Thus, please make sure that you never place info@bulk-mail.org in any spider-a-ble, crawl-a-ble, locations. Because it would be very bad if info@bulk-mail.org were to receive a lot of spam.

For more information on the awesome value of info@bulk-mail.org, please see this write-up about info@bulk-mail.org

If you happen to run across any risky mentions of info@bulk-mail.org, be sure to give them a call and let them know! Their number is 1-866-831-4764.

So, I have decided I’ll employ a new policy.

I’m going to let such comments stand. Especially when they bend over backwards to complement my work. I like that. I’m shallow that way.

However, if the URL and/or email address associated with the comment is nothing but a marketing splurb, those particular fields will be deleted.

OK — I finally got around to actually following the instructions on this red sweater post. Ahh… much better.

Now MarsEdit actually shows me content pretty close to how it’ll look when published. This should greatly reduce the # of round trips when integrating pictures and text.

Got it mostly working in about 10 minutes. Still not quite full fidelity; flickr and google content doesn’t show up, but that is more of a feature than a bug.

Tedious, but worth it.

I finally returned to the farmer’s market Saturday morning after a many month hiatus. Amongst a number of yummy purchases, I ended up with 30 pounds of assorted grapes (at the obscenely low price of $13). It is good to be recognized by the vendors.

Obviously, I’m making tons of raisins. And freezing some. And keeping some around for noshing upon. The quality of these grapes are just amazing. All seedless. Some as big as plums. Ranging from sugary sweet to slightly tart.

While in Missouri, my Mom taught me how to make her style of pie. Extremely simple to do, very subtle nuances required to do it well.

Hmmm… grape pie? A google search reveals lots of recipes for Conchord Grape Pie, but very few plain old grape pies. OK — time to improvise.

Pictured at right is the result. Completely delicious. A decent product for my second pie ever, but not quite perfect; the bottom crust was just slightly underdone and I had to work the crust too much due to improper tools.

The pie is in the style of my Mom’s Cheatin’ Tart. That is, I made a pie crust that was larger than the pie tin, dropped it in the pie tin, added the filling, and then folded over the excess. It was off-center on purpose. Some people like more crust, some less, and thus having an off-center hole allows one to cut to the tastes of the consumer.

The filling is a combination of about 2 cups of raw grapes and 1.5 medium sized pears. I simmered the grapes and pears for about 30 minutes in 1/3rd of a cup of water, with cinnamon and a touch cayenne pepper (not enough to taste, just enough to draw out flavors — thanks, Ben!), until the grapes were soft but not totally mushy.

The key with making a pie crust — in this case, a dead simple flour/sugar/salt/butter crust (I’ll try Chuck’s vodka crust once I nail this one) — is to ensure that the fat (butter or lard — butter in this case) does not get too hot. Thus, one needs to avoid working it too much, which I failed to do. I was using a cuisinart to mix the crust, but the Cuisinart dough blade sucks. It leaves flour untouched all around the outside edge and requires significant mixing after the fact. My mom has a cool little blender top mixer that does a great job.

While doing my pie engineering, I posted a series of observations on Twitter. Much useful feedback was given. For now, I have ordered an OXO Good Grips Dough Blender with Blades; the good OXO dough blender, not the flimsy one.

I also need new pie tins. According to my Mom, black tins make the best pies I can’t argue with her expertise. I do wonder if a is the way to go. I might try making a pie in one of my many cast iron pans.

Update: Mom wrote in the comments with some hints and tips. I also made a new pie using a marble cutting board + keeping the dough cold. More soon.

Thank you. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

Just a missing tag. Stupid me. Should have fixed it long ago.

Dumb little man (nice weblog, btw) has an entry reminding folks to actually erase the hard drives of their old computers.

He misses two key points.

First, secure erasing of hard drive contents is built into Mac OS X. Launch Disk Utility, click on the volume or drive you want to erase, then click on “security options…”. I just zero out all data, but you can be up to 35 times more paranoid than I am.

If you want to ditch a partitioned drive, I would suggest repartitioning the drive down to a single partition. This allows for a single erase-and-zero pass. Takes just as long but you don’t have to mess with it in the middle.

