It was a sad day for my inbox yesterday as Randy Cassingham announced that he was closing his RandysRandom mailing list – but he still has his excellent publications This is True (short weird-but-true stories with off-the-wall commentary), Stella Awards (astounding cases of real-life lawsuits that makes the “McDonald’s Coffee Lady” look like the most reasonable person on the planet), Heroic Stories (short, inspiring, true stories of people going out of their ways to create profound positive impacts on others — without being sappy, to sentimental, or religious)
All three are free, worth signing up for, you won’t get spam or pressurised to buy anything (although you can sign up for a premium sub to This Is True and get a Premium Readers only special edition in between the standard issues)

I’m off to see yFriday on Saturday!

How shortsighted is this? UCSB (some American university) has banned windows2000 from their college network due to the problems they had last term with security. Instead they recommend replacing it with XP home….talk about crippling your pc! Why they don’t just get a proper policy set up which insists that all pc’s attached to the network are uptodate with patches and kill the net connection for those pc’s which aren’t. Not sure how you’d physically do that seeing as though the pc’s are the students own (I presume) but then again, how are they going to detect what OS they are running? If they can detect that, then i’d expect them to detect the patch level. Alternatively they could do some port filtering – but that could cause more problems….I guess if people use linux, then they are going to have even more problems with misconfigured servers with major security holes in it as its a lot harder to naildown a linux box if you dont know what you are doing….
Ironically the site that hosts the information is running Windows 2000 according to Netcraft

Went to see Signs tonight – most boring film i’ve seen in a long time – actually fell asleep during it. The only interesting bit was the last twenty minutes or so. Kristen thought it was excellent so don’t just go by my opinion 🙂

Congratulations to Tim and Ruth who have just won a PS2 each – how lucky is that?

Thanks to Mark I have discovered AceFTP as an ftp client. It works on my lan out to the internet (which some companies such as fasthosts didn’t like leechftp) and one cool feature is that you can see the history of your ftp download speed!

There is now a long awaited utility that checks to see if Lavasoft’s Ad-aware signature file has been updated, and if so it downloads it. For those who are not aware, this utility checks to see if there are any spyware (software that reports on your surfing habits etc) installed on your computer.

Finally – I’ve worked out what is wrong with Kelly’s website in that it keeps making adobe acrobat launch in the background. She has a counter at the bottom of the page and that is what is loading acrobat for some reason……It is the bit which loads the graphic up (the javascript) that does it although I don’t know why – all I know is that the counter does not load on the screen. Incidentally it also occurs when I visit the counters homepage.

Spent the best part of a couple of hours messing around with the comments. I can either give people the choice to allow comments or not, but no search facility – OR I can have search facilities but no comment switching (at least in the archives – it works on the main page for some reason at the moment….but I think that may be ie caching the main page.

Assuming the website stays up, Virgin are taking part in the opportunity to download from 10000 mp3 free on the third oct, but you need to register on the 2nd.