I have been a member of a computer and network security related website community for about a year and a half -- NewOrder.
Recently, the admin team of the site approved me to be the chief admin -- the one primarily responsible for the site's direction and content. This is no small task, since the site has around 45,000 registered members.
I am excited to be going into the new year as the head honcho. It is a neat community, and I hope to be able to keep it knowledgeable and lively.
Stop by for a visit, and tell 'em that mirrorshades sent you.
I am finding at this point in my life (late 20s) that grandmothers are getting into the habit of sending money for Christmas and allowing me to pick out my own gifts. Since I am not one who can easily come up with a "wish list" (much to the dismay of those who would endeavor to purchase gifts for me), I prefer this method.
Here is what I have gotten for Christmas so far from various grandmothers:
- a neo-lounge CD entitled White Martini (the "larger image" link is worth a look)
- a classic CD from one of the greatest DJs around, Paul Oakenfold (Southern Sun almost brings tears to the eye)
- an older but interesting-looking First Person Sneaker game, Thief II: The Metal Age
- a bottle of Johnnie Walker's finest malt scotch whisky, Johnnie Walker Green Label (official site here)
The largest single purchase so far was the bottle of Green Label, taking a $50 bite out of the Christmas money. I went back and forth on whether or not to purchase it, but in the end I decided to since I would never buy a $50 bottle of booze for myself with my own money.
I've got some bucks left to spend, and I've got my eye on a USB flash drive or two.
If I had to make a wish list, I doubt any of those items would have been on it.
Ho ho ho.
I have been using the Mozilla Firefox web browser for some time now -- ever since version 0.5. I recently upgraded to the 1.0 release, and overall I have been impressed.
However, I just managed to wipe out all my stored cookies from the options menu, by clicking the "Clear" button instead of the "View Cookies" button. I have no idea why this happened -- I have never ever used the clear function before, as there are some cookies I like to have around. Perhaps a warning "Are you sure you want to clear all cookies?" would be a nice addition.
It looks like the format of the screen may have changed just slightly, but enough to coerce me into clicking the wrong button. And it's not a huge deal, since I was going in to clear out some of the cookies anyway.
Just one of those frustrations that happens first thing in the morning....
This evening as my wife and I were wrapping Christmas presents, I had the happy experience of watching a long-forgotten movie from my childhood. It is called Sword of the Valiant, and it tells the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (one of the Arthurian legends).
This is pretty much a forgettable movie, though for a youngster interested in knights and wizards and dragons and the like -- it was very cool in its day. I must have watched it a dozen or so times when I was younger, and I found that I could still remember a lot of the lines from the movie.
I doubt this is one that is in any video stores -- there are a couple of known actors in the film (Sean Connery and John Rhys-Davis to name two) and a hottie playing Morgan Le Fay, but otherwise there's not much to it.
Still, I loved it as a kid, and enjoyed watching it tonight.
As I was de-spamming the comments in this blog, a thought occurred to me.
Perhaps not everyone whose website shows up in comment spam is a deliberate spammer. The reason this occurred to me is that the URL listed in the most recent batch of spam did not seem to be advertising anything (though I did not visit the site so I cannot verify that).
Maybe there are 3rd party blog spammers passing themselves off as "website traffic builder services" or something like that -- certainly there are services offered to publicize websites on search engines. Maybe blog spam is a strategy used by some of these services?
In this way, if I were to pay to publicize this site, ShadyMarketing.biz might be using blog spam (and/or email spam) as one of the techniques. The marginal cost of spam approaches zero, so this is far less labor-intensive than trying to do other types of media publicity.
So maybe we shouldn't hate LarrysCasino.net -- maybe it's the scummy marketers who besmirch the good names of online pharmacists and adult entertainment sites?
Though the week is almost over, I guess I could mention that I am working as a co-host for an online event on TechSoup, a technology community I have been involved with for the past couple years.
The week-long online event is on the topic of spam (the junk email kind, not the canned semi-meat), and I am handling the "how to block spam" portion.
Check out the discussion here if you are interested. Note that I post under the username "mirrorshades" in the forums.
I am moving management of this blog's RSS feed to a snazzy new service I found called FeedBurner. It adds lots of bells and whistles to the plain old feed, and adds tracking and statistics for feeds.
If anyone actually reads this thing using RSS, please update your RSS feed to the following: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RumBlog -- I am trying to set up a redirect for the old file, but it is not cooperating so the old file is now broken. [Update -- the redirect is now working, so old RSS feeds should get to the right place.]
Looks like a very nice service overall.