Tag-team AOL IM …

Tag-team AOL IM tricks! You gotta read these two IM conversations simultaneously. Between Anil and myself, and between Anil and my brother.

It’s wacky! It’s goofy! It steers you into trees! A marvel of 1970s engineering, it’s the Swing Bike!

Gigalaw: The Challenge of the Open-Source Business Model. [via dangerousmeta]

Tim O’Reilly: What’s Next for Linux and Open Source?

Not many people know that there is a 1994 sequel to Bob Clark’s humorous holiday classic “A Christmas Story.” Originally called “My Summer Story” you can now occasionally catch it in cable under the name “It Runs in the Family.” In fact, I’m watching it right now.

A whole lotta ass-kissing goin’ on today. Gross. Please stop.

Walgreen’s drug stores have it right. I just saw a TV commercial that says all of their stores are linked together electronically so that you can easily fill a prescription at any one of their stores anywhere in the U.S. If only we were so lucky in New York City, which is dominated by the drugstore chain Duane Reade, which has 172 stores. This past summer my doctor prescribed some medicine that I had to get filled evet 2-3 weeks. And since I was often in different parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn when I ran out of medicine, I used a different Duane Reade pharmacy almost every time. I quickly learned that every store’s pharmacy had independent records systems and I had to have them enter my data again, every time. What a pain! You’d think that companies like Duane Reade would get with the times and link their pharmacies together as a convenience for their customers. It is almost 2002, after all.

Sigh…I have no less than 53 54 different forward/discard recipes filtering the email on about ten different domains, and I’m still getting way too much spam. I think it’s time to start filtering based on subject line or message content (HTML email!), a measure I’ve been reluctant to start using. What’s most depressing is spammers are now auto-generating email addresses based on domain, so I am getting a lot of copies of the same spam to webmaster@, marketing@, info@, and other common usernames, sent to each domain I own. It’s pretty easy to filter these, but I still have to configure my spam filters for each domain, which takes some time.

Last week while in Michigan, my brother and I spent some time (and money) at the local Indian casino. I wasn’t doing too well on the tables, so I was ready to cut my losses and go. On a whim, I dropped a couple $20’s into a Jeopardy! slot machine and hit it big enough that they had write me out a tax form for gambling winnings. Needless to say, it was a pleasant Christmas present, which I used to buy my family gifts and a Playstation 2 for myself. Time to build up that video game callus on my thumb. Haven’t had one of those since I was a kid playing Asteroids on our 2600.

So you want to be a Jeopardy! contestant…

Mental Engineering is a local Minneapolis cable TV show that mixes outrageous commentary about some of the world’s worst television commercials. Only in America can there be a talk show about TV commercials, and still make it funny and entertaining. OK, well maybe in Japan too, except in Japan it’d probably be too bizarre to understand.

URLs seen on TV. Last edited September 8, 1996. Of course!

Another interesting cable TV access program is Invisible Girls.

Ah, breaker one-nine, this here’s the Rubber Duck. You got a copy on me, Pigpen? C’mon.

How to fold a dollar bill into an origami dress shirt. [via cardhouse]

Posted by Cameron Barrett at December 30, 2001 10:22 PM

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