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Sunday, 10:11 pm, 07 March 2004 My ISP, in all its wisdom, merged with Yahoo. Sometime over the past 24 hours all POP mail went to Yahoo mail. Fortunately both barbalet.net and nobleape.com have mailserver options. So I switched both on and picked up SpamAssassin. It is one of those ironies, that Yahoo advertises spam removal and yet pumps their webmail service with ads. Better than hotmail though. Just. I'm interested to see how good SpamAssassin is. I had a really kick-back Sunday. The wife had the day off too. So we spent our time cleaning up, doing craft related stuff and I began writing a network document for Mridul P, who wants to write the Windows networking code for Noble Warfare. I should get around to writing the Mac networking stuff too. Not much more to add. Good night. Saturday, 08:22 am, 06 March 2004 Call to WeFunk I called up WeFunk this morning. I was up around 5.30am and I tuned in for the right time to call Nick. For a number of months now I have been trying to arrange a cross Atlantic mix featuring WeFunk's veteran freestyler Butta Beats. I have sent a couple of emails to Nick (aka Prof Groove) about the time frame for the recording sessions recently and I haven't heard anything back from him. So we chatted for a few minutes and then I let him get back to it. I headed for the shower figuring I would be out in time to catch the finale of the show. Stepped out of the show to hear Nick say 'trans-Continental' and Static say 'James Bond'. Could have been about something totally different. I promise to locate the sound byte if needbe. Weblog Comments - Jackin' for Bucks I read two weblogs recently where I noticed the comments were disproportionately in favour of particular things and appeared to be surprisingly well worded. Corporate America is cruising weblogs for controversial posts so they can put them down. The first example comes from my main man, Mr Frosty Mug. His recent post on AppleCare. Relatively insipid. AppleCare sucks. Apple sucks. End of story. I think Apple has taken a leaf out of the RIAA's book - they are all really the same conglomerate anyway - and is now paying people to troll weblogs for negative posts to comment bomb. The comments are all really well worded, well structured and totally against the other comments in the log. Similarly Justin's Links post on EMI vs the Grey Album. The comments that were generated far exceeded anything posted on other subjects. The difference? The pitch against companies. I get traffic through Justin's site, so I have a good indication of his relative traffic numbers. I would have thought they were slightly better than Frosty's and probably much better than mine. Yet still the numbers don't add up. I can't see how so many well educated lawyer types went through Justin's site on that one day and at all other times, the posts he gets are from teenage girls looking to meet him. Something is wrong. Barbalet's Log may be off this weblog radar. I am sure Frosty and Justin don't use logtrack and I am pretty sure both the log programs they use support feeds. Makes trolling that much more interesting. If you troll logs for money from corporations, please let me know how much you make. I am sure I can better your current salary for about six months worth of real collation work. You can contact me through this codified page. The phenomenon of comment bombing. The number one reason you aren't going to see comments in the near future on my musings. If you want to comment or asking a question. I have a really good record on email response and most of the emails I get about the log, I actually post to the Log. Good morning! Wednesday, 10:56 pm, 03 March 2004 This is the kind of crud that passes my spam filtering and ends up in my intray... Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 09:20:59 +0530 To: tom at nobleape dot com Subject: Notify about your e-mail account utilization. From: administration at nobleape dot com Dear user of e-mail server ''Nobleape.com'', Some of our clients complained about the spam (negative e-mail content) outgoing from your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by a proxy-relay trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe, follow the instructions. Pay attention on attached file. For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is "51716". Kind regards, The Nobleape.com team http://www.nobleape.com Strangely the file contained an exe. I use a Mac laptop. But the bits of the exe that interested me included; ..LoadLibrary ..GetProcAddress.. ExitProcess... RegCloseKey... GetNetworkParams ..CoInitialize..Shell Execute StrDup... URLDownloadToFile wsprintf ...InternetOpen ...bind.... This is a Microsoft family-restaurant menu of all the good stuff this trojan was going to run on my unsuspecting machine. Loading a library, getting an address, perhaps getting some key information through the network information. Then running a shell and downloading a URL to a file - potentially the thing that is run from the shell. Good night. Wednesday, 09:22 pm, 03 March 2004 Greetings miniature fans. I got an email late this afternoon from Fred Reed with the Goffik Ork Rokkers. I think I picked these up on eBay late last year. I seem to remember juggling Christmas gifts and time off work. I wasn't sure what take Fred would have on them. If he would go Grateful Dead or go glam almost. He stuck to the mid road.  