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I will be away until July 8th. No new posts from now till then. Just wanted anyone who poped in to know so they would not have to waste any online time. Thanks for dropping by and see you (hopefully) on July 8th.
Skip at 5:21 AM
For anyone who was or is a nerd Paul Graham has a long article called 'Why nerds are unpopular'. There are some interesting points made and it may hit a responsive chord in anyone who might find themselves at my page here. If you aren't nerdy enough to appreciate it he also has a few items about spam. Yesterday Bill Gates roasted spam. Gates wrote, "Spam is so significant a problem that it threatens to undo much of the good that e-mail has achieved". Hear Hear. It's about time he spent some of his money to fix some of the problems he had a hand in abetting.
Skip at 4:50 AM
Ran across the link to Absolutely Free Hosting. I was taken back by the large number of listings there of providers that are still offering free hosting. Admittedly most will only do this with banner ads and/or pop up ads. There is almost always a price tag on FREE. But still, even with the internet crash and tight market for any money paying banner ads these places still exist. I didn't check out all the listing there but I did check out a few and they seemed to be live ones. A couple of the ones that say 'no ads' didn't work or put up a page that they were not operating at this time. There are some names everyone recognizes like Geocities. Most of them I had never heard of before. I'll keep this link around for the rainy day when I have no money.
Skip at 5:13 AM
Another contender for content. If you can't think of anything to post on a Tuesday link to This-or-that.org. As they put it on their site:
"The way it all works is simple...each Tuesday, they ask ten questions, in this-or-that format, as in *Coke or Pepsi?* You then post your answers in your own weblog, and leave the link in the comments. If you don't have a blog, then just post the answers in the comments. Whatever."
Just thought I'd point it out. Never know when the brain will go dead and I need something like this.
If you need some extra in Blogshares check out the offer from Geek News Central. Anyone who blogrolls them is offered a $25,000 transfer.
Skip at 8:06 PM
For a little bit of fun on a Friday try your skill (luck?) at Getting Clippy. Anyone who has encountered Micosoft Office products has probably met Clippy. If you have, then you will probalby apprecite being able to trow various office supplies at him. Sting him with those rubber bands!
After, check out Blogpulse where you can see a list of the key phrases, key people, and the top links culled from each days blogs. They have the last ten days worth there. These seem to be mostly American blogs but you can get a feel for what people are spending time musing about. It is another neat way to find new blogs when you tire of these web rings.
Skip at 5:58 AM
My favorite topic of SPAM was the subject in an MIT Technology Review article. It is an interesting and informative article about spammers, how spammers operate, and spam fighting. The article reviews how products like Brightmail, Spam Assassin, and Spam Net work. There is also a section on Bayesian filters. I'm hooked on Bayesian filters and I'm glad to see the article point out that the future of spam blocking belongs to things like these filters.
Skip at 5:12 AM
I was listening to TNN last night and an ad came on to tout REN & STIMPY.
Yes, it is true, they are coming back. I went to TV Guide and sure enough TNN has ordered new shows and bought the rights to the 52 old ones. Hurray, Hurray. The ad was also touting the name change to SPIKE TV. However, Spike Lee has put a restraining order on them to stop the name change. Hope this doesn't stop REN & STIMPY.
Skip at 4:58 AM
I was going to ignore this, as I saw postings on some other sites, but when the free commuter paper here in Toronto had an item about it this morning I was hooked. It seems to me that the people at Deloitte Consulting have too much time on their hands. But, it also has given them some free publicity by creating a program, which can be downloaded for free at Bullfighter. The program will comb through Word and PowerPoint documents and highlight the jargon to "cut the bull"!
The free paper said that leverage was the most hated word followed by bandwidth, touchbase, incentivize, and envisioneer. Guess I better not try to run the program through today’s post! I just wonder why anyone would need a program like this. People who need to hide things will continue to use jargon, and those who hate it will continue to write in plain English. The novelty of this will be fleeting.
