Guy falls asleep ...

Guy falls asleep in a trash bin. Bin is emptied into garbage truck. Man gets compacted, and lives! This reminds me of when I was in college and working the grocery store night shift, stocking shelves. About twice each night I was responsible for emptying "Igor" which is what we called the cardboard baling machine. Wheeling a cart of empty boxes to the back room was always accompanied by someone saying "It's time to feed Igor." When I first started the night shift the other guys in my team would tell scary stories about incidents across the U.S. where some unlucky kid would get himself crushed while removing the bale of cardboard. Ahh, they were quite the jokesters. If you want a really funny story, ask me sometime about the time I tipped over an entire pallet of Pepsi while unloading the delivery truck. Man, I never knew 2-liter Pepsi bottles could fly like that.

Maureen Dowd: The Boy Who Would Be Emporer. Clever.

OK, I was looking at this Perl CGI called RssDisplay that will render an RSS feed into HTML so that it can be included into a server side include. It's great little script, but not exactly what I'm looking for. What I want is something that does the exact opposite: takes a chunk of static HTML and renders it into an RSS feed. I want something like what Syndic8/NewsIsFree is doing with this scraped CamWorld feed [XML], but instead of relying on their service I want the CGI to reside on my own server and perform the same function.

This NY Times article is ludicrous. A recent survey says that 81% of Americans feel that they should write that novel that lurks within them, and the author then proceeds to discourage readers from even trying. Apparently the author is forgetting that dead-tree books is not the only form of media that makes a person an author. The traditional high cost of book publishing has kept many very talented writers from ever being published, but the low cost of the Internet makes it a perfect medium to let anyone publish anything they want -- and that includes the Great American Novel the author of this article so desperately wants people to avoid writing.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: The president's real goal in Iraq. Scary, if true.

Is Jake Stoner ...

Is Jake Stoner the next Bernard Shifman?

• Jake's unsolicited email to me
• His response to my SpamCop report
• My response to him

• Jake's MLM Web site
• Jake's other MLM Web site
• Yet another MLM web site, by Jake
• Jake's name appears on this list of known spammers

The television graveyard tonight forced me to channel-surf, and I ended up watching the Miss Venezuela 2002 pageant. I don't care that I didn't understand a word of it, hot damn!

I must admit that I fell for this Paypal scam [more]. The scam email made it through my SpamAssassin filter despite scoring an impressive 96.7 points. The email looked incredibly authentic, but when I went to the link in the email I got some kind of error and then forgot about it. Now that I know the email was a scam, it's completely obvious. I think the reason I got an error was the scam email was sent to me on September 11, 2002 and I didn't visit the fake scam site until almost a full week later. By that time, PayPal's fraud team was aware of the scam and the scam site was partially disabled. I have since changed my password, just to be safe.

The Nation: Open ...

The Nation: Open Letter to Congress

Salon: Iran's leading filmmaker denied U.S. visa. "...the State Department was reportedly unwilling to bend the harsh new rules recently put into place by the Bush administration restricting the issuance of visas to Iranian citizens." What worries me the most about this is that it's not just Iranian nationals that are having difficulty getting temporary U.S. visas, it's also foreign nationals from less-threatening places like Russia and the Ukraine. Everyone must now go through this new "background check" before a visa can be approved. I'm also worried that the world's governments may react to the Bush administration's tightening of American borders by changing their own rules for American tourists coming to their countries. As it stands today, Americans can travel more freely between the countries of the world than citizens of any other country. If this changes, I can see it having a dramatic effect on the international tourism industry. I don't have a solution, but I hope the Bush administration treats the issue very carefully and with a level head.

Ted Rall: War Cry. Most humor has a very solid grain of truth.

...

CamWorld: Trips: 2002: Siberia: My pictures from Siberia are finally online. I've broken them down by location. Krasnoyarsk Yenesei River Lake Baikal Irkutsk Trans-Siberian Railway Stolby Nature Preserve » Use this link if you are linking to this. Feel free to leave me feedback for any picture. Enjoy!

The new IKEA commercial shot by director Spike Jonze is truly brilliant.

