blah, blah.
Terry Moran: Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes?
Scott McClellan: blah, blah, blah.
Terry Moran: What's the evidence on the ground that it's being extinguished?
Scott McClellan: blah, blah, blah.
Terry Moran: Well, I'm just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency.
Scott McClellan: blah, blah, blah.
Terry Moran: Yes. Is there any idea how long a 'last throe' lasts for?
PR: If the sale of the existing online dating business cannot be completed, the Company will not seek to obtain additional or alternative financial support from shareholders or others to support the online dating business. The online dating business will be suspended while alternative buyers are approached.
Translation: We're screwing our sharedholders. If the sharedholders try to stop us, then we'll just run the company into the ground.
Download Cory's new book.
Nathan Weinberg: Putting the name of a famous person in a Google search box, followed by “dob” gives you a result like this one for Tom Hanks.
Mini-Microsoft: A curve, though? Actually, it's more like three buckets than a curve: bucket 4.0 (A! Sweet!), bucket 3.5 (B. Well, okay), and bucket 3.0 (C! Dang!). I don't bother considering the gold star (4.5) and the platinum star (5.0). And I don't want to bring up 2.5 because I'll get side-tracked.
microsofts-30-or-how-i-learned-to-stop.html
Randy: I'm always amazed how employers like to make the workplace into high school. A grade point average with a bell curve feel? Why not just tell the employee how he's doing, how he can succeed, what you like and where he can improve?
Mark Fletcher: There's been a small rash (ouch, you should see a doctor about that...rimshot) of press coverage about the new stealth web start-up 24 Hour Laundry. Who knows what they do, but whatever it is, they're doing it wrong. Here's the thing, stealth mode for a web start-up is the kiss of death.
This last week, I travelled to Victoria and got to experience the Internet away from my usual places. Here are my notes.
- The hotel had high-speed wired access.
- Another downtown hotel had wireless ($10/hr).
- The place of business, had wired and wireless, but both were disabled. They enabled wireless for me.
- The Victoria airport had wireless, but it didn't seem to work.
- The Vancouver airport had wireless ($8/hr).
Dan Ravicher: If they do have rights and a license is needed, then the term in the license to Microsoft's rights that requires attribution by the licensee of all of its downstream licenses is in fact not compatible with the GPL, just like the original BSD license, which required a similar attribution, is not GPL-compliant.
st3v3p: There is so much obfuscation going on with people who are even supposedly in our camp like OSI and it is really simple either you are in with GPL or you are out. If you are out fare ye well but you are not with us and you are apt to fail. Businesses and the rest of us know what free means and what the economic implications of it are.
Randy: It would seem to me, that GPL is not open anymore, it's restrictive.
I know someone looking for a Product Designer to work out of Kingston, ON. If you are interested, then please email me your resume.
REQs: 3-5 yrs building Web-based applications (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and a degree.
Inside Google: Google has now made its site targeted ads, which appear on specific websites and are sold based on page impressions, available to all AdWords buyers.
I'm spending all this afternoon walking around downtown Victoria. I ate at Milestones am currently at Belleville Park having a pint and WiFi ($10/d). I gotta admit the weather in Victoria is amazing. They keep telling me it's raining, but I've never seen it rain. I noticed a lot of the guys have goatees. This might explain Tim Bray (not a goatee, but WTF is that close).
Defamer: The clever folks at Accolo [cut] have found lost footage from Paris Hilton’s infamous burger-fellating ad and cobbled together a far sexier version.
Dave Winer: Three years ago today I quit smoking.
The Sunday Times: The startling figures emerge from studies into toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by almost all the country’s feline population. They show that half of Britain’s human population carry the parasite in their brains, and that infected people may undergo slow but crucial changes in their behaviour. Infected men, suggests one new study, tend to become more aggressive, scruffy, antisocial and are less attractive. Women, on the other hand, appear to exhibit the “sex kitten” effect, becoming less trustworthy, more desirable, fun- loving and possibly more promiscuous.
Randy: Funny, I read that sentence over and over and all I understood was "cats make woman more promiscuous".
