November, 2002

  1. Goal Achieved – 4 Million Page Views in 2002

    Last year I had 3 million page views on my various web sites, and this year I set a goal of increasing that by at least 1 million page views. Yesterday I hit the 4 million mark. One of the major increases was at AnimalRights.Net, where average traffic has more than doubled from about 1,500…

  2. Best Political Comment of the Week

    Slashdot has a thread about this proposed Microsoft initiative that would essentially create a Google for your entire life — dump all of your home videos, pictures, correspondence, e-mail, etc. into one unstructure database. So just put your entire life into one big database. To which an astute Slashdot poster observes, Sounds kinda redudant to…

  3. Don’t Taunt the Dictator

    The South African Press Association reports that Zimbabwe’s government has enacted a new law making it a crime to, . . .make any gesture or statement within the view or hearing of the state motorcade with the intention of insulting any person travelling with an escort or any member of the escort. The press association…

  4. Disagree with Tom Daschle? Watch What You Say!

    Henry Hanks comes through again with a link to ridiculous comments by Tom Daschle, in which the soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader links people who publicly disagree with him to death threats he’s received, “What happens when (radio talk show host) Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people aren’t satisfied just…

  5. Salon.Com’s Status — It’s All a Matter of Perspective

    Yesterday I happened to run across this rather positive assessment of Salon.Com’s financial position by Dot.Com big spender David Talbot in which he pokes fun at the pundits who have been predicting Salon.Com’s impending doom, In fact, our impending non-existence has been predicted in the press for so long, and with such conviction, that we…

  6. More Zimbabwean Ministers to Travel to Europe Despite Ban

    Despite a travel ban which is supposed to keep all members of Zimbabwe’s government from entering Europe, two Zimbabwean ministers have once again proved the ban is a sham by obtaining visas to visit the European Union headquarters in Belgium. The two are traveling there via Germany, which also is supposedly covered by the travel…

  7. Why Do People Own Guns?

    My local newspaper, The Kalamazoo Gazette, ran a story about gun ownership this week where they essentially added some local quotes to a larger story written by The Newhouse News Service (the Gazette is a Newhouse paper) about why people own guns. If you believe the story, people own guns for only two reasons: 1.…

  8. Are White Lists the Best Answer to Spam?

    Ken Werbach argues in Slate that spam filters are doomed because of the sheer volume of spam and that the future belongs to so-called white lists (Werbach really misses the boat here by failing to so much as mention client-side filtering). A white list configures an e-mail client so that only only from a predefined…

  9. Mailing Lists That Really Piss Me Off

    E-mail administrators like Barb Niehaus really piss me off. Niehaus runs a mailing list that doesn’t require a confirmation e-mail — so anyone can (and some idiot out there does occasionally) paste my e-mail address in a submission box and I’m receiving her newsletter. Now I don’t have a problem with that per se. I…