Desperation

I think McAfee must be getting a bit desperate. Seems they *really* want me to renew my anti-virus: Subject: Subscription Renewal Price Enclosed From: subscriptions@mcafee.com Date: Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 1:06 AM Subscription length: 1 Year(s) Renew Subscription(Auto Renew) Base price (pre-tax): £ 64.99(GBP) Subject: Alert: 1 Month Remains From: subscriptions@mcafee.com Date: Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 4:39 AM Renew Now Save 15% 1 Year Total Protection £55.19 SAVE 15% Subject: Alert: 2 Weeks…

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Misdirection

Hey. So you know when you receive an email that isn’t spam as such but is from a real person who meant to send it to another real person that isn’t you but is probably someone with the same name as you and a very similar email address, and you read the message and think “this is sufficiently weird that it would make a great easy blog post to just stick the whole message up…

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Genius Product Ideas #247

This genius business idea is free to anyone who wants it: someone really needs to make a little tool for cleaning out the headphone socket on the iPhone. As I carry mine around in my pocket typically without the headphones plugged in, I find I’m constantly having to use the end of a paperclip to remove all the fluff and lint and crap that somehow finds its way into the headphone jack. Given that Apple…

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Aussiefication

So last night we headed for the Sun Theatre in Yarraville to see Mark Watson reading some passages from his new book, parts of which happen to be set in Melbourne. One of the many things he spoke about was his affection for this city and his plans one day to move over here. In answer to some further probing on the specifics of his migration plans during the audience Q&A (I think he was…

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Oh Yeah, Comment Spam. I Forgot All About That…

One of the downsides to kicking off the blog again has been the return of the dreaded comment spam. Before I moved the blog over here, I was using my own custom blog system, which meant I could implement a very simple little trick to stop comment spam. Not quite a CAPTCHA in the true sense of the word, but good enough for my little insignificant blog: I simply added a field asking people to…

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46 People Like This…

I’m all for social network integration and everything, but I can’t help thinking that there might be some occasions when that Facebook “like” button isn’t actually an appropriate thing to have on a news story: Really, NME? 46 people “like” the fact that a former member of ELO was killed in a freak road accident? That’s just great. In other news, 295 people just love the fact that Charles Haddon jumped to his death at…

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Neither Here Nor There…

I was struck by a wave of nostalgia the other day, when my mid-afternoon-lull/boredom-alleviation strategy at work saw me tuning my iPhone to BBC 6 music, only to find Damon Albarn mid-way through a performance of his The Good, The Bad, And The Queen “concept album about modern life in London”, recorded at The Roundhouse in Camden in 2006. Ah. 2006. When I used to live just down the road. Suddenly I wasn’t sitting at…

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Logic

Curious article here from the normally sane Charles Arthur in The Guardian, which opens with: The invitation to Apple’s event on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena centre in San Francisco shows an acoustic guitar, with a soundhole in the shape of the Apple logo. Seasoned watchers of the company know that this is the time of year when the iPod gets a refresh, yet there’s a shadow over the digital music player that turned Apple…

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