Linking Matters: Using 'hidden links' is one of the oldest methods of search engine spam so you wouldn't expect to see them on a respected news site like the Financial times online, (FT.com).
Randy: Anybody wanna bet Google doesn't ban FT.com like they did Wordpress?
Update: FT removed the whitening and now exposes these partner links to the end-user.
This is the best piece of technology on the planet. I'm on my third Linksys router. The first was non-wireless, which I then gave to my brother and sister who still happily use it today. I upgraded to the wireless model two years ago. After it fried this weekend, I bought another. I didn't have to run the setup. I just swapped the old one with the new one and it worked. Out-of-the-box. The only required step, is a change of admin passwords, away from the default.
Funny, is Cory, I think.
When I got home earlier today, my broadband router died. It was a Linksys Wireless-G router, that served me for exactly two years (I bought it June 10th 2003). Much appreciated. I'll try to resurrect her, but I'm not holding my breath. This, of course, means that R|mail is down, it runs in my basement, which currently has not Internet access.
Update: iM now connected to an alternate wireless connection in my neighbourhood. Gotta love WiFi.
Update II: I was unable to resurrect my Linksys. Looks like I'm headed to BestBuy this afternoon. But first, the kids want to watch Sharkboy and Lavagirl.
...for when I lose the cheapness and buy a $1 pair of earphones.
Microsoft's Channel9 Website is quite funny. I subscribed to the RSS feed earlier this week. Every thread is the same. A Microsoft guy announces a new Microsoft thingy, then a handful of Microsoft bashers jump in telling everybody why this product is really stupid (example). I have to wonder what kind of life the trolls are living.CNN: An 18-year-old student tossed a homemade bomb into a high school classroom in southern Japan on Friday, injuring 58 teenagers when the gunpowder-filled jar exploded and sprayed shards of glass near the teacher's desk, officials said.
Check out the Google flat link ads at the top of the blog. Very cool! Takes minimal space and I had good CPMs on the square link ads. I'll report back in a week on the performance of these flat link ads.
GoodMorning Silicon Valley: "John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. No argument, it was true, they were. Well, even though the vast majority of people have never heard of Steve [Gillmor] or myself, we're more influential than John Lennon or Bob Dylan ever were. We're media hackers." -- Blogger Dave Winer's last words before his ego exploded.
Impress your friends. You've been major slasdot'ed.
SI: Villecco went first, and she knocked her 9-iron tee shot into the hole on the downhill 115-yard third hole at Chenango Valley State Park Golf Course. The shot landed just short of the green, rolled toward the hole and banked in off the pin. [cut] Once the celebration subsided, it was MacDonald's turn to hit. "The glory was all over. I got up there and didn't think anything about it," said McDonald, who hit a 7-iron and then stared again in disbelief. "I just swatted the ball, down it went, bounced twice, hit the pin and went in. We just couldn't believe it."
For the last few hours, I have been unable to access Gmail from IE. When I navigate to Gmail, I'm presented with a blank screen. It seems to work fine on Firefox. Anybody else experiencing similar?
Update: It's working again on IE.
PCMag: Microsoft late Wednesday rolled out an updated version of its MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search, complete with tabbed browsing, designed to add another level of simplification while browsing the Web via Internet Explorer.
Randy: Downloading...
Review: It's OK! Missing one key feature. When you have one tab open, then the tab bar should disappear; waste of real estate.
Update: Since I installed the toolbar, I can no longer access Gmail on IE. I can access Gmail on Firefox. This may or may not be related to installing the toolbar.
Update: I confirmed these two issues are unrelated. It would seem that Gmail is broken on IE right now, or at least my Gmail account. I'm still able to use Firefox to access Gmail.
Reuters: Former Soviet international Valeri Kharlamov [cut] [was] elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame Wednesday. Kharlamov, killed in a car accident in 1981, never got the opportunity to play in the National Hockey League but left his mark on the game in 11 consecutive world and European championships helping the Soviet Union to eight gold medals.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050608/sp_nm/nhl_fame_dc_1
Randy: Kharlamov is best known as the person maimed by Bobby Clarke in the 1972 series.
