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Question: What's the lamest sport?

My Answer: Auto racing. Drivers piss themselves because there are no restroom breaks and the real "athletes" are multi-million dollar cars. Yet they call it a sport. It may be a race, but it's one that requires substantially less effort by the human than the machine. I don't consider any sport that requires mechanical devices to really be much of a sport. They need a new category for these kinds of things. Hunting and fishing are still sports, though they may fall into this category too because they're sports in which the opponent doesn't know they're playing.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Question: For what do you think this decade will be remembered most?

My Answer: The downfall of the music industry as we know it. Of course, that may be wishful thinking, but we'll see. I couldn't think of much better. The 90s are known for the Internet age, I think. It may be too early to say.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Does an email address from a California-based company (say, one ending in "@mac.com") count in the recent ban on spam in CA? Good luck enforcing that one. 🙁

Question: What's your favorite oxymoron?

My Answer: Today I heard the phrase "critical praise" and it just sounded odd. Not a true oxymoron, because by "critical" it means "from someone or a group of someones who is/are critic(s)," but it still sounded odd. My absolute favorites are often computing terms that pop up from time to time. Y'know, like "advanced user." 🙂

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Not only has Fastlane crashed, but it seems that Mr. Sterling is done for as well. Oh well. At least I've still got West Wing. A Sorkin-less West Wing, but a West Wing nonetheless.

A friend of mine, who lives near Baltimore, did some war driving:

We did this in two sessions of driving. The first was about fifteen minutes (driving to a restaurant and back), the second was about an hour and a half (we actually drove through apartment and housing complexes the second time instead of just sticking to the main roads).

54 unique wireless networks
6 ad-hoc networks, the rest were APs

34 of those networks had WEP turned off
12 had the default linksys SSID
5 just had an SSID of "default"
4 had an SSID of "wireless"
2 had an SSID of "MSHOME"
1 had the default 3com SSID
1 had an SSID of "cvsretail"
The rest of those 34 had various SSIDs.

Most of the wireless APs we found were near middle income apartment buildings. We drove only about twenty or thirty miles total.

One day I should get a friend together and do some war kayaking. 🙂

Question: What's the most money you've ever spent on music in a single day?

My Answer: I once bought a ton of R.E.M. imports on a single day and the grand total was just under $400. I got a lot of good stuff, though!

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

After yesterday's icon comes this revision. We like this a lot more. We were slightly concerned with the cultural significance of a carton of orange juice, as Andy tells me it's used for whey in Austria, but whey isn't offensive, is it? Most of our target audience will be in the US anyway, let's not kid ourselves.

Adam Betts is doing our icons, by the way. What's odd is that if you Google for 'betts bros icon' this very blog comes up first. 😛

Thanks to those who wrote re: beta testing. Two people IMed me - if they could email me instead, I'll add them to the list. It's full now and it will start sometime last next week or the week after.

There's a new game on your iPod with the 2.1 update: Music Quiz. It's awesome. Five songs are listed, and a short clip of a random song from your iPod is played. A prize counter ticks down as some choices disappear. Choose the right song quickly and get massive points! Or wait and choose between two if you're slow. Fun for hours!

I only wish it had a set limit so you could compete for high scores. Currently, the game just goes on forever.

It feels unusual posting this to the "Computing: General" category, but I wanted to point out that there's now an iTunes LinkMaker. Search for songs, artists, albums, and create links, badges, etc. Great.

I also want to publicly prod one person (perhaps he's named Jason) to get Recent Tunes update out. The update will upload file(s) to your blog so you can have a "now playing" list. It will remain free. Jason, yo, get crackin'! It's nearly done, man, so push hard!

Like everyone and their brother, I too have now installed MT-Blacklist. Some things I like, don't like, and want to see changed:

• I don't like that it's retroactive. I hope no previous comments qualify as spam, because I've deleted any and all spam comments posted to my site. I have none.
• What if it deletes a comment that's valid? Can I get it back? Will the log just show me that something was deleted?
• I guess the default set (I scanned it) is pretty safe.
• I've published my list at http://nslog.com/blacklist.txt (I've added about 12 IP addresses).
• Perhaps if we shut down comment spam from the get-go, early on, then it won't ever be a problem. Since the more highly PageRanked blogs are typically aware of the problem, and the desirable targets for comment spammers, then this seems like a real possibility.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Work began on our next product's icons today. The result you see to the right. Very, very, very few people know what this app does (or will do), and my guess is that you won't guess it from the picture over there either.

We know now that PulpFiction won't be ready next Friday (for Panther), but we do know that it's coming along nicely, and that the final product should be both simple to use and very powerful, building on established paradigms (I hate that word sometimes) and leveraging a lot of "I already know how to do that." We're trying to make the program accessible, yet feature-rich.

We'll see how it shakes out. Want to beta test? IM or email me privately. You'll need a copy of Panther, first.

Question: Do you judge?

My Answer: Only the people on Survivor. 🙂

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Cingular went GSM in my area a while back. Though I didn't upgrade (they didn't have the Motorola v600 I want), I did note that they had the phones in stock and were gladly selling them to anyone who wanted them.

Knowing that they are, indeed, GSM, I ventured over to Cingular.com to see if they had a listing for a new phone I heard about today, the S-E Z600. Funny, but I shop for phones, type in my zip code, and all I see are TDMA phones, not the $300 GSM ones.

Cingular, get your act together. Please.

I use SpamSieve with Entourage and it works beautifully. Sometimes, though, a false positive occurs: email that isn't spam is marked as spam. I routinely check my spam folder to see if any messages have slipped through, but with over 200 spams per day, this is tedious at best.

I've emailed Michael the idea, but here it is again: SpamSieve should change the subject of all suspected spam. It should precede the subject with [xxx] where xxx is a rating, from perhaps 001 to 100. I could sort my spam folder by subject, and reduce my quick scans for false positives to the 25% of messages least likely to be spam.

Did that make sense?