I am now getting spam to a email address that I have never publically released. I suppose that it is conceivable that a spammer randomly put together an email based on a domain name. But they have millions of email ids already. I doubt that they would take each doman and brute force search them for new ids?

Another possibility is that I have sent email to this private id and some SMTP server along that route has been comprimised and is logging email addresses.

Or perhaps, my mail system is forwarding all non-valid ids to this primary id. Sigh. This is another problem to investigate. I wish this thing was install once and forget.

I like to read the News of the Weird in the Austin Chronicle. Every so often, there will be a story about how having the middle name of Wayne leads to crime. And in it are people who all share the same middle name of a famous John Wayne.

I know two people who share that middle name. I wonder what that means for me.

I looked at my door last night and found this stuck to it. Is it some junk advertising that people like to leave on my door? Are the neighborhood kids getting creative?

I am really starting to want to work for Google. Why? They are coming out with some neat applications. Plus, I have heard that Google allows employees to spend 20% of their time on their own research projects. This would definately fit my style. The only problem is that they are located in California. Living in California is expensive and house prices are ridiculous.

First, it was GMail. When GMail came out, I thought that you could do more with one gigabyte of mail space than just read email. You could essentially treat it as a USB key and transfer files between work and home. So, I created a Python application to turn a GMail account into a network filesystem. It works quite well. I still want to enable Linux to be able to mount and unmount someone’s GMail account.

Now, they have come out with Google Maps. The user interface is visibly better than other map sites. The reason why is they use Javascript under the web browser to do most of the work. Because their maps are pretty, I was tempted to reverse engineer the code. So, I spent the past two weekends figuring out what goes on under the covers. There were a number of challenges. The javascript code is shall we say space optimized. That is, there is no whitespace and all functions are named like: Ae, Bu, Jk, etc. So, I reformatted the javascript code and wrote a tiny Python proxy to substitute my pretty code for debugging purposes (Firefox has a great javascript debugger).

Now I can do something like this:

googleMap = GoogleMap ()
googleMap.setZoomLevel (2)
googleMap.setMapName (“map.jpg”)
mapUpperRightHome = googleMap.findLocation (“2900 1460, Round Rock TX 78664”)
mapLowerLeftHome = googleMap.findLocation (“1000 Sam Bass Road, Round Rock TX 78664”)
googleMap.setBounds (mapLowerLeftHome, mapUpperRightHome)
googleMap.createMap ()

To create maps like this:

Time Warner Austin is forcing me to upgrade my modem. My ex-officemate suspects that my old modem did not have DOCSIS support for throttling.

Anyways, I did notice some things about the new modem. It is *much* smaller than the original one. It is actually less massive than the power wart (on the right) that it comes with. I also saw that I get a new address range 70.113.33.X versus 24.?.?.X.

Update: I have also noticed that the receive light is always on. It is like the cable company is always trying to communicate with the LinkSys box.

I have learned that Jack L. Chalker has died. This is sad news. He was one of my favorite authors. The world will be a slightly worse place now.

This reminds me of when Issac Asimov died. Sigh. I must be getting old when my favorite Science Fiction authors are dying…

I decided to take a big step. It is the second scariest moment of my life (the first being buying a new house). I have paid off my mortgage. The savings account was making a ridiculous rate so I thought I could at least not have to pay off interest on the house. This brings my savings down to an unconfortable level, at least for me anyways. And I don’t feel comfortable about my job security either. So, this year I will have to save big time! I am aiming for being able to live for two years of unemployment.

Yeah, I know I could have used that money to invest in something, but I have not have that good of luck with the stock market. I am much more concerned about security and reducing my monthly expenditures right now.

So, Mike Chapel tells me to search on this
global thermal nuclear war game
and look at the number 2 entry. I do. It was this:

Global Thermal–Nuclear Warfare – ticalc.org


… wargames.zip. Filename, wargames.zip. Title, Global Thermal–Nuclear Warfare.


Description, The simple game of global thermal–nuclear war. …


www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/86/8690.html – 12k –
Cached
– Similar pages

This obviously was not what he was talking about. I asked him what he was talking about.
He said it moved further down and was now number 6. So I look at it. It was this:

IMG Review: Big Bang Chess


… If I had to choose between a rousing game of Global Thermal Nuclear War, and


a nice game of chess, I’d take chess any day of the week. …


insidemacgames.com/reviews/view.php?ID=509 – 39k –
Cached
– Similar pages

That also was obviously not what he was talking about. So I ask him again, “Are you on drugs?-)”.
It turns out that I was using Firefox
and he was using Microsoft Internet Explorer.
So I try IE and I can see what he is talking about.

Interesting!

It seems that IE was showing me this:

And Firefox was showing me this:

This is on the same computer at around the same time. Two different browsers show two different results. Weird!

Today, in an odd coincidence, I recieved a bunch of items. They are: a 21″ P202 monitor, a docking station for my new T41p thinkpad and version 9.0 of Slickedit! Oh, and today was payday also…

Wow, I have done 12 Sametime chat sessions this week. Actually, now that I think about it, it was 14. I closed 2 of the sessions. But wait, there is more. Another person just sametimed me! Gah! This is getting too cluttered!