It didn't take long, but Google's success, like Microsoft's beforehand, is turning righteous geekoids against them.
Although I'm part of the Podcast Specification Working Group, I have never actually made my own podcast. My 7-yr old daughter has.
Apple User: How am I gonna face all those PC nerds I've been flaming for years?
Mark Evans: Cogeco Cable has launched its telephony service today.
Randy: I foresee a future where DSL stands for Dark Subscriber Lines.
Tonight, I tried to donate most of my Adsense earnings to Sick Kids. I wanted to donate $37.50. I filled out a lot of information and clicked submit.
We were unable to complete the requested action.
I tried re-entering the information, same error. How come software just doesn't work? I wonder how many donations they lose? Third time was a charm. I just hope they don't ding my Visa for $112.50. Receipt.
Video of car thieves stealing bait cars.
Chris Anderson: Three reasons why I don't use a Mac:
- Somebody at Wired should know what 97% of the country has to put up with.
- etc...
My sister gave me one as a present for being in her wedding party. I kept it on my person for years until the al-Qaeda took it away from me. My first plane flight after 9/11 got the knife confiscated.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004YVB2/kbcafe
Warning for Oleg: Do not click and buy! Please!
| a Cowboy You scored 4 Honor, 5 Justice, 10 Adventure, and 4 Individuality! |
| Well pardner, the thing that drives you is a sense of adventure. You're willing to play by the rules, but only so long as you've got open territory to cover and new frontiers to explore. You don't need much and you don't ask much.
Strap on your six gun and wear your Stetson proud. I think you'll do just fine |
 |
My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
|
| Link: The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test written by fluffy71 on Ok Cupid |
Telegraph: It's hard to know which is the more shocking: the $70billion cost of the story so far in America, or the finding that only 42 cents in every dollar spent by the companies reaches the successful claimants.
http://money.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/06/04/ccom04.xml
If I am elected, my pope name will be:
Pope Unspeakable Harold III |
huhcorp: Our female staff members are all hot, so, even if there's nothing to meet about, we'll sit and flirt with them, and charge you for the time. [cut] Our main consulting strategy is to convince clients that we do stuff they can't do themselves, and that we deserve lots of money for it. [cut] Our marketing solutions are newer than anyone else's, and they sound better because we give them cool titles like "Global Awareness Paradigms," and "Market Consciousness Philosophies," and "Creative Product Re-development Support." [cut] Client satisfaction is always our first priority. Well...actually...maybe something like third or fourth. But we really do take care of our clients. More or less, anyway. [cut] Our CEO is rarely in his office, and all female team members are expected to sleep with him, or at least pretend like they want to.
ContagiousMedia: Ever worry about your wife cheating? Want to know where your daughter is late at night? Need to know when your girlfriend's temperature is rising? [cut] These panties can give you her location, and even her temperature and heart rate, and she will never even know it's there! [cut] forget-me-not panties have built-in GPS and unique sensor technology giving you the forget-me-not advantage.
DDI: Basically, you play DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]. [cut] When you do poorly, it shoots you in the face with flamethrowers. Yes, you, as in your actual corporeal body. And yes, flamethrowers, like the kind that are on fire.
http://interpretivearson.com/ddi/
Randy: I hope nobody minds if I skip this dance party.
LukeW: As Google and Yahoo! continue their volley of product offerings, I thought it would be useful to compare the interface design solutions each company employed to solve similar user needs.
Randy: Not much real depth of comparison, just one liners, but the way the author laid it out makes it easy to judge for oneself.
I'm considering buying this for my son. He told me the other day that he likes Star Wars even more than Batman. That was quite a statement for a five yr old that sleeps with a black cape and a pointy eared mask. By the way, if you click thru to the Amazon site, there's a pretty good flash demo.
Warning for Oleg: Don't click on this link and buy it. I will make money, if you do.
Too funny! Had to share.
