July 5th, 2008 1:34:26 am pst by 
Sterling Camden
-
From my British pal
Jim, who came to America to steal all our tech jobs and bass player gigs.
-
Forget the copyright issues — imagine the marketing data they’ll extract from it!
-
Happy Bloggiversary, TD!
-
I’m thinking of creating a “Best viewed with anything except IE” chicklet
-
I didn’t even know that Emily was Libertarian. I guess it figures — she’s intelligent, after all.
Posted in Share the Love | 
No Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
July 4th, 2008 10:31:44 am pst by Sterling Camden
On this Independence Day I suddenly remembered a play from my fourth grade class – I think we performed it in honor of George Washington’s birthday. It was written entirely by the student actors – mostly by my good friend Steven, who played the part of George Washington. As its title, ”A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Mount Vernon”, might suggest, it was a series of humorous scenes in which a mostly clueless George meets various famous contemporaries with whom he engages in conversations that somehow never find their way into the history books.
I played the role of Patrick Henry. George wanders into St. John’s Church on March 23, 1775 just in time to hear me deliver the end of my famous speech:
Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace–but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
So George raises his musket and shoots me.
Then he turns to the shocked crowd and says, “Well, it was the easier of the two options…”
Posted in Tempus fugit | 1 Comment » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
July 4th, 2008 1:33:14 am pst by Sterling Camden
-
More entertaining examples of natural selection in action.
Thanks,
Joseph.
-
Lately, when someone gets even close to 90 days, I change my policy to “prepay only”.
-
Regexen don’t grok context.
-
Pretty BASIC poetry, if you ask me.
-
I don’t know how Teeni automates these posts, but I want the algorithm.
-
Some links to Fursday ‘Fore the Fourf humor
Posted in Share the Love | 2 Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
July 3rd, 2008 2:01:57 pm pst by Sterling Camden
This morning as I walked the dogs I saw an SUV stopping at each mailbox along the road, delivering thick phonebooks in plastic bags (it looked like it might rain). How environmentally unfriendly, I thought. Well, at least you can use the plastic bags for picking up after your pets, but what can you use a phone book for?
- The obvious: a booster seat for the vertically challenged.
- Fuel for a fire — they burn slowly when closed.
- An almost unlimited supply of material for paper airplanes (complete with insignia).
- Place under your monitor to raise it to the correct viewing angle when searching for phone numbers online.
- Once you’ve collected enough of them, you can use them as giant building blocks.
- Open the book flat in the middle and use for a blotter for crafts projects. Just rip off the upper pages to refresh.
- Use as a source of stock photos – if you’re looking for pictures of lawyers and auto salesmen on a yellow background, that is.
- They make great projectile weapons. The only downside: if your opponent survives your salvo, you’ve just given him the same weapon.
- Great source of cut-out words for ransom/stalking letters. Most words are even printed in the same font.
- Who uses a knife for blood rituals any more? You’ve got over 1000 paper cuts right at your fingertips.
- Why waste duct tape when a few pages of the phone book will do nicely as a gag?
- Use a few more for the blindfold.
- Several phone books taped to the ankles work just as well as a cinderblock and chains.
Seriously, who uses a phone book to look up phone numbers any more? You only have two search options: alphabetical or by (usually only one) category. And you have to scan the pages yourself. No “narrow your search” option, or even a “Find” shortcut. The information they contain is only updated once a year. Besides, when you think of how many are distributed every year, they have a huge (physical and carbon) footprint.
So why does the phone company keep giving them out? Well, there’s still the ad revenue.
And it helps that guy in the SUV pay for his gas.
Posted in Out of Nowhere | 3 Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
July 3rd, 2008 1:34:38 am pst by Sterling Camden
Posted in Share the Love | No Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
July 2nd, 2008 5:50:26 pm pst by Sterling Camden
For years, I bravely posted my email addresses on the web with a “mailto:” link — trusting my email spam filters to keep the annoyance within manageable limits. And that worked, for many years. I’ve had my address posted on the web for all spammers to scrape since 1997. But lately things have gotten a lot worse. I get so much spam that not only do I not have time to inspect it for false positives, I can’t even get into my spam filter at all because it takes too long to load. Fine, I’ll trust that there aren’t any good emails getting spam-bucketed and just let them expire.
But what finally broke the Inbox’s back was some spammer’s escalation of the practice of spoofing my account as the sender of spam to others. They must be sending out thousands of messages a day pretending to be me, because the number that bounce back is in the hundreds. Fortunately, all of these that I’ve looked at so far aren’t using my real account, but rather aliases that I’ve published on the web that forward to my real account. So, I’ve decided to take down those forwarders and to replace every published bare address with a contact form instead (or a link to one).
Now that I have all three of my sites on WordPress, I decided to look for a WordPress plugin that presents a spam-safe contact form — or write one if I couldn’t find one. The Great Google led me to my old blogbuddy Doug Karr, who has adapted an existing plugin to create the WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection plugin. The “Spam Protection” part is achieved via a challenge question of your choosing. The plugin is highly customizable, and secured against cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
I placed one of these forms on the Contact page for each of my blogs. The only thing that required more than two minutes was to think of an appropriate challenge question for each one. Here’s what I came up with:
Appropriate, don’t you think?
OK, I did go back and add a hint to the last one.
Posted in Get a Grip | 8 Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
July 2nd, 2008 11:26:12 am pst by Sterling Camden
Just 101 tons of spam.
Posted in Get Outta Here | 17 Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
July 2nd, 2008 1:33:00 am pst by Sterling Camden
Posted in Share the Love | No Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
July 1st, 2008 1:32:49 am pst by Sterling Camden
-
Misinterpreting “premature optimization” is the root of all evil.
Thanks,
Assaf.
-
If we allow government to abridge the rights of any member of society, we are giving government permission to abridge the rights of every member of society.
-
Free, online regex tester to solve one of your problems. Thanks,
Jeff.
-
I love regexen — but then, I like to pile on the hot sauce, too.
-
Ruby is not a pure and perfect language like Lisp — I agree with Reg that that’s sometimes bothersome, but on the whole I think it makes Ruby more of a human language.
-
Sizable and pressed/unpressed images, without JavaScript. Thanks,
Doug.
-
Yet another “how popular am I?” tool — but this one’s quick and seems accurate. Thanks again,
Doug.
Posted in Share the Love | No Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
June 30th, 2008 5:38:40 pm pst by Sterling Camden
prograsm - n. An algorithm that nails it… just… right.
(Inspired by a typo)
Posted in Out of Nowhere | 2 Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
