One Grumpy Dick: Computers and Internet

I've been down, but not like this before...

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 01:48:20 GMT

Some of you noticed that "One Grumpy Dick" was down for a while.

I asked my buddy MC, who runs the Spaces team, "What's Up? Where's my space?" and he put me in touch with some of the cool Spaces folks, who were extremely helpful and got my space back on right away. Here's a transcript of our email exchange.

Me: Any idea why [my space] would get disabled?

Spaces: [...] I wonder if this came up in one of those crawler searches that looks for suspicious words?

Me: That's possible. I did rename my space "One Grumpy Dick" just before having it shut off, but that's because my name actually is "Dick" and I actually was grumpy. Perhaps "grumpy dick" has connotations about which I am not aware. Only the spam bots know for sure...

Spaces: Forgive me, because I understand this was very inconvenient and a negative experience for you as a Spaces customer, but [your mail] made me laugh out loud.

Ah, spam bots. Always good for a laugh!

Big thanks to MC and the spaces guys for being helpful and fun.

It's the End of the Internet

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:25:16 GMT

...as we know it.

This sucks.

Be afraid. If you like the way your cable company controls what you're allowed to see on TV, then you'll LOVE the way they want to control the Internet.

This will essentially ruin the internet and crush the cycle of innovation that has been driving the tech economy. Yay, Congress!

Virtual Earth Rocks

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 21:29:18 GMT

I built a couple of virtual earth apps this past weekend. They both use the nice APIs from ViaVirtualEarth.

Wedding Map

The first is an ultra-simple map with static content. Fun with css and the alpha filter in IE for a bit of transparency.

The second is not posted anywhere yet. It does data mining from San Francisco Magazine's Dining site and maps San Francisco's restaurants. Very sweet.