20060510T214200Z

Nothing much of interest to report, so I'll bore you five with the following:

• I have never been diagnosed with allergies, however this so-called "fact" has failed to impress my immune system which is reacting to a large amount of pollen and other crap in the air (thank you New Jersey). I gave up a daily dose of Actifed two years ago on advice of my doctor (the near-immediate ten point drop in my blood pressure was a possible consequence of this). Switching to Claritin and generic knockoffs with Loratadine has helped some, but not enough, so I have spent the last several days in a sort of awake but miserable funk.
• Frisket continues to be a dog. Not much else to report there. She has been very upset the last couple of days to discover that a squirrel has returned to harvest stuff out of the planters on the deck. Some of the "stuff" that the squirrel is harvesting might just be left over matzoh bread from Seder.
• Lisa and I leave for Ireland in about three weeks. We are spending a couple of days in Dublin, followed by hiking around Cork. While we're away Frisket will be at Monstermutt though we are trying to line up a couple of suckers friends to dog-sit her for a few days (we'll be gone 12 days).
• We hosted Todd over the weekend and are looking forward to seeing Alex next week. Frisket has been saving a stick to show Alex when he stays with us.
• On the work front I've been doing a bunch of stuff, almost none of which I can report here. I made a commitment to myself this year that rather than working on a single thing at a time and getting nothing done, I'd work on multiple things at a time. Not sure I'm getting anything done still but I feel busy which I guess is a good thing.
• If you blog or otherwise have a site which is getting nailed by comment spam, and you can block by keywords, try using this wordlist I put together for blocking comment spam. I was kind of like: duh, isn't this common sense? Of course, if it was common sense I would have done it years ago, released a tool and reaped billions of dollars in fees.

Some links I've bookmarked recently:

• Going Bedouin and Bedouins are Everywhere, about moving to a truly mobile workforce and mobile company. Not on an individual basis, but as the basis for the organization.
• This is ancient, and is trapped behind the NYT tollgate, but When News Breaks, Flashy Content Loses Out discussed how sites (I believe it was specifically NY1.com) go to barebones content when under higher than normal load. This isn't really new, and I believe it's unecessary these days. At ibm.com we had some code that would watch the log files and detect when we were under intense load. If we were then the same code would switch the site to a static homepage. During the Deep Blue chess match we had a "games time" page that we put up on www.ibm.com which gave people the option of clicking to the match web site or to the IBM home page (which itself was static). Didn't do a damn bit of help to shed load or offset the problems we were having with Domino Go Webserver. If you're managing a site which can routinely expect high traffic loads, you shouldn't need to switch to a static or barebones site, high traffic loads should be part of your normal infrastructure plan. Instead of thinking of all those users as hostile people beating up your site (which was my perspective when under the gun at IBM), think of them as eyeballs you need to capture and explore your site. If you're in bare-bones mode then you're unlikely to retain these new users, new eyeballs when so-called normalcy returns.
• RISE IN BROADBAND CHANGES CONSUMERS™ INTERNET HABITS: another non-surprise here. As people get better access and higher bandwidth, what they do online changes. Apologies for dragging out Deep Blue again, but one difference that we sort of knew to expect but still under-planned for between the 1996 and 1997 chess matches was the effect of widespread deployment of 56k modems would have on the site. In 1996 the "normal" dialup speed for people was 28k-33kbps, even though many people had 56k or x2 modems, the ISPs didn't have 56k pops available. By May 1997 more 56k POPs were available. So people spent more time trolling around the site, more time downloading multimedia content.
• WSJ.com - Pundits Discuss the Internet's Future: a dialogue between Esther Dyson and Vint Cerf about the future of the Internet.