Adventures in Spam Part I
Today I got this lovely piece o' unsolicited e-mail;

Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 21:36:13 +0800
From: "Erlinda Petrossian"
X-Priority: 3
Subject: bjarne,Increase your breast size. 100% safe!

=================================

Guaranteed to increase, lift and firm your
breasts in 60 days or your money back!!

100% herbal and natural. Proven formula since
1996. Increase your bust by 1 to 3 sizes within 30-60
days and be all natural.

I've seen the shape of things to come, with all these WiFi accesspoints springing up like mushrooms, and the future is about DRIVEBY SPAMMING. Hordes of drug-crazed spam barons in dark minivans will roam our neighborhoods and infect our machines with millions of commercial vira, wireless infomercials, streaming video offering limited time only special offers and 24-7 ultraspam instant messages delivered directly into our homes.

 
Thought is was worth sharing the worst 3 celebrity weblogs/sites with you, from this piece in SFGate;

1. melaniegriffith.com: Actress Melanie Griffith's site appears to be a parody. The "Working Girl" star materializes on the site in a nightgown, in front of what looks like the old "Melrose Place" set.

2. jeffbridges.com: Everything about this site is bizarre. Bridges writes in illegible longhand, then has someone digitize it for computer display. His ramblings include promotions for his projects and pictures of creepy little heads he made out of clay.

3. genesimmons.com: Simmons is portrayed as the chief badass from the band Kiss, so one would expect him to be rocking and rolling all night and partying every day. So why is the aging face-painter spending valuable hell- raising hours at celebrity softball games with cast members of "Dawson's Creek" and interviewing on women's TV programs?

 
Der vil være perioder med ensomhed og tomhed i alle menneskers liv. Dette er et fordelagtigt tidspunkt for dig til at få adgang til deres barskab.
Rune T. Kidde

 
Despite annoying popups on every single page, it's worth reading this long article The Sorcerer of Sony in Business 2.0;

Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei is worried. His company sells a lot of PlayStation 2s. It also sells tons of Walkman units, Trinitrons, and Vaio laptops -- about $57 billion worth last year. But intense competition has shaved profit margins on Sony's core electronics business to a razor-thin 1 percent, and Sony is locked into a price war with Microsoft, which last quarter trimmed the cost of its critically acclaimed but struggling Xbox to a money-losing but market-share-gobbling $199.

Luckily, some much needed (and maybe even unexpected) profits roll in from the massive online game Everquest;

But instead of simply load-balancing the number of players per computer, it allows fans to relocate their characters to different worlds on other servers -- for $50 a move. "Would you believe we've generated over $1 million in revenue simply from moving characters?"

 
Bizreport tells us that according to Nielsen//NetRatings 20% of the total US online users are between the ages of 2 and 17, as of July 2002. Twenty million US teens are online, over half of these use Instant Messenging.

 
Must.. Finish.. Redesign... Why does it take me so long?

 
Postcard from the Edge; Not the movie, the website where Jaron Lanier talks about his job as a technical consultant on Spielberg's movie "Minority Report";
When I demoed Eyematic's face-grabbing software, I mentioned in a macabre aside that face matching to determine a person's identity might sometimes be a better idea than, say, iris matching, because criminals might be tempted to gouge out someone's eyes to fake out an iris-based system. (Not that it would actually work; living and severed eyes can be distinguished by machines. ) Well, you can see the result in the movie.

Hate to rain on your parade, Mister Virtual Reality ÜberVisionary™, but that little trick was used in a little ol' movie called Demolition Man nine years ago. Sorry.

 
And the nominees in the category "Best Contemporary Scandinavian Music Video employing Massive Amounts of Nifty Visuals" are

A-Ha | Lifelines [Link to Real clip at bottom of page]

Royksopp | You remind me [Real clip]

Junior Senior | Move your feet [5MB Quicktime]

 
As you have probably noticed by now, the Summer02Meme/MahirClone-of-the-year is Ellen "Is she stoned" Feiss of Apple Switch commercial fame. She seems to be all over the place, New York Times, Wired News and now - not surprising - several kinds of merchandising (beep, beep, beep)

 
According to C|NET, Gateway will launch an "iMac-Killer" next week. Sounds like a really good idea, until you see how it looks (no sleepless nights for Apple's design dept. over this one)

 
Certain people have publicized this very page for the world to see. It almost feels like when a group of people come to your house and you're still in your underwear and the place is a mess and... I was going to redesign the rest of my site, add more features, fine-tune the design and... Aargh, too late now, just note that this is not the final URL for my blog, it'll live on the frontpage of t v e s k o v . c o m one day when I'm ready... (but thanks for the kind words anyway, guys)

 
What do you get when you cross LEGO, e-commerce and military equipment? Something like MECHANIZED BRICK Custom Lego® Kits for the Military Modeler