NetBloke.com - Random Ramblings
Publication Date: 30/05/2001
ISSN 1445-1360
Publication Date: 30/05/2001
ISSN 1445-1360
G'Day!
For those of you who were quick off the mark last week you are probably wondering if I am a very small, blonde midget. Well I can tell you I am not! I am in fact a 6-foot tall blonde. The small person you were looking at was of course my daughter Hayden. Yep that is right when Karissa and I got married we bought one of those 'just add water' bags of sea monkeys. We weren't to know that they had included genetically engineered sea monkeys, and hence we ended up with Hayden. Damn that GM corn!
Oh and how many of you noticed that the title of last weeks issue was the same as the week before? Married Madness does perpetually exist in this home, but it was suppose to be my Nightly Nightmare last week. Thanks to an over eager Lyris email list host it appears I am preapproved or something. Now only if it was as easy with my pending mortgage!
I am going to let you all in on a special I am running for my day job at Sausage Software. I wasn't going to mix business (Sausage) with pleasure (NetBloke) but I thought some of you might want to take advantage of this. So anyway just go over to www.sausagesizzler.com to see what I am talking about. If you don't want to build Web pages or make graphics or the like don't bother, as it would be a waste of your time. Otherwise it may be worth your while to sneak a peek.
How would you like to tell me what you want to see in NetBloke? What do you think would make it better? You may even have an idea for a theme for an issue. I think fresh ideas make for a better experience for all my readers if I improve the quality of each issue.
Finally this week I would like to ask you all help me make NetBloke bigger and better. All you have to do is tell your friends about NetBloke. Just go to NetBloke.com and tell a friend!
Until next week seeya later!
Nathan Allan
Following on from last weeks tip for setting up a free email account for online registrations and the like, one fellow bloke has added to my suggestion of using Hotmail or Yahoo mail.
His comment and suggestion goes like this:
"Yes, it will work but of course then you occasionally will have to wade through tons of stuff to see if you have any real mail hidden in there. I use a bigfoot address as they have brilliant spam filters - I can honestly say that in the last 2 or 3 years I have received two items I considered spam! They also have some nice other functions for free."
A good suggestion from a fellow reader. I really like that!
http://www.bigfoot.com
Yet another fellow bloke, Michael Rosner had a suggestion for avoiding spam from not so nice spammers. Here is what he had to say:
"Just read your latest newsletter (love those jokes!) and thought I'd share my strategy for avoiding spam and preserving my privacy when registering at unknown websites.
I use the service at www.mailexpire.com. They issue you a randomly generated e-mail address which forwards mail to the address you provide. The lifespan of this random address can be specified from 12 hours to 3 months. It can be extended or shortened after creating it as well. If I just want to get a
password e-mailed to me, I'll set it for 12 hours."
I looked into it a bit and found out the guys who created it are from Combustion Productions in Ireland. Like the rest of us they hate spam and wanted to offer a solution to the problem. I think that is a noble thing to do!
http://www.mailexpire.com
It appears I threw in a piece of slang last issue without even knowing it. Quite a few of you emailed me asking what "chucking a wobbly" is. Well I made you all wait until this week for the answer.
Chucking a wobbly is when a person has a little bit of a rant and rave or gets a bit overly upset at a situation.
A couple of good examples would be the sports coach that nearly pops a vein in his forehead when his player misses an easy scoring shot or the toddler who has a good cry and scream over not being allowed to eat sweets for dinner. Karissa said if you all lived with us you would see examples of chucking a wobbly form yours truly on a regular basis.
A reader asked me to review the EarthPulse Web site. It is a site that focuses on conservation -- something that wouldn't hurt us all to look at a little closer. Now I am no greenie but I do happen to really love the outdoors and would like to see that all the things that I have enjoyed in my life will still be there for my children.
National Geographic and the Ford Motor Company founded EarthPulse. Here is what they have to say about it, "Through EarthPulse our organizations have the opportunity to entertain, engage, and educate people worldwide on environmental issues." It is nice to see that a big motor company is trying to make a difference.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/earthpulse
As you may of noticed I dropped the Question and Answer section just before I went off to Hawaii and got married. It slipped my mind to add it back in until now. So send in your questions and I will try and answer them! If I cannot I will publish the question and see if your fellow readers have the answer. I already know there are a lot of smart people on this list so the answers should be interesting!
To start things off here is a question for you!
How many different t-shirts did I wear on the Webcam last week that were from Internet companies?
Answer:
Well for those of you who checked it our regularly you will have noted I wore three. They were for Sausage, Lockergnome and MyComputer.com.
It was interesting to see that people were watching when I got an email from Chris Pirillo, who had had a capture of my Webcam sent to him from a Gnomie because I had a Lockergnome t-shirt on.
Here is an idea for all you dot com employees out there -- if you send me a t-shirt with your companies' logo on it, I will make sure I wear it on the Webcam! Email me for my size and address (Hey what can I say I like T-shirts!).
An old, bearded shepherd with a crooked staff walked up to a stone pulpit and said, "And lo, it came to pass that the trader by the name of Abraham Com did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot.
And Dot Com was a comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she had been called Amazon Dot Com.
And she said unto Abraham, her husband, "Why doth thou travel far, from town to town, with thy goods when thou can trade without ever leaving thy tent"?
And Abraham did look at her as though she were several saddle bags short of a camel load, but simply said, "How, Dear?"
And Dot replied, "I will place drums in all the towns and drums in between to send messages saying what you have for sale and they will reply telling you which hath the best price. And the sale can be made on the drums and delivery made by Uriah's Pony Stable (UPS)."
Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the drums. And the drums rang out and were an immediate success. Abraham sold all the goods he had, at the top price, without ever moving from his tent. But this success did arouse envy.
A man named Maccabia did secret himself in side Abraham's drum and was accused of insider trading. And the young man did take to Dot Com's trading as doth the greedy horsefly take to camel dung. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominican Siderites, or NERDS for short. And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the deafening sound of drums, that no one noticed that the real riches were going to the drum maker, one Brother William of Gates, who bought up every drum company in the land. And indeed did insist on making drums that would work only if you bought Brother Gates' drumsticks.
And Dot did say, "Oh, Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by others." And as Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel, or as it came to be known "eBay," he said, "we need a name that reflects what we are," and Dot replied, "Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators."
"Whoopee!", said Abraham, "No, YAHOO!" said Dot Com.
And that is how it all began. It wasn't Al Gore after all.
