The coldest winter I ever spent
I’m bidding on a $20k project as Computer Guy. That is, if I can take a minute to actually write up the bid. I’ve been running ragged with people that call me saying “Oo oo, you gotta help me right now! It’s am emergency! And I had a cleaning person over a few days ago. We worked together to clean the house before my folks got back from Florida for the summer.
Every month, Paypal’s policies become nastier and nastier. I’ve read many stories at NoPaypal and a couple other sites. Now I’m starting to believe them. Freenet just reported that Paypal cut them off because they didn’t like them.
17th May, 2004 : Paypal suspends Freenet donations account
Paypal has frozen the account we use to accept donations over the web, they refuse to give any reason other than “use of an anonymous proxy”, which suggests that someone at Paypal took a dislike to the goals of our project, since I have never used an anonymous proxy to access Paypal (this being the activity I assume they sought to prevent). It is fortunate that Johann Gutenberg did not rely on Paypal to fund his work on the printing press, which also allowed anonymous publication of information, since his account would probably have been frozen too.If you are concerned about whether your account might be at risk due to your political opinions you may wish to speak to their PR contact Hani Durzy at (408) 376 7458. If you are an investor and you would like to see what other political opinions Paypal doesn’t like, you may want to speak to their Investor contact Tracey Ford at (408) 376 7205.
They have said that they will refund our outstanding balance ($550) by check, but all of the projects subscriptions have been canceled which is a significant setback. Other means of accepting donations, including E-Gold, are still active. Anyone wishing to make a donation by check should email me directly. Unfortunately neither of these methods are as convenient as Paypal, but we will do our best to find an alternative ASAP.
E-Gold and the somewhat related digital monies are starting to look pretty darn good. E-Gold fees are about 1% of the transaction while Paypal is about 3%…. a 66% discount.
I flew, I flew!
It’s been forever. I flew for just 2 minutes when Stevie was here a few weeks ago. But on Saturday I got to fly almost a whole battery out. (I was a little short for time). It’s so funny… The first time up, I thought the plane had some issue since I couldn’t control it well. I brought it down and, yes, the prop was on backwards. A second time up and it still wasn’t flying right. I looked and looked but the plane looked fine. So up a third time and…. well, it just took me a few minutes to get my wings back. I’m still not at 100%, but give me another 10 minutes in the air and I’ll be doing flips in no time!
If you have ever accidentally deleted your web site, you might find it cached on the web with one of these tools
* Archive.org
* Do a Google search for your web site like so: allinurl:mysite.com site:mysite.com
Ok, this is funny. A great guerrilla protest concept.
lifted from the site:
Chants
The full Billionaires For Bush DIY Manual
I’ve been keeping these sounds on my Pocket PC for a long while now. It’s time I put them someplace ‘useful’
First, some foreign language profanity
Shysa by Laura Hanna
Stragna by Jasna
Merde by Shara
Tim Reynolds with his classic Wavexpress line
John Tesorio’s classic line, and the other one.
Simon Tidman really wants to know…
CA has this big ad in eWeek Magazine for their backup software. So I asked them
I am looking for a backup product capable of backing up from a Win XP computer to an untrusted Win XP or Linux machine on the internet. It should be possible to access the data on the untrusted machine in a random access manner.
We’ll see what I get for a response.
http://habeas.com/ I still don’t totally understand how this company uses the power of haiku to defeat spammers. But I think I like it.
I think it works thusly:
– If you promise not to spam people and sign up with them, you get 8 points subtracted from your SpamAssassin score when you use the Habeas header in your emails.
– If you (illegally & inappropriately) use the Habeas header in your email, then when the Habeas people catch you, they’ll tell SpamAssassin that the IP address that sent the email gets 8 points added to their spam score.
– If you illegally use the Habeas header, they’ll sue your ass off, but quick, for copyright infringement (the poem), defamation (their header would never voluntarily associate with spam), and license infringement (you didn’t sign up for the Habeas service).
Nice. Of course, a distributed offshore email relaying scheme can probably get around it. Forged headers might also be able to get around it. The battle continues…
(For reference, using the phrase “WIN FREE VIAGRA!” in the subject field of an email costs the message only about 4 points. A difference of 8 points will almost definitely make or break an email’s spam threshold in SpamAssassin. I’ve only every been marginally happy with SpamAssassin’s performance. I set it to a threshold of “8” and it catches about 10 spams a day (that’s 40% of the spams I receive recently). If I set it any higher, it starts catching legitimate mail. Still, SpamAssassin from my email hosting company and Cloudmark Spamnet on my client have been working together to do an excellent job recently.)
Thanks to Dada Mail for pointing out this Habeas thing to me.
Oh and I also just noticed….
Vispul’s Razor (the source code for Spamnet) is open source. The plug-in for MS Outlook (the Spamnet service) isn’t.
The Vispul’s Razor / Spamnet collaborative filtering servers are located at cloudmark.com.
That’s an interesting collaboration between open source and not… The unix folks are free to develop the brains of the system in an open source environment while Vispul is (hopefully) making money off the gazillions of Windows clients. If you had unix at home, you’d be able to get the service for free. But hey, Vispul is only charging $2.00/month for the service. It’s well worth it for any individual client to buy the service. Everyone wins. Open source seems to work.
I was parked in a parking lot on the NJ Parkway on Feb 23rd. As I was walking toward my car, I pushed the button on my keychain to unlock the door. To my surprise, that caused the alarm on a car just across from mine to start beeping. I unlocked my car again and the alarm stopped. BEEP BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP BEEP. I’m thinking that there aren’t enough radio code keys out there!
And that reminds me of a story a friend told me recently. (Gosh darn it, I can’t remember who told me this story! It wasn’t PPG…. so who was it? AAARRRGGG My memory!
My friend gave her car keys to an attendant to fetch her car from the lot. A few minutes later, the attendant drives up with the wrong car. Some discussion ensued. It turned out that her car had been parked in the wrong space. But the kicker is that her car keys fit the car that was in her space! Not enough key combinations!
I’ve never been to the place and I haven’t heard the radio commercial in years now but the radio commercial is STILL stuck in my head!!
“At Tony Floramo’s, the meat falls off the bone!”
Listen to my version of it
Floramo’s
213 Everett Avenue, Chelsea, MA 02150-1816
(617) 889-1330
Tommy Floramo is well known for RIBS with Meat that falls off the bone
Directions: From the North: Take route 1 south to the last exit before the Tobin Bridge, Carter Street.
Keep to the right and turn left at the lights.
Located next to gas station on the left.