Secondly, don’t forget to erase the data on broken hard drives! Just because a drive no longer works does not mean the data is inaccessible! Often, carefully swapping the controller board on a drive is enough to restore it to working order long enough to pull off the data. Professional recovery services (and really careful hackers) can even swap the platters from a dead drive to a working drive to recover data!

Me? I take dead drives apart. They have amazingly powerful magnets inside, along with all kinds of very useful screws, washers, nuts, coils, and other fiddly bits.

The platters, obviously, contain the data and they should be destroyed. I run one of the magnets over them upon removal and then keep a stack of the platters around as they have proven to be incredibly useful! The platters have been used for everything as clamp pads for gluing stuff to spacers to level a table or work surface to being used by my son as part of a bug house.

Note that not all platters are made of metal! Some are made of glass! So, if you plan on smacking the platters with a hammer, be careful!!

Or, do what I did when I discovered this: Set up a high speed photog kit and drop a pinball on it!

The first post is quite the mind bomb.

Personally, I hope this is the first of many such posts.

Update: No, I don’t think that Steve’s rather poignant essay is a blog post. But, really, why not? As corporations increasingly rely upon the web to disseminate both formal press releases, success stories, and anecdotal information, where does is the line drawn between “web site” and “weblog”?

There is an URL… an RSS feed… The ‘hotnews‘ section of Apple’s site is certainly a sort of corporate weblog.

This post serves two purposes.

First, go read the essay. It is really is quite interesting.

Secondly, what is the definition of a weblog? Where is the line between corporate news collection and corporate weblog? Apple’s “hotnews” section often has non-press release content. Does that make it a weblog?

Stuff you may not know about me. Hrm.

0. Brevity is not my strong point. But you knew that if you are a regular reader of this weblog (as if!).

1. I write this weblog for two reasons. The first is, as the title implies, as a sort of diary of the bits of my life that I want to be able to easily find later (thanks to Google!). The second is to share my experiences, thoughts, and point of view with an express purpose of learning from others. It is why the comments are unmoderated beyond spam elimination; the dialog that ensues is very valuable to me (be it educational, humorous, or ridiculous). I’m a technorati junkie. Even the advertising on this site is useful beyond the meager income it generates; seeing how the revenue changes based on what I’m posting gives me a little bit of insight into the nature of the internet. Though, really, it still depresses me a bit that my post about Paris Hilton’s little security breach is the most $/day I have ever earned.

Yet, as gregarious and wide ranging as this weblog is, there is a slew of my personal life that is verboten.

Oh, and the only reason why I haven’t been posting a lot of code related stuff recently is because I’m working on really cool things that I can’t talk about until we put the next great cat in a box and ship it.

And I really don’t have a problem with that. As an Apple blogger, I respect the policies set forth by the company and, even, agree with them though it prevents me from openly commenting on a number of things.

2. “I ride tandem with the random / things don’t run the way I planned them.”. Words I live by. Stuff happens to and around me. Random stuff. Maybe no more or less than anyone else, but I try to pay attention and get in the middle of things. Sometimes happy, sometimes tragic. At this point, I find the randomness normal but others tell me it is extraordinary. To me, it is just life and life is pretty damned entertaining, interesting, and worth living. Can’t wait to see live whatever happens next!

3. I buy lottery tickets every now and then. I get the math. Totally. But sometimes, you just have to pick up all five dice and try to throw a natural yahtzee to win the game!

4. I have had a lot of near misses. See #2 (and #3, for that matter). Stuff just seems to happen around me and I generally manage to land on my feet. I have been within 100 feet of lightning strikes 5 times, I have seen 4 tornados in person, I have been in about a dozen car accidents, a handful of nasty bike accidents (stitches, etc), broken my arm and ankle, had stitches on my knee and hand (twice, iirc), torn up my ankles badly enough to require crutches several times, have watched a lamp randomly explode in flames in our house, have very nearly blinded myself with hot solder twice, have been in two major floods, been in swarms of locusts (twice — midwest — hard to call it a plague, though I bet the farmers would have disagreed), lost a family house to a hurricane (Ivan), been attacked by poisonous snakes twice (dog saved me once, I jumped in time the other), been stung by a jellyfish badly enough to end up in the emergency room, etc…

And, yes, now that we live in the bay area, we do have earthquake insurance. All things considered, it just seems prudent.

