One of my friends who shall remain nameless is having problems with her mother snooping on her surfing, including getting one of those AOL Naz…er…Guardian doohickeys put on her account to keep an eye on her.
What we’re trying to do is find really innocuous, family friendly, stupid websites for her to start visiting on a regular basis so her mother is wondering what the *#$@& her daughter is REALLY up to. offers a few suggestions in his journal. Anyone have any other suggestions?
What would be REALLY neat would be if one of the more web-savvy programmers out there could come up with a really cool routine to visit a site for someone, cache it, and display it under their really innocuous URL. Then, while someone is really surfing all the wonderful disturbing sites (like my radio show), their logs make the spies think that they’re visiting some place like “fuzzylittlekittens.com.” Any takers? 
Their stock introduction at the drive-through is “what combo would you like today?”
Not “would you like a combo,” but “WHAT combo.”
So the last time this happened, I explained “I’m sorry, I don’t want a combo. And since that’s apparently all you’re interested in selling, I shall take my leave of you” and pulled away.
Then, after thinking about it while waiting to get out of the parking lot, something occurs to me. I loop around, park and go in and ask to see the manager.
After explaining my objection to this most aggressive upsell ever, I explain, “and on top of it all, it’s ‘WHICH combo would you like today?’ not ‘WHAT combo!’” I could hear her sputtering as I left. I don’t know which unbalanced her more, being criticized for her staff’s being pushy, or for her staff’s poor grammar.
(Sad postscript: typing this has made me hungry for KFC. Now I have to drive into Millville on my way to the theater!)
Well, we weathered another shift out of Daylight Savings Time, and I’m still tired. 
I can understand the logic of switching between the two: so we don’t start getting sunlight at 3:30AM in July and don’t have to wait until almost 9 AM for sunrise in December, but sometimes I wish there was an easier way.
I never would have described Strong Sad as “Prufrockian,” or drawn allusions between los Bros. Chaps and John Updike, but it’s interesting to see one of my on-line guilty pleasures getting the intellectual treatment. The National Review has just checked in on Home Star Runner!
I’m behind schedule again! I’ve been waiting for the Cubs to win or lose the pennant, because that’s going to affect what’s on the show next Friday (October 24). I’ve got something cool, but it’s going to depend upon what happens!
If you can wade through the garbled syntax and typing, you might want to check out the advice of Vanilla The Plastic Snowman, alleged songwriter for Logan Whitehurst And The Junior Science Club. Something for all you frustrated songwriters to keep in mind.
You can find Vanilla’s essay on hit song writing here.
If you already know how to write a hit song, you may want to check out Logan’s essay on How To Be Cool instead.
I think it’s finally time to launch something I’d wanted to do for a while: The Sixty Second Shakespeare Company! Adaptations of the major works of the bard, edited down to sixty seconds and dramatized.
Anyone who wants to help out, please let me know!
Okay, I’d gotten sick of Netscape 7.1 and any flavor of Mozilla crashing constantly whenever I visit a page with anything more than rudimentary JavaScript. The problem was that I would never be able to go back to IE because I had gotten absolutely addicted to Tabbed Browsing. (You have no idea how necessary it is until you’ve used it!)
Anyway, I kept looking around, and finally heard that the newer versions of Opera support tabbed browsing. Happy happy joy joy! I’ve been running Opera 7.20 for Win32 for a little under 24 hours, and am hooked. I don’t plan on going back. You owe it to yourself to try Opera if you haven’t yet. Their page can be found here. The ads aren’t that oppressive, especially since ZoneAlarm negates most of them.
Also, I’ve taken the time to renew my SpamCop membership for another year. If you want to keep your mailbox clean, there’s no better service. Plus, you get to send nastygrams to the ISP’s of the people that sent you the spam with just a few clicks. Check it out!
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