Friday, July 12, 2002

Finally, just when I thought I couldn't take the losses any longer -- the mocking, taunting, relentless bottle caps that said PLEASE TRY AGAIN but might have well have said YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO WIN, YOU BIG FAT LOSER -- my Dr. Pepper cap came up roses today: WINNER 12 PACK COUPON. Can't just cash this in at a participating retailer. Nope. Gotta mail it in to Waco, which will probably get me on all sorts of Pepper mailing lists, and then they'll send me my coupon. This is almost as exciting as the time I accidentally won a Jacksons album (all vinyl back then, baby) when I called the station to make a request but ended up being caller number nine. Actually, I bet I get more use out of twelve cans of Dr. Pepper than I ever got out of that crappy album. 4:34:43 PM

I couldn't settle on a good title: "change is in the air" or "changes in the air." Probably the latter, since there will be more than one. First, a superficial change: I keep bouncing around with the look and feel of this site, because, well, frankly I don't like browsing around and seeing other sites that look exactly like this one. Too confusing. Plus I just gotta be me. So sometime over the next few weeks, I'll be rolling up the sleeves, applying some lessons from Mark, building my own swank CSS-based Radio theme. Second, I'm going to move all of my leukemia-related stuff (including this recent, rough, angry piece) to a separate location. Probably another install of Radio. I'm planning on using weblogs a bit differently: instead of a daily chronicle of current events and interesting links, I will use it to help me tackle writing about my own experience with leukemia. I don't want to lose myself in the past, though, so I will keep this site going as well. Lots of stuff on the to-do list. Better get cranking. 9:01:10 AM

There's a great little pissing contest going on at MeFi. If you can get past the amusing semantic battle about what does "conservative" mean, there are plenty of good links in the conversation. Like I hadn't realized that when GW was investigated for all this, Daddy was the president, and the head of the SEC was W's former lawyer. Not to suggest a conspiracy, just some clear conflicts of interest. And even if it was an open and shut case (which it isn't), the main point, really, is the hypocricy. It's okay to have changed your stance. It's okay to move past your past and want to do something about problems in corporate America. But I haven't heard any admission that maybe somewhere in their past, Bush and/or Cheney had been involved in ethically squishy dealings. It's the same as presidents running at least back to Reagan, but probably much farther: never admit to any unproven potential wrong-doings in your past. But at least Clinton never spoke out against infidelity. 8:33:47 AM

Imagine if, in response to the deluge of catalogs, credit-card offerings, and other junk that clutters your mailbox at home, the U.S. Post Office decided to simply not deliver anything that seemed "junky." At least according to this ZDNet article, that's the tactic being taken by some spam blocklists. Of course, it's much more expensive to send out vast amounts of bulk mail with the post office, and there's no real disincentive to turn off the spam. Maybe a different approach is necessary. Like my favorite reply to a telemarketer ("I'm in the middle of dinner right now, but if you give me your home phone number, I'll gladly return the call after you've left work for the day"), maybe the response to spam isn't to block or filter, but to simply auto-reply. Flood their inbox with their own junk. Only works if the reply actually goes back to the spammer in question, and only if everybody does it. I'll work on refining my eye-for-an-eye spam software. 8:19:33 AM