Skip at 5:19 AM
Last week I wrote about Kickme.To and V3 offering redirection to your page(s) with their fun domain names. I should have mentioned a third one called tinyurl. This one doesn't give you a neat name to use but it does reduce the characters needed to get to your page. If you share a sub page, like I do, for free you can turn something like:
pages.interlog.com/~fchryslr/weblog/skipblogger.html which is this page
which I can very seldom type without problems, into: e4u8.
Try it and you will get direct to this page again.
It doesn't have the same mnemonic value as the others but the reduction to a few characters is sometimes more desirable. You can't get to choose the value. Each request just gets issued the next available. I don't know of a way to change it, either. If you change page host, you just go back to tinyurl and get a new tag
Skip at 5:19 AM
I'm totally amazed by the sheer number of blogs there are in existence. Blogshares main page now says there are 69,118 known blogs. If you go to Weblogs there is a constantly changing list of recently updated blogs. Same thing at Popdex where the popularity list of blogs is constantly changing. I feel like a little speck in the universe. How can any blog be noticed these days? Where do all these people find things to blog about? Is this craze just a passing fad? I think most blogs will only be read by a few close friends and relatives, in the future. After all how many people can just put the Friday Five on their site when they have nothing else to write about (just checked - seems like it is 187 today!). I guess you can go to Quizilla if you still have no content but need a change. All my friends and family are in close contact (and mostly computer illiterate) so they won't read anything I put here. Guess I'll just keep doing it cause I can.
Skip at 7:14 AM
A bit of a fun Thursday, as a warm up to Friday, try the pinball game at pepsi uk for a few hours of diversion. If you are competitive you can play online and try to beat the high scores already there (good luck!). You can also download the game to your own PC and play to your hearts content.
For those of you into fonts check out Blambot Comic Fonts. As this page states, there is lots of cool FREE (my favorite word) stuff! Some very nice fonts that can be used with attribution to Blambot, for non-profit, non-commercial users. There are some great fonts there ready to download. You can get Nate Piekos to create your very own font too!
Skip at 5:32 AM
Having you own domain is so cheap these days that everyone who wants a neat domain name can get it. In the old days there were a lot of companies offering sub-domains for people who couldn't justify the expense of their own domain. Most of those have gone away, burst with the Internet bubble. For any one who still wants an interesting and quick way to get to their web pages two are still around. The first one I think of is Kickme.To which offers over 200 different sub-domains for you. You can set up kickme.to/yourname or hang.at/yourname, or for example Wannabe.at/Cactusguy. This allows you a quick and easy URL. The second one I can recommend is V3 with such names as browse.to/yourname, been.at/yourname, zip.to/yourname, and a few hundred others. Both services have been around a long time and have been very reliable. V3 insists on pop-up windows with some adverts (for example browse.to/Floyd). They have to make money to keep going so it is a small price to pay.
Skip at 6:18 AM
It's hard, when trying to write something most days, not to get stuck and repeat yourself. I've written about this before but can't think of a better item to repeat. I visited the web site and am excited because of the banner stating Yankee Clipper IV is being written!!!
I've been using Yankee Clipper for a long time and couldn't survive without it. It's the best (in my opinion) freeware clipboard enhancer there is. The current version is Yankee Clipper III but the prior, smaller (but still feature rich) version is still available for downloading too. It has worked on all versions of windows I have owned and always flawlessly. It handles pictures, URL's, Richtext, etc., of any size, without getting in the way. I love being able to scroll through all my cuts and with a simple click I can get at any of them.
Enough gushing. Now I see from the web site the notice "The popularity of this program is driving us to the poorhouse". They are looking for volunteer mirror sites. Can anyone help? If you, or anyone you know can help, why not contact them.
Skip at 5:14 AM
An interesting article in News.com speculating about the death of PNG (pronounced ping) because of the patent expiration Unisys holds on GIF. PNG was created because Unisys started to enforce it's patent for Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) which was the basis of GIF. Compuserve was becoming very popular and they were using GIF. Unisys wanted in and threatened to sue everyone using GIF without paying. PNG was born as a result and while very good never made it to the popularity of GIF. I think the death announcement is premature but now that GIF is going to be royalty free, I can't see it growing in use. Everyone knows about JPEG and GIF. Not many people I talk to understand what PNG is.
