So I mentioned earlier that I received an e-mail when I renewed my domain name thanking me for extending it to 2004. So I hit reply to that message from Verisign and asked them why their automated systems think the domain name expires in 2003 but their customer service reps. tell me it expired in…
August, 2002
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Seth Dillingham has written an interesting post about honesty and why there seems to be so little of it in the world. Seth writes, The issues discussed most [by religious and secular leaders] are related to sex, drugs, and violence: premarital sex and cohabitation, increased acceptance of “alternative” life styles, widespread use of recreational drugs,…
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Much of my weekend was spent sending expletive-filled e-mails to “customer service” folks at Verisign. I literally cannot believe how one organization could be that incompetent — at times they were approaching WorldCom-esque proportions in the creative way they were keeping track of my domain name. Okay, this story goes back a few weeks to…
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Glenn Reynolds criticizes a ridiculous web site that Rebecca Blood links to, which reminded me of something I wrote late last month but never posted about Blood’s extremely credulous post about antibiotic resistance to staph infection. Blood wrote, And the genie is out of the bottle: ‘The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has announced the…
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Excellent introduction to an article about SpamNet in the latest issue of Wired, Consider this irony: Yahoo! spent millions on a campaign to promote the slogan “Do you Yahoo!?” And sure enough, people everywhere now use the name of a search engine as a verb. Sadly for Yahoo!, that verb is “Google.”
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The Washington Post recently reported on the progress of the Innocence Protection Act — a bill slowly winding its way through the Congress that would help convicts gain access to DNA evidence that might exonerate them. The bill would offer federal funds to states to reform the way they collect, preserve and offer access to…
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On September 5, 1972, Palestinian terrorists killed two Israeli Olympic athletes and took nine others hostage. In a later shootout, all the remaining Israeli athletes and officials as well as the terrorists were killed. In a story on the accomplishments of a contemporary Israeli athlete, Reuters describes that attack this way, Members of the Palestinian…
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Here’s another example of the sort of egregious ethical standards at some weblog-oriented sites, this one courtsey of Slashdot. Posting about the recent revelations of yet more accounting problems at WorldCom, a Slashdot editor writes, There’s also a NYT story. I love how the news outlets are saying, “error”, “irregularity”, “problem”, as if this was…
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Today I went in and saw my doctor about the viral infection that’s been making me feel lousy most of this week. Not very interesting, perhaps, except my doctor has a peculiar habit that I’ve never seen any other physician do and which is simultaneously scary/intriguing — when he gets to the point where he’s…
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I’d never heard of a little program called ActiveWords until Jon Udell gave it high marks in a post on his InfoWorld weblog. This is essentially a DIY command line interface for Windows. Pick a keyword, assign it a task, and you can instantly launch any application, window, URL or script from anywhere within windows…