I found the following reference to kbSearch by purprin at del.icio.us...
複数の検索サイトを股にかけるマルチ検索ポータル
Using Babel Fish, I translated it to...
The multiple search portal which puts the plural search sights on the crotch.
Intel PR: At its Worldwide Developer Conference today, Apple® announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh® computers using Intel® microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007.
Further to the debate about RSS Ripoffs, the concept has been termed Gutenbomb. Andy Baio, of Waxy.org, has thrown Lockergnome's Encyclopedia into the mix.
Randy Charles Morin
from this day forward you will also be known as
Þorvald the Mad
I found Gmail extremely quick for processing emails. Then, I discovered Gmail keyboard shortcuts. Now, I find Gmail extremendously quick for processing emails.
http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&hl=en&answer=6594
Citi bank offers a 1-7% cashback credit card with no annual fee. I don't think this is available to CDNians.
We'd all like to announce that Apple said 'yes' to Intel's proposal of marriage. WTF? This changes everything. The losers are IBM (the divorce), Motorola (the child) and M$FT (the other woman).
BSA: As an engineer like you, Dilbert was trained to think through the consequences of an action. He grasps the connection between protection of intellectual property and the motivation to innovate and create.
Reports around the blogosphere indicate that Gmail had an outage this weekend. I was rarely connected and thus didn't notice.
http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/06/05/gmail-goes-down/
detnews: EBay Inc., the world's largest Internet auctioneer, agreed to buy comparison-shopping site Shopping.com for about $620 million in cash, its largest acquisition in more than 2 1/2 years.
http://ebayinvestor.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2005/06/internet_giant_.html
Friday, I sold my iPod to my sister for $150 CDN. So, iM official unk001 today. I found I listened to most of the podcast within reach of a computer. All I really needed was earphones.
Bookmarked: Dave Winer on FeedBurner and more.
b3ta: Wired magazine once defined the onosecond as the time between hitting send and realising that you really didn't mean to send that to your granny.
Today, my Alexa traffic rank is 8,888. I suspect that because I've mentionned the Alexa toolbar on this blog a couple of times, that my stats are likely a little exaggerated.
Amazon is selling Golf for Women magazine for $8.49 ($1.42/issue). Plus you get $5 off your next Amazon purchase. Total price is $3.49 ($0.58/issue).
Really! I'm serious! Black and Decker sells a cordless broom. Question? Where do I plug the cord into my regular old broom?
I thought it might be interesting to see how the big five Web 2.0 startups are doing? Anybody want to suggest other Web 2.0 startups? These stats are compiled from Alexa toolbar users only. Download it, if you want a voice.
WashingtonPost: After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir." "Mark Felt," he said.
Randy: I don't watch all that many movies, but maybe, I'll rent All the President's Men, if it's even available.
Wow, Andy's really linking to some great shit today. Subscribed.
Shagster: Want to see who else is on their list to find out who you've shagged by association.
Meetro is the new online meeting place that lets you find friends and new people, based on wherever you are when you're using Meetro.
Wendel: We've launched! Three cheers to the entire team for their herculean+ effort. We're off to get shitfaced. See you cats in the morning.
Randy: Subscribed.
Server Maintenance In Progress
Randy: They're back. Who does server maintenance in the middle of the day Wednesday?
Spamusement: Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!
Chris Anderson: One of the most frequent mistakes people make about the Long Tail is to assume that things that don't sell well are "not as good" as things that do sell well. Or, to put it another way, they assume that the Long Tail is full of crap.
Randy: The long tail is mostly crap, with scattered gems. MHO.
David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Dave Winer and Dina Mehta. Something to listen to later today.
Here's another security features in XP SP2. In order to stop SearchURL hijacking, they have added a provider key and that provider key is now passed to MSN, not the actual SearchURL. Depending on the value, M$FT redirects to Google, Lycos, MSN, Yahoo! or whomever they decide owns that key. This means, I'm locked out. I can't redirect to my own search engine. Robert Scoble, if you are listening, or for that matter anybody at M$FT, how do I get on this provider list?