As I previously reported, somebody has been interacting with Web sites using my email address. I suspect that in addition to the ones I know about, this individual is probably also doing things that I don’t know about, because I assume that not all the web sites at which he’s using my address are kind enough… Read More: Mysterious identity thief uses my email address to create Skype… »
Long-time followers of my advocacy may recall my story from years ago of attempting to get the Social Security Administration (SSA) to deal with the fact that they sent several of my kids’ social security cards to the wrong address because the software they were using to canonicalize mailing addresses was buggy. Some sleuthing on… Read More: Semaphore Corporation continues to canonicalize addresses wrong and refuses to… »
IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of August 12, 2011, it appears that Brave New Foundation had nothing to do with the spam reported below and in fact they are as much a victim as I am. Please see this posting for details. Dear Nation of Change (along with Brave New Foundation), Let me tell you about a little strategy I… Read More: “Nation of Change”, who are you and why are you… »
I’ve added “Basic Instructions” to my comics aggregator. Tip of that hat to Seth Gordon for pointing me at this fine comic! UPDATE: Because the author of “Basic Instructions” sometimes publishes his strip after people have already read their daily comics, I’ve also added “Basic Instructions (1-day delay)”, so you can use that one instead… Read More: UPDATED: “Basic Instructions” added to comics aggregator »
GoComics.com changed their Web page format and broke my screen scraper again last night. I’ve updated my comics aggregator to support the new page format as of this morning.
For some reason lost in the mists of time, I decided at about 7am yesterday that I just had to upgrade my Fedora 14 desktop to Fedora 15. Sometimes I get these weird ideas… I followed the instructions on the Fedora Web site for upgrading using yum, and 2,978 downloaded packages and several hours later,… Read More: Fedora 14 -> Fedora 15 upgrade notes »
Somebody seems to be using my email address in a weird, ongoing way that doesn’t seem to be benefiting them in any way. The fact that I can’t figure out why they’re doing it concerns me, because I have to suspect that there is some benefit to them, which I just haven’t been able to… Read More: Who’s using my email address, and why? »
For those who use my comics aggregator, note that as of yesterday, the comics.com web site has merged into gocomics.com. I’ve just updated the aggregator to reflect this. The comic strip “That’s Life” appears to have been lost in the shuffle; I’ll check again at some point in the future to see if it resurfaces… Read More: comics.com has merged into gocomics.com »
Last month, I wrote about Google’s surreal attempts to collect from me a debt I don’t actually owe, and my unsuccessful attempts to make it stop. Things have gotten much worse since then. I sent a letter (appended below) to the office of Google’s CEO over a month ago. There has been no response. Today,… Read More: Google AdWords is still staffed by poorly trained monkeys »
I try to make a habit of giving out “tagged” email addresses to web sites when I sign up for accounts / mailing lists / whatever. For example, when creating an account at widgets.com, instead of just signing up as “jik@kamens.us”, I might sign up as “jik+widgets@kamens.us”. It ends up in the same mailbox regardless,… Read More: A study in contrasts: handling stolen email lists »