jtnt://life/unedited

Spam sucks. It struck me today as I checked my email, which I hadn’t checked since Friday afternoon, and I had over 400 messages. The vast majority were spam, of course.

I wish the problem was that big companies were sending spam. They would feel pressure and rethink their policies. Even discontinue using spam altogether! Hey, this is my fantasy.

But, alas, the people and companies that send spam are shady thieves, operating from the darkest halls of the web. A place where identities are fleeting and regected email is like smog. Just a necessary by-product of the industry.

At least that’s how I like to imagine spammers. I don’t reallly need help hating them, 409 emails in 51 hours (that’s 7.5 a minute, BTW) handles that just fine, but I welcome any help I can get.

Another web project I’ve thought about is keeping a history of spam. Like spamarchive.org, but with a more artistic (less scientific, at least) goal. Sort of an active time capsule, constantly updated by anyone online. An online museum and historical record of spam.

I’m sure someone has done something of this sort, but I’m liking the idea more and more all the time. Stay tuned…possibly.

Checking my stats today, I found the following referers in my logs. I can’t seem to find where they link to me, and some of them are seriously weird sites.

• http://www.tourthai.com/index_t.shtml - This one sent over 30 people my way! Huh?
• http://www.upsaid.com/justdevin/
• http://www.tienneti.com/sezioni.asp
• http://andysucks.org
• http://www.noboys.org
• http://meredith.flutterglubmeow.com/blog/
• http://www.renaissancesistah.com/journal
• http://www.forever-star.com/journal.html
• http://aekituesday.blogspot.com/…

I’m not an active member of blogsnob or any other traffic-enhancing services, so I am really at a loss here. That’s not totally true, as one blogsnob ad does appear in one post a few weeks ago. But after checking my blogsnob stats, I have only received 17 impresssions from those guys. This doesn’t even begin to explain all of the above.

Well, the other day I made what I considered to be a keen observation that Daring Fireball had changed its title to “Fair and Balanced” as a sort of protest to the whole Fox News/Al Franken legal battle. Now I find out that it’s a bonafide movement among bloggers. I couldn’t resist joining in.

I got an email about a new Meetup.com MoveableType event today. After not voting for a venue (simply becuase all the venues listed were awful), I clicked around to see what some of the locals were up to.

In the internet alter-world bloggers live in, geography is forgotten and indeed looked at as irrelevant. I disagree. And I think Meetup.com is a testament to the fact that geography and the internet can come together. In fact, I think each enhance each other or feed off each other.

Without the desire to get together with like-minded people, meetup.com would not be as successful as it is. Without the internet, it would obvisouly not exist at all.

The very fact that everything is so placeless on the internet makes me even more curious when I do find a site (especially a personal blog) that is produced locally.

Here are a few sites I found while poking around on Meetup.com that were either interesting to read or pretty to look at. All local to the DC area.

• Webcrumbs
• samLife
• Farrellyville

I never really liked politics. In fact, I usually ardently avoid political discussion and debate. Now, maybe it’s just that I live so close to DC, but I can’t seem to get enough of this California governor race. Or maybe it’s just the fact that it’s such a damn freak show. So, I’m happy to give you the latest news from Bizarro Land:

It has been reported that Rob Lowe will take on a “senior position” in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for California governor.

There is no room for parody here. There is nothing anyone can say that can make this whole thing funnier or more outrageous that it already is. So, that’s that.

If anyone can offer assistance on getting a BitTorrent server running on Mac OS X with a Netgear RT314 router and dyndns.org service (to get around the dynamic IP crap), I’ll… I don’t know… help you with something. Basically, all the Python scripts work, and I am able to generate the metafile correctly. And I am even able to run the headless downloader fine, but no one can connect to the server. I have the ports setup in the router and have messed around with all kinds of stuff, but still no go.

(Disclaimer for the RIAA: I intend to only legally share music that is specifically allowed by bands that have an open taping and trading policy. Lay off.)

Also, Michael Tsai released a seemingly cool utility called BBAutoComplete today that offers automatic word-finishing in BBEdit and some other Barebones apps. The problem is, I can’t seem to get it to do anything. I haven’t completely RTFM yet, but I think I’ve read the important parts, and the damn thing just doesn’t do a thing. (Figured out the root of my ignorance. Was starting with a blank document to test this out, and BBAutoComplete uses the text in the document and other open documents to figure out how to complete the words. Got it. I’m a dunce.)

If you happen to be able to help me with both of these, I’d prefer help with the BitTorrent stuff. I have a feeling that I’m just missing something stupid on the BBAutoComplete and will figure that out soon. Thanks!

