URLs du Jour

2006-01-09

Pun Salad, now with new and improved ISO 8601 formats for dates! Assuming I remember to do that from here on out.

  • This t-shirt speaks volumes about the wearer's impressive courage and sense of humor. And she's also pretty easy on the eyes.
  • Lileks' Bleat is always worth reading, but you really must check out today's graphic, which will make any non-Photoshop wizard say: how the heck did he do that?. Also has a wish-I'd-written on the spam messages that slip by his filters:
    They're all for mortgages. Yes, nothing cements my confidence in an online mortgage provider like a letter whose misspellings are intentional attempts to defeat my filters.
    Excellent point, and not only because I've often thought the same thing. How effective can it possibly be to send intentionally-misspelled spam like that? Doesn't it just scream "dishonest scam" to any sentinent reader?

    Anyway, Lileks has an ideal penalty for spammers, illustrated.

  • If you want to have your thoughts provoked, Jaron Lanier has an essay over at "Cato Unbound". Title: "The Gory Antigora: Illusions of Capitalism and Computers." Responses are promised from Eric Raymond, John Perry Barlow, Glenn Reynolds, and David Gelernter.

    Myself: I don't really get Lanier's point. It doesn't help that Lanier's writing style is rambling and pretentious. When he makes a point I understand, it seems either (a) trivial when shorn of fancy language ("Human cognition has been finely tuned in the deep time of evolution for continuous interaction with the world." Duh.) or (b) wrong ("As it happens, I dislike UNIX and its kin because it is based on the premise that people should interact with computers through a 'command line.'" I don't think UNIX has a single premise, and in any case, that's not one of them.)

    If you don't want to wait for the Raymond/Reynolds/Barlow/Gelernter responses, Slashdot has an article, and the comments there, as always, vary widely in quality. Many people seem dubious.

  • Note that yesterday's decision to refer to myself only in the third person has been jettisoned today. What was I thinking?

Last Modified 2006-01-11 12:46 PM EDT