Someone close to me, for the past 2 years has been proud to be a SuicideGirl. It was a well deserved honor, for Inocencia (Her SG Name) is an amazing and wonderful woman. From early on she was quite fond of the community of awesomely talented and empathetic individuals. Although with time, she began to get the feeling that the staff, particularly, Missy, were somewhat 2 faced.

One day, Inocencia, came across a website offering pornography content, licensed content you could "lease" to use on your very own porn site. For some reason the girls in the sample pics seemed awfully familiar to her. She then realized the pictures she was looking at were actual SuicideGirl pics, without the familiar SG logo, she was looking at pictures of her friends! How did this happen, she thought? With a little investigation she actually found out that SuicideGirls had actually sold the content for that exact purpose. This was absolutely appaling to Inocencia, she submitted her pics to a web community of like minded individuals, who appreciate the girls as art, not as meat.

Angry at this fact, she decided to vent, to whom else, but all of her friends on SuicideGirls. She made a "Journal" entry mainly venting how she felt and that she felt betrayed by Missy. Lo and behold, not 2 days later, Inocencia goes to login as she regurlarly does and she is redirected to "Renew your membership" page.

What ???

She asked if I could log in and see what was up, I agreed.

Once logged in, I went to her profile and was floored to see that she was "Archived". I ran a quick search through the boards, and found a posting by Missy, it read "For private reasons Inocencia has requested to be archived". What? She requested to be archived? This was absolutley ridiculous!

So, I in turn decided to post on my "Journal" a little message of what I thought of this, mind you I am a paying member. This was my post:

"Actually, Inocencia DID NOT request to be archived, she was archived without so much as an email notification. The most likely reason is that Inocencia reported on her blog that SG is actually licensing their content to PORNOGRAPHY SCUM in order to generate revenue. The truth of the matter is that SG is no longer run the way it was started, it has become a money hungry machine who does not care about the people it tramples along the way.
Inocencia was repeadetly asked to modify or altogether remove her blog entries, what happened to free speech?
It's a sad truth Missy, why do you lie, Inocencia never asked to be archived."

Not 4 hours after my entry, I decided to check if I had received any comments, after login I was unable to reach my profile page. I checked in my account settings, and this is what I saw:

Well, so much for free speech and open minds. I absolutely love what SuicideGirls was when it began, now I'll just sit and wait for the death of this souless abomination.

SuicideGirls
2001-2006
R.I.P.

Update October 17th 2007

Read what other BS SG is pulling on a photographer, geez Missy do you have a soul?
http://apneaticmedia.com/

_{This is a speed test of your browsers javascript engine, yes, javascript can be a primary factor of speed. Once the html and script have been downloaded by your browser, it must get parsed and processed by your browser. I honestly wasn't surprised as to which browser outperformed the rest, it's code is written so low level.}

_{Javascript Browser Speedtest}

Just announced, CNN has just launched a new department, I-Report and it's recruiting the entire world to become reporters!

They even include a ToolKit which gives some trade secrets for taking the perfect photo or video.

The proliferation of video devices and computers should make for a very interesting experiment. I beg to wonder how much CNN will censor or shape the reports submitted by users to their own agenda.

A little while back I was doing a gig for a gentleman very familiar with patent trolling. He was constantly digging at me to deliver him ideas, ideas that could be produced into a consumer product. Being accustomed to solving logic based problems through software, it was to be an interesting task. To make a long story short, one of the ideas both he and I prefered was a small desktop device that would:

1) Accept receipts, business cards, scraps of paper with a recipe, any paper within certain dimensions into a double sided scanner, which would scan and OCR

2) Temporarily store OCR information to internal cache, and triple check consistency of reaped data. Snapshot would be sent to a workstation client, which in turn would request confirmation from a user that all data was acquired. Once confirmed, the "machine" would transfer scraps of paper to a shredder device that would then permantely destroy original copy

3) Share data to Personal Information Datastore and link back to electronic reproduction.

Unfortunately, this idea was never followed up on, heck it wasn't even patented (Want to make it happen, let me know!).

Today I read about Intuit's launch of their 2007 version of Quicken personal finance package, which they tout as a virtual file cabinet.

"The ability to easily download or scan important financial documents and create a permanent digital archive inside Quicken makes perfect sense to people and will certainly help them locate these documents at tax time or years later if audited."

I certainly hope this is an attempt towards something resembling my idea. To be free from all of these pesky little papers that I seem to amass on a daily basis, would be a welcome blessing.

