"Good" spam
Looks like a bunch of jabronis have come together and formed a group to create "trusted sender-certified" commercial email. They believe that people don't like spam because the end user is afraid of being scammed or that the company is fraudulent. With this idea, people will know that the company soliciting the email is trustworthy and legitimate.

I guess this group doesn't recognize that people hate spam because:
1) it's usually about bullshit products or "NEW" mortgage rates
2) the sender doesn't stop sending you the spam
3) most of them are written in HTML and include attached banner ads, making downloading a bitch for dial-up users
4) you can't get off the email list
5) that's what 95% of most people's inbox is cluttered with
6) and you get A LOT OF IT. My mother gets about 30-40 spam messages a day, and that's not even her hotmail account. Thank God I have a virtually-spam-free alum account. :p

Am I missing any other reasons?

Their plan also sounds like a way to get around web-based email filters. Hum.

"By 2006, consumers are expected to receive an average of 1,400 pieces of junk e-mail to mailboxes every day, according to Internet researcher Jupiter Media Metrix." Oh joy.

Oh you bad Germans, you just better watch out!
That's what my favorite teacher Mr. Hare used to say when he was explaining the French's position on Germany in pre-World War 2 Europe. He used to stand on the left side of the classroom and shake his hand at the Germans, and say 'Oh you bad Germans, you just better watch out!'. When he was pretending to be Austria, he would stand on the right side of the classroom, and say in a whiny voice 'Can we be in the Third Reich?'. Germany, of course was in the center of the classroom. Just like a map! All this of course was before we got to 1940 when the French turned turned traitor and went down on the Germans like a Thai whore on a New York businessman, while the Austrians also got to enjoy the fellatio of the French.

But enough about the traiterous, smelly, prostituting French, this article is about those 'bad Germans'

I like how in the article it says 'Many adherents see it as a form of social Darwinism rejecting religious norms and promoting the right of the strong to dominate the weak.' Hmmm, sounds sort of like Nazi propaganda based on Nietsche teachings.

I'm so clever and smart and self important!

I'm moving
To this place. Woot! I'll be paying less than I am now, and I won't have to live in the ghetto!

Fun with AIM
Here's a conversation that my buddy Pete had with some guy. As you can see, there are other people in this world that are as strange as the ATG team. It's very vulgar though so that's why there is a link to it. You've been warned......

Yeah.
There ain't much to say today, much like yesterday. There's some snow on the ground right now. Actually, there's a lot of snow and it's accumulating pretty quickly. And like two or three days ago, the temperature was in the high 50's or low 60's. Um, I think I'd like just a little more consistency in my weather, please. Make it happen, Al! And one of my new car registration stickers won't stick to a license plate. That's something a little crazy glue and duct tape can take care of, though. :)

I can't really find anything to write about from the sites I frequently visit. What a shame.

Fairvue's weblog awards have been handed out. You may recognize a few of the winners. And it looks like Wil Wheaton won in every category he was nominated in. Fear.

There's some Photoshop stuff over at Something Awful. The theme? "TV shows that will never be made." These are the runner-ups. The actual winners will be displayed some time later. Good stuff.

She has HUGE tracks of land (that can be used as lethal weapons)
I guess if you gotta go this is a decent way.... If this story wasn't from Yahoo I wouldn't believe it.

Here's another unbelievable link... This guy has WAY to much time and needs to get out more.

RTFM
I have lots of links saved up from my 2 months or so of not posting. I kept saving links all this time. Now that's devotion!

So here is the first one: Read It!

One Two Three Marlenas...
Looking for a dumb quiz? Here's one: Which carebear are you? It's not too good (I got back two results when I took it instead of one), but I like some of the questions and possible choices.

Looking for the Enron's ethics? Try eBay.

Both links from that Sexual Hypertextual Vegetable site.

On an unrelated note, whatever happened to the band The Wallflowers? I heard their "One Headlight" song on the car radio for the first time since high school. I remember them having a song on the Godzilla soundtrack many seasons ago, but since then...? Hmm, they're probably hanging out with Hootie and the Blowfish.

"'Go to the dance with a 35-year-old?"
Hocking said. "But then I realized, she's really hot."

-- In reply to a date with Playboy Playmate Petra Verkaik.

I wish I had those types of connections. ;) Well, I do have a hoe...

Story found over at Blues.

Update: Same story. More words.

Way busy
Sorry I haven't posted in a while but I just got a new apartment and the moving process takes a bunch 'o time. The good news is, however, I will be putting up a web server so that we can host this page on it instead of crappy Geocities. That means cool script stuff and totally customizable pages. Maybe we can even get our own domain name or use an old one (thesevoices.com, cough, cough)? ;) Rock on...

