Elliott Rodgers

So another spammer decided to call me out on my Spam Policy. This one really f***ed me off by spamming the page where I shared my break up with my girlfriend.

So a report has been sent off to their ISP SoftLayer Technologies in Dallas, Texas, US identifying the bottom feeding pond scum and asking for appropriate action to be taken. I will add any progress to the bottom of this blog post. I’m not hopeful of any results given that the second Google Search Suggestion is SoftLayer Technologies Inc Spam which makes me think that a big group of people are searching for the term. We shall see.

Update: What a surprise…. it seems SoftLayer Technologies from Dallas, Texas, US has the same Allen Jenkins responding to abuse emails as Uubiquity Server Solutions! Regular and observant readers will recognise this as the company (and useless) person who responded to an earlier spam report complete with the same “we’ll refer it to the customer and never get back to you report“.

I use a lot of CoffeeCup’s software and have done for a while now.

They have a really good offer at the moment on their Website Color Schemer (which has loads of handy color tools) and Web Color Handbook PDF for just US$19 (for existing customers it’s an unbelievable $9!!). You can get the offer at https://www.coffeecup.com/store/specials/color/ until August 13th.

On the 1st of March I took part in “Blog Splash” with Fiona Robyn, a UK author, who is putting her third novel Thaw online, one day at a time (SPOILER WARNING: if you are going to read it, do it from Start of Thaw).

Fiona Robyn was kind enough to let me interview her.

Thaw Synopsis

Ruth is thirty two years old and doesn’t know if she wants to be thirty three. Her meticulously-ordered lonely life as a microbiologist is starved of pleasure and devoid of meaning. She decides to give herself three months to decide whether or not to end her life, and we read her daily diary as she struggles to make sense of her past and grapples with the pain of the present. ‘Thaw’ explores what makes any of our lives worth living. Can Red, the eccentric Russian artist Ruth commissions to paint her portrait, find a way to warm her frozen heart?
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It feels like the internet has been around forever, but it was March 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee published a paper titled Information Management: A Proposal, his ideas and proposals became many of components of today’s internet. However there were plenty of people involved before Tim Berners Lee as far back in time as 1958.

Where possible I’ve cross referenced and checked sources as much as much as I could.

1958
The US Department of Defense started the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which developed into the basics of the Internet in the 1960’s and was the world’s first operational packet switching network. ARPA came about due to threats that were believed to exist relating to the Cold War. This project would change into ARPANET in a few years.

1960s
Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the very first paper on packet switching theory in the summer of 1961. Douglas Englebart developed NLS – an online hyperlinking system and also invented the mouse; a vital tool that wouldn’t become popular for almost twenty years. Ted Nelson comes up with the term “hypertext”.
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