Saturday, October 22, 2005

I will eat your dollars

As seen on Slashdot, there is an article over at the LA Times titled "I will eat your dollars" about the 419 scammers from their perspective. After reading the article, I'm sorry that my scambait fell flat. For those not aware, a scambait is where you receive one of these scam emails, and reply to it, usually from a different email address (they probably won't even notice. They send out thousands of these scams at a time) that isn't directly to yourself. The goal is to turn the tables on the scammers, and make them the victims. My goal was to try to get a picture of the scammer holding a sign with a name such as "Mike Oxmal" or "Ben Dover" or something just as silly. Unfortunately, the scammer's Yahoo! addresses were shut down before I was successful. Maybe it's time to reply to another scammer and see what happens...

Thursday, October 20, 2005

You have been eaten by a grue

Over at ASCII, Jason Scott, of BBS Documentary and TextFiles.com fame, has made a post about his next documentary project about text adventure games tentatively titled Get Lamp. Personally, I would have titled it "You have been eaten by a grue," but that's just me ;)

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Oh yeah. *That* is balanced reporting.

Over at the Hot Point blog, there's an entry titled "Why the internet can be a bad place to meet people. A murder in Virginia. The Taylor Behl story." It's a huge rant about not meeting people on the internet. Towards the end, there's a paragraph that reads:
All of the above said, there are many positive relationships that have been formed as a result of individuals meeting over the internet. Most internet dating services have a portfolio of success stories they are very happy to share. It's also true that it's the minority of meetings that result in someone being victimized. In fact most meetings will be just fine. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that it's much easier for someone up to no good to find you over the internet than it is in person. Regardless of how you meet someone, it pays to be careful with who you associate with — this holds particularly true when comes to meeting people on the net.

This is the only redeaming quality to the entire article. In general, you only hear about the bad things that happen, whether they're on the internet or in society. I'd be interested in a study showing whether meeting on the internet is statistically any more or less dangerous than meeting in any particular place IRL. Comments?

One by one, the penguins are stealing my sanity.

Hello all... Sorry for the missed day with no post. My goal is a post per day. Hopefully, today will rectify that. (And yes, I realize that I've recycled this entry's title from an earlier blog. Or is nobody paying attention?)

Over on Slashdot, there is a discussion about the sabatoge of Linux on the desktop. Now, I'm probably a bigger proponent of Linux than many, but as a computer geek, I know there's the issue of the right tool for the job. I think that in the task of a general user's desktop, Windows is probably where it's at. Anything else, and you'll get the "But why doesn't XXXX work on it? It works on my friend's PC." The only way around this is to make their first experiences, and their day-to-day experiences, be with something else. Unfortunately, Windows still rules the business desktop, so that's not likely to happen. And that's fine with me, because I'm a Linux advocate, not a Linux zealot.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Web design

I've had my own website, in one form or another, pretty much since I originally volunteered at Greenapple back in 95 or 96, before being hired as a full time bench tech at one of the franchise computer shops that were in town at the time. So, you could say I've done a bit of basic web design over the years. I've never really done anything too fancy, though, because I like simplicity. Also, I've never done any design work that was commissioned by someone else, until now. I just completed the campaign website for Carl Tatman as a "trade in kind" project. This means that he gets some website design, and I get to put his website into my portfolio. Sure, it's a pretty basic site. But to me, that's what a campaign site should be. If you try to go fancy with it, you risk losing the forest for the trees, and I did not want to lose his message because of too much style and not enough substance. If anyone would like to check out his site and provide a little feedback, feel free.