Jury Duty: Very …

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 ™. 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/[email protected]
&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:

  • fistbang
  • msn messenger black jumbo dog
  • scientology tupperware
  • fold dollar bill washington penis
  • beastiality safety guide

Posted by Cameron Barrett at November 4, 2002 09:33 PM

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