Asides

the sensor is still covered with schmutz, but I started lugging it around again. feels good...

I was asked to turn in the iPhone last month. Due to the contract setup, it couldn't be cancelled right away, so I was able to borrow it for an additional month. That month is up, so now I just finished nuking the iPhone again so I can turn it in. I've likely saved the University hundreds of thousands of dollars by advocating and using free and open source software for nearly a decade. But that $50/month will probably be what finally saves the University from budgetary destruction. Phew. Disaster averted.

>"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
>
>-Plato

The Big Dog passed away yesterday. Her health was kind of shitty for the last year or so, but she seemed to be getting stronger. Yesterday afternoon, she didn't seem herself. She seemed weak, lethargic. She refused food. In her 11 years with us, I had never seen her say no to food. She knew something was up.

She went quietly, just after going to bed. Apparently, without pain, probably as a result of internal bleeding due to massive organ failure. She was a good dog. She was a pain in the ass sometimes, sure. But a good dog, in every sense of the word. She craved human contact, and would adjust her 75-pound frame to lean against a hand that wasn't petting her, or wasn't petting her just right.

I just got this phishing email. You may have received a copy of it as well. I normally delete them without much thought, but actually read this one. It's got a new angle I haven't seen before. Here's an image of the email (not using the plaintext, to avoid attracting phishers and spammers etc... wait. too late...)

Update: Microsoft just nuked the account used in the phishing scam.

I tried to post this as a comment [on the OLDaily post](http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=52593), but got rejected with a "Permission Denied" error.

>Wait. Wired produces a bloated, braindead "magazine" that's really just a CD-ROM's worth of images of magazine pages, and you complain about bloat being the "Apple way" I don't get it, Stephen. Apple had nothing to do with the app. And AT&T in the states is the bad guy for imposing the caps, not Apple. An Android phone running on AT&T would have the _exact same_ limitations.
>
>>D'Arcy

"The course blog, with its simple reverse-chronological set-up is an event-ness force multiplier — on the one hand it engages with the world and creates an audience (like we always point out), but on the other hand it is very much about forging a group identity in opposition to the outside world."

(Via Mike Caulfield)

I dutifully downloaded Steam onto my office Mac Pro. It's not new, but it's not too shabby, either. Grabbed a copy of Portal. Clicked "Play" and was rewarded with:

WTF? This isn't a new high-end game. It's complaining about my video card? Dang. Maybe I'll try tonight on the MacBook Pro. Unless it complains about something there, too... *sniff*

A spam roach managed to get through Akismet, .htaccess filtering and Bad Behaviour, to crap this little gem on my previous post. Thank you, Google, for giving these cretins a business model that makes this kind of nonsense worth their time.

(actually - this isn't irony at all. it's brutal honesty. admirable, even. we should all be so honest...)

I know where I'd rather be right now. 2 more sleeps.

I haven't really played with a client app for posting to a blog in a few years. The web interface for WordPress is pretty darned good now. But MarsEdit 3 just came out, with rich text editing. That might be pretty cool... Does it handle media?

Looks like it might. And it integrates with my Flickr account, too.

The spammers have decided to try crapping on my blog again. Distributed spam botfarms - Chinese, Hungarian, Latvian, Turkish, and now even Israeli (I didn't know spam was kosher). annyway...

I had to crank up the antispam countermeasures a bit. Akismet wasn't stopping them, so I've added Bad Behavior as well. Hopefully there won't be any false positives. Bad Behavior always makes me a bit nervous, as it's rather final and unforgiving. Both very good things if it's right, but it's occasionally wrong...