Independent: Russia fears US oil companies will take over world's second-biggest reserves. Perhaps it is time that the Bush administration prove beyond doubt that their 'Iraq plan' is not about oil. Iraq has a confirmed reserve of 112 billion barrels of oil. At $20 a barrel, this oil is worth trillions and trillions of dollars. The Bush administration, spending billions of U.S. taxpayer's dollars to remove Saddam Hussein from power so the oil companies can take over, starts to look like quite a deal. Enron and Worldcom are pocket lint compared to this amount of money. Memo to Bush: War is not a business plan.

Al Gore: "Great ...

Al Gore: "Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another." Bravo, bravo.

Brian King: Roll Your Own Browser

This disturbing Financial Review article suggests that the proposed Iraq war is about oil. A regime change in Iraq would turn it from the 9th largest oil producer to the 4th largest. The oil companies that run the Bush administration -- ahem, I mean the oil companies are highly in favor of this, since cheaper oil from Iraq increases their profits. The interesting twist is that economists are saying that cheaper oil will increase the U.S. economy. But I still don't think that's something to go to war over.

The Alien Language Institute, founded in 2999 in New New York, NY. An off-shoot from Futurama.

I've been using ...

I've been using MultiZilla for the past few days. At first I didn't like it because I was so accustomed to using numerous browser windows while surfing, but I've actively changed my behavior and have grown to really like how MultiZilla works. Now I use one browser window with numerous tabs for each set of sites I am browsing, usually grouped by topic. I find the UI of MultiZilla a little rough but the improved functionality is worth the trade-off.

NY Times: G.O.P. Gains From War Talk but Does Not Talk About It

Toby Scott on Xbox: "If the only way Microsoft can get a big exclusive title is by buying the developer, that's not a viable business model."

I have RSVP'd for the next Meet-The-Makers event here in New York City, scheduled for November 6. Brian Alvey, the conference organizer, is actively seeking new media professionals who are able to attend as guests and/or speakers and represent the companies they work for. There is also a MTM event scheduled for San Francisco on October 21. I attended the first MTM event back in April and was very impressed by the group Brian was able to bring together.

New extreme sport: ...

New extreme sport: Skydriving, or dropping a car from a plane and then "driving" it on the way down. Too bad there are no pictures of what the car looks like after hitting.

I am watching my Koyaanisqatsi DVD tonight. It is still, beyond doubt, one of the most amazing films I have ever seen. I once wrote that this movie needs to be required viewing for all high school students. I've now amended that thought to say that it should be required viewing for all people. The imagery and music together are an incredible experience and an amazing teaching tool. No other film has ever made me think so much about the world we live in. Last night I watched Monsters, Inc. (yay!) and Shallow Hal (don't bother).

Now what are those LEGO people up to now? Wink wink.

Um, here is a guy named Harmik who apparently earns a living by being a Tom Jones look-alike. Through his web site, TomJonesClone.com, you can even order women's panties decorated with his picture. Hmmm...

Interesting story about the possibility that Flight 93 was shot down by our own military, simply to protect the White House, its intended target. If this is a cover-up, the Bush administration has a lot of explaining to do. Check out the list of evidence. Conspiracy theorists love this stuff.

Here's are two more of my favorite pictures from my trip to Siberia. The complete slideshow will be ready soon:

Both pictures were taken near the village Novo-Snyezhnaya ("New-Snowy") on the southeast tip of Lake Baikal. The Snyezhnaya River is named after its white rocks.

I'm still in ...

I'm still in a weird sleep phase. I get home from work and sleep from about 8:00 PM to midnight and then get up, answer email, watch TV for a couple of hours and then fall asleep again until about 6:00 AM and then get up and go to work. For some reason this feels like what I should be doing, even though it's messing up my gym schedule and my coworkers stare at me for being at work before 10:00 AM.

I love this job posting on Craigslist. "No pretend web designers!" Hee hee.

The complete text of O'Reilly's Creating Applications With Mozilla is now online. I was involved with this book very early in its creation but moved on to other things. Congrats to David, Brian, Ian, Pete and Eric on a job well done.

Google Groups: UFOs From A to Z

NY Times: Spam is estimated to be 32% of all email sent. That's approximately two billion pieces of spam sent every day. It must be stopped.