In other nerd related news, the Alienstar Free Wargame rules I am hosting, have taken a savage upswing this month. I am getting some substantial bandwidth usage from sites linking just to the files! I think this is called bandwidth theft in some quarters. But I am willing just to email those responsible and ask for a link to the directory and not the files. After all my page has the full rhetoric about the author's rights and now the correspondence with the author. The author, Mr Bryant, has gone MIA. So I tracked his address down to the Alienstar site registered address. The letter is condensed and included on my Alienstar page. In other news, I have been looking at the memory management and gameplay in Noble Warfare. I have a command line version I am crisping up. Basically I want the command line version to play actual battles and test the AI. It is still quite trying and as I am working in components, each bit seems to work - but will it work together? We will have to see. I am enjoying the tinkering and documenting. Good night. Wednesday, 04:42 am, 03 March 2004 The Death of Email Here's a new phenomenon. Or perhaps an old phenomenon wrapped up in a newish medium. About 70% of the emails I send, aren't responded to. I am going to track the exact number but it is getting to the point where if I don't get a response after the second or third email with no response, I begin to wonder why I am corresponding with the person in the first place. I first noticed this method of email through Doug Rushkoff. Doug rarely responds to the second email in a chain. If you get a third email, you are in new territory. Through the whole period I have known and corresponded with Doug this has been the case. He is consistent, but it was something I found disturbing initially. I have two thoughts about lost email communication. First, I think most of my correspondents have a different view of email than I do. For me, email is a bit like water. It is alway there. More than the post, it is a means of communicating in isolation. Without email, there is just isolation for me. The emotional weight of email, I have written about in previous logs. Sift back a couple of months or check out the Barbalet's Log Archive for more on that. Secondly, I think most of the people I correspond with either have an informal or formal view of priority. If you work in software engineering, where the code meets the bits, so to speak, you will be receiving about 40-100 emails a day minimum. Work related emails. You have to prioritise these emails. I try to respond to all my emails fullstop. Work related in particular. But if someone has written to me specifically, I feel a necessity to respond. The informal priority, I find with people of a more artistic temperament. Figure painters mainly but also muso-academic types, like WeFunk's Prof Groove, for example. Here they prioritise email based on their own (perhaps emotional) connection to email. Email has less reality than a person, so it is easier to prioritise against. The big additional factor which has gotten worse in the past six months, and really chronic in an upscaling of hostilities in the past six weeks, is spam. It is a war, and the casualty is legitimate communication. I get about 20 emails that break my spam protection and between 50-100 per day that are caught. Now spammers are tuning their spam against spam protection and increasing their volume, everyone is becoming a spam expert! Everyone apart from legislators. So, from all of this, isolation ensues. I used to feel isolated in Australia. Isolated from technology. Isolated from the doers. Now I feel isolated because the means of communication has gone dead. Back to bed. Good morning. Monday, 09:02 pm, 01 March 2004 I was half asleep when I wrote last night's log entry. In fact, I was forcing my eyes open as I typed. One event I meant to write about yesterday was my trip to Altrincham with the wife. I have been meaning to go to Altrincham with Michele for a couple of months now. It is about 20 minutes drive away and quite a bit different to Wilmslow. We headed out mid-morning and I checked out the Altrincham Games Workshop. Relatively friendly. Clean. Lots of stuff in stock and a good fleet of kiddies playing games. Then I went to Altrincham Gaming, the indy games shop about three minutes walk away. It stank of drenched sweat and rotting cloth. There were three guys sitting around a game board talking about the sexual exploits of a demon king. The fellow behind the counter had an eyebrow piercing. But I thought to myself. This is authentic. This is what it is about. The fellow behind the counter painted figures. So after chatting to him briefly I tried to get some commissioned work from him. He is very difficult to contact. I tried the number he provided four times today without any luck. The image of gamers as 20-somethings, quite overweight with definite hygiene problems seems to fit with my avoid-at-all-costs connection with the Hobby. Perhaps it is one thing to like miniatures and collect well painted ones. But to spend substantial time in a fantasy world. Perhaps this is what I do with Noble Ape. Perhaps. I got a good couple of emails from Chris Blair about the current and future conversions. He spent some of his weekend at Cry Havoc, teaching kids how to paint miniatures. I purchased a High Elf army book at the indy store and found some artwork that seemed to lend itself to a Chris conversion. From all the Fred Reed in the US jobs, none of them have come back. Not one. Fred Reed has gone silent until he gets to painting my figures. So my miniature interest is in a forced lull. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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