PhotoDude.com

Over three years ago, I wrote a little open letter to Yahoo, “Lost In The Yahoo Desert”:

I know I don’t visit you very much. Not like some others. But you have this one page I like to visit, the “Most Viewed” News page. No, I’m not going to link it. Because it is virtually guaranteed that you’ll just change the link.

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The recent scandal involving Eliot “Ho No” Spitzer and a prostitute has brought a rather interesting aspect of copyright and our web personas to the legal forefront:

Since her identity was disclosed, newspapers and Web sites have splashed photos of Ashley Alexandra Dupre in suggestive poses on front and inside pages. Dupre was known as “Kristen” in court documents accusing Spitzer of paying thousands for prostitutes’ services.

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This feels a little like making a post to be certain that “you do know the sky is blue, don’t you?” But it has come to my attention that not everyone pays attention to the things that seem obvious to me.

For example, if you get a poorly formatted mass email sent to you and dozens of others, that claims things like “Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim” ... “ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into Office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran” and other seemingly scandalous claims, consider this: Hillary Clinton is seeking any half-assed angle she can scrounge to get back in the race, and if those things were true, don’t you think she’d be hammering on that daily? Yes, you know she would. The fact she isn’t ought to be one clue.

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Dear Gmail,

I’m sorry to have to write you publicly like this, but you have left me little choice, and I have a couple of bones to pick with you.

1. Look in the bottom right corner of your logo. It says “BETA.” We won’t get into the argument that being in “BETA” since April of 2004 represents an underlying fear of commitment. We’ll just say that an app that presents itself as in “BETA,” even for 3.5 years, ought to have clear and simple ways for their “BETA” users to provide feedback about problems with the “BETA” application. You do not. I looked and looked, clicked and clicked. The closest thing I could find was a form for “Got a feature suggestion for Gmail?” So I suggested several things, including get out of “BETA” in less than one presidential term, or have an “easy to find” form for submitting problems.

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The other day I set up a “need it now” domain for a client, and they also wanted the email to be separate from their current workload. So I forwarded the domain mail to a Gmail account I created for them.

The question comes, “is this secure?” While the tempered response is along the lines of “it’s as secure and your current email,” it’s not really the correct answer.

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Fred Wilson apparently decided to spend part of his weekend making old people sputter.

I’ve been reluctant because I don’t want to pick at this scab of a meme. I really don’t want to be the guy who made it harder for anyone older than 30 to get funded in the web services market.

Who is developing this “clearer idea”? Who is developing the set of “design patterns”? It’s the younger generation. And its important to understand why.

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I don’t exactly know why (yet), but I finally succumbed to the Twittering masses. Because I simply don’t have enough time-sucking vortexes, I suppose, as you can tell by the vast number of posts on this site recently.

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You may have gotten an email stating “photodude” wanted you to signup at spymac.com. My apologies. Don’t sign up. Here’s what happened. I got an invitation from a friend that I had not heard from in a while. So I checked it out.

As part of the sign up, “Step One” asks you if you’d like to check and see if any of your Gmail contacts are already members. In my case, it found none. So I click on “Step Two” (note, I did not click “Invite” or “Spam Everyone,” I clicked “Step Two”).

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Dear Yahoo,

I know I don’t visit you very much. Not like some others. But you have this one page I like to visit, the “Most Viewed” News page. No, I’m not going to link it. Because it is virtually guaranteed that you’ll just change the link.

You see, today is the third time I’ve woken up to do a little morning news surfing and found that page gone. Poof. No redirect or forward to the page’s new location. No 404. Just an ugly dead end, redirected to a broken page.

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There’s an article in the NY Times that I found interesting, “‘Yours Truly, the E-Variations.” It’s about the various ways that people “sign off” in their emails, and how those variations are sometimes perceived by others.

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Late Monday night, I published an article reiterating my disdain for Donald Rumsfeld (among others), and re-using the phrase “unconscionable malpractice.”

About 12 hours later, at roughly 1pm EDT Tuesday, someone came to visit from IP 152.216.3.5:

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You might recall me whining about Earthlink overcharging me by a factor of 100 for something called “USF Fee Recovery.” Thus, I read the following with interest last month:

Under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, BellSouth said Friday that it will stop collecting a $2.97 per month regulatory fee from its high-speed Internet customers.

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12:40am Sunday night, er, Monday morning. I decided to check off something that’s been on my “to do” list for a while: buy reidstott.com. In case I run for office some day. I’d hate for a partisan squatter to grab it up.

Yeah, right. Anyway. Email shows the purchase transaction between PayPal and Godaddy was completed at 12:53am. Afterwards I log in at TextDrive and add a new virtual server to my account, as well as a new email user, via ugly geek magic called Webmin.

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