Got my first piece of spam delivered to my inbox at gmail today. Not bad in just under a year of use (I signed up 1st July 04). In that time I’ve also not had a false positive either. The only spam that I have had to the email address has been some sort of “working under pressure” mailing list that somehow got my address from somewhere. Seeing as though I am careful about who I give the email address to I know I didn’t sign up for it and it also looks like gmail is more resilient to the mailbombing antics that yahoo and hotmail seem to face.
Month: June 2005
Last night I saw my first ever real Lightning bug/Firefly. Although I had seen them in the movies I had never seen one in real life. I didn’t try to catch them in a glass jar but Kristen did try to catch one in her hand but it rose up over the screened in porch much to her annoyance. There is quite a good close up of them on Flickr
Evernote has been updated (a few days ago but I’ve only just noticed). I’ve found a couple more bugs which I’ve posted to the forums but the software is still very useful. Worth checking out if you need a to-do/reminder/one note application.
No, I’m not talking about our estate agent, but I’ve just finished Something Rotten. A good book although the plot gets really weird towards the end and I felt the last chapter or two were a bit boring. Next on the list will be Pratchett’s Going Postal
Well ok, some of them are. Using the instructions at Steve’s page I’ve now been able to locate the positions of photos taken on geoblogging.
Whoppix is a customised knoppix bootcd for security testing (and hacking) and the main website also has some very good video tutorials on how to use some of the tools. One of them shows how to crack wep in 10 minutes (although the wep they crack is a 64 bit code and if you are using wep then you *are* using a longer key aren’t you????). As an aside, my firefox seems to hang at the end of the camtasia show but it does eventually get back to my control.
Security Forest also contains some information too.
I phoned the moving company up this afternoon as we had a letter saying that our contents were due to arrive at the end of May and our stuff is now sitting in a box on the pier in New York. They were talking about delivering it to us in two weeks and I had to remind them that they were putting it in storage until we had a job and a house. Good job I mentioned that as I would have not been happy if they turned up one morning with a big truck!
Kristen has been doing a lot of scrapbooking recently and rather than use up a lot of her parents ink we decided to use Samsclub to print some photo’s off (as the price is 17 cents a picture for 6*4″ photos, 1 hr processing with pick up at the store. 11c for mail order.) The quality of the pictures is not too bad but as you’ll see there has been some cropping of the photo which Kristen was not expecting. This has ruined a couple of the photos as having the top of your head missing does not make a nice portrait.
Here we have the original picture as uploaded from the computer (Click on the thumbnail for a large version of the file)
However the version that came back from Sams club had been cropped to the following image.(I’ve cropped the original photo to get this image shown as I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment)
(Yes I know the cropped version looks bigger but that is due to the proportions of the thumbnail pictures).
In this particular shot it doesn’t matter too much although the heads have been chopped off a little. This cropping would be a major drawback to using this facility. At least some other services ask you where you want to crop the photo.
I’ve got some codes for 36 free photos with winkflash so I’m going to try these at 16c a photo and Dimeprints are 10c per copy. In the end I created a spreadsheet to work out which was going to be the cheapest for a certain number of photos (as the postage costs make some services cheaper than others at different quantities). Of course this all assumes that the cropping is user controllable and the quality of the pictures are the same. I’m going to send some of the samsclub pictures to the other services so that I can do a comparison.
I watched most of the first season of 4400 yesterday as USA was holding a marathon rerun of the first series before the premiere of the 2nd series later on in the evening. It was a good series, similar to the x-files but not as spooky but with more of a focus on the real life effects of being dumped back onto earth after being away for x number of years. The funny thing is that at the moment I am currently reading Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten and the main character is struggling with the exact same issues. I wonder whether Jasper watched the tv series too.
One of the annoying things with watching that much tv is the amount of adverts you have to sit through and you would have thought that they DON’T need to advertise the premiere of the 2nd series EVERY time there is an advert break. After all, if you are sitting there watching a whole series, it is extremely likely that you are well aware of the premiere and you just want them to get on with it.
I had tried to get the dvd out of the library and blockbusters, but neither of them stock it. I’m surprised as blockbuster had a whole stack of tv series but not this one. (It was available on bittorrent though but its too risky to start using that sort of network)
I was reading another one of my reads this morning, 2guys2cities when I saw that the post on backup strategy was written by Mike McBride. Is that what you were *really* doing whilst you were pretending to be on holiday Mike? I’ve come across several blogs where people have had guests in to say something – normally whilst they are away on holiday or something. I wonder if there is a market for babysitmyblog.com 🙂