After going back and checking my referrers over the last month, I’ve noticed a few spam bots coming to my website, I assume trying to harvest email addresses. I’ve encoded mine as unicode, so I haven’t been too worried. This past Saturday I received my first spam email on my oh-so-secret personal email account. I was rather irritated to say the least. Also, this morning, I got some comment spam on one of my earlier posts. Luckily, Movable Type emails me the IP of people who make comments on my site.

When it comes to networking, I’m still somewhat of a beginner. I understand many of the concepts, can put together a Workgroup or Domain using Windows 2000 Server, and can generally not screw things up too much. One of the many things that I still don’t understand is what the crap is wrong with our server. I’m trying to get the internet connected to our small domain at work. I’ve got two NIC’s connected to the server: one for the DSL connection, and one for the internal network.

I’m down to my last week-and-a-half of college. I’ve got seven more class days, including today. If my posts are few and far between for the next two weeks, this is why.

Here are a few interesting reads from around the world wide web this evening. Microsoft trying to control blogging. Gator tries to shed it’s self-inflicted unpopularity by changing it’s name to Claria. Napster’s back (well, it’s pretending to be…). MSN splits in two. Mozilla Firebird is a viable (and better) alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Well, duh! Eolas, don’t make the W3C smack you down…

People who are familiar are asking themselves, “What? Winamp 5?! What happened to version 4?” It was explained that Winamp 2 + Winamp 3 = Winamp 5. For those unfamiliar with the technical differences between Winamp 2.x (WA2) and Winamp3 (WA3): Winamp 2.x: This was a continuation of the old 1.x codebase. It works, it’s really fast, it’s skinnable, and it’s just plain spiffy. There are many current plug-ins and skins for this application. Winamp3: Winamp3 was completely rewritten from the ground-up, based around an all-new technology from Nullsoft called “Wasabi”.

Apple has finally released iTunes 4.1 for Windows bundled with the shiny-new QuickTime 6.4. I got home, downloaded and installed it, and decided to give it a whirl. I whisked through the iTunes Store… I wasn’t planning on buying anything just yet. Mainly, I just did some searches for bands and record labels that I wasn’t too sure would be there. Some were, some weren’t. That’s alright… that’s what KaZaA’s for anyways, right? Bands who would rather have people steal a single track from their album, rather than to make it possible for people to pay for that same single track (not naming any names, Metallica, Linkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers…)

I’ve begun some preliminary work to launch a Mozilla/Opera 7/Standards-compliant browser website. Many web designers and developers are fed-up with Internet Explorer, but many end-users are okay with IE. The goal of this new site will be to promote the use of browsers other than IE, or at the very least, to get people to upgrade to IE6. I’m still working on a name for the site, along with some artwork and other types of propaganda. This can be used kinda like the WaSP’s “Browser Upgrade Campaign” that was recently disbanded, except to push for non-IE browsers.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is the new governor-elect of California. He’s fairly liberal on social issues, and pretty conservative on economic issues. Although I agree more with the politics of Tom McClintock, he’s not a leader. If you watched him in the last debate, he’s got some very good points but he’s just not a leader. Arnold is. Another reason why I’m glad Arnold won the election is for one main reason — he’s not a politician. I’ve believed for quite some time that the problem with federal, state, and local governments is because there are too many politicians in politics!

I’ve discovered a nifty little MT plug-in called “Acronym”. It takes many of the common acronyms and abbreviations and gives them a keen little description that is visible on mouseover. Some of the more common ones are CSS, XHTML, W3C, IE, NS7, IE5/Mac, and US 508. Actually, it’s just my way of testing out what this plug-in can do, and what it can’t…

I first started reading articles on the new changes to Internet Explorer (due to the Eolas patent case) beginning last night. Much more was written by this morning. Here are the articles I’ve come across so far… “Get Ready for IE Changes” - What Do I Know? “Eolas Fallout” - Mezzoblue “Changes to IE” - All In The <head> “The Eolas matter” - Sidesh0w “Changes to Internet Explorer” - Gemal’s Psyched Site “Dance, Microsoft, Dance!” - YoungPup “Microsoft tweaks Explorer to address ruling” - News.