I've been getting a ton of scam spam recently. You know the kind, "Let us transfer millions to your account and you can keep a percentage"

Today, I started getting new spam (in my view) from someone trying to buy advertising on my sites. At first I thought the email was legit, but when I got a few regarding a few different sites (and some duplicates) I realized that it's someone I don't want to communicate with...

Here's a sample of the text:

"Hello,

Browsing on the Internet I came upon your website (mydomainhere.com) and I find it very interesting and useful.
My name is Daniel Lee and the reason I am contacting you is my interest in purchasing advertising spot on your site.
I will be very thankful if you tell me how much a text link or banner 120x60 / 125x125 on your home page or all pages will cost.Thank you in advance!

Daniel Lee"

Thankfully, it will only take Thunderbird a couple of clicks to start marking all of these as spam and I won't have to see them in my inbox anymore.

Now, I'm not saying all Ron Paul supporters are funny. Just that some of them are. I know very little about Ron Paul and the little exposure I've had to his name hasn't been positive.

My first exposure was spam. Yeah, someone thought that a good way to get his name out there would be to spam my inbox. WRONG.

Another was a little message above the freeway here in Utah. I mean no offense to any dyslexics out there, but such "writing" errors are a bit of an annoyance to me.  It did make me laugh.

Funny People.

Starting Feb. 12, Microsoft will auto-update your browser to Internet Explorer 7 (unless you've upgraded already.)

It will be interesting to see how this affects the browser percentages online.  Currently the ratio of IE7 to IE6 users that visit this blog is almost 2:1.

(By the way, over half of the visitors to this site are running Firefox!)

Facebook has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services.

I don't quite see what the partnership involves other than some Facebook specific documentation and extra samples of facebook apps that run using AWS.

Either way, it's good to see some more promotion of AWS. As you know, I'm a big fan. We've been using AWS with our We're Related facebook app as well as the entire familylink.com website since October and love its instant scalability and cost savings. I'll be posting more about our Amazon EC2 experiences later.

Lately, my wife's been doing a lot of stuff in photoshop on her MacBook which only has 1GB of RAM which gets eaten up so quickly and the system starts getting quite slow. I decided it was time to break down and buy some more RAM for her MacBook.

So, I'm shopping for a memory upgrade for my wife's MacBook and as I look around...WOAH...$300 from the Apple store. I don't really want to pay that much. It seems quite expensive. I figure it's gotta be cheaper than that so I start looking around.

I found this, the same memory upgrade (2GB) for $65. I can't believe Apple charges so much for it. And I can't believe they get away with either.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the 30 year countdown to the Y2K38 bug.

Ok, let's see if I can lose you here.

Most computer systems calculate time in the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. When calculating January 19, 2038, 03:14:07, it is 11111111111111111111111111111111 seconds in binary. On a 32 bit system, one second later wraps around to 0 which equals January 1, 1970 (which is bad for calculations.) A 64 bit system has another 32 0's in front of those 32 1's and won't wrap around.

So, when you're refinancing your 30-year mortgage this weekend, you'll know exactly what's going on when they say, "We're having computer problems, can you come back Monday?"

Recently, there has been a lot of news about Network Solutions' questionable tactics. (more info here, here, here, here and here) To summarize, when you searched on their site to see if a domain was available, they would register it immediately. Preventing you from registering it elsewhere. They did this at no cost to them because registrars have a 5 day grace period before they actually have to pay for domains that are registered.

Along the same lines, I ran across some similar activity at the other end of the stick. I found a domain that had expired a month or so ago but hadn't been released yet (preventing me from registering it.) I liked the domain, but didn't have my heart set on it.

Once it was finally released, it was immediately registered by snapnames. They conveniently listed it in one of their auctions for $59. I'm speculating on this, but I'm willing to bet that if I would have shown interest in that domain I would have suddenly seen some competition and the price would have gone up significantly. Being suspicious of snapnames, I just waited until the "auction" ended (which was within the 5 day grace period mentioned above.)

You do the math: $0 for snapnames to test the domain in their auctions and a minimum of $59 for me to buy it. That's a nice profit for them.

