The family

A picture of us from Skye's kindergarten graduation:

College Humor: Web Site Story

This parody in musical form is great. I wonder if they'll do RENT next?

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1913584

Bad web designers sabatoge companies

This link for "maxonlift.com" provides a summary that only talks about the requirements of MSIE to use the website. This is the space where it's absolutely important to try to sell the viewer on clicking your link - it's imperative to use these short 21 words to summarize your company (or website) and make the user click-through.

Instead, a web designer ensured that an (unpaid) ad for Microsoft Internet Explorer takes that place. Didn't anyone at Maxon run a google search to see how bad it looks?

What I'm Reading Now: The Yiddish Policeman's Union

Kavalier & Clay was meh, and I put The Final Solution down before chapter 3. This one starts with a murder. We'll see if it works.

Happy Birthday, Missy

My wife's little American Eskimo dog had a recent birthday. I don't think she enjoyed her party hat.

Spamarrest: the spam filter that spams

I've been using spamarrest for years as a spamfilter. It's an extra POP mail server that sits between you (meaning your mail client: outlook, thunderbird, etc.) and your actual email POP server. If a sender is in your whitelist, it gets through. If not, the sender gets a bounce message with a captcha challenge that will let them add themselves to the whitelist. You can override senders into a blacklist too.

The pros:
You don't have to scan email to recognize spam. You don't even download the spam at all.
Real people can still get through even if you don't have them in your whitelist.
Spam is reduced by 100% - not 98% (as you may get with Bayesian or advanced filters)

The cons:
Asking others to help you manage your whitelist is obnoxious.
Spamarrest bounces on every non-whitelist & non-blacklist email - that means they are increasing global email traffic by a 1:1 ration of spams received by their customers.
Spamarrest emails your new whitelist contacts with advertisements - i.e., SPAM. I think it's a no-brainer that spam-filtering companies should avoid spamming.

They do have a feature where you can use them for SMTP too, and every outgoing message you send can automatically add the recipient's email address to your whitelist. That ensures your new contacts won't get a bounce or a spam, and it doesn't take any work on your part.

What I'm Reading Now: The Sirens of Titan

I'm ready The Sirens of Titan now. Yeah, I know. More Sci-fi. I try to keep the sci-fi to a minimum, especially when they have terribly cheesy covers like "Sirens" does, but it turns out I'm a Kurt Vonnegut fan, so I'm probably going to read all his works.

Bioshock 2 Concept Art

I really like this bioshock 2 concept art, even though Bioshock was a terrible, terrible game.

[cilck to zoom]

What I'm Playing Now: Plants Vs. Zombies

Popcap's Plants Vs Zombies has captured 3/4 of my family. This game stays fresh with a wealth of minigames & puzzles in addition to capaign mode, plus the extra plants you can buy, and 4 different gardens you can create.

I don't even mind the DRM. You can license up to 5 new installations through their website. It's certainly better than Steam and CD-DRM. It still has the problem that I may not be able to play the game in 10 years, though - I assume that eventually Popcap will stop licensing it, and then this thing I own self-destructs. This is why no DRM is always far superior to even the most lenient DRM.

Here sunflower sings about PvZ:

Meaningful life

For those of us raised by 8-bit NES, this is wonderful.

UUDDLRLRBABAStart = Extra Life

UDUDAAABA = Meaningful life

StartDDDUDDDD = Life with brief bursts of joy that are quickly smothered by long periods of darkness.

Wordle - fun with typography

I stumbled on Wordle today and made my own wordle with the first speech I could think of. Can you guess what it is?



I added it to the wordle gallery, too.

Thanks to wikiquote for the text, and to Jarratt Moody for creating Say What Again (embedded below).

Comcast broadband is baffling

My Comcast cable modem is fast - I get about 6mbps down and about 300kbps up, which is usually bout 45 kib/sec upload. I used to pay a $10 premium to bump that upload to about 60 or 90 kib/sec.

For some reason today I'm getting speeds at close to 300kib/sec upload on compressed files (i.e. I'm not enjoying escalated speed because of modem compression or other tricks). That's over 600% of the speed I bought.

I don't get it. Is the cap broken? Have they bumped the speed all basic accounts?

ASoIaF movie, yes. Videogame, no.

ew. I was glad to hear that HBO will make a series out of A Song of Ice & Fire - I can't wait to see the drama unfold on screen - but to make it into a videogame? No.

Cyanide studios is going to give it a shot. I think I'll pass.

What will this be, exactly? Medieval warfare? Castle-building? spying, intrigue? All these things can be done (and have been done, many times) without the ASoIaF name on them. This doesn't make any sense.

Every inch won in blood

Usually I'm a bit bored with the writing style used by Tycho (of Penny Arcade). ...but now and then he has these great nuggets, like today:

The place between "good enough" and "great" is a haunted realm of madness and despair, where every inch is won in blood.

Toll Brothers: lying doesn't win customers

I just received an email from Toll this morning advertising their Magic Moment campaign - buy a house by the 7th and get a special low rate. Never mind that today is the 5th. I'm thinking that 2 days isn't enough time to deliberate and select a region & home to move your family in to - this is a half-million-dollar purchase, not an impulse item.

They go one to quote an $18,000 tax credit in bold red letters. Never mind that the California state rebate plan is out of funds, and the federal plan will expire faster than Toll can build you a house and close escrow.

The California state program is disappointing - the credit is supposed to last a full year (until Mar 2010), but in under 2 months of availability, they've received applications covering 75% of the available budget.