Year: 2008

At 9am Pacific Time on November 10, a hosting company called McColo was shut down.

I’m sure hosting companies go out of business all the time, but this was significant because a company called MessageLabs– which specializes in large-scale e-mail systems– noticed a bit of a drop in the number of spam messages it saw crossing its servers.

Other companies hosting vast e-mail farms, or otherwise measuring e-mail traffic on the internet at large, saw a similar precipitous drop in the amount of spam flying around. It’s clear that McColo was home to a huge group of spammers– some estimates say as much as 25% of the global spam came through their servers.

Woo hoo! Now let’s find the other hosting companies enabling these spammers…

A parody group called the Yes Men put together an awesome duplicate of the New York Times web site, complete with articles dated July 4, 2009.

It includes such rousing headlines as

Iraq War Ends: Troops to Return Immediately
Ex-Secretary Apologizes for WMD Scare
Court Indicts Bush on High Treason Charge
National Health Insurance Act Passes
Nation Sets its Sites on Building a Sane Economy
USA Patriot Act Repealed

If only.

If. Only.

In our family bedtime prayers with the kids, we encourage them to be thankful for things in their lives. Every now and then we get an interesting one.

Last night Alex was on deck, and he expressed his gratitude thus:

“Heavenly Father, thank you for aqua lungs…”

Aqua lungs? That was a new one to me. And Zack’s heart was full tonight as he prayed:

“Heavenly Father, thank you for video games…”

I guess the Wii has a divine influence on young minds.

I’m reviewing some servers that I manage for Google and found one that’s been running for a while…

[fixed: 19:15:40 up 990 days, 22:16, 2 users, load average: 0.13, 0.03, 0.01
USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root pts/0 18:13 1:01m 0.00s 0.00s -bash
root pts/1 19:14 0.00s 0.01s 0.00s w]

Holy cow, that’s more than two and a half years without rebooting. Go Linux!

As a system administrator who has spent countless hours installing, configuring, and tweaking spam filters to keep customers (and myself) happy, I found this Dilbert gem priceless.

It’s only a matter of time. In order to defeat the spammers, the filters will need to be smarter than the spammers themselves.

I’m writing an e-mail to a client and I noticed that my e-mail client spell-checker doesn’t approve of the word “sheesh”– it highlights it in red.

It also doesn’t like “noob”.

What kind of spell-checkers are they writing these days? Clearly these are legitimate words that have their place in professional correspondence.

(With apologies to Chancellor, who was the recipient of this message.)

The little things are really the big things.

I was thinking the other day about how those little things in life tend to be the big things you remember. It’s particularly noticeable in my business– I’ve had many clients tell me how much they appreciate some seemingly insignificant thing I did for them.

As an example, a while ago I worked with a woman who needed a corporate intranet. I was doing the programming work and had set up her user account to show her how to use the system. She went through it with me (via phone) and then took a week off to get married. While she was gone, I logged into the system and updated her username to reflect her new last name. When she returned from her honeymoon, she was pleasantly surprised to find that her information had been updated (and you know how newlyweds can be). She called me and told me how much she appreciated that gesture, and that thirty seconds of my time has since translated into all kinds of additional projects (and thus income for my company).

Consider how little things enrich our experiences in so many areas:

• The waiter who brings a refill, without being asked, just as you’re finishing the first glass.
• The checker who actually makes eye contact while handing you the receipt and saying “Thank you”.
• The smile or nod from a stranger as you pass them on the sidewalk.
• The bank teller who flips through the stack of twenties and hands you a nice crisp bill instead of the dog-eared one on top of the pile.
• The driver who sees you on your bike and stops to let you cross the intersection, even though they have the right of way.
• The person who holds the door for you at the post office because your arms are full of packages.
• The e-mail or phone message from someone you’ve contacted, telling you they got the message. Even if they can’t do anything about it right away.
• The person with a huge cart in the checkout line who notices you only have two items and lets you cut in front.

In a way it’s fun to spend a few minutes here and a few minutes there doing little things for my clients and friends and family. Sometimes they don’t notice, other times they may but don’t say anything, but many times they comment about how nice it was that I was thinking of them.

If I was a corporate guru (which I’m not) with one piece of advice about how to succeed as a small business, it would be that the little things make a world of difference– for good or bad. Leverage that tiny amount of effort into a positive relationship with a customer (or a friend) that lasts years.

“What’s wrong with you people? You make programming more difficult than it needs to be. I have Frontpage Express to write web pages with, and when I write code with it, I never need to debug it. If you were as good of a programmer as me, you’d never need to debug either.”

— Actual manager of a software developer

I think I set a new record this week… I worked on a total of thirty-three different projects for clients. In five days. And it doesn’t include all of the overhead stuff just to run the business.

I need a vacation.

The National Toy Hall of Fame (who knew?) contains such classic toys as Lego, an Atari 2600 game console, Mr. Potato Head, and a kite. And as of yesterday, it also contains…

a stick.

That’s right, possibly the most timeless toy of all time. According to the museum’s curator, Christopher Bensch:

It’s great to see some fun in the world.