The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I'm having one of those days where I feel like I've already read the whole internet and now there's nothing to do!

But then my Big Boss, the mayor, Twittered this and I had something to do!

GOOD NEWS: you can OPT OUT of receiving phone books at your door. details here: http://bit.ly/ajyRk7. Spread the word.

If you get Dex directories (which I think may be only from Qwest), give it a try. They bury that opt-out thing in obscurity, and the instructions are on that bit.ly page. Now if I could find the same service for that lame-ass weekly "Living" section from the newspaper...

This is a test of Dreamwidth cross-posting. I'm giving some thought to moving all operations over there, and I want to see what crossposting looks like on LJ.

If you're on LJ, and in my flist, and if you feel like it, would you try leaving me a comment--particularly, how you feel about leaving a comment on DW via OpenID?

Thank you!

Seems like it's about time for a report from the geek side. I'm on vacation for a couple of days and have been enjoying the balmy just-above-freezing sunshine from the comfort of my sofa, while playing on the internet in between very productive writing sessions.

If you're on a Windows computer and you don't yet use Chrome as your main browser...well, why not? Chrome is made of win, and the only things that don't support it well are boring work-related web apps like the trouble-ticket system that haunts my days at the office.

Lately, Google has introduced Chrome extensions, and I've found two or three of them that I love.

( Cooliris, Feedly, and Gmail Notifier )

Chrome Extensions: my new favorite toy.

This guy is claiming credit for the whole amazonfail debacle. He says he did it on purpose, with "ten lines of code," for the lulz and (if I'm interpreting him right) to expose the flaws of user-ranking systems and the hypocracy [sic] of...um...Craigslist? Not sure.

Anyway, if it's true (and it has a certain ring of authenticity to it), I feel kind of sorry for Amazon. They've been hacked, and a significant flaw in a generally pretty cool system has been exposed and very cleverly exploited.

The whole glitch-vs-policy argument is a little harder to explain away, but it's not like a large organization's policy has never been misstated by an employee under the gun before.

I'm a little bothered by commenters who equate Amazon.com's physical HQ location in Seattle as some kind of proof of liberal bias, and I really don't like being called a "libtard," and I'm not sure how I feel about this kind of costly hacker vandalism (if that's what it is) as a form of social protest.

But all in all, I think I kind of admire it.

ETA: brutal_honesty doesn't allow non-member comments, so it's possible that the comments there are a little biased. Mine, if I could have posted it, would have been:

Not sure I get how your metadata tag-gathering excludes the big anti-gay titles, but I'm not nearly as clever or as cool as you are. It never would have occurred to me to use my dislike of a group of people to cause such a shitstorm! Wow.