Stream-of-consciousness on a Sunday morning:

 

Star Trek: The Tour - 250 tons of sets, props, models and costumes from all of the TV shows and movies. Oh man, I totally want to go to this if and when it comes to Seattle!

 

It's in LA (Long Beach) right now until March 2nd. They're planning to visit 40 cities around the US over the next 5 years - no details yet on which cities or when.

 

Read more at MSN City Guides and the official tour site. Check back with the tour site for the 2008 tour schedule.

 

 

 

 

This is why I am always so tired.

 

 

[from XKCD]

Update on my article a few days ago about people receiving IM spam from me. Do not trust sites which offer to show you who's blocking you on Messenger.

 

First the good news - all 5 of my computers were not compromised in any way. No virus, malware, spyware, trojan, keylogger or rootkit.

Now the bad news - I was stupid enough to give my ID and password to a site that I shouldn't have trusted.

 

There are - so I discovered - sites out there which claim to be able to show you who has blocked you or deleted you on Messenger. Of course, you have to give your ID and password to them, and then they show you your list of buddies. This is similar to how Facebook invites you to find your friends - you give Facebook your ID and password and then see the list of your buddies. The difference is Facebook can (in theory) be trusted not to abuse your trust. Other sites, however... well, the good old Latin phrase caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) was never more applicable.

 

Here's how the scam went down: About two weeks ago, I received an IM from one of my friends telling me about this site which would show me who was blocking me. Well, I trusted my friend - maybe moreso because I had just been chatting with her earlier in the day - so I clicked the link and gave my ID and password to the site. I noticed that the results were not very reliable - the site told me that I was blocking myself (one of my other IDs) which I knew not to be true. After that, nothing happened for about a week, when I noticed a large uptick in the volume of spam I was receiving in my email account, and then on Friday when these IM spams started happening.

 

To be honest I never thought about this Messenger blocking site that I had given my ID and password to. I started scanning my machines, furiously looking for the malware which didn't exist. After making some inquiries to some knowledgeable sources, it became clear that it was this website that was the source of the spam. 

 

So I'm writing this in the hope that when someone sends you a link to a Messenger blocking info website, you'll be smarter than I was. Don't give them your ID and password!

For those of you who use Flickr, I found a handy-dandy little tool which adds a Flickr upload option to your "Send To" context menu - In other words, when you are browsing your photos on your machine, just right-click on one and choose "Send To Flickr" and it will upload the photo for you. No muss, no fuss :-)

You can read about it here on Microsoft's on10 blog.

Today two people on my Windows Live Messenger buddy list got messages from me that I didn't send. Both were fairly nonsensical words with (of course) a link, in the hope that the recipient would click it. I also received one from another person on my buddy list. If you get this kind of message from anyone, ignore it, and certainly DO NOT CLICK THE LINK!!

 

There seems to be something new going around. I have never seen this before - previous Messenger (IM) Spam was typically from people not on your buddy list. This one, since it appears to come from someone you now, is more insidious.

 

I've run two anti-spyware/malware scans from different tools which found nothing at all. At this point I am not sure if it is some sort of machine infection or if something else is going on. Couldn't find any info on the web. So just watch out!

On the same day, I ran across some good news for the future of the TV industry, and some rather sad news for the Sex industry.

 

50% of men would give up sex for 6 months in exchange for a 50" TV. 33% of women would do the same. (MSNBC).

Simultaneously with this 'revelation' comes even more remarkable news - Amsterdam, the sex capital of Europe since medieval times, is cleaning up its act, and looking to replace its world-famous red-light district with something more "clean". (Reuters)

 

I first visited Amsterdam in the summer of 1989 while back-packing around Europe. I have never forgotten wandering down the main pedestrianized shopping street of the city, and seeing the juxtaposition of a sex shop right next door to a McDonald's. Pictures of Ronald McDonald surrounded by kids in the window while right next door were devices and articles of explicitly adult entertainment. This was not anywhere close to the red-light district, I hasten to add. I wasn't expecting sex to be quite as pervasive and commonplace, or as integrated into the society, but there it was. Such a thing could never happen in Ireland, or the US. But its days are finally numbered, apparently, if the current administration has its way.

 

Indeed, maybe nobody will really miss it - if people would really prefer to be watching their shiny new TVs than having sex ;-)

Here in the US, the two biggest social networks - MySpace and Facebook - are going international. Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington has an interesting comparison of Facebook's approach to localization (community localization of the UI "skin", but no real market customization) to MySpace's approach (build heavily market-customized product, plus build up teams in the various countries).
 
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/07/facebook-turns-1500-users-into-spanish-translation-slaves/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/18/myspace-russia-quietly-launches-myspace-turkey-coming/

 

Facebook's approach is obviously quite a bit cheaper. But which approach to increasing your global presence is better? Will MySpace's greater investment pay off?

Would a community localization approa (a la faceook) work in all cases?

Football = a strong America. Baseball  = an increasing amount of foreigners (from central America and Japan) taking the place of Americans on the field, and a huge loss of trust due to unchecked steroid abuses.

 

Today I watched the Superbowl on a 100-inch screen in a dedicated home theater room at the home of friends of ours. The game was exciting right to the very end (for a change) and it was a lot of fun to watch it in a room with others - compared to watching it by myself at home, it's more fun when people are shouting or talking about what is happening on the screen.

 

Apart from the game itself, I thought it was interesting how the editors of the program tried to tie the event to a feeling of patriotism. It was clear that the message was "watching football is patriotic". They showed a video of several players or managers speaking the US declaration of independence (from the British). This included a player with firemen in front of the 9/11 ground zero, and other images of US troops in desert camoflage.

 

To be honest, I have no idea what football has to do with patriotism of any kind. There is a perhaps single-minded marketing weapon being used on the American people to commercialize patriotic feeling. If the NFL is successful in combining "honor the flag", "war on terror", "support our troops" and "watch football", then they might just succeed at replacing baseball as "America's Favorite Pastime".

 

They might already have won that battle. Even I, a non-American and a general skeptic, feel that football is more "American" than Baseball these days.

I guess you've heard about Microsoft's semi-hostile takeover of Yahoo! Inc...

 

If the takeover happens (if the board and stockholders approve and if Microsoft then clears government examination of the deal), there is certainly a huge amount of duplication between the two online entities - not just homepage or search but everything from finance to instant messaging to email to music downloads, to say nothing of the infrastructure such as servers and datacenters. That at least on the surface seems to indicate some chance of major reorganizations ahead.

 

I wonder how the folks at Yahoo (the rank and file regular employees) feel about it. I also wonder how my colleagues are feeling. Due to a team ski event today I didn't have a chance to get the pulse from people on my team, but I'm sure that come Monday, this will be a hot topic around the watercooler. I'll bet that it will be a hot topic for the rest of the year!