I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence, but on my latest visit to Daring Fireball, I happened to notice that the title of the page is, “Daring Fireball: Fair and Balanced.” I’ve just never noticed what the title was before. Being that the author of this site is extremely intelligent and obviously up on current events, it has to be a nod to Al Franken’s recent legal battle with Fox News. Either way, it’s hilarious — and Daring Fireball is one of the best blogs going.

I’ve come to a resolution on this whole issue of “plagiarizing” code. (I really shouldn’t even think of it that way, frankly. It’s just a nice, sensationalistic way of referring to it.)

First, a brief update. Brandy, being very generous by giving her limited time to a complete stranger, promptly got back to me on this issue after trying to investigate who actually wrote the dropdown menu code at Sapient. She couldn’t find out who actually wrote the code, but offered this bit of sage advice:

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“I would just use it and if anyone gives you a problem then find another solution. You could even give proprs in your .js file, that’s a really good way to be ehtically correct. You arn’t hiding that you snagged it and your happy to say that you did cause you think it’s a well written peice of code. I can’t see how that could bring any harm.”

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Exactly. This was pretty much where I was sitting (near the fence) on the issue, but my uber-ethical side had to get a second opinion. And this was also the gist of what Rob was saying in the legal speak I quoted in my first post on this.

So, I plan on customizing the code for my purposes on a future project, but the original project for which I was investigating this for wound up continuing on with the old (IMO, hideous looking and dirty code-wise), non-validating code. A few options were explored before making this decision.

Taking the dropdown menus out completely — even though we all agreed that they were not necessary to the usability of the site — was impossible, simply because of the red tape we’d have to go through with the higher ups to make a change like this.

We could have also used a different DOCTYPE, but that would have thrown the X/HTML compliance requirement out the window. No can do.

So, the decision was made with the client and the CMS developers that we would take the DOCTYPE out completely. Again, not my first choice, but it was mostly out of my hands. As long as the code would validate “conditionally” by force-feeding an X/HTML DOCTYPE to the W3C validator, all the CMS-driven requirements would be met - as stipulated in the contract. It just meant that we would have to make sure to test religiously, to make sure that sending certain browsers into quirks mode didn’t screw anything up.

Which brings us to the end of our story for now. The site got delivered a couple weeks ago, and after CMS integration and much content entry (thankfully not performed by me or anyone at my firm) was launched on Monday.

I still can’t wait to get an opportunity to put these menus into a site at some point, though. Everytime I go to the Cingular site I spend 10-15 seconds rolling over the navigation just to see how smooth it is. Heck, the only reason I go to the site at is to marvel at the menus! Nice work Brandy and team.

It occurred to me today that I really don’t like all the “got milk?” spoofs/alterations. This hit me in the face today when I saw a bumper sticker that said, “got lacrosse?” What the hell does that mean?

It makes me want to make a site that catalogs all the different variations of the slogan, which in its original form is quite good, I think. I’ve got some down time at the office these days. Maybe I’ll start that up.

So, here’s the official call for entries. Please send me anything that has an alteration of the “got milk?” slogan on it. If you need my address, just email me at jtnt(AT)funky4u(DOT)com.

Arnold Schwarzenegger announced today that he will run for California governor.

The next person you think of after hearing that is undoubtedly Gary Coleman. I know. Same here. He played Arnold Drummond in Diff’rent Strokes. It makes sense. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any scarier, Coleman is also entering the race.

Logically, Larry Flynt then comes to mind — him being a freak as well and all. And you guessed it, he’s running, too. He’s running on the ever-popular “Vote for a Smut-Peddler Who Cares” platform.

If they make this campaign into a movie, it will be the best work any of these guys has ever produced. Except for Flynt, of course. And if they don’t hold a public debate, it will be a crime against humanity.

And to prove that California is truly bizarro, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California announced she would not run.

I predict that this election will produce the highest voter turnout California has ever seen.

A friend from college stopped in on his way from New York to Chicago last night. He was driving some friends of his parents car back home for them. Dan and I hadn’t seen each other nor spoken in almost two years.

He arrived at Union Station at around 3:45pm, and from there we picked up the car in Columbia Heights. The car wasn’t there, because inexpicably, the guy had driven it to his mother’s house.

We got back to Clarendon around 6pm or so. Within 10 minutes we were sitting out back, sipping on beers, shootin’ the shit — just like old times.

The feeling of reconnecting so easily was palpable enough that it actually came up in conversation. It’s no substitute for actually keeping up better with each other over the last couple years, but it gives me a fantastic sense of continuity. It’s good to know Dan will always be there. And it makes me realize that many others will be also.

Aaahhh.

The webstandards.meetup.com meetup has been cancelled, since less than 5 people confirmed that they’d go. I’m guilty - I never confirmed myself. Excuses, excuses, I know - but I was just too busy.