I am one of those "old timers" when it comes to HTML design, heck I still remember using Archie to find good junk! Hence, for the longest time, I avoided using CSS for anything other than maintaining look and feel when doing web design, HTML tables were the only way to go for positioning elements on a page.

One of my first attempts was RespectThyCustomer, I was intent on adding rounded corners, an almost mandatory feature for any site looking for the over-hyped Web 2.0 moniker. So I went a Googling for some rounded corner CSS examples and was bombarded with 1001 different way to do one thing. Baffled, and not wanting to spend way too much time, I began looking for a wizard, something that would take all of the grunt work out of this task that is supposed to be menial. I came across several different wizards, none of which truly impressed me, but I settled on one, and trucked forward.

Today, after speaking with a good friend, he showed me his little wizard that he built. Wow, was I impressed (yes, his CSS Kung-Fu is much better than mine), not only is quite adaptable, the code is quite small, and it can be actually be emailed without necessity of attaching an image.

Check it out here!

Thanks Dave!

So, have you heard of LinkieWinkie? An enigma, wrapped inside of a puzzle that calls itself a social experiment.

"a very altruistic little site and loves to be talked about." - Quote

A spider of some sort that crawls the blogosphere in search of mentions to itself. Using it's uknown logic, it then adds links back to the reference on it's home page.

When you run a WHOIS lookup you get this:

Registrant:
   Denise Russell
   33 Kirby Drive
   Telscombe Cliffs
   Sussex
   BN10 7DY
   UK  
Record created on 22-Jun-2006

So we can deduce that the "creator" of this little project hails from the UK and this domain was registered fairly recently. It seems to have developed quite the following based on its traffic stats in a very short time, perhaps just all the blogos-buzz.

Yes, I'll bite as well, I'm interested to see where this leads and curious as to the amount of traffic I'll receive if my link does make it on to the home page!

I'll report any findings back here, Cheerio!

Other sites where LinkieWnkie is mentioned:

http://arteccentrix.blogspot.com/2006/07/what-is-linkiewinkie.html
http://thisbiochemicallife.com/2006/07/26/what-the-hell-is-linkiewinkie/
http://www.senserely.com/james-the_meaning_of_linkiewinkie.php
http://rumboard.com/2006/07/linky-winky/
http://thepinkpanther.typepad.com/pinkie/2006/07/follow_up_linki.html

PS:

http://www.linkiewinkietracker.blogspot.com/
http://postmodern-living.blogspot.com/2006/07/linkie-winkie-take-3.html

Just found this great little trick!

Have you ever attempted to Remote Desktop connect to a server running Terminal Services and received the dreaded "Too many active connections" ? Fret no more! Just open up a command line and type:

mstsc -console

This will open you're RDP client, type in the server addres, and voila! You're connected to the rarely used console session!

Thanks goes to Jon Galloway through Haacked

In 1956 IBM introduced the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control), the great grandfather of the most widely used desktop storage device, the Hard Disk Drive. Oh what a long way we've come! This behomth was the size of two large refrigerators, weighed a full ton, required an air compressor to protect the heads, and it's total capacity was only 5 megabytes!

 The Hard Disk That Changed the World

One fundamental problem with driving these days has to do with accountability. People can do whatever they want as long as a cop doesn't see it regardless of the type of headache they are causing other people.

Well, if you cause trouble, draw a few eyes, or are a great driver then you are likely to show up on Platewire. Platewire is a site that allows you to enter the plate number of a car that you came across on the road as a flag, hazard, flirt, or award. If you don’t have a pad and paper handy in the car you can always call-in a plate number and retrieve it later.

Gratis Internet, the company that started with Free Condoms and earned their mark giving away Free Ipods, are closing up shop.

It appears that the lawsuit filed by Elliot Spitzer, New York state Attorney General, affected them tremendously. Being an ex-employee of this company, I saw this coming, primarily due to the fact that they hired a COO from a completely different industry, who after 3 months, still didn't understand how the company generated revenue! Just goes to show, a business model based on breakage, will eventually break.

All of my condolences go out to my ex co-workers, half of which were laid off this week. Peter Martin, one of the co-founders left the company last week.

Another internet saga comes to an end.

Gratis R.I.P.

PS: Here is supporting documentation. Besides the fact that half off the staff has been laid off, and "more cuts coming" whispers are heard through the galley, the lawsuit filled against Gratis request at minumum $500 per New York residents email address in their database. As NYC was one of their top cities in a database of over 150 million email addresses, you do the math.