5. My very very first paid job was at the age of 3 or 4. I took cuttings from my dad’s jade plant and raised flats of little jade plants that I sold to local shops. For all I know, my dad slipped ‘em the money to give to me. I have no idea how much I made.

The first computer job I ever had was a one time consulting gig at the age of 14. I had to rescue data from corrupted floppies. In the basement of a sorority during fall rush. While the pledges practiced their cheers in front of me. Easy job, but I kinda drug out the process a bit. They paid me $50 for what would have been a 15 minute job. I took an hour. Still not a bad $$/hour rate for a 14 year old in the mid-80′s! Definitely left an impression: “A job can be directly or indirectly enjoyable. It doesn’t have to seem like work.”

My first salaried job was building TI 99/4a cassette interface cables for $1.25/each. I could do 3 to 5 an hour, depending on focus and a bit of luck. It was all under the table and not long lived, but very educational working in a mom and pop electronics shop.

My first legitimate, tax paying, salaried position was in a grocery story at the age of 16. I was the bag boy, stock boy, clean up on aisle 5 boy, and occasional cashier. Was there exactly three months before I gave my two weeks notice. That the manager was surprised that I would give two weeks notice instead of just not showing up was an eye opener. The whole experience made me realize that the average employee in such a job was generally a nice enough person while also being a complete slacker buffoon out to take advantage of whatever situation they were in, but not bright enough to actually pull anything off.

After that, I became a professional soccer referee. It was an easy job. And lucrative. I would make up to $75/game when doing college level tournaments. Not bad for a 17 year old. I was making more money in a few hours a week than my store clerk, near minimum wage paid peers, were making in a month. An eye opener; jobs can be both enjoyable and lucrative, if you just acquire a little bit of relatively uncommon knowledge.

And then it was on to computer related jobs. Many of them. Spent the first five years bouncing between positions to learn. And learn I did. I also learned that it is a complete pain in the ass to have to file taxes in 5 states for a single year.

Now the hard part…. who shall I tag? Sometimes you gotta roll the dice (and sometimes they need help — seriously — I can’t imagine most of these people making it to this part of this post of this weblog…):

Jonathan Schwartz

James Duncan Davidson

The Macalope

Wil Shipley

And the really long shot (I have 5 degrees of separation or less for the above — and basically infinite for this one):

Marc Cuban

Update: BoingBoing has picked up on this story with excerpts from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Violet Blue. Violet Blue has posted an excellent article on the subject (NSFW as it contains the photo of the naughty bits used to lure the respondents into temporary stupidity). Violet Blue, as always, provokes thought:

But isn’t what Jason did essentially the same as what the cops do? (Except the result is arrest, not just being outed.) How, exactly, is what Jason did any different than the duplicitous fake-ad and chatroom impersonation tactics police and government use to bust people for porn, sex work and online sexual solicitation? Or even something as benign as selling sex toys online?

Its a fuzzy, fuzzy world… everyone sees black & white, but everyone’s contrast/brightness are different.

So, some dude recently posted a fake w4m (woman looking for a man or men) ad on craigslist.org. No big deal. Happens all the time. Hell, my World of Warcraft mule was a mostly naked female orc. It was hilarious — I received all kinds of free stuff from other players trying to chat with me.

I would have posted some statistics (I believe either CNet or Wired has an article), but my obvious Google search left me fully expected a call from the Feds. Without safe search, that is one damned disturbing set of search results.

With safe search on, that same search reveals about a bazillion articles or mentions of men posing as women for fun and profit.

So why bother mentioning this?

Because some dude posted the w4m ad and then posted all of the responses, including with often nekkid multimedia content, to his LiveJournal account. The LiveJournal community then went on to do their very best to identify the unwitting participants.

Ugly.

