Why the Left Hates America: A reader sent me a note telling me that I need to read this book, Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness. Oh goodie, more airplane reading. I wonder if I will get singled out at security checkpoints for carrying both of these books about "hating America" (see yesterday's post).
Popularity Contest: Remember in high school there was that one popular kid who everyone liked, but then s/he went away for the summer and came back with a different perspective. At some point the popular kid who everyone liked turned into a flaming asshole that nobody liked. As in high school, if you do things that are going to make people dislike you then you will not be elected King or Queen of the prom. I wonder if the GOP realize this.
NY Times: The Left Dumbs Down
Salon Books: How the world sees Americans. This is a great author interview, and I look forward to reading this book. [via MrBarrett]
Macromedia's New Product: The worst-kept secret right now in the world of web design and production management is Macromedia's supposedly super-secret project that everyone already seems to know about. Yesterday at Meet-the-Makers, I saw a live demo of this product and it looks very promising. My only major complaint is that you cannot easily use it with existing large sites that already have a template-based content management system. You also cannot import legacy Microsoft Word documents that have not been meta-tagged. It looks perfect for maintaining a small-to-medium sized Web site but is likely a nightmare to use for maintaining larger sites with lots of dynamic content and modular templates. It also seems silly that Macromedia is making anyone who sees a demo sign an NDA, since a lot of people already know about the product and even the news sites are writing about it now. I'm thinking that the NDA business is just another subtle marketing ploy.
I know that with time there will be conversion tools built that allows their new product to interface directly with some of the larger CMS solutions like Vignette, Interwoven and Documentum but there is little compatibility right out of the box. It's mostly geared towards sites that have simple template structures and/or are static HTML or use Dreamweaver templates.
Downward Spiral: Now that the GOP has majority control over all three branches of the government, the next two years will be very interesting to watch. It is very likely the United States economy will continue in a downward spiral, and unemployment will continue to rise. Unhappy Americans will turn out in force in 2004 to erase the existing government from office. After all, the politicians in office right now can be held responsible (can't blame it on bi-partisan bickering/stalling) for any major issues that arise between now and 2004 -- the biggest one being foreign policy. It is clearly an issue that the Bush administration does not have a handle on, and likely never will -- at least as long as it is driven by special interest needs like Big Oil. If there was ever a need for the emergence of a third political party (probably the Independent Party), 2004 is a prime year for it.
Vote Today! If you are a U.S. citizen please do not forget to vote today. I found out this morning that since I have moved since my last voter registration that I can only vote via affidavit. Remember that your vote does count.
Wired: FTC: Where Spam Goes Off to Die. Great article. Apparently the uce@ftc.gov email address has been receiving so much spam recently they can't afford to store it any longer. Yeah, this is indicative of a bigger problem. From October 23 to November 5, my installation of SpamAssassin has caught 10.2 MB of spam, which equals exactly 1234 pieces of spam (80k file) after I filtered out the false-positives.
MSNBC: Online job listing an ID theft scam. Never give out any more information than you have to, even if it's not a scam.
Solo Travel: The Serendipitous Life of the Solo Voyager. This collection of anecdotes hits home for me since there is a strong chance I will be traveling solo to many, many places in the next 4-6 months. As I have already mentioned I plan to be in London on November 22 and 23 and will be going to Malta from there for 3-4 weeks with a potential week-long side-trip to Egypt and/or Tunisia. Back to the U.S. in time for the Christmas holidays.
Glasnost: Oh my, someone is selling a Russian MIG 21 fighter jet on eBay Motors. Yes, it's real.
XUL Planet: 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot. "Giant lizards are cool. Much more exciting than a blue e." I can't even remember the last time I launched Netscape 4.x., not even for testing purposes.
Jury Duty: Very few updates this week, as I begin jury duty today for the Supreme Court of New York. Hopefully I can be excused early so I can attend Meet-the-Makers event on Wednesday.
Update: I was able to postpone my jury duty service another six months because I have pre-arranged travel plans, leaving November 22 for Malta, via London. Any case I would have been picked for had a chance of running for 1-2 weeks, which would have caused problems with my trip.
BusinessWeek: How to Undo AOL Time Warner
AIFIA: A new industry organization called the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture looks to be a promising resource for professionals practicing user experience design and information architecture. My only question: What does "Asilomar" mean? Is the organization named after the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Monterey, California? On further reading, the word asilomar is Spanish for "refuge from the sea." Karl Fast, one of the founding members responds:
In May a group of us (the instigators are listed on the web site) went to Asilomar, just outside Monterey, to talk about The Future of Information Architecture (tm). It was a weekend pow-wow. We talked about how IA is emerging as a profession. We wanted to help this continue. How best to do this?
Prediction: I'm going to make a daring prediction and say that the Republican party is going to lose a lot of power in tomorrow's elections. I don't have any proof except that many people are frustrated with the way the Bush administration has been running this country. Most polls show a pretty even split with the Democrats leading by a few percentage points. When the people are frustrated they vote for change, and right now the GOP does not reflect positive change for the majority of the population.
Science Fiction Contest: The International Technologies from Science Fiction organization is holding a contest for writers aged 15-30. Entries are due February 28, 2003. Hmmm, I am not quite 30 years old yet. I'll think about entering this.
Open Source Book: There is also a call for chapters for a new book being published next year that deals with Open Source software development.
PayPal Email and Spambots: A friend who works at PayPal sent me a tip which will help reduce the number of times my PayPal email address gets scraped by spambots. It's easiest to just show the before and after HREF attribute code.
Before: https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=example@example.com &no_shipping=1&item_name=CamWorld%20Tip After: https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=VTD8JYPBY6338 &no_shipping=1&item_name=CamWorld%20Tip
The business ID you see in the After string can be found by logging into your PayPal account and clicking 'Referrals' in the page footer. My email address is still visible if you click through to the PayPal page, but by requiring at least one click through from Camworld I can at least prevent some spambots (but not all) from getting it. My suggestion to PayPal is to engineer a workaround for this so that member email addresses are not available to automated bots.
Recent Camworld Searches: Here are some of the more bizarre search terms people have been looking for that results in a page from my site:
Game Button Arcade: These are small Javascript games that are played entirely with the form button. You won't understand until you try to play them. Go ahead and try it. This makes my head hurt. [via Boing Boing]
New Book on Japanese Society: The New Japan: Debunking Seven Cultural Stereotypes. More info.
