Towel Day!!!

Today is Towel Day, a day when all geeks can carry their towels with them in tribute to the hoopiest frood of them all, Douglas Adams.

Minigolf, Dinotown and Over the Hedge

Wow! What a day! Got up early and met up with Brad and George to hit the road. After a good brunch of coffee, coffee and more coffee, we did the hyper jitter back into the car and out to giggle ridge mini golf; a whimsical and well built mini golf course that reminds me a bit of bear country at Disney world. After a game, trying to not peg kids off with golf balls, we swung around to Dinotown; an old theme parked that back in the day use to hold the Flintstones, and now sports a set of toony and colour filled dinosaurs. After a dinner of Chinese food we went out to see “Over The Hedge”; a DreamWorks animation based on the Sunday comics of the same name. Its had some great writing and fun characters. I decently recommend it for anybody looking for a fun, no brain movie.

Mothers Day

"The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system." (via Bruce Schneier)

The Station Agent

Last night I found myself with a drifting mind, plucking through my video collection like a ferret searching for the source to a noise. I decided to watch “The Station Agent”. It’s the story about a little person who finds himself sick of society and moving to a small town to find some peace. Not only was the lead role well done, but this movie introduced me to one of the best actresses I have ever seen; Patricia Clarkson. She portrayed one of the most realistic tormented rolls I have ever found on the big screen. There is a certain calm yet profound feel to movie. It’s great to see a movie work without violence or any of the systems put in play for people with low attention spans and an inability to appreciate the details. Click here to see the official site.

Blond Joke

There was a blond lady and an "intellectual" type onboard a plane. He thought he would make conversation with her and asked her if she would like to play "intelligence". She asked him how to play. He said the rules are really quite simple. I'll ask you a question, if you get it wrong, you give me $5.00, then you can ask me a question and if I get it wrong, I'll pay you $50.00. She agreed to play. He asked her, "what state is the Grand Canyon in?" She thought about it for a moment, and quietly handed him $5.00. She said, "ok, it's my turn. What goes uphill on three legs, and runs down on four?" He thinks about it for a minute, then thinks a little longer, then passes over $50.00. He looks over at her and says, "ok, what does go uphill on three legs, and runs down on four?" She quietly slips him another $5.00.

Spammer's Fear Reaches The Point Of Blackmail

When I saw the spam in my email box, I could not help but have a cheshire cat moment. Blue Frog; an application which helps fight spam has no doubt become such a threat to spammers that they are trying to blackmail any that use it. The email contained the following. “Hey, You are recieving this email because you are a member of BlueSecurity (http://www.bluesecurity.com). You signed up because you were expecting to recieve a lesser amount of spam, unfortunately, due to the tactics used by BlueSecurity, you will end up recieving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally. How do you make it stop? Simple, in 48 hours, and every 48 hours thereafter, we will run our current list of BlueSecurity subscribers through BlueSecurity's database, if you arent there.. you wont get this again. We have devised a method to retrieve your address from their database, so by signing up and remaining a BlueSecurity user not only are you opening yourself up for this, you are also potentially verifying your email address through them to even more spammers, and will end up getting up even more spam as an end-result. By signing up for bluesecurity, you are doing the exact opposite of what you want, so delete your account, and you will stop recieving this. Why are we doing this? Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails. Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails, but do not believe for one second that we will stop this tirade of emails if you choose to stay with BlueSecurity. Just remember one thing when you read this, we didnt do this to you, BlueSecurity did. If BlueSecurity decides to play fair, we will do the same. Just remove yourself from BlueSecurity, and make it easier on you. Mack Rivera” For those of you who did not read my original post on this great program, the Blue frog organization gathers spam from users and makes requests on behalf of them to be removed from bulk spam lists. If they do not comply, your small, simple and by no mean intrusive blue frog icon begins to ping the spammers servers. With over half a million users this makes the spammer servers overload eating up their bandwidth and costing them money. I will not be held hostage by spammers, if you’re sick of spam, join up and make Blue Frog an even greater threat to these spammers that use extortion to push their unwanted emails; no matter how much they try to blackmail me I intend on standing behind this little program. I get the feeling that the spammers are beginning to feel the pressure. For the bluefrog's blog entry on this subject click here.