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Technorati Profile You are reading entries from the computers department. June 17, 2004 support our troops -- send them your GMail invites! I keep reading about how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are having their tours extended long beyond when they expected to come home, and their morale is suffering as a result. Thankfully, many of our soldiers are able to stay in touch with friends and family via the Internet, but their e-mail access is often very limited. WWdN reader Drew sent me the following note earlier today: I will send you an invitation for the hard to get Gmail if you post something on your site telling others to give their invites to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. See, Google gives 1 gig of email space, perfect for movies and pictures from home, but it's invite only. When you get an account you will get invites too, and if you could pass them along to those who need em that would rule. I think this is a fantastic idea, and an easy, but very powerful way for many of us to help support our troops.
GMail gives users 1 GIG of free storage space, which is more than enough for pictures, movies, sound files . all sorts of things that could help our servicemen and women feel a little closer to home. The thing about GMail is that it's currently invite-only, so I e-mailed Drew back, and asked him if he had some sort of clearinghouse set up for soldiers to submit requests for invites.
See, once you talk to one of them, they pass an email along to fellows stationed with them, so we're just trying to dole them out as we get the request. There's no way to know how long Gmail will be invite only, but SGT Tim Knowles in Afghanistan said that good morale is hard to come by out there and in Iraq, and the guys are buzzing about the possibilities of 1 gig. I'm going to look into getting a site together or at least a list. Of course, there are epic assholes online who will pose as soldiers so they can get invites, but I think it's completely worth the risk. So here is your challenge, WWdN readers: * Help spread the word about this effort, and keep checking back here for a link to the soon-to-be-built clearinghouse for requests. Maybe your story will be seen by some other people who can get on board, and together, we can make a positive difference!
I am done dealing with childish attention-whore script kiddie crapflooders. I've never done anything to you subhumans, yet you continue to attack and deface my website. I can't believe that you would think that it's somehow okay to post kiddie porn in the comments on any website, but I am absolutely stunned that you are so devoid of any basic humanity that you would flood a post about my pet who is dying. So I'm now officially putting out a bounty on your heads. I am offering $1000 for information that leads to the arrest and successful prosecution of anyone involved in the crapflooding of this website.
So check it: A graduate student at the University of Florida is doing a research study on you - the readers of this blog. There is a survey she would like you to complete & it takes less than 10 minutes. The survey asks basic questions about you & your reading of this blog.
Please do not trackback to this post or survey since the point of her study is to actually understand you as a reader of my blog rather than people who find the survey through other links.
spent an hour or so making stickers, to give my brain a rest after writing all day. la bOINGbOING the onion Best Week Ever How about some love for XM? lucy - XM 54 Ethel - XM 47 Fred - XM 44 And of course, we've got to have some Star Trek stickers: tng deep space nine voyager Okay, so consider yourself inspired! Get outta here and make some that are cooler than these .
Windowmaker, which I haven't touched since Red Hat 52 I ::heart:: wmaker. I've got my iBook on my desk to my right, and I check it every 30 minutes or so for new e-mail.
I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the kde 32 install I did, but I'm not exactly sure. All I know right now is that my /home partition is safe, as are all the Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot files within said partition. I'm pretty confident that I can boot into runlevel 2 and fix it .
But you can have my polyhedral dice when you pry them from my cold, dead hands . provided I fail my saving throw, of course), and it's awesome. Because I'm running Knoppix out of RAM, it's moving at transwarp speed. If you've even shown the tiniest hint of geekery in your life, you owe it to yourself to give Knoppix (or any LiveCD, really) a go.
konstruct is building kde 32 I don't quite know why, but there is something immensely satisfying about watching hundreds of lines of code (that I completely don't understand) scroll by. It's so much more "real" than just watching an LED blink on and off.
Fedora Project's Core 1 release good enough to use on a daily basis? I'm still runing 90 with a ton of stuff in /usr/built/ and /home/wil/bin/ (So I guess I could call it the WheaTONIX version of 90 .
You spend all night turning on and off the faucet in your sink hoping to find a ring. And the number 1 way to know you've been playing too much Nethack: 1 Whenever you look at someone's email address, you think "Oh my God! The number double plus one reason I know I play too much nethack is how hard I laughed when I read this.
Remember a few days ago when I was so excited to learn the magic use of the TITLE tag? Several readers e-mailed to let me know that I can build symbols using unicode, like < or > to show off my HTML . Many people ask me why I don't use target="_blank" in my links.
The answer is, "because it's just as easy to right-click (or ctl-click, if you're a machead) to open links in new windows, most browswers can be set to open links in background tabs or windows anyway, and I'm too lazy to type it into every link." The follow-up, of course, is, "Well, then why don't you just put make "_blank" the base link?" Now, I am off to have left-over soup, and a slice of just-baked potato bread for lunch.
For some reason, since we moved to our new server, about 60% of my outbound e-mail is getting blackholed. Typical messages: Remote host said: 550 : Client host rejected: REJECT - We do not accept spam!
Remote host said: 554: Recipient address rejected: Relay access denied For those of you scoring at home, we are NOT a relay. Congressman, I can stand here before you right now and tell you, if you think we are a relay, you. The uber-cool guys at logjamming have tried to contact the various RBLs that are blocking us, but none of the RBLs have responded. One of them went so far as to block our freakin' request: Hi. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. com: Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. Make us prove that we're not an open relay, and bounce the freakin' e-mail we send to prove it! Now you're screwing up the Internet so badly, legit e-mails get killed. UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out to me that the RBL issue is because of Rackspace, not WWdN or logjamming. It was also brought to my attention that I misread the qmail error (don't tell anyone, okay? It will reveal to the world what a lameass non-technical-pseudo-geek I am) about osirusoft. None of this changes my feelings about spammers, though. While we are all annoyed by the proliferation of junk mail, and its continued invasion of our inboxes, this problem of innocent people getting caught up in RBLs and the like is something I've never thought about until it happened to me. Therefore, on behalf of the Internet, I would like to invite all the spammers in the world to kindly fuck themsleves.
While I was putting music on it, I decided to take a look at the iTunes Music Store, and see what it was all about. Wil, you just told us the other night on Your Mac Life that you didn't like the iTunes Music Store! Well, here's what gives: I misunderstood what the iTunes Music Store was about, didn't fully grok how it worked, and I have changed my mind entirely about it. I said that I wasn't all that thrilled with it, and cited the (incorrect) fact that the buyer wouldn't be able to take the music he / she / it bought and bur...
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