That’s what I call planning ahead
Pseudo-consensual link-farming
This, I think, is a new one.
I have received a piece of spam (sent via an insecure host in Ukraine) that appears to be an innocuous request by one blogger to exchange links with other blogs. The problem is that the sender is nobody I’ve ever heard of, and the blogs aren’t particularly on the same subject as stuff I write about (if anyone figures out what subject I’m writing about, please let me know).
The blogs in question appear to be legit blogspot-hosted blogs–and they have on-topic content–except that the sidebars are obvious link-farms, as is the website associated with the sender’s e-mail domain.
So what we have here is an attempt to get people to act as part of an unpaid link-farm. More polite than comment-spamming, I guess.
Nastygram to T-Mobile
Following is the text of a letter I’m sending to T-Mobile
I recently signed up as a customer of T-Mobile, and was annoyed to discover that every time I receive voicemail, I also receive a text message from the network notifying me that I have voicemail (that is, I was annoyed after I overcame my initial confusion). A customer-service rep told me this is just the way it works, and there’s no way to turn it off. This isn’t a feature, it’s a bug. You should turn it off.
I was doubly annoyed when I received my first bill and learned that I am being billed 5¢ for each of those messages—which I don’t want in the first place.
My annoyance all the more acute because a neighborhood I visit regularly is so poorly covered by T-Mobile that phone calls often roll over to voice mail automatically. So we have a situation where I’m often out of reach because of shortcomings in your network, and I am paying extra for poor coverage.
You guys have me on the hook for one year, but so far, I’ve been less than impressed and will eagerly explore my options when my contract is ended.
Beat the spread
I had dinner last night with some friends, Drew and Farooq, and rather than watch George II deliver a pack of lies, platitudes, and empty promises, I insisted that we talk.
Inevitably, talk turned to politics. Now, neither of these guys has any love for our current Dear Leader, but I was surprised at their antipathy towards Dean, which was not so much because of any of Dean’s policies, or even his personal style, but what the mainstream media has told us his style is: angry.
This surprised me on a couple of levels. Both of these guys are much smarter than me, and generally very well-informed. But in this case, they were making a judgment A) based not on platforms and policy, but on personality, and B) based not so much on the person’s actual personality as the conventional-wisdom story of that person’s personality.
Now, I’ve been impressed by Dean–I haven’t decided for certain that I’ll vote for him, but it is looking that way. So I have my own biases. But when Farooq showed us how Dean is depicted on the Drudge Report, of all sources, to back up his point, I was a bit appalled.
Aside from cracking that Dean’s too unstable to be the man with his finger on the button, both of them seemed to believe strongly that we need a safe bet candidate like Kerry to have any hopes of defeating Bush in November. I’ve been thinking about this, and I don’t agree.
I suspect that if the election is anything but a blowout (which is very unlikely), it will be rigged. All it will take is a discreet call to Wally O’Dell and some voting machines “patched” in some close races.
Which is why we would need to gamble on a blowout. A safe candidate like Kerry might edge Bush in a fair fight, but without a blowout, and–in a rigged election–certain to lose. A riskier candidate like Dean might have a greater chance of losing a fair vote. In an election, though, where the opposition can rig the outcome a little but not a lot, we need someone who has some chance at beating the spread.
This tinfoil-hat logic isn’t the reason I’m tending towards Dean, but it is something I’m tossing around.
Restructuring
The front page hardly looks different, but I’ve completely reworked all my blog templates.
For one thing, I’m using individual entry archives. I’ve decided that makes the most sense. I’ve kept a calendar view (derived from Mark Pilgrim’s) for my monthly archives, along with the category view of the archives.
I’ve installed a couple of patches to thwart blogspam. And to deal with MT’s dodgy linebreak conversion, I’ve installed bloxpert, thanks to which the pages I’ve cursorily checked are now valid XHTML.
The downside to this is that all inbound links will break. Sorry. I may try some kind of mod-rewrite trick to divert inbound links to the correct calendar page.
MT Users: Install v2.66 now
The people bitch, Ben Trott listens. Movable Type has been updated to 2.66, mostly to add anti-blogspam controls.
- URLs are passed through a redirector, so as to negate any googlejuice that spammers might hope to gain. This just made things more complicated for David Sifry’s Technorati.
- You can add a ThrottleSeconds value to your mt.cfg file. Mine is ThrottleSeconds 60, for whatever it’s worth. I’d prefer for this to be progressive (ie, 30, then 60, then 120, etc) and to have an auto-ban feature, but this is a good start.
Disabling comments on old blog posts: questionable wisdom
There’s a lot of talk among hardcore bloggers on the subject of the best way to deal with spam in their blog comments. Some people advocate turning off comments entirely; others suggest turning them off after the post reaches a certain age. It seems that comment-spammers mostly focus on older entries–perhaps simply because statistically, most entries are old, but perhaps this is intentional, in the hopes that the blog owner won’t notice comments on posts that have scrolled off the front page.
There’s also been a lot of discussion of power laws and inequality.
How one runs one’s blog is one’s own business, of course, but it’s a shame to disable comments on old posts. Jason Kottke famously had a thousand-comment-long discussion following his review of Matrix Reloaded.
I’ve observed a vaguely similar phenomenon in a post I made after getting my wisdom teeth out. A google search on the phrase “wisdom teeth out” brings up the comments on that entry as the third result. People drop by to relate their own experiences getting their wisdom teeth out: it’s not a discussion, exactly, more a repository of anecdotes, mostly by people I don’t know and have no other contact with. Obviously this couldn’t happen with closed comments.
