The Substantially Similar Weblog

Seen in my server log today:

“Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Linux Rulez)”

Looks like someone can’t make up their mind.

Although I can’t identify the problem exactly, it appears that Hotmail is rejecting a ton of mail right now. Some of it bounces, so the sender sees that the message didn’t get through, but in many cases it just disappears into a black hole, and neither the sender nor the recipient ever finds out that the message wasn’t delivered. Some have suggested that this is connected to the Mydoom epidemic, but I have some evidence that it predates the latest worm by a few months. For example, a Hotmail subscriber to an email list I administer just told me she had never received any messages from that list over the past two months, although I’ve never received any notices that her address is bouncing.

If anyone has more insight into exactly what’s going on, please comment on this entry. In any case, I’m hoping to spread the word that Hotmail is very broken, and since I can’t email Hotmail subscribers directly, this is the best I can do.

As it turns out, googling for “cannot rename self” returns no results. This would almost qualify as a Googlewhack, although apparently you can’t have a legitimate googlewhack that requires quotation marks. In any case, Steve recently asked me to rename myself and I replied “cannot rename self,” so you see how this all got started.

(don’t I deserve at least one truly geeky blog entry every few weeks? — what, all of them are truly geeky?)

I recently received an email from a “free local reuse” list offering a free bassinet.

I had no idea what a bassinet was, or whether I wanted one, so I did a quick Google search, only to find that Fischer-Price has recalled its portable Bassinets:

Fisher-Price has received 24 reports of fingers getting caught or pinched in the bassinet frame, including 10 children with cut fingertips, one infection and one broken finger.

Apparently it’s a sort of baby seat. The recall notice was quite scary. Does “cut fingertips” mean a cut on the fingertip, or that it cut the fingertip entirely off?

So my first impulse was to think of ways to spread the word about these deadly bassinets. Even though I have nothing personally to do with them, if it’s going to cut off babies’ fingers, then we should all know.

But then I remembered how I had come across the notice in the first place: it’s the top result from google. Apparently enough other people also felt that this was the most important thing to know about bassinets and had linked similarly back to the recall notice.

I think this is an example of google doing it’s job well: emulating and amplifying “word of mouth” communication. If the CPSC posts recall notices on its site and no one linked there, I doubt anyone would have ever come across the notice. I mean, how often do you check to see if any of the thousands of household items you own have been recalled? But the weight of enough people coming across this has pushed it up to the top result.

I also noticed another bassinet recall, which seemed to apply to a slightly different product: “Although the drop leaf shelf is not intended as a support shelf for infants, when used in this manner, the drop leaf shelf support mechanism will fail to support the infant. The infant could fall causing head or other bodily injury.” In fact, a search for bassinet recall reveals an extraordinary number of problems! One of them says “infants can become entrapped in an opening between the bassinet’s side and mattress platform and suffocate.” Who would have guessed?

So my advice to prospective parents: stay away from bassinets entirely. I think a traditional crib is probably the safest way to go.

(courtesy Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug)

Okay, so Pittsburgh rocks too, although the WiFi hot-spot at the Pittsburgh Airport is a little less “hot” than in Florida. Still free and open access, though, with the catchy essid of FlyPittsburgh.

In other news, the newspapers here seem to be somewhat proud that Pittsburgh has “won” the official designation of “distressed city.”

The Fort Lauderdale Airport· in Florida is the first one I’ve found where there appears to be free and ubiquitous WiFi. I’ve been quite frustrated over the past few months: every airport seems to have WiFi supplied by T-One Mobile where you need a subscription or day pass. I just want to check my email for 30 seconds—I don’t want to spend $7 for “unlimited” access for the day when I’m only passing through briefly.

But at Fort Lauderdale, you just turn on your WiFi and you’re instantly assigned an IP address, no firewalls, no payment schemes, just Permanet· (temporarily). And you get something like half a megabyte per second bandwidth—both up and down.

Check out Tapestry: Your Favourite Comics by RSS· if you (1) read comics and (2) use an RSS aggregator, such as my personal favorite, Straw·. The site provides a list of comics available by RSS, as well as an RSS feed that provides updates on new feeds available.

I recently noticed an email is going around with the subject line Submission re: (your email address):

Someone who knows you just submitted a Word-of-Mouth Connection about you at our website, WordofMouthConnection.com. When your acquaintance submitted this Word-of-Mouth Connection at our website, they provided us with your email address.

I did a quick google search for “word of mouth” and “word of mouth connection” and all the top results pointed to the site itself.

It appears, though, that the “service” is a total scam. Snopes· does a good job at documenting the problems with the Word of Mouth Connection·. So pass on the word:

There’s no “report” or any other useful information to be found here just a notification that some anonymous contributor recently submitted an “I HAVE INFORMATION” entry on you. If you want to find out what this anonymous contributor actually said about you, you have to communicate with him through Word-of-Mouth’s ANONYMOUS EMAIL SYSTEM which this is where the “sucker” part kicks in is only available to Word-of-Mouth “Power Users”: One-Year Subscription $19.97, Two-Year Subscription (BEST VALUE) $29.97. However, all the “Power Users” who have written to us about their experiences with Word-of-Mouth have reported that after they paid the fees to learn what was being said about them, all they learned was that the anonymous contributors had “misplaced” whatever information they supposedly had to share.

In the tradition of people who like to say “I’m currently blogging from [x]” where x is some location other than [home]—

I’m currently blogging from Maxfield’s House of Caffeine·, on the corner of Dolores and 17th in the Mission. I highly recommend it. Features include:

• Spacious interior, well spaced tables and comfy couches. Counter seating if you don’t want to look at anyone (or look out the window); also several outdoor tables on a relatively quiet street.
• Well lit, tastefully decorated, lots of plants.
• ATM in the shop, if you care about that.
• Excellent wireless signal, no hassles joining the free LAN. Getting approximately 140kB/s at the moment.
• Decent ecletic music targetted at people like me (note Miles Davis and the Flaming Lips in the same set).
• Very respectable coffee prices in this Starbucks age. Regular coffee for $1.25, and an espresso is only $0.25 more. Single Cappuccino for $1.75; double for $2.00. How can you not get a double under these circumstances?
• Pleasant, unharried staff. The whole place oozes chill.
• They appear to, at least informally, allow pets.
• Live music performances in the evenings, looks like primarily jazz and bluegrass variety.
• With a name like Maxfield’s House of Caffeine, it’s got to be good. Lots of newspaper articles on the walls about the healthful effects of caffeine (possibly prevents tumors from sun exposure, delays menopause, improves complexion, etc.).