December, 6, 2002 archives

no, i don't really have anything against jakob nielsen. i think he says lots of great things, actually. i was just re-reading his microcontent: headlines and subject lines article, and realized that nearly all of the headlines i've used in recent posts violate the written in plain language: no puns, no cute or clever headlines test. i think i use titles most when i'm trying to be cute or clever. the exception is when i want to claim a google position. (and i'll add that i'm disappointed that google can't handle the »s and «s in my page titles. we'll see if it handles the numeric version of those entities better.)

a clever con to create a new state agency. no, it's not about the department of homeland security, it's a piece from the moscow times about a con-man who tried to get office space for a fabricated coast guard-equivalent in russia.

scientists at colorado state university think too much refined bread and cereal may be behind teen acne, and and an australian team is going to perform a study to try to prove it. another point in favor of low-carb diets?

the secondary effect of blo.gs being a yahoo! pick is starting to kick in—yesterday it was sapo (a portal in portugal) which chose it as a site-of-the-day.

there isn't a whole lot of text involved in blo.gs. i should probably add some i18n and l10n support once i've moved it. (soon.)

this is another theme month: kids.

• international: unicef
• national: marine toys for tots foundation
• local: LA's BEST

an interesting spam: no subject, relatively normal-looking sender, and body text that just said browsing through the cnn website i came across this cnn article which seems to be about you: http://www.cnn.com/USArticle1840@www.example.com/. that url abuses the syntax that allows for specifying a username in the url to push the actual site url to the end—the real request there is to www.example.com with a username of www.cnn.com/USArticle1840.

that almost qualifies as clever. too bad it was sent to a message-id instead of my real email address. (every email has a message-id header, which happens to look quite a bit like a real email address to stupid spam bots. my mail system isn't currently set up to bounce those non-existent addresses immediately, so i sometimes see the double-bounce.)

just to clear up any confusion, i really hate all the people i know who can write well. like this one.

every once in a while, i'll use a word in a way that i think is interesting. often accidently. more rarely, i'll cobble together an interesting sentence. usually accidently. there's been a few times where i've put together a particularly satisfactory paragraph. mostly accidently. i think i have once or twice written something of essay-length that may not entirely suck. those were a lot of work, and an extraordinary collision of accidents.

(i figured out why i don't use capital letters. it is part of my continuing campaign of sabotage i wage against myself.)