What’s also interesting is that this must be a self-reinforcing tendency. I have no way of tracking how the same comments page has been ranked in Google’s results over time, but I can’t imagine that it has always been #3. The more people that comment there, though, the more that page is likely to be ranked highly as a result for wisdom-tooth-related queries.
Incense beer
Drinking an Anchor Christmas Ale with my tom yum soup tonight, I made a bizarre discovery: it smells exactly like Nag Champa incense.
Can anyone explain this to me?
Squeezing the golden eggs out of the goose
South Congress is becoming a victim of its own success: fun stores like Terra Toys (which has been down there as long as I can remember) and Lone Star Illusions are losing their leases, presumably to make way for tenants that can pay usuriously high rents.
South Congress has, of course, become a happening area, especially with First Thursday. The landlords, no dummies they, see the high foot traffic, see storefronts being rented to trendy, expensive boutiques, and decide to cash in.
This will backfire. Squeeze the goose that laid the golden egg and you will kill it. I’ve seen this happen before.
I grew up in Lincoln Park, Chicago. When I was born, it was not a great neighborhood–not even a good neighborhood. It supported three kinds of businesses: gyros palaces (which had mysterious fires with great regularity), resale shops, and prostitution. Gradually, thanks to people like my parents moving in, the neighborhood was rehabilitated. Rents on Clark Street (the main commercial street in the neighborhood) rose and rose. By the time that my parents opened a shop on Clark in the early 90s, much of Clark Street’s retail space was owned by a handful of landlords; my parents’ landlord, Marvin Winkler, was greedy to the point of madness. He would rather leave a storefront sit empty for a year than lower his rents. He may have been an extreme case, but ultimately, the greed of the landlords was self-defeating. The rate of business failure was very high. Stores that were useful to local residents, like copy shops and cobblers, got priced out of existence (not that the residents could afford to shop in their own neighborhood anymore, as housing prices had also skyrocketed to the point where people spent all their income on rent). A large number of new business openings were poorly conceived nicknack shops run by people with no business acumen and less chance for commercial success.
South Congress today is successful because of the shops that are there today. There’s no magic pixie dust in the air there that creates success, it’s a vibe that those shops create that will not last long beyond their absence. The landlords owning the storefronts on SoCo can raise their rents to the point where only national chains can rent from them, at which point SoCo becomes a strip mall. Or where nicknack shops with clueless operators spring up and vanish like mushrooms after a summer shower.
iPodlet redux
I wrote before that we’d see interesting things come of these matchbox-sized hard drives, now that they’ve got pretty serious storage capacity. And now we have. Apple doesn’t call it the iPodlet, though.
At the risk of sounding churlish, I’m a bit disappointed in how big it is. It’s the size of a business card. OK, that’s churlish. But I really thought they could get a microdrive-based iPod down to about half that size.
Later: There’s been a shitload of virtual ink spilled over this thing. My thoughts:
The iPod mini is probably using the Hitachi 4 GB Microdrive. Hitachi also makes 1 GB and 2 GB units. I am guessing that after Apple fleeces the early adopters, they’ll contemplate bringing out downmarket versions for a little less. Either that or the Microdrive capacities will ratchet up, and the 4 GB model will itself become the downmarket version. People condemn the mini for its capacity, but seem to forget that the original iPod had only 5 GB capacity.
People bitch about the price. Considering that a bare 4 GB Microdrive retails for about $500, I think it’s a steal.
People bitch about the capacity. I suppose that if I wanted to use my iPod as my primary storage for MP3s, I would too. But that’s what my desktop computer’s hard drive is for–I wouldn’t need to have all my music on my iPod, and Apple has done a lot of work to make it easy to move MP3s between the computer and iPod, to generate random playlists, and generally to keep the iPod full of whatever music you want. There are two limiting factors on how much music you can play on any portable player: the memory capacity (coupled with your tolerance for listening to the same thing repeatedly, I suppose) and the battery capacity. It’s a happy non-coincidence that the same device you use to charge the iPod is what you use to transfer music to it. Having 100 hours of music on a portable player is redundant if you’ve got 8 hours of playtime with the battery. I might want more than 8 hours of music so that I don’t need to pre-select exactly what I will want to hear, but I don’t think I’d need 12.5x more to satisfy my desire for variety. I get about 48 hours of music into 4 GB–or 36 hours plus my entire home directory, and I rip my music at a higher bitrate than the iTunes default. music time: battery time ratio of at least 3:1 and as much as 5:1 sounds about right.
People suggest that it’s foolish to buy a 4 GB unit when one can buy a 15 GB unit that’s $50 more. If I were getting an iPod, I’d get the mini. I don’t need a 15 GB player. I do need portability, and the original design of the iPod, clever though it is, just isn’t as small as I’d want.
People bitch about the design. That’s a matter of taste, and de gustibus, non disputandum est. I admit to being a little disappointed in the dimensions, and unthrilled by the styling myself. But I still look forward to playing with one.
Still later Now I read about Toshiba’s 0.85″ drive. Obviously Apple wouldn’t have had time to engineer the new mini around this, but it suggests we could see even smaller iPods, or that the mini in its current form will get a capacity boost sooner rather than later.
Also interesting is GarageBand. I watched The Keynote, and Jobs made a couple of wry references to file-sharing. In the back of my mind, I mused that with GarageBand, he might be taking the ultimate end-run around the MPAA. Surely this has nothing to do with Apple’s decision to develop and market this program. Surely not.
But it’s fun to contemplate.