The auction expires and the domain is immediately grabbed by enom.com. There is no way for me to offer to buy the domain or bid on it at this point. I still decide to sit back and watch.

Within 5 days (that dang grace period again), the domain is available again. It looks like someone over at enom is doing some domain tasting. Finally, I'm the proud owner of a millcreekphotography.com and I didn't have to pay someone's extortion fees to get it.

(Disclaimer: the following site is owned by Millcreek Systems, Inc.)  I like getting my $6.95 domains here.

Sun announced today that they will acquire MySQL AB for approx $1 billion.

I think this will do great things for MySQL.  It seems that MySQL outsiders have often considered it a "toy" database.  I couldn't disagree more.  I know of one huge site that uses MySQL extensively, you might have heard of them, its name is Yahoo.

This might help those outsiders to see MySQL as a viable database option.

I thought I'd share a few of the things I learned during my self-challenge to blog for 30 days.

I don't need to blog every day. I found some days I was in a blogging zone and would write a 2 or 3 posts. I'd then save those posts for other days so that there would be a steady stream. Other days I just wasn't up for it or too busy to think about blogging (thankfully, I had some of those pre-composed posts!) I think I only missed 3 days during the 6-week period.

I suck at writing. I knew this in high school and so did all of my teachers. Just be glad this isn't hand written because when you combine my poor writing skills with horrible handwriting it could be considered torture if I made you read it.

Personal stories draw people back. (I learned this from my wife's blog.) Sharing personal information & experiences make people want to come back to read your blog. I typically spout off some technical solution I found in my entries. My wife shares experiences in hers. She has a steady stream of loyal readers. I get an occasional techie in search of a solution, never to return again. I don't really see this changing in my blog because I'm slightly paranoid and don't like to share a lot of personal information online.

I write for myself. I'm a selfish man. I don't write here for anyone else. I made a whopping $1.13 last month from the ads I have here. My posts are usually tech notes or rants. Sometimes I'll post something I want to share here and email the share-ees a link to see it (like my "Funny People" section.) I post tech notes so I don't have to find them again later. It seems like I usually have to refer back to something I did every 3-4 months, so this is a good way for me to keep them all in one place.

As the gift giver in this blog post, I would like to clarify a couple of things...

"An air soft pellet gun has the capability to shoot someones eye out." - I have never heard of this happening. If anyone has, please let me know. I've heard many stories of children poking eyes out with sticks.

"After making plans to get together for a game of 'Cowboys and Indians,'..." - As I recall, I said, "Let's go out and shoot them some time."

"...it is a weapon..." - Um, no. It's a toy. It's not a toy for all ages. We haven't decided at what age we will let our daughters handle such a toy, but since my oldest is only 3 we have at least a few years to think about it.

Here are a few reasons why it is considered a toy:
1 - It's made of almost all plastic (except for some springs) and shoots out little plastic balls. Plastic == toy.
2 - My wife shot me with mine (at my request) and it did not break skin == toy.
3 - My mother-in-law has one and loves to play with it. Play thing == toy. (as a side note, she gave me a great tip: a box, like a FedEx box is great for shooting, since the BBs go through only one layer of cardboard and end up inside the box.)

I just don't understand some people's irrational fear of toys. They shouldn't let their hoplophobia be extended to include suction-cup guns, airsoft guns, cap guns or other similar toys. What is going to be the response when your child picks up a stick and starts pretending it's a gun or a sword. (I guarantee that any son of Andrew will do this!)

I know this will put most to sleep, but here's a quick comparison of the actual energy of such projectiles. For the record I have no good feel for what a Joule of energy is (other than it's equal to one newton-meter) This is just an easy way to compare the amount of energy each projectile has.

airsoft
275 feet per second (which is the fastest pistol I could find when purchasing said gift)
6 mm diameter
0.12 grams
= 0.8 joules (not even enough to puncture a soda can)

bb/pellet
1000 feet per second
4.5 mm diameter
8.2 grams
= 31.9 joules

.22 long
1,750 feet per second
3.9 grams
= 1110 joules