self-praise

Today's parking manouvre was particularly stylish. Almost... jaunty.

continued boobery

I just can't let this go, because the stupidity keeps increasing. Some moron's filed a class action lawsuit on account of how they were injured by the now-infamous breast.

another fun moment on office IRC

<stella> Entombed are also playing tonight! whohooo!
<kathryn> yeast!
<stella> look, what have i told you before, 'yeast!' is NOT the new 'whohoo!

gosh, I was /so/ wrong

It turns out you could see Janet's nipple after all! (NSFW, obviously) As long as you had instant digital recording, snapshot, and zoom capability and were determined enough to step through frame-by-frame for the best combination of angle and lighting!

that'll be thirty cents, please

Hmm, maybe I need to give up reading c|net again: Is charging for email such a bad idea?. Well, yes, it is here, because you're not offering a solution to the biggest problem with the idea, which is "How Do You Charge For Email?" It's all well and good to tell me that if a spammer is charged 25¢ per email his business model goes out the window, but how does the spammer pay that money? With a stolen credit card? By hijacking, as is increasingly frequent, someone else's connection, so that the hijackee pays instead? How does this solve spam any better than faulty laws?

How about going after the money? Prosecute companies who knowingly use spammers to advertise, lower merchant credit limits on companies caught advertising with spam, cancel credit-card payments to spammers - I know AmEx can take up to three months to settle with the merchant, which is plenty time to investigate spam complaints. It's not that hard; sure, the spammer's hidden away in a cave in Florida, but the company name is right there on the spam. The charge usually levelled at this tactic is that, well, my competitor sends spam with my name on it, and I take the rap; I can't see how this stands up to even basic scrutiny, since if I've paid for a spamming run, there will be a paper trail pointing at me. If I haven't, sure, the competitor and the spammer both get away with it, but hey. It's at least worth a try.

one more ranty bit, then I have to go and do some work

Social Networking.

I received an Orkut invite yesterday from someone I didn't recognise but who I've apparently had technical dealings with in the past. Aside from the much-ranted-about privacy issues, and the friend-or-not issue that seems to cause so many allegedly antisocial geeks such heartrending difficulty, my biggest problem with any of the social networking toys I've looked at to date is the question of what the hell it gives me. Maybe I'm unique in not being particularly enamoured with the notion of belonging to a web of people the bulk of whom I don't actually know, but so far I've seen nothing compelling about these systems. LiveJournal provides a way of keeping in touch with people I know from UseNet, without the spam and noise that makes UseNet unusable, so there's an instant win for LiveJournal from my POV. But beyond that, I've already got email and a multi-protocol instant messenger for keeping in touch with people, and I really can't see how filling out yet another demographic form and writing quirky yet insightful things about myself gets me anything over and above what's presented to people who accidentally hit my website while googling for, say, hash brownies or bike tricks (the two most common search referrers on my site) and start looking around.