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According to SlashDot, the FTC is considering new legislation that would create a national "do not call" list for telemarketers. The legislation would also require telemarketers to have caller ID enabled and to limit the "hangups" that predictive dialers generate. There are some loopholes for charities or businesses you've bought from (i.e. my car dealer bugging me to come in for an oil change), but if it gets AT&T to stop calling me, so be it. Sign Me Up.

No, that's not some kinky sex toy you see here...

Gabe and I went rock climbing yesterday. While it's safe to say he's quite a good deal "more monkey" than me, I did fairly well I guess. I think big feet are a minus, as is "weighing a lot" and having more upper body strength. For someone who types all day, I have surprisingly weak fingers. We climbed at Coral Cliffs in Ft. Lauderdale (ugly site, but not a bad joint all told).

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Gabe and I were flipping through our respective spam corpuses (corpii?) today and came across some interesting statistics or examples.

The word "unsolicited" appeared in 144 spams, 0 real emails. The benign "trust" has appeared in 47 spams, 0 reals. "toner" is 181/0, but that one's pretty obvious if you've ever gotten those stupid ink jet refill spams. "success" is 0 for 98. "spacer.gif" is 0 for 317! "serif" has struck out 141 times and gotten no hits, but that pales in comparison to "font" which shows up in 13054 spams (but 288 valid emails, giving it a probability of 0.500). "cash" = 291 spams, 2 real. The best words, all with 0.010 probability of being spam? "usb", "apple.com", "beta", "cocoa", "moreinfo.fcgi", "maildrop", "phil", and "stupidity" (among a few hundred others).

First Amazon patented clicking. Now, it seems, AOL has been granted a patent on instant messaging networks.

The patent (6449344), originally filed in 1997, and granted in September this year, gives AOL instant messaging subsidiary ICQ rights as the inventor of the popular IM Internet application. The patent covers anything resembling a network that lets multiple IM users see when other people are present and then communicate with them.

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Just a few days ago I finished listening to "Accidental Playboy" by Leif Ueland via iTunes (courtesy of audible.com). It's a fairly interesting book written about one unassuming journalist's tale on the Playboy Millennium Search Bus. It's witty, amusing, and is a nice, light bit of non-fiction in the usual mix. Some parts were flat out funny, but I'm sure any lulls that existed may have been smoothed over by the fact that my brain can much more easily tune out an audible reading of a book than it can when I'm doing the reading. Now, back to "Twenty Years After," by Dumas. It's good so far (about 1/5 of the way through).

BBEdit is one of my favorite applications. I use about 1/10 of its power (we supposedly use the same percentage of our brain power at peak usage) because it typically follows good standards, stays very much "out of my way," provides keyboard shortcuts throughout, and so on. In short, it's a very good "citizen" of Mac OS X as John Geleynse likes to say. It's even got an animated dock icon when doing massive find/replaces or uploading files to FTP servers.

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My friend Ron and I had a nice evening at Outback one time (nice = I got to eat steak). The time flied as we bitched about various women in our life, and how seemingly illogical they can be... y'know, guy talk. Sports, work, women, and steak. Guy stuff. Part of my goal that evening was actually to ask out a waitress named Michelle, and as I'd yet to do this by the time we'd completed our meals, I said "yes" to "would you like to order a dessert or coffee?" The waiter came back, we ordered (me a sundae, Ron nothing as they had poor coffee). Waiter Boy put the sundae between us and said "you guys are sharing right?" Uhhh…

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Perhaps someone can explain to me just why in Sam's tarnation XML is so wonderful. Why? Because I'd really like to know. I feel like I'm missing the boat here, and that XML is something I've already seen and done. Except I called it "tab-delimited text" or something.

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Which side are you on?

I've always said "pop." At Pennsylvania Free Enterprise Week (hi Kelly, hi Molly) we pretty much figured out that the dividing line for PA was about mid-state (and vertical).

Anyway, it's "pop" darnit. Actually, whatever it is, it better not be Pepsi. For me anyway.

When you're all done with that, take the dialect survey. Be forewarned: it's pretty long and will have you talking to yourself like a crazy person.

Today as I drove around after returning "Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood" (I think Sandra Bullock is an adorable creature, but even this movie could not be saved. UGH!), I saw a young woman sitting in her Cabrio convertible (are they all?). So here I am, sitting in a light ADC t-shirt, shorts, windows wide open blasting Shania Twain, and this girl's got a jacket and a SCARF on. We live about an hour north of the southernmost tip of Florida. It's at least sixty something out. And she's wearing a scarf? Oy... I give up. I guess I'll have to adjust. Where's my leather jacket...

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Adium 2.0a1 (pre-alpha, really) should be released as source code today. For those that don't know, Adium is a brilliant little AIM clone written in Cocoa by one "Adam Iser" (figure out why it's called Adium yet?). The biggest innovation is arguably the "tabbed windows" that prevent your screen from becoming littered with the five conversations you're having.

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Want to see your private parts in wax? The "fine" folks at Match Your Snatch can do just that for you? As seen here, these "skilled" workers sell kits that allow you to model your very own genitalia (or, I presume, that of your loved ones...) in wax. You too can "clone your bone." As the site suggests, you could...

Order a few to enliven your next Girl's Night Out and guess who's who!

With suggestions like this, how can you pass up the opportunity?!?!

From this article comes this quote:

The next time you check your e-mail and want to curse the lowlife responsible for all that unwanted commercial e-mail--aka spam--you might start cursing into a mirror.

Hate the sender all you want, the sad fact is that you may very well be the person ultimately responsible for the spam you receive by giving your address out to various Web sites, posting it to newsgroups or mailing lists, or otherwise exposing it in places where anyone can find it.

Yeah, what the #@!* ever. It's MY fault for expecting companies to treat my email address with respect. Riiiiiight. Yeah, silly me. I should blame myself for the porn and penis enlargment and goodness knows what else email. What the #@!* ever.

In Hackass, John Gruber writes about Leander Kahney, the Apple beat writer for Wired "News." At the end, after a fairly brief but accurate disassembly of what I would agree to be the work of a "Hackass," Gruber proposes that we "simply ignore" comments like this.

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I switch someone to a Mac nearly every time I work. Granted, I only work one or two days a week, and still for the benefits, but it's pretty interesting stuff. I've read a bunch of stuff about how "oh, those Switch ads aren't working" or "the market share isn't rising" or whatever. I'll tell you: I've got first-hand knowledge of the fact that those people are wrong.

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