Economist: So many planes, so few passengers

I'm doing a bunch of travel research since I want to travel internationally once more this year, probably in November. Here are my choices for a 7-10 day trip around Thanksgiving:

• St. Petersburg, Russia
• Malta (very nice and inexpensive)
• Paris, France
• Cyprus
• Tunisia (not likely)
• Turkey (probably not)

It is pathetic that Erin Clerico, who owns weblogger.com, is picking stupid and unenforcable copyright fights with people using the term weblogger in their products and services. Considering that my writing about weblogs predates Erin's whois record for weblogger.com shows just how stupid and petty this is. Weblogger.com, for the record, is a teeny-tiny Userland Manila-hosting service reseller. Grow up Erin, you don't have any legal ground to stand on.

Internet.com: The Great Credit Card Bazaar. This is one of the reasons I have paid off all of my excess credit cards and cancelled all but one account. It's a good idea to regularly (once every year or two) cancel your credit card accounts and transfer your balances to a new creditor.

Paul Krugman: The Vision Thing

I think I'm ...

I think I'm sick. I went to bed yesterday at 5:00 PM and got up this morning at 6:00 AM and went to work because I couldn't bring myself to sit in front of my computer or the TV at home. Yesterday was a weird day. I didn't go to work because I had a scheduled CT scan in the morning and for the rest of the day felt like crap because of the gallon of barium sulfate cocktail they made me drink. I spent three hours this morning editing the pictures from my Siberia trip and then became depressed and drank a cup of hot chocolate. Now I feel hot and feverish. Maybe it's just a severe case of postponed jetlag.

Here's the Deal. I have not talked about this publicly until now, but enough readers have asked that I might as well just tell you. Yes, I am sick, but I am not going to die. In June of 2001 I was diagnosed with an extremely rare lymphoproliferative disorder called Castleman's Disease. For about a week in late May they thought I had Lymphoma and I was preparing myself for a long battle against cancer. I was lucky and it turned out to be something much less serious that did not require chemotherapy. But I still see my doctor every few months and have a CT scan every 4-6 months as a preventative measure. All of the tests since last Fall have shown no change and I am clinically healthy and no longer on prescription anti-inflammatory steroids. Earlier this summer I joined a gym to get my body into a better physical shape, and it's slowly working. I've lost about 15 pounds since I started but an underactive thyroid gland is making it a slow progress. I am thankful that I have excellent doctors, but there are times when I become frustrated and depressed and want to stop writing CamWorld. But I realize the act of writing this site is a form of therapy for me and it helps me along where few other outlets cannot. I've considered writing more about this and someday maybe I will, but for the most part I have accepted my health problems for what they are and am thankful that my condition is not more serious (though it could become so if I ignore it).

Having a potentially life-threatening illness changes a person. I refused to accept this last year but have come to understand that it has changed me. I am a different person than I was a year ago. Those of you who have known me for years may have noticed these changes. You can go back and read my CamWorld posts from 1998, 1999 and 2000 and you may be able to spot how I have changed, how I have matured, and maybe even pinpoint the dates I made conscious efforts to be a different person that I was in my past.

It feels good to get this off my chest. Now all I feel like doing is going to sleep.

Interesting. Microsoft has discontinued Internet Explorer for Unix. This makes me wonder if or when they will axe IE for Mac OS X. I don't think it matters much, except from a political stance, since Mozilla is an excellent replacement for IE -- regardless of your OS platform.

Dan Bricklin: Why Johnny Can't Program

I put my pants on this morning and found the 700 rubles (about $22) I thought I had lost last week at the Irkutsk airport. Sigh...

I'm back! My ...

I'm back! My trip to Russia was amazing. I took over 600 pictures and have a head full of memories. I will spend time this week putting together a trip report. Stay tuned.

Here's a little preview of the pictures I took:

Giant rock formation at the Stolby Nature Preserve, - Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Those little blurry dots on top of the rocks are people.

An abandoned house in a Siberian village - Sludanka, Russia.

If my schedule allows I will join my brother on this year's Multiple Sclerosis Bike-a-thon. Please consider donating to this good cause.

SpamAssassin caught over 7 MB of spam over the two weeks I was away from email. My hosting provider upgraded their FreeBSD installation four days ago which broke my SpamAssassin installation. Reinstalling (and upgrading) fixed it but I still suffered having to manually delete a couple hundred pieces of spam received over the past few days. Yuck.