Geek Drivel

One of the (few) spam messages that survived to show up in my junk folder today:

Subject: Hilarious! Could it be true? See inside.

Jessica Simpson Breathes Air
READ FULL STORY

Um… unless Jessica Simpson is a fish, a methane-breathing alien, or dead, why would that pique my interest? Isn’t that rather like exclaiming “Amazing, Robin Williams wears pants!”?

I know some people go nuts over celebrities and follow their every move, but this would be a bit much even for a stalker.

LifeHacker.com ran a poll of their readers last week to determine what their “must-have” Firefox extensions are. Surprise, surprise — AdBlock was at the top of the list. LifeHacker is an ad-supported site, so the title for the post reporting the results is no shock.

(I don’t see any need to block ads, myself — but I do block any and all scripts and plug-ins, including Flash. [I'm easily distracted, so I can't stand things that move on the screen.] The website owners still get their ad money for text-only ads, and I can tolerate their sites, so as far as I can tell it’s a win-win situation.)

I probably don’t really need to point this out, but if Microsoft were still the only browser game in town, everyone would be forced to see animated ads, everywhere. As evidence: back in the mid-nineties, one of my then-roommates started playing with Internet Explorer when it first came out, and he reported that the back button became far slower between one version and the next. When he dug into it, he discovered that Microsoft had changed its behavior — the earlier version retrieved everything from the local cache when you hit the back button, resulting in an extremely fast and efficient transition. But advertisers had apparently complained that they weren’t getting the additional hits on their ads, so Microsoft changed it to re-retrieve all graphic images when you hit the back button.

When all the competition is essentially free, people are going to go with the alternative that gives them what they want, rather than the one that forces them to take things they don’t want. Is it any wonder that people are switching to Firefox in such large numbers?

I ran across this quote on the Tools For Thought blog (which is rapidly becoming a new favorite of mine):

From the film Roger Dodger:

Nick: Like, what do you do all day?
Roger: What do I do all day? I sit here and think of ways to make people feel bad.
Nick: I thought you wrote commercials.
Roger: I do. But you can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that there’s something missing from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right?
Nick: Well, yeah, I guess.
Roger: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you can convince them that your product is the only thing that can fill that void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they run out and buy a stupid pair of cargo pants.

Possibly exaggerated, but true nonetheless.

If the human brain were a piece of computer software, this would be considered a critical security vulnerability. The company responsible for it would be expected to patch it as quickly as possible, security software packages would add features to detect and prevent it, and the people exploiting it would be considered criminals. But since it’s human nature, the victims are expected to block or patch it themselves, and the people exploiting it best get six-figure salaries and corner offices in New York City.

Is it any wonder that logically-minded people (including us computer geeks) tend to look askance at the rest of humanity?

My friend Ploni Almoni crows that Apple “ranks 85 out of 100.” That’s nice Ploni, but honestly, they hardly have any competition in that arena.

I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what I want to do, but I don’t know where to begin.
– Stephen Bayne

Quite interesting…

Although interesting (to me) in and of itself, I’m mentioning this article because of this bit from the last paragraph:

In other developments, spammers have abandoned the use of image-based spam, file attachment spam and other such frippery by going back to basics. Nine in ten spam messages now contain little more beyond a few simple words and a URL.

I’d call that a major win for the anti-spam effort.

I’d wondered at the lack of spam recently, but I figured that SpamBayes/ThunderBayes was just doing an exceptionally good job. Which it is (when I saw the above, I checked… out of 308 spam messages in the past couple weeks, I’d only had to look at forty of them, and SpamBayes was unsure of only seventeen of those), but getting only about 22 spams a day is pretty freakin’ amazing too, considering that I’ve had these e-mail addresses for five and seven years now. (I’m not counting the GMail account or the account at the company that bought our Project Badger, since both of them have their own very effective spam-filtering stuff.) After only three years with my previous e-mail account, I was being inundated with a couple hundred spam messages a day.

Uh-oh! Better lock up your e-mail program ’til he’s re-caught!

GoddessJ pointed this one out to me:

We regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of

The Astrological Magazine

will cease with the December 2007 issue.

So the stars didn’t say anything about that, eh?

Two of my favorite targets in a single (and pretty good) article — bonus!