Misc junk
Stories and such that aren't worth their own respective post, but they need to be shared:

* How to tell if your ass is too small. Pretty self-explanatory, eh? (from Camworld)
* Annoying house bird: 0. Angry male: 1. Let it be a lesson to other screeching birds and dogs that don't ever stop barking. (from Geektastic)
* Gender-neutral Bibles, coming to a church near you! Is this really a necessity? It kinda defeats the "holiness" of the Bible if you start swapping words around.

Family Guy gone in four week's time
That's the rumor, anyway. But seeing how FOX has already got rid of The Tick, I kinda expected Family Guy to be considered putting the axe to. So, barring overwhelming popular opinion, get ready to say goodbye to Stewie and the gang.

I'm not sure what the hell FOX is thinking. The ratings for the show aren't that spectacular, but they aren't horrible, either. And believe it or not, they are almost on par with The X-Files ratings this season, a show Chris Carter wants to put an end to but I haven't seen anything saying that FOX is looking to drop the show. And it's already a given that Family Guy wouldn't do incredibly well in its time slot. Friends and Survivor are on at the same time! If anything, FOX should consider moving Family Guy to a new time slot (again) and see how it does.

I don't want the show being dropped in favor for something as dumb as The 80's Show or, even worse, The Chamber. It's the funniest show on television EVER. Especially last week's episode. Way better than The Simpsons and Futurama, both cartoons FOX still has on the air, too.

There's a FOX boycott attempt going on. Sign it if you wish. Bonus points if you actually boycott FOX programming and advertising, too, except Family Guy (duh).

Word to your mother.
I'm not sure what your mother actually has to do with anything; it sounded like the thing to say at the time.

Some things have changed around here, some in terms of looks, most of it in more effective coding that you won't really notice, and some things that should make IE/Netscape 4.x users wish they had a more up-to-date browser. There's also a short poll off to the right you can fill out, assuming you're using a computer with a built-in email client. If you don't have a built-in email client (i.e., Eudora, Outlook...), I'd be curious if you told me what happens.

This site looked fine in Netscape 4. Now, it looks worse than the Taliban's future. I have decided to move to a more efficient and "clean" look by replacing a shitload of tables (this site had 26 embedded tables, plus 1 per post!) with a shitload of division tags (there's only 6 tables left for now), which in turn makes future site changes way easier to do and each page insanely quicker to load (too bad load was never an issue, eh?). The drawback to this is that non-web standard browsers see a huge mess. And while I don't want to alienate people still running 1997 browsers, there's plenty of new browsers on the market that are fairly compliant to standards that were set in 1996 (CSS-1), and some don't even use as many resources as the 4.x browsers. That's what I have read in a few places, anyway. I hope that's actually the case for Netscape 6.2; I had huge problems with that browser when it was first released. But now it's the most compliant browser out there at the moment.

If you're a web designer, you may want to consider doing the same thing. It's time to put an end to writing HTML with redundant and workaround code.

Sorry for the tirade. But now you know why I did what I did. And I'm willing to bet that like 99% never really cared to begin with. :) Just fill out the poll and go on with your web surfing, heh.

Good job, Bledsoe. And down with Marshall Faulk.

It must suck to be a bookie right now...
... because the Patriots are going to the Super Bowl! And the odds were that the Steelers would win by 10.

The Patriots have done their part, now the Eagles need to step up and take out the Rams. Because that last thing I want is Madden trashing the Pats while having gay sex with Kurt Warner the whole game in New Orleans.

Also, eat my shit, Terry Glenn. No ring for you!

Want some random links?
No? Too bad, I have some. I don't really remember where I found these links, but I'm more than certain that they are from sites that are linked to somewhere in the left column.

* Pic2HTML - Aparently, this coder was too l33t to just say "Picture to HTML" and he/she had to use broken chatroom abbreviations in its name. But whatever. It's still pretty neat. Take an image from your computer (a small, thin picture) and this puppy will turn it into a bunch of crazy characters in different colors. Woo.

* I think that Coincidence Design thing you wrote about, Mike, is in fact real.

* Blogger has gone Pro. I don't think I need the Pro version, although I'd really like to have the archives be more customizable.

* I was looking up information on a specific computer case and about heat flow, and I somehow came across this article about a guy using a centrifugal blower to cool his system. What a freak show. The article is here, but you may only need to see the pcitures on the last page.

Uh... that's all I have. Pretty weak, I know. But that's ok; expect that useless poll off to the right to get some use within the next 24 hours, though.