Flame Warriors

I love these caricatures by Mike Reed of Flame Warriors. We've all encountered some of these, I'm sure. It's darned near impossible to avoid them on listservs, message boards, forums, even comments on blogs. I've even known one on a message board who seemed a combination of at least 3, maybe 4 of these types. Link found on Miss Cellania.

Meanwhile, I've considerably upgraded my tech life with a new laptop (a darling Toshiba with Vista) and a new cellphone (my, they've changed in 5 years) that has internet access and a phone to go along with its lovely QWERTY keyboard. I've been spending my evenings the past 2 weeks reading manuals. However, improved devices and prior experience with similar devices have greatly improved my learning curve on these things. I never did get an address book into my old phone and the new one already has a bunch of folks programmed in. I might even leave it on during the day as it seems to have a better battery, too. It really is true that things are pretty much outdated by the time you get them home. ;)

~~~o0o~~~

Helpful Blogger Blog

I found Blogger Buster in Blogger's Blogs of Note, and rightly so. It's a nifty blog featuring all things Blogger, including free templates.

~~~o0o~~~

More Email Issues

An amazing thing happened today. I got an email from a woman apologizing for trying to change my email password. She got my email addy mixed up with hers. However, she wasn't one of the 2 ShellyS-es I've already identified. Two noteworthy things occurred with this email:

• She actually recognized that she'd made an error.
• She emailed me to apologize.

I'm not sure which impresses me more. :)

~~~o0o~~~

Mad Libs Online

Mad Libs, that "game" where people come up with nouns, verbs, and adjectives to create a story, is 50 years old, and to celebrate, it's been given a new website and widgets for people to put on their sites and social network pages. Let's see if I can add a widget to this entry.


~~~o0o~~~

Video on Flickr

Flickr now accepts short (max 90 seconds) videos from pro (paid) members. There are some definite rules re: content that will be allowed. Basically, they're looking for this to be sort of extended or moving photos, in the safe or moderate mode. There's definite appeal in this. I haven't had time to really play on YouTube and the thought of making my own vids to upload there is too daunting. It's just too big and I haven't made anything animated since my film class in college (1974). But this little video project on flickr might be just the incentive I need to try out my digicam's movie setting.

~~~o0o~~~

Email Not for Amateurs

Hey, you, out there, you don't want me to know personal info about you, and I don't want to know it about you, either. Nor do I want you to know personal stuff about me, unless I choose to share. But there are things I definitely shouldn't know about you and you should definitely not know about me. Like financial info. Or passwords to websites.

And yet, I know stuff about other Shellys out there, because they're not being careful when giving out their email addy. Sure, we might be careful *who* we give it to, but not *how.* Because either by mistyping or purposefully making up emails, people are giving out *mine.*

A lot of websites and webs ervices require an email addy upon registration. If you don't want to give out your main addy or don't want to run the risk of spam, create another email account somewhere to use with that account. It's what I do. Then make a note of it somewhere. Memorize it. Pay attention to how you type it.

I got my gmail account, thanks to an invite that I believe I got because I had a Blogger account. (It's been so long, my memory is fuzzy now.) The date my gmail account was created was April 28, 2004. That's right. Nearly 4 years ago, I've had that email account which is my main email. I was welcomed as a beta tester. I still had my AOL mail addies. I fell in love with gmail and was happy that because I was in early, I didn't need to add numbers or extra characters to my account name, the way I had to with AOL. I got the addy I wanted. I'm ShellyS on most online services, but for some, I had to add numbers. But apparently, I'm not the only Shelly S and if the others have gmail, they surely have other characters in their addies.

But they forget to type in those extra characters or don't bother/want to when they sign up for online shopping sites and social networks, or when they purchase airline tickets or register for conferences. Maybe they have Yahoo! addies, but forget and type "@gmail" or think making that switch will alleviate some spam in their email. I have no clue why they don't give their actual email addies to those sites, but I do know I'm getting their mail.

At first, last summer, it was about a mobile phone thingie (Helo) that I'd never heard of. They didn't even double check the email they were given by requiring a confirmation. I got notices of overdue payments. I didn't get the bills, and when I called (after a series of emails that made my head ache), they couldn't look up the account to verify the info. All they could do was look up my email and tell me if my name was attached to the account. It wasn't. They said they couldn't take out the email addy from their records. I sent future emails from them into my spam folder. They stopped coming sometime in the fall.

Then I got emails for other things, some of which mentioned the intended recipient by name, some of which just greeted "Shelly," and some with no clue re: who they were intended for. All but a few were automated and I couldn't respond to let them know the error, but a few were from actual people. One woman thanked me for telling her my addy wasn't for her niece. The real estate agent (in Phoenix?) wasn't interested in knowing I wasn't his prospective client. The major clothing chain sent automated notices of bank transfers for payment, but prudently obscured the actual bank account number. Then today, I got a confirming email for a social network I hadn't heard of, via an automated sender, with login and password.

If I were a malicious person, I could've gone in and changed the profile, changed the password, done all sorts of nasty things. Instead, I'm posting the names of two of the people whose personal emails I keep getting in the hopes that they might Google their name and this post will come up and they can fix the problem. I don't like posting people's names, but I have no other way to tell them I'm getting their mail and seeing things I shouldn't see. There might be other Shellys out there whose mail I'm also getting, but I can't find their actual names to confirm this.

So, if you see this, Michelle Sundberg and Shelly Smithson, this is for you.

~~~o0o~~~

Internet Miscalculations

This Newsweek editorial by Clifford Stoll, from 1995, is quite amusing due to all the things he got wrong. I've been a Newsweek reader since the 1970s, so I'm sure I read this article, but I don't recall it. Lines like this one, stated with such conviction, are the sort of thing that can easily come back to bite a person in the butt:

"Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no
online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place
of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government
works."

Uh, well, "replacement" may still be in the future, but co-existence has settled in nicely. What's striking, along with the miscalculations and misperceptions, is Stoll's inability at the time to envision a possible future, to imagine how things could adapt, to consider the creativity of the people who would be using the internet to make it more manageable.

He tackled a number of issues that the internet was supposed to make easier. Here's one:

"Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland
of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.
Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.
Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them--one's a
biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that
doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument.
None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages
like, 'Too many connections, try again later.'"

He never considered that someone, many someones, would find ways to help with the noise. That people would organize what's online. That search engines would improve. That Google would come along and customize searches, create advanced and scholarly searches, that online encyclopedias, while imperfect, would bring data together for people, like Wikipedia, or even About.com. He never considered that libraries would step in and bring worthwhile databases together, such as the Internet Public Library and The New York Public Library, along with thousands of other libraries (public and academic) offering some sort of online experience.

I really like this bit, though:

"Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point
and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make
restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become
obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the
entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send
money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most
essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."

Uh huh. He couldn't envision eBay, PayPal (which has had a major impact on how many people do business), Amazon.com, the online services offered today by brick and mortar stores, and others. Then again, he couldn't envision Second Life, MySpace, and FaceBook, either, apparently. He couldn't see how the internet could bring people together, in cyberspace and sometimes, in person.

His editorial is a classic example of the risks of stating things so emphatically, because that almost guarantees you'll be proven wrong someday. Just because the internet hadn't realized its potential in 1995, and likely hasn't reached its full potential yet, didn't mean it wouldn't someday. I'm really happy he was wrong.

Thanks to Miss Cellania for the Newsweek link.

~~~o0o~~~