Not long ago, my husband and I finally caught up to latest and greatest entertainment trend: HDTV. It really is true that once you go HD, you never go back. Therefore, instead of being behind on high-definition movies, I found myself stumbling upon a nice HD-DVD player this past weekend. The player comes with King Kong, a smart move on Microsoft’s part to provide a high-quality movie with the kit to convince consumers like myself to go ahead and seek out the exciting technology that is known as HD-DVD.

King Kong was superb in HD. Wow. I decided that I would stock up on my Netflix account with some DVDs for later viewing… except, well, I came across a lot of these:

Where’s my HD-DVD format when I need it?

That’s when I did some searching and realized that there’s a huge Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war going on. Now, my clueless self (until now) is personally affected. Am I the only one? I doubt it.

Apparently, HD-DVD was doing well for awhile, but it looks like Blu-Ray is gaining momentum. Still, here’s what Google is telling me:

This morning, I checked my email to see that I was invited to be a coauthor the “Blogmeme_Belgium” MyBlogLog page (I won’t link directly to the page because the load time is horrendous with all the authors who have signed up — there are at least 300 of them and their avatars ALL load on the sidebar). Beyond the number of authors, there are 188 members in the community.

Since I have no involvement with this site, I didn’t accept the invitation. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one:

The strange thing is that this is the only rejection that I was able to visibly acknowledge (though I am sure that most people did not accept the invitation — those 300 people who did are a small chunk of the people who appeared to have been invited!). Sadly, a good amount of my blogging buddies actually blindly joined this spammy community!

One of the smarter “coauthors” made sure to label the community appropriately:

The gamethis.com URL links to an ebay auction, where someone was looking to sell the domain name (and did for $1200). What it comes down to is this: this was certainly unwanted spam.

Earlier this week, I was troubleshooting an issue with our mail server and found a spam email sitting there that caught my eye (especially since I posted about it 10 days ago). Rand, you captured the hearts of many women, and you even caught the attention of the spammers. For that, I thank you for making me laugh.


Received: (qmail 15223 invoked by uid 110); 9 Feb 2007 12:42:40 -0500
Delivered-To: [redacted]
Received: (qmail 15220 invoked from network); 9 Feb 2007 12:42:40 -0500
Received: from 201-x-x-x.spammer.stuff.removed.here.ar (HELO computername) (201.x.x.x)
by ip.address.not.4u with SMTP; 9 Feb 2007 12:42:40 -0500
Message-ID: <453f01c74c71$0e406913$890dd5c9@spammer.stuff.removed.here.too>
From: “Forged Name” <@[redacted-forged-header].com>
To: “Random name” [redacted]
Subject: What Happened to Super Bowl’s Mystery Groom?
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:40:34 +0000
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
format=flowed;
charset=”Windows-1252″;
reply-type=original
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000

Spam message removed within

Well, at least it wasn’t all sysadmin work.

Okay, this is a rant that I’m going to get out while I have a chance. I’m logged onto my Google account and I’m looking for some images. One image caught my eye. When I moused over the image, I realized it was related to an article I wanted to follow up on. I accidentally closed out of the page with the results so I had to do the search (for the same criteria) once again. The results were different; the image I was looking for was gone.

I noticed this earlier this week as well. It was the same game — Google image results appear to vary. The extremely frustrating thing is that I actually clicked on the images, but in subsequent searches, Google did not opt to provide me with this content. Is Google trying to assume that because I visited that site, it is no longer pertinent to me, so it won’t serve me with the images that I am actually looking for?

So far, Google Personalized Search sucks. I urge you not to use it.

I was one of the first users of Facebook back in April 2004 when it was rolled out to specific schools other than its founding community, Harvard. I had graduated college the previous year, so many of my classmates seemed to have “moved on” from the social sites of my time (all of which have dissolved). But over the past few months, the Facebook community has become a huge success and is continuing to flourish, and my classmates are slowly beginning to join the network.

I look back at Facebook’s emergence as a truly popular and desirable network that has simply gone from good to better. While other networks seem to lag behind, Facebook is truly another face in the crowd. And it’s obviously doing something right.

I “interviewed” my friend (and fellow ‘03 grad) who recently signed up to Facebook. Why the sudden appeal? Not surprisingly, word of mouth took the cake. The icing? Her younger siblings were using it all the time. Facebook is not just a social network anymore; it is a society. I’ve seen several profiles with quotes to the likes of “I live on Facebook.” And several people are trying to convince others to jump on the bandwagon, because this one seems to be a keeper.