Hello To The Spammers!

Just a quick hello to all the idiot spammers who keep posting crap about prescription pills, part-time jobs where I can make a bazillion dollars and things to increase my 'manhood' to my blog. Hello cretins!

Amateurs @ the Post Office

Eugh. The run up to Christmas. Tons of unwashed masses at the Post Office with their parcels, incomplete/non-existant forms deliberating for hours over which rate they want.

And then there is me. Nineth back in the line. Form ready, waiting for amateurs to stumble through the process of mailing a gift to Manitoba with more angst than NASA needs to get cargo to the ISS.

I hate the festive period. :(

Email on the go, sent by TELUS

Missing blog

Thanks to some asshats who keep abusing the blog-script on my front page I've had to remove it.

It bastards kept injecting urls into my legitimate html source which would lead to Google and others reporting that my site was laden with evil.

Assholes.

Email on the go, sent by TELUS

Success & Whoops

I'm dead excited to report that using SynCE I've got my Windows Mobile device to talk to Evolution on Linux.

The downside is that rather than taking the contacts and calendar from my phone and moving them to Evolution, I took the nothing in Evolution and blew everything away on my phone. Ooops.

If you call me or I miss an appointment, Im sorry - my phone has temporary amnesia until I can restore from a backup.

Love, me.

Email on the go, sent by TELUS

Migration to Linux Almost Done

For a few years now I've been going back and forth to Linux trying to figure out if I can get Floating Point into the Open Source world.

I'm quite excited that for the last week things have been going 'OK'.  Not fantastic I'll grant you but OK.

The major obstacle is that all of my current designs and client-base are heavily entrenched into Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, so to get around this I'm running a virtualized Windows XP environment via VMware server under Linux.  Although a little sluggish on my laptop it's tolerable and I have my XP workstation to fall back on if things get very tedious.  Aside from Quickbooks and the software that drives my label printer everything else has been migrated to Debian.

There are still some quirks.  I haven't got my Windows Mobile Palm synchronizing with 'Evolution' yet, but I'm getting there.

Generally speaking things are more clunky under Linux, but on the whole routine tasks are much faster than Windows.

I'll keep you posted...

Leighton, Owner Floating Point Digital Images 403.510.4793, www.fpdimages.com

Test upload from my phone

Ooooh, the unbridled excitement of mobile blogging...

Email on the go, sent by TELUS

Free Bumpersticker Template Fixed!

Hi Folks,
A couple of weeks ago I updated the free decal template on my website and screwed it up in the process.

I've now fixed the problem - just in case you were wondering what I was playing at.

Thanks (and sorry!) :)

Open Systems Banner

...just updating the Open Systems Banner here tonight. Mark Farina is spinning on the CD player so all is good. More RAM in use than you can shake a stick at.

A quick 'hello' to all my friends in Europe (and one down in the US) who have ordered the monster banner of open-system loveliness.

Take it easy, people...

'Oh, hi, Jesus. You free for dinner Wednesday?'

Jesus
Whether or not he shows up will sure answer a lot of questions for people worldwide.

My grandad
Died long before I was born. It would be great to meet the only one of my grandparents I never knew. It would let me talk to the man who my grandmother use to speak about so lovingly.

I'd fit in well in 'Casablanca'

I like Rick. He's a hard, no-nonsense kinda guy but at the same time is pained and vunerable. I like that he sees the big picture and knows that Ilsa is better off with Victor than him, and that Victor needs Ilsa to help with his work.



Captain Renault I quite like. He spends most of the movie playing both sides of the argument, not favouring one or the other, but doing what seems best given the circumstances.

Please, Use The Curtains

A cautionary tale, folks.

I've just finished up with the plotter for the evening, and it's 2230, so - obviously dark outside.

I look up, and to my horror across the cul-de-sac, one of my neighbours is merrily changing the sheets on his bed, with the light on, the drapes (curtains) open, stark-bollock naked.

You just can't make this stuff up...

Fortune Cookie

Thanks to 'Fais' Chinese Take-Out' for this one:

"Good ideas will spring forth naturally from your mind in the coming week"

Fantastic ;)

I'm hoping this happens before my arteries clog from the gingerbeef and deep-fried chicken-balls. Heh heh heh.

