BunkBlog

This article just made me feel so much for Mr. Ralsky. He’s made millions on spam, and yet he feels so harassed by the public that he hides his address and phone number, working from cell phones and unlisted numbers to remain anonymous. He talks of “covering his tracks” and is unapologetic about his earlier convictions for fraud. Dude, if your business resembles the Sopranos in many details, perhaps you are doing something wrong.

Got a clarification on Cafepress’s “make $25 or get erased” policy. Apparently, there is a significant accounting problem at CP, due to the many stores with a small amount of commission due, yet not enough to send them a check. Those stores cause headaches. Stores with no commission due (all too many of them, I’m sure) don’t cause a problem.

So, I fall into the “pain in the ass” accounting category, it seems. I get about 25 bucks a year in commissions from Cafepress. But, they say they’ll make it easy on folks, by allowing them (soon) to use their commissions as partial payment on Cafepress products. If you do that, the commission accounting mess goes away, and your store remains open. Of course, it also means you used up your commission to buy a t-shirt instead of getting a check, but if you’re not making more than $50 per year, it probably doesn’t really matter anyhow.

Now, to prevent me from having to use CP-Bucks to buy my own stuff, you could head over to my store and help me out. Nobody has bought any “Eat Me” gear yet, which is quite a surprise, considering the folks on LJ…

Microsoft screws up privacy again

They got some real dim bulbs over there, I think.
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After consultation with my expert team of marketing researchers, I’ve put together another design. More of a broad-interest design than my norm, it’s still a goofy little niche.

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This is a great calendar. I think I may have to get one of the Remixed Propaganda calendars, complete with “John Ashcroft is Watching You” image…

Which is geekier, the Clie NX70V or the Fossil Wrist PDA?

I can’t believe they actually put a full Palm PDA into a watch. It has the same resolution screen as my decrepit Palm III, but it’s not much bigger than my current (admittedly large) watch. Battery life measured in days is probably not good for a watch, but you could finally sneak a PDA into a SCIF… OK, that was a bad thought. 🙂

Imagine playing Bejeweled on that little screen. hehe
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I have no idea when I’ll get to the backlogged Userpic requests I have right now. While trying to get a crossover connection working, I somehow borked my dialup connection. No matter how much uninstalling, reinstalling, and safe mode nonsense I do, the damned thing fails to function.

Get this, the network connection seems to work, and the DNS servers are found, a decent IP address assigned. But, not a single internet application works, not even ping or nslookup. The programs that give an error message with any info at all indicate that the programs are unable to create sockets or allocate sockets. This helps me in no way at all. I tried uninstalling every network item, which even removed the network neighborhood icon. Then, I rebooted into safe mode to remove even the vestiges of winsock. Well, I’ve got Windows ME, so I can’t boot to a command line and the files are locked and “in use” even on a system with no networking setup. Go figure.

Anyone have a handle on this? Anyone?

Update

After trying the “remove winsock2” trick in regedit, unsuccessfully, I ended up just installing WinME over itself. All better. Stupid system that breaks itself…
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current_mood: frustrated

Proving once again that /. is a potent source of change, the Distributed Proofreading project has completed 6169 pages so far today, compared to 6281 the previous 7 days. All thanks to one artcle on Slashdot. Coolio.

Now I’ve got something to do at work…

Update: As of Tuesday morning, they’re up to 52000+ pages complete this month, compared to the goal of 33000, and they’re sustaining about 10,000 pages per day since the Slashdot and Kuro5hin stories were posted. What a great public work using spare time. Love computers.
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I don’t know why kids (and they are invariably 12-15) want to butcher the language to the point of incomprehensibility. I know when I was in school, we would use single letters or numerals in place of words, and so on. But it’s gotten so far out of hand now I can’t even begin to decipher some of the crap showing up on Livejournal.

Here’s a partial list:

• Dun – It’s a real word, meaning a brownish-yellow color. It doesn’t mean “do not.”
• Yew – Another real word, it’s the name of a tree, not the second-person singular. And, it’s not even shorter than the word that should be used!
• Wit – Humor, not conjoined.
• Misplaced Zs – Alwayz, azz, etc. No comment needed.
• Wuz – It’s not any shorter than the real word, so why use it?
• Ur – An ancient Mesopotamian civilization, not a second-person possesive.

I’m only hitting a few of the highlights, obviously. What is really interesting to me is that, because I learned to type at the age of 10, my handwriting sucks ass. But, when I type I am anal about going back and fixing errors. The more you type, the faster you type, and so the less useful those absurd abbreviations become.
But, I’m old so what do I know?
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I was playing with the various kinds of opacity in Fireworks. Think it’s a bit too weird?

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Because some people think my background graphics for my site are BORING, I’ve revamped it a bit. If you view the site with a Mozilla-based browser (Netscape 6.x or Mozilla are the two biggies), or with IE 5.5 or greater on a Mac, you’ll see it exactly as intended. If you use IE for Windows (any version) or Opera (any version), you’ll see a slightly wrong version, but still readable.

Is the background boring or is it interesting enough?
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Since I’ve been looking at all these other content management systems lately, and even wrote an essay on why LJ is better than Blogger, it occurs to me that the vast majority of CMS-based sites have a navigation column along the left side of the page. Since I’ve got the navbar as a DHTML-based menu system on the top of the page, I don’t fit in. But, the page ends up looking rather wide with the single-column format.

So, I ask you, my adoring public…

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I installed Movable Type this weekend, just to play with (Greymatter refused to install and run), then I went ahead and installed PostNuke as well.

They’re both pretty slick, and they make a consistent site and all that. But, I think the combination of Dreamweaver for site development and Livejournal embedded into my main index page is doing pretty well for me.

For those who maintain both an LJ and a self-hosted weblog, why? Please explain to me why you have both, especially those who seem to post the exact same things in each. Why not just use LJ embedded in your site? It’s one line of HTML.

Seriously, I’m curious as to the reasons folks have for maintaining two different weblogging tools. Entertain me.
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In order to keep languages alive, or at least understandable to future archaeologists, a group named the Rosetta Project has started making micro-etched disks with over 1000 languages written in teeny-tiny writing. Very interesting article on Wired.
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A great funny piece about the various weblogging stereotypes. I think most of LJ users fall into the Teenoger category.
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Hey, Cafepress accepts Paypal now. Neato.
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The ever-vigilant information systems security officer has just announced that there are email greeting cards that install porn on your computer. Thanks for that timely information. Spent a couple weeks hiding under a rock, have you?

Defense Information Systems Agency, the most messed-up group of IT folks I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with. Our MS Office binaries are stored on a file server, so they are slow and crash-prone. The official browser for DISA is Netscape Navigator 4.7. The IT shop won’t support laptops or PDAs, regardless of how many are purchased by the various departments. Ostriches.
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For anyone who has been stationed at the Third Military Intelligence Battalion, check out my newest design.

Go on, , you know you want something to remember ARL by.
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Just updated the site a little, adding a new Thought, this one about LJ.
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Made a couple userpics for fun, since nobody requested anything today:

current_music: Jimmy Eat World – Hear You Me
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