Umpteenth

  Jun 23, 2004

I don't know what it is about Gmail that makes people completely lose their self-control, their sanity, or their ability to distinguish a verb from a noun, but I do know that I'm not the only one whose Gmail inbox attracts invitation beggars like the Sunnydale Hellmouth attracts undead minions determined to start an apocalypse. An apocalypse, because apparently there are quite a lot of them.

To begin with, they, the beggars -- and some of the undead minions -- all want an "invite". Not an invitation, mind you, they want an "invite". Most of their pathetic, bland, uninspiring, boring and unimaginative attempts at getting invited gets the trash treatment. But every once in a while I'm bored, so, I reply, "why?".

Again with the unimaginativeness.

Not one of them have ever talked to me before, don't even know who I am, found me on page 19 or so on Google when they searched for "@gmail.com", and sent their stupid ass entreats to at least a dozen more people. When I remind them that unsolicited bulk e-mail, even if their particular bulk is of the smaller variety, is commonly known as Spam, and that everybody hates spammers, they get defensive.

"I didn't mean to spam you." No, really. He tripped. It was an accident. He was doing his homework, tripped over his dog, fell on his keyboard, hit his head, and has no recollection of what happened. Actually, had he been that imaginative I'd have just given him the "invite" right away. Alas, no such luck.

Just recently, another guy explained that he in fact didn't spam me. Yes, he sent me unsolicited e-mail, but he only sent me one. Oh, well then, here's your "invite", now sod off. The same guy actually tried to convince me that I was, indeed, the first he had e-mailed about an "invite". If he truly skipped to page 19 and singled me out as his lucky benefactor, then I must have done something really terrible in a previous life.

If you can point out all the Buffy references, obscure as they may be, you get a Gmail invitation.

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Buy the T

  Jun 21, 2004

I read John Gruber's fantastic but Apple centric essays far long before I got a Mac. Because, even though his writing oftentimes is exclusively within the Apple realm, the writing is of such high quality that it doesn't really matter what he writes about, only that he does.

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Statistics

  Jun 15, 2004

I've realized that my website statistics have become more and more ambigous, as more and more people subscribe to the XML feeds. Crawlers and aggregators are pounding on my feeds, giving me a harder and harder time to read anything out of the statistics.

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Tables

  Jun 09, 2004

A few days ago, I was given the task of developing a very basic company presentation, a two-day project, from graphic design, through HTML/CSS-implementation, to final touches and finish. Figuring I probably don't have time to develop it using XHTML and CSS, I had to resort to table-based design...

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