I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

When spammers converse in your Inbox

!http://groovymother.com/images/spammerchat.png 554×74 (Celebs love their watches)!

Do you know the watch preference of a C-list celebrity? Send it in, and we’ll pay $10 for each one we publish.

Razrsharp

I was going to skip my traditional annual cellphone-contract-expiration-celebration this year. The Nokia 3650 that I got last year was doing me just fine, thanks. But that all changed when it completely died on me a couple of weeks ago.

Almost precisely a month after the manufacturer’s warranty expired.

Hurrah and huzzah, then, for my American Express card’s Buyer’s Assurance Plan, which refunded me the full $300 I paid for the phone, despite the fact that I got back $300 in rebates at the time.

So, with my free $300, I’ve dropped a re-diculous sum on the supra sleek-n-sexy Motorola RAZR(Amazon.com: Cell Phones: Motorola RAZR V3 Phone (Cingular))—which after rebates, will effectively set me back $70. (Yes, I’m aware that, opportunity-cost-wise, I’m spending $370. But don’t shatter the illusion, please).

The reviews looked positive, it’s got Bluetooth, and it passes the all important iSync test.

I’ll pass on a review once I get my grubby hands on it.

Judge Judy and Executioner

Getting to sit in today and watch daytime TV, I see a trend:

Judge Judy, Judge Hatchett, Judge Joe Brown, The People’s Court, Divorce Court, and Texas Justice!

What happened to the good old days, when you solved your problems on daytime TV by knocking seven shades of shit out of each other?

Internationalization RAWKS!

Silly little kewl thing that amused me today. Playing an MP3 by the Japanese bubblegum-punk pop-band that I know as Shonen Knife, and having it appear in my Audioscrobbler profile as ’”少年ナイフ”(Audioscrobbler :: Artist :: 少年ナイフ :: Statistics)’:http://www.audioscrobbler.com/music/%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4%E3%83%8A%E3%82%A4%E3%83%95.

I look forward to seeing how badly MovableType and RSS readers mangle this entry!

Dear EFF: Please Practise What You Preach

The EFF (who I support) have published a new white paper, claiming that anti-spam technologies are a danger to freedom of speech.

It’s a point that they’ve tried to raise before—Their pathetically fuckwitted, tediously illinformed sysadmin created a mad stink in February 2003, claiming that the Razor distributed anti-spam system was being abused to deliberately block MoveOn.org and EFF emails.

As I’ve stated before, spam is very much in the eye of the beholder. That “Unsolicited” at the front of UCE is problematic, since there’s no way for a system to know whether the receiver solicited the mail.

But in the meantime, EFF, can you please fix your mailing list sign-ups to verified opt-in. Currently, it is easy to sign up any email address to their EFFector newsletter, with no notification or validation to the address in question. Just enter an address as you join their Action Center, and voila, unsolicited bulk email will be sent to the recipient of your choice.

EFF: Fix this, become a good member of the mass email community, and perhaps then I’ll take your anti-anti-spam rhetoric seriously.

Update to add: Justin helpfully takes the time to debogusify some of the technical cluelessness of the paper.

Let’s Face It

Paging the LazyWeb! My desired plugin for Thunderbird:

People use Avatars on message boards and in instant messaging. There have been standards for years to include them in email. I’d love to see a Thunderbird plugin which displays them.

Preferably all of the following “standards” should be supported.

• Ye olde classic X-Face header. It’s XBM-tastic!
• The new, poorly-named PNG+MIME Face Header
• The X-Image-Url(Daniel J. Luke’s Weblog: Picture in Mail (X-Image-Url)) header which is used by Apple Mail
• The sending email address’s Gravatar

Surely someone with knowledge of XUL can knock this out fairly quickly. All the image-displaying stuff is baked right in. You just need to code the part that understands the headers.

Goofy Goober Rock

Currently rawking my headphones: The Spongebob Squarepants Movie Soundtrack. Quality, quality stuff. Much like the old Powerpuff Girls CD, it’s got a bunch of excellent indie artistes such as The Flaming Lips, Electrocute, The Shins and.. er.. Motorhead. Highly recommended.

So… did I miss anything?

I was in St Louis this last week on business, so haven’t really had a chance to post my reaction to the election. (Let’s just say my plan to put up a second entry titled “Unfuckingbelievable” with a screengrab of the ‘Kerry Wins’ headline from boston.com didn’t quite pan out).

Much has already been said, so I’ll just add this perspective: The British general election of 1992 was the first election night when I stayed up to watch the results.

I watched the exit-poll predictions of a Hung Parliament (no single party gaining a majority) turn into John Major’s Conservative government getting re-elected. After 13 years of Conservative governments—the reign of Thatcher, the disastereous implementation then speedy reversal of the Poll Tax, the pointlessness of the Falklands War, the shagging backbenchers—the electorate turned round, said “More Please!” and voted them back into office.

I remember a month later, Spitting Image captured it fantastically, closing their series with a hippie protest song entitled “The Times, They Aren’t A-Changing”.

The Cabinet: Now look to the future, and what do you see?
John Major: I’ll be here for ten years
Michael Heseltine: Then ten years of me.
Norman Lamont: You’ll still think I’m rubbish
The Cabinet: And we’ll all agree.
For the times, they aren’t a-changing.

But in the end, Labour swung around, voted a smooth (Rupert Murdoch approved) prettyboy to lead the party, and their landslide victory in the 1997 election was all the sweeter. The delight of seeing Mellor, Portillo, Rifkind, Forsyth and all the other Tory scum lose their seats was one of the sweetest nights of my life.

Of course, Tony Blair turned round a year later and abolished the free university education. And then supported Bush in the Iraq war. Which kind-of cancels out most of the good.

So really, the fact is: It doesn’t matter too much who wins. All politicians suck. But man, do some suck more than others. And for the next four years, the White House is going to be the Dyson vacuum cleaner of the western world.

But let’s see how the next election night turns out.