I mean, responding to some random ad with photos of your face and nekkid crotch is just plain stupid. But what “rfjason” has done is going to turn out to be one of those legal precedent setting events.

There is already discussion of creating legislation to regulate sites like MySpace. This will certainly add fuel to that fire.

On the useless side, it may spawn conversations of regulating sites like CraigsList.org. Certainly, there are any number of large businesses — the entire newspaper industry, for example — that would love to damage CL’s world.

But this really doesn’t have anything to do with CL. What “rfjason” published were the private email responses to the original public post.

While there are privacy laws and regulations focusing on corporate communications, I don’t believe there are laws focusing on private email communications between individuals? I honestly don’t know. Anyone have more information??

And that will likely be his downfall. While there may be a small number of the respondents that are openly promiscuous (for the record: I have no problem with that even if it ain’t the life for me), the larger number had the expectation that their private email response would remain private.

In particular, I fully expect that “rfjason” is going to find himself under a mountain of lawsuits. Regardless of whether or not he loses a single lawsuit, he is going to be spending a lot of time generating billable hours for his lawyer. If there isn’t a precedent set, he will likely find himself in a spiraling set of appeals.

If he doesn’t end up dead.

I would imagine that publicly destroying a person’s marriage, career and other parts of their social life might just push one of the wronged right over the edge.

The responses have been divisive. A large number of folks fall into the “it is just a prank, whatever” camp while a seemingly larger number grok that this “prank” has caused very real damage to those “prank’d”.

What it really boils down to is a question of privacy. The individuals responding to the ad — gullible though they were — had a completely misguided reasonable expectation of a private conversation leading to a possible booty call. While they were being dumbasses to have said expectation, being “outed” certainly seems like an unnecessarily nasty way to teach ‘em a lesson. So nasty, in fact, that it could — likely will — lead to law suits.

It is now starting to hit the news wires. This is either going to be very interesting or it’ll completely fizzle out if the set of respondents don’t choose to follow up.

The whole “What the Dell?” design rant received quite a bit more attention than I expected (thanks to an initial link from Daring Fireball and snowballing from there).

Quite a few comments, too. Including comments from Dell employees that spawned a bunch of email communication with them. I have a new found respect for the company.

Aside: Yes, to be perfectly clear, I am an Apple employee. This weblog, however, is completely disconnected from my day job other than that many of my hobbies and my profession overlap. I am speaking entirely for myself here.

Initially, many of the respondents pretty much agreed with my opinion of Dell’s site design. Go read the original post if you want more context.

About 20 comments in, a comment from RichardAtDell shows up:

Was reading your comments on both our website and one of our new products. We have been working on a overhaul of the Dell.com website and comments like yours arare most helpful. For additional detail and discussion, feel free to visit our blog at:

http://www.direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/07/30/1224.aspx

As for the product you mention, different people have different technology needs and preferences. While this product mayy not fit your technology dreams, it does for others. A major benefit of Dell’s direct model is giving customers the opportunity to configure products with technology they want. That means some extra steps in the buying process, but the customized technology is what many appreciate and value.

The site that Richard mentioned is quite interesting. It documents exactly what the Dell design team thinks of their current site, including some rather pointed quotes from various weblogs and direct feedback. They pull no punches (beyond keeping the language clean).

I was impressed simply in that an organization within or connected to Dell was so brutally honest about what the company is doing wrong. The team even compares their product to the Apple site. They excuse the remaining complexity behind the claim that their site is to “serve different customer needs, and, I think, possibly harder to design and manage”.

I wrote Richard a quick email thanking him for both posting to an obviously hostile forum and to also commend his teams openness and honesty in their work. We have exchanged emails since. Nice guy.

As per the product I mention, I still think it is a silly design. I should go into some more depth on that front at some point.

AnneAtDell later attempted to post what was, in effect, boilerplate marketing content. The first post failed. Could have been WordPress’s fault.

Actually, WordPress kinda boned RichardAtDell’s first post, too. He posted an URL with a trailing period at the end (as in, the end of a sentence). WordPress parsed the content and made the URL clickable, but included the trailing period. End result was a broken URL. Amusing to see people assume the worst about Dell on that one.