Month: February 2003

Great, if you’re reading this you made it here!

By now you’ve noticed that I’ve been making massive changes to Obtainium – new logo, all sorts of sections. There’s two focuses (foci?) there – pointing to cool stuff (as well as, eventually, explaining how to make your own cool stuff) and helping out friends of mine. So if you’ve got a cool product or service, let me know, and I’ll make a link to your website. And if you don’t have a website – we can make one and put it here. By the way, if you need your (low-traffic) website hosted, I can do that too.

Let me know what you think!

If Fry’s opened stores in England, would they call them Chip’s?

Obscure trivia(l) fact of the day:

When I was growing up, I remember hearing that the vowels were “A, E, I, O, U, and sometime W and Y.” W? I know, for example, that “by” and “fly” use Y as a vowel (while “year” for example, doesn’t). But what words use W as the vowel? Other people I’ve asked have only every heard it as, “…and sometimes Y”.

Thanks to Google and today’s bout of bored curiousity, I found this:

The letter W does not normally spell a vowel by itself in English, but it does so in a couple of obscure words like ‘crwth’ and ‘cwm‘, both of which you can find in a big dictionary, and in both of which W spells the vowel of ‘moon’. That’s because these words are taken from Welsh, in which W is *normally* used to spell this vowel.

You’re right – I must be very, very bored.

“Dell dude” arrested for marijuana posession. But the peanut gallery comments are even funnier:

“Maybe he was at a party with Ellen Feiss… ;-)”

“Doesn’t he know that pot is a gateway drug?”

“buying a Dell gives money to “the Dell Dude,” the “Dell Dude,” gives money to his dealer, the dealer gives money to a group of ultra-violent Columbian Communist guerillas, who in turn, kill families and extended families of farmers who refuse to grow for them…”

Open-source idea, since I don’t have a consumer electronics company. (Though I hear the patent office grants patents with almost no review lately.)

Voice-activated telephone answering system. When the phone receives an incoming call, the voice activation circuit comes on, and processes spoken commands.

“Hello?” – answers call, puts caller on speakerphone, sends “Hello?” to caller.
“Who is it?” – reads caller ID; or answers call, asks caller “May I say who’s calling?”, plays response over speaker, waits for response.
“Message.” – direct call to voicemail
“Wait” – puts caller on hold
“Hangup” – hangs up.

Software-upgradable to allow for future enhancements.

My friend Chris sent me a change of address today, and included a vcard – so I went ahead and added a vcard to my address site (Yep, that’s the site I referred to another friend who asked for my s-mail address – and her response was “sheesh, can’t you just copy and paste your address – I had to click through!).

Vcard (or .vcd) is a standard format for addresses. Take a look here and see what your browser does with it. If it’s linked to your address book, it should just add itself.

So this got both of us thinking about addresses – and of course I’m always thinking about phone numbers. Chris’ suggestion was for a distributed .vcd server with multi-level security, sort of like pgp keyservers – so people you had listed would have access to other numbers than spam/telemarketers/etc.

But of course I’m thinking bigger than that.

Have a centralized agency, like icann (that hands out domain names, but hopefully with more accuracy and less hassles!) assign IP address-style identification numbers. You could either pay for a single number (or however many identity numbers you wanted) or a range of numbers (for an organization and its employees/positions)…

…sorry, I’m spending too long arguing with myself about all the problems (as well as benefits) of this approach. Maybe I’ll update this if I work anything else. Write to me with ideas. You know my address!

Got another virus today, in the email box. Except it wasn’t.

Here’s my evidence (addresses changed to protect the sender):
-This was an email addressed to cybertel (at) cybertelcorp.com – an address we don’t use (undefined email addresses at cybertelcorp.com are sent to me).
-It was from someone I don’t know – sounding like something to do with stocks – like “jim@stockagents.net”.
-It contained only a word document with an equally cryptic stock-ish name like sharesissuance.doc. (I didn’t open it to see what it was, of course!)
-There was no message, only the attachment.

On a whim, I went to “www.stockagents.net” (or whatever) and it redirected to “stockpeople.com” (or whatever else) that was a company that sends stuff to our company president. Sure enough, he knew “jim” and had been waiting for a message.

I should have sent the nasty anti-virus response back to “jim” anyway. Grrr.

(By the way, did you also notice that this has nothing to do with my “real job” – database management and billing? Only sucked up half an hour of my day or so, if you include this blog entry.)