Please don’t waste your time – and mine – astroturfing here.  I’ll just delete the comments as soon as I see them.

I really, really welcome genuine comments on any of the posts I’ve ever written (the ajax logfile tailer & the elliptical mileage calculation posts are especially popular), and I read them all.  But the moment I determine you’re fronting a comment for advertising purposes, it gets deleted without a second thought.

Save yourself the trouble, really.

Tags: astroturfing

Popularity: 4% [?]

Yesterday, @pkedrosky mentioned having watched a great Pink Floyd documentary on VH1.  I searched around a bit, and though I couldn’t locate the entire program, I did find these six parts.

Edit: The videos have been removed due to Terms of Use Violations… I’ll get some good sets up there – there are many.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Sometimes this stuff just comes to me & I have no choice.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I watched the temperature in Littleton, the nearest town with an official weather feed, climb from 2 to 3, and now 4 degrees F.

I may have to remove my fleece…

Tags: weather, cold

Popularity: 1% [?]

Today, it is cold.  Actually, it is very, very cold in most of Colorado today.  That’s theme #1.  Theme #2 is Wordpress themes.

I’ve used Wordpress since 2005 or earlier (I began testing it before I made the switch), and one of the reasons I’ve stuck with it is the theme metaphor.  I appreciate the ease with which I can made visual presentation changes, with almost no coding effort at all.  The folks who’ve developed themes & made them freely available are to be thanked.

Yesterday & again this morning I tried several new themes and have settled into one that I really like.  A couple of tweaks later, and this feels like what I’ve wanted for quite some time.

Tags: wordpress, themes

Popularity: 1% [?]

A woman was shopping at the local supermarket where she selected:

• A half-gallon of 2% milk
• A carton of eggs 
• A quart of orange juice 
• A head of romaine lettuce 
• A 2 lb. can of coffee
• A 1 lb. package of bacon 

As she was unloading her items on the conveyor belt to check out, a drunk standing behind her watched as she placed the items in front of the cashier.

While the cashier was ringing up the purchases, the drunk calmly slurred, ‘Ya mus be single.’  The woman was a bit startled by this proclamation, but she was intrigued by the drunk’s intuition, since she was indeed single.  She looked at the six items on the belt and saw nothing particularly unusual about her selections that could have tipped off the drunk as to her marital status.

Curiosity getting the better of her so she said: ‘Well, you know what, you’re absolutely right, but how on earth did you know that?’

The drunk replied, ‘Cause you’re ugly .’

Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

I IM’ed a friend yesterday to let him know I no longer used facebook.  He asked why, and I told him I no longer trusted facebook.  The truth is – I never really trusted them; it simply took a while for that to sink in and for me to take action.  I wiped as much as I could from my account & deactivated it – not surprisingly, you cannot delete your account. 

Trust is the single most important factor of any of my online activities.  Simple utility isn’t the differentiation any more, as there are many choices today for even arcane services.

I simply don’t trust facebook at this point. Beacon was designed as a social-spying program, etc… and Zuckerberg himself seems like the type of person ¹ I wouldn’t trust if he lived across the street. I’ve read a lot about him & the litigation around the formation of facebook, and one quote that stands out is "Just how many enemies he has collected at such a young age.”²

I think 2008 will be a watershed year for facebook in ways that the company isn’t expecting.  I can afford to be wrong – they can’t.

¹ http://www.02138mag.com/magazine/article/1764.html

² http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071130/ironic-yes-but-zuckerbergs-privacy-violated/

Tags: facebook, trust

Popularity: 1% [?]

This is pretty interesting.  As the blogosphere started to get into this story, I (and many others of course) already knew the plot, the main characters, and the cliff-hanger ending to "today’s episode".

Kara Swisher: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080103/free-the-scoble-5000/

Techcrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/03/plaxo-flubs-it/

How? Twitter. 

You mean this Twitter?  Um, yes, that one.  Twitter is about instant whatever.

Tags: twitter, scoble, facebook

Popularity: 1% [?]