Also, as a note of interest, antivirus experts are warning that the Bugbear.B virus is spreading rapidly and some are saying that Friday will be the worst. Be careful of opening attachments and make sure if you use Outlook as a email client to get up to date.
Wander-Lust webring on my side bar is now dead. It was a very good ring and I liked using it. Thank you Rick for the time and effort you gave, sorry that it has to end.
Skip at 5:38 AM
In todays Garfield, he is standing next to Jon and thinking "back to the shallow end of the thinking pool". It made me think of my sister's favorite insult, "their elevator does not go all the way to the top". I'm a very mild mannered person and insulting anyone to their face is beyond my value system. Just as well as I can never think of the right insult until an hour or two after it would have been appropriate. But as this implies I do "Think" of insults, even if I never verbalize them. I envy people who with a quick wit and aggressive manner roll out insults at any time. I will never be like that but if I ever decide to change I visit the Insults.net to brush up on some "interesting, informative, humorous, educational" (as their main page states) insults. If I've had a bad day I can go and find a appropriate insult for someone. It usually makes me feel better.
Skip at 5:24 AM
Between work and Blogshares I don't seem to have any time left today. Thanks to Micah and Christine for the gifts of stock. I was pleasantly suprised by you both. I hope tomorrow won't be as busy as today. We are upgrading our systems tonight so tomorrow morning will be great or just a nightmare. I'm hoping for the first but preparing for the later.
Skip at 8:20 AM
I still have an email address at Yahoo. Since they stopped forwarding and POP3 service for freeloaders like me, I have seldom used it. Once every few months I log on and clear out the bulk mail folder, just to see how well the spam filters there are working. But, I don't really like using web based mail clients so I have not used it for sending or receiving anything of importance.
Just last night I was told about YahooPOPS. I knew it existed but I didn't pay much attention since it was just a downloader of messages from Yahoo. Now with the release of version 4.5 you can also send mail. I downloaded and installed the program. With a very easy configuration of YahooPOPS and setting up my Yahoo id in a new Mozilla mail account pointing to localhost setup by YahooPOPS I was downloading and sending mail from Yahoo! I am limited to text based mail only but I seemed to work well. You can set up the client for the usual download options, such as not downloading messages over a certain size. You can also set up the client to automatically delete the bulk mail folder upon exit. By default YahooPOPS sets itself up for port 110. You can change this if you are using things like POPfile or Web2pop. Very interesting, I just may start using the old id again.
Skip at 6:15 AM
If you don't have a lot of HTML expertise, or you want to brush up on some aspects of web design for your site have a look at htmlgoodies.com. They have a lot of helpful items there, like the tutorials, and a mentor community available to assist you on specific questions. I have subscribed to the weekly newsletter for a long time now. It has an example of some design point and some question and answers from the mentors. A quick read but it often gives me some ideas or reference points of what can be done. I can recommend it and the site. It is backed by Internet.com which you can check out for lots of other type of info. I have never been bothered by them trying to cross sell.
Skip at 5:14 AM
Wow, June 2nd, the start of the sixth month of the year. As always, I look back and wonder where the time has gone. The last few months have not been kind to Canada. With SARS in Toronto, headlines around the world deter people from visiting. With Mad Cow in Alberta, headlines around the world are scaring people away from beef. Meanwhile, I just go about my life. Arriving at work each morning and going home each night. Nothing in my life has been altered by either crisis. Well, maybe I don't listen to the news as often. It just seems to be the same things over and over again. I need another sweeps week, so they put something interesting on TV for a change. For now I think I'll just read some other unexciting blogs. It makes me feel better that there are so many people out there blogging about nothing. I am not alone!!!!!
Maybe I should try Chris Pirillo's tactic and rent my chest. I have a few years and many pounds on Chris. I could undercut his prices and give you a much bigger space to rent!
Skip at 5:51 AM
Helping to lower the average quality of Web content almost daily.