Speaking of questionable business practices, since “Paxfire”:http://www.paxfire.com/ was unable to get their server-error-advertising scheme past ICANN(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), “they’re selling it to ISPs”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50115-2005Jan30.html. It works like this: you mistype a URL and instead of getting a mostly unhelpful error message, you get a mostly unhelpful page full of ads. Apparently this [...]

Posted in Technology No Comments »

“Anvil and Sprocket”:http://www.anvilandsprocket.com/ was recently crawled by the “TurnItInBot”:http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html. This is a bot that, without fanfare, copies the content of your site and stores it in a database. There, it is used to match against copies of student papers to help catch plagarised papers.
I’ve asked them to stop. For one thing I’m suspicious of [...]

Posted in Diary 8 Comments »

Recently, AT&T Wireless (which I liked, wonder of wonders) was bought out by Cingular. Since then, they’ve been pestering me to move my service from the old company’s books to Cingular’s books, so I just did that. I had to add a line for Elf anyway. And I decided to get a couple of new [...]

Posted in Commerce No Comments »

Digby “responds to a joke letter”:http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_01_23_digbysblog_archive.html#110688380850953943 making the rounds, wherein the President presumably tells liberal whiners about human rights that, ok, you don’t like how we’re dealing with them? Then we’re sending one to your door.
bq. Although Ahmed is sociopathic and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity to what you described as his “attitudinal [...]

Posted in What The...?!? No Comments »

I keep seeing more and more “things like this”:http://crankyliberal.blogspot.com/2005/01/theocratic-blackmail.html about intellegent design. I haven’t paid much attention. After all, I believe very strongly in intelligent design and I certainly think -it should be taught at every level of the computer science curriculum-. Excuse me a second, the Elf is trying to get my attention.
Oh. “Intelligent [...]

Posted in Science 12 Comments »