Development, Politics, Pop Culture

You can't put "capitalist" in the title of a blog post without including this image

The spam that arrives in your inbox is addressed to speciffically to you (in terms of the e-mail header protocol), and intended to be read by only you.  There won’t be a ton of people, if any, other than you reading (or simply deleting) that spam e-mail.  It’s a private message to you.

But when someone’s Facebook account get hijacked by a virus and they start spamming their own wall, the spam isn’t quite so private anymore.  This type of spam is a bit more public facing, like a billboard placed along a rural highway.  The billboard has limited exposure, as the only people who will see it are the locals.  It’s personable-facing–right at the point the scope of the term “public”  is narrow enough to be atomized into persons.

Spam comments on blogs and forums are capitalist graffiti–completely public-facing massages designed to make a profit.

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When it comes to development, I’m a firm believer that laziness is a virtue.  If I can write code to do what I need done in as little lines as possible, not only am I doing less typing, but my code is probably going to be more efficient (either that or it’s going to be really hacky).

In the course of web design, I find myself coding rollover images often.  I’m a big fan of pure CSS image rollovers, which are quicker to load and don’t deal with JavaScript.  However, if you’re dealing with many links that all need a rollover, your css quickly becomes bloated.

JQuery to the rescue!

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After Prince declared the internet dead (and Kenny G declared the internet not dead), I wondered where we, as humanity, would go next in terms of connectivity.  Holomovement?  The Mer-ka-bah?

Barring a massive leap forward in consciousness, I thought up the idea of Telegraph Roulette.

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The new James Bond movie is “canned“.  Not in the can, but delayed indefinitely until MGM can raise some money.  Some lenders are pressuring MGM to sell their rights in “The Hobit“.  Warner Brothers offered 1.5b for the studio in its entirety, but considering the last back of Tolkien movies grossed about 3b, I think MGM was right in rejecting the offer.  On the other hand, MGM is 4b in debt right now.

Motorola launching a “Grab Life by the Calls” tie-in campaign with Discovery’s Dirty Jobs show. The slogan sounds  like Dodge’s “Grab Life by the Horns“, retired in 2007.  It also sounds a bit like “grab life by the balls”.  Motorola also has another (much worse) tag line, “Slap Mother Nature in the Face“.  BP joke, anyone?

As a new subscriber to The Economist, I was always excited to get my issue on Friday, read the whole thing over the weekend, then take The Economist’s “well red” quiz on Monday evening (I’ve never scored above 6 out of 10).  But I was really disspointed by this week’s cover story on Cyberwar.

I’ve yet to read an article that describes the threat from cyberwar in non-analogous terms.  The Economist’s article is about “arms control on the Internet”–whatever that means.  There’s mention of a “cyber-attack” on Estonia and the denial of service attack on Georgia during the start of the Russia-Georgia war (an attack which anyone could participate in, BTW).  But beyond that is nothing but fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

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