Gadget wish list, please

Top gadget? Right now I've got my eye on a 'HeadPlay' (www.headplay.com). My plan is to again become James Bond on my PS/2 that sits idle for a large part of any given month ;) Late last year I finially finished off 'NightFire' after two years of on and off tuxedo clad coolness.

After that, I'm after a Garmin GPS so that myself and my wife can get into GeoCaching. There are tons here in Calgary as well as outlying communities so that'll get us out and about before winter shows up again. Last weekend we tried it but there was 18" of snow on the ground and that made things somewhat tricky.

Government Sanctioned Spam

So, I'm sat here, Sunday evening thinking about activities for next year and I've got banging around in my head that I'm going to do a spot of mail-merging.

Oh, but wait - isn't that the same as spamming? Uhh, no - that's advertising. Surely?

Let's compare. I'm sending out unsolicited information to people I don't know advertising my services. Can't tell whether I'm talking about sending a letter or an email, can you?

So how is it, I could get locked up for sending out a half-million unsolicited emails, but no-one thinks twice about prosecuting the thousands of spammers who dump unsolicited flyers into my postal mailbox year in, year out?

The difference? Well, obviously it comes down to money.

You pay to send mail. You pay 51cents here in Canada for a regular letter, and Canada Post must just be loving it that companies use it's door-to-door service to carry their spam. Millions of either addressed letters from banks you don't want to save with, or the even more irritating 'unaddressed' letter-mail where they'll merrily stuff any old companies crap directly to your door? How is that not spamming? And where is the 'unsubscribe me' information?

Seems to me that people who spam via email are doing nothing different, the difference being that the postal services of the world don't see a dime, and neither do the governments, and that must just drive them nuts. How dare they communicate with potential clients for free. How dare they make a profit on return rates that would get heads of traditional marketing departments fired!

How is it everyone cries out for spam-houses to be closed on the internet, but the very governments that are trying to kill email spam don't go after their recently and very profitably privatized mail services?

In this eco-conscious world, shouldn't we be prosecuting the Citi-Banks of the world who regularly send me applications for credit-cards I don't want and contain no less than 40g of fine paper that's been coated with lovely environment dissolving solvent inks? Oh no, wait - we can't do that, since that creates 'employment' and email spam doesn't.

Seems like a bit of a double-standard to me. Either it is fine to send someone stuff they don't want, or it isn't. It can't be acceptable to spam provided you pay through the nose for it - either via mail or fax, but that it's not groovy if it's for fractions of a cent as an email.

So postulte this. If each of those irritating emails you get advertising prescription meds was individually typed by someone, and they were being paid a fair wage with respect to their local economy - would we still be screaming out to have it stamped (ha ha - punn there!) out? No - probably not. We'd whine and complain, but probably not do anything because we know some effort went into it. When we know it's a machine mass emailing, then we get all hot and bothered.

Seems we've got it round the wrong way...

Love me,

My Big New Task List

Hurrah! Christmas is almost here and I have crap loads on my mind - or at least, did.

Thank god for my bathroom mirror. Yup, you read that right. I've got two dry-erase pens on top of my bathroom cabinet and in true 'A Beautiful Mind' form I'm writing my notes and tasks on that.

It seems to work pretty well. It's the first thing I see in the morning, and just before I crawl into bed I can pour out all the thoughts that I've got banging around so I don't forget them.

Awesome. :)

UK Roadsign Translation Fail

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7702913.stm

Whoops :)

Congrats to Brent @ Good Under Pressure!

Congratulations to Brent Trevors of 'Good Under Pressure' (Pressure Washing and Graffiti Removal)!! He appeared on the front page (above the fold, no less!) of one of the Calgary Heralds supplements this week with regard to his involvement in Calgarys graffiti cleanup.

The connection here is that I've decalled three of Brents vehicles, of which I've managed to remember to take photos of zero.

Anyway - nicely done, Brent, and all the best :)

Attention Darwin Fans!

Fantastic post on 'The Onion'...

http://mobile.theonion.com/content/node/85766

FPDI #1 On Google!

Thanks to a friend for spotting this, but if you run 'tension sheet' through Google, I come out top! How awesome is that!!!!

I also think I come out third or fourth for 'free decals' as well as 'unspeakably low' for just about everything else. But I'm not focusing on that.

Excellent...

Oooh, Cool!

FPDI is now ranked third for the search 'free decals'. Awesome!

Watch this space 'Fail' and 'Epic Fail' decals coming soon...