It’s February Again…

Posted on February 1, 2008 by ken

… which means it’s February Album Writing Month. Fourteen songs in twenty-eight days, or actually 14 1/2 this year, since it’s a leap year. I’ve already posted my first, “Saturday Night Snowing Hard,” and you can track my progress on my FAWM page or, of course, right here.

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Posted on January 28, 2008 by ken

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Rudy’s Blues

Posted on January 25, 2008 by ken

The New York Times this morning endorsed John McCain, in an editorial that asked the question, “Why, as a New York-based paper, are we not backing Rudolph Giuliani? … What about the man who stood fast on Sept. 11, when others, including President Bush, went AWOL?”

That man is not running for president.

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

I cannot wait not to have Ghouliani to kick around anymore.

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Posted on January 23, 2008 by ken

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Facebook Spam Redux

Posted on January 22, 2008 by ken

So just after writing a few friends who’d written me FunWall notes (which I won’t read, because to do so you have to install the application and I’ve been down that road already), I got a “challenge” from a friend to take the Princess Bride trivia test in Flixster (which I actually have installed and like, or at least, I used to like it). I took the quiz and submitted it before I noticed that there was a checkbox to “Send quiz to your friends,” so once again, I was tricked into spamming people.

But it gets better. After I finish the quiz, it refused to show me my score unless I sent more spam to at least five friends.

This is not Facebook’s doing, it’s the morons who wrote this application. But they need to improve their monitoring of how third-party applications work.

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Apple’s Rebate Site … Powered By Microsoft

Posted on January 13, 2008 by ken

I was amused to note that in trying to submit a rebate for some new Apple equipment I bought, an error message came up clearly indicating that the site is running on a Microsoft .NET server. The site is most likely run by a third-party rebate-processing company, but it’s still amusing. Especially since it didn’t work.

(And how annoying is the whole ridiculous rebate process, anyway? I bought all the equipment at the Apple store, so they already know I qualify, so the only reason they didn’t take the price off the total at checkout was the hope that I’d forget to file the rebate or fail to follow all their rules correctly.)

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Posted on January 7, 2008 by ken

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Posted on January 6, 2008 by ken

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Posted on January 4, 2008 by ken

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Facebook: Spam Factory

Posted on January 4, 2008 by ken

I joined Facebook a few months ago, to keep up with some friends and colleagues who aren’t part of the other social networks I belong to, and to keep abreast of social networking in general, which interests me professionally. Each of the networks I belong to has a purpose: LJ is a blogging platform and a way to keep up with friends who blog regularly and to whom I’m close enough to share fairly intimate details of my life; its filtering capabilities allow me to have concentric rings of friends who see different levels of detail. Myspace is strictly for music networking, and works quite well for that purpose despite its horrendous user interface.

Facebook filled a gap: it let me keep abreast of people who don’t blog or to whom I am not close enough to want to share detailed blog entries. It’s the best way for me to keep up with my many former colleagues, and its telegraphic style makes it possible to actively watch a very long friends list.

Or, it used to. Facebook has gotten increasingly problematic. Even though I have set my preferences to the contrary, my news feed is filling up with so much spam and crap that I miss significant updates (like new photos) by friends from whom I really want to see updates. I turned off email notifications because the vast majority of them were notes not from friends, but from applications my friends had installed. I mostly ignore those requests, but I was becoming increasingly puzzled by the amount of spam I was getting. Had all of my otherwise rational friends suddenly turned into junk-mail-forwarders?

I decided to accept a few requests and see what was going on. I went through eleven screens to read a one-line Christmas card message from one person, tried to return a thrown snowball to someone else (and after ten or twelve screens gave up entirely), and tried to share music through iLike. None of these applications worked properly, and all of them did their best to trick me into spamming everyone in sight. I’ve documented my interaction with one particularly deceptive application below, but this is pretty much standard behavior for most third-party Facebook applications. It is very difficult to install these applications without spamming your friends; they mislead or tell outright lies in order to get you to do so, and in this case, even ignoring it entirely won’t help.

No fun with FunWall

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