Check out iTown -- Your Town as a Blog

I just got the nicest email from a Harvey Kirkpatrick.  He apparently read Essential Blogging and liked it.  Nice to be appreciated.  Harvey is the mayor of "iTown" which is a new community designed to create "town blogs".  That's a very interesting idea.  They've licensed Radio and are using it to build the BlogSpace.  They also seem to be taking the concept of a town blog pretty seriously and are up front about what constitutes unacceptable content.  [_Go_] [_Harvey's Blog_]

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How Cool ... Spam for Everyone and for Everyone a Good Spam

If you write an anti-spam product like Inbox Buddy then you might be interested in this:

Is your spouse dissatisfied with the size of your spam? A brand-new website has made several hundred thousand pieces of unsolicited commercial e-mail available for you to download today. Act now!

After a quiet online debut last week, the Spam Archive is making quick strides toward becoming the largest public library of junk e-mail on the Internet. [_Go_]

Oh and in a side note -- one of the nicest things for me about the Wired redesign to an all CSS based approach is pasting into Radio works much more nicely -- no HTML to clean up manually.  Thanks Wired.

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Amazon Take 2

Like Moxie I seem to be still having problems with Amazon.  But where she at least got humor out of it, I have NBF -- nothing but frustration.  A note to support staff anywhere -- replying with answers that are self evident just make you look like a buffoon.  Here's one of the lines from the email:

1.Offer valid through December 31, 2002.

Ah... HELLO !!!! It's December 2nd.  DUH!  Well another day, another unhappy customer.  You would think that their customer service reps would look at an account profile and see that I've previously used Amazon promotions successfully and say to themselves "Well he did it before ... Perhaps he's not a drooling, babbling idiot.  Maybe we should take his comment seriously and try it ourselves".  Nope.  All they did was send me the restrictions on the web page where the offer is described.  So I've now emailed them again and we'll see what happens.

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Presentations Anyone?

While I suspect that most of my regular readers have seen these already, I just threw up a home page for all the presentations I gave in the past year.  [_Go_]  My php-con stuff as well as my webbuilder stuff is there.  Unfortunately none of my presentations from preceding years are online -- or likely to be.  Some was company proprietary and other so far predates PowerPoint it's not even funny.  Sigh.  Legacy office data anyone?

Note: Yes I do "sigh" a lot.  It seems like as far as we've come in computing, there's just so damn far to go.  At times it boggles the mind how crude everything still is.  I've recently been reading Tog on Software Design which came out in Dec 95 and it seems like all of our office software is exactly where it was when he wrote it.  It's a great albeit at times depressing book.

Oh and it snowed again in Boston last night.  It seems like Old Man Winter is here early and with a vengeance.

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