shellen dot com: September 2003 | Sincerely, Jason Shellen

This is [x] good

Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext and Blogger-fan has an interesting tagline on his work email signature. At the end he includes this bit of text:

this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private

I love that he is bootstrapping new privacy technology into good old email. I doubt I would add this to my work address but perhaps in responding to personal email. Either way I love seeing how blogs are changing normal communication modes. Next up:

[x] please blog!

SF Grand Prix 2003 photos

The race was great, but I'm too tired to add captions to all of them right now. The Canon D60 is an amazing camera, I took 215 shots. A bunch of the photos are from the celebrity charity race portion that Google co-founders Larry and Sergey took part in. They competed against actor Robin Williams, venture capitalist John Doerr, Gary Fisher (who had a broken wrist), the SJ Shark mascot and more. It was a great time and I even got a quick ride around the closed off streets of San Francisco in a Team Saturn car.

My T-Mobile International SF Grand Prix 2003 gallery.

Note to Nick Denton

Nick,

I agree with the general tone of your caution to Jason Calacanis (though I think he's a black-belt so perhaps I won't agree to heartily). However, I'm willing to bet that switching to tasteful Google AdSense ads on Gawker and Gizmodo would outperform the $2000 you currently rake in. Just ask Matt Haughey.

Yours,
Jason

SF Grand Prix

I wasn't really happy with the pictures I took at last years SF Grand Prix. Which is why I haven't linked to them until now. This year though, I am borrowing a Canon EOS D60 so I can take some high speed shots of all the great race action. See you there! More info on the 2003 SF Grand Prix here.

Never forget?

I'm finding it odd that the tragic activities of September 11th, 2001 are being remembered by many with the phrase 'Never forget'. I couldn't forget if I tried.

Last night at my in-laws, as 60 Minutes slogged through the odd gestures made by our President in the days following 9/11, I was hoping for the show to be switched to a lighter subject. America knows all to well what happened that day and in the days after. Anil said it well today when he wrote...

(There are) people, who are consumed by their anger, unable to move forward with their lives, and determined to pick the scab and make sure it never heals. They find honor in making sure the pain never subsides, and in trying to make others hurt like they do.'

I was 3000 miles away safe in my bed as I woke to a scene that I will take to my grave and two years later I still find it a painful subject. Were you glued to the television for a solid week like I was? We all had front row seats to 9/11 and it will never be a welcome topic.

So...what are we supposed to 'never forget'?

That we felt helpless then and helpless now.
That we are a nation divided between those who seek justice and those who seek vengeance.
That we now live in a world where 'making the world safe' means exacting pain and suffering in a foreign lands?
That we could have turned tragedy into an opportunity to heal our rift with the world and instead have made the world less sympathetic to our way of life?
That war is now a way of life for America.
That people who felt 'angry' by the events on 9/11 are upset by those who felt 'hurt'.
That suggestions for peace are now considered traitorous.

I can't forget these things either. Even if I tried.

I won't ever forget the images of our fellow citizens, towering buildings and giant planes lost. I also won't forget that we need to explore, change and challenge ourselves to move on past vengeance, fear and denial. We have noisy neighbors who aren't happy with us. It's time to listen. They have our attention and we need to think about our goals. Perhaps there are some who will never forgive but if our goal is a safe nation, then we need to 'forget' our current path.

Jasper Johns - Flag - 1954-55

Are you willing to pay zero dollars?

As Goldman said

'The feature wagon just arrived and dropped off a host of bloggity goodness at rock-bottom prices. And we're passing the savings on to you!'

We just turned on a bunch of features for all Blogger users at no cost. Why? Because we have to move a lot of blogs by the end of the month. At Crazy Uncle Ev's Discount Blog Shack we are all about slashing prices.... and we love you.

Elsewhere:

Bogus eBay scam

Seems like I'm getting more and more email of this variety. I've recently received very 'real' looking Citibank, PayPal and the below bogus eBay email. Looks like lots of folks are receiving similar spam.

How to spot a bogus link

For those of you who receive email like this, rolling over the URL link in the message is usually the main giveaway. They have addresses like domain.com listed as in the above phony email but in reality it will take you to a nefarious site aimed at collecting your personal information. The way they fool most folks is through keeping a portion of the 'real' domain intact. For example they keep domain.com but add something like @101.101.101.255 to the end of the domain, effectively rerouting it. Sometimes the redirection is hidden so it's not as obvious as my 101 example but either way, just because a portion of a URL appears to be correct is no reason to trust it. I'll give you a sample of wacky IP tricks, here is a link to Hotmail.com.

For more on wacky IP addressing, here is an old post on the subject. The lesson: when a company contacts you via email to change your sensitive credit or personal information, it's best to go to the address you know them by and change your profile from there. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule, but isn't it worth highly scrutinizing banking and finance correspondence?

A Picture from my PCS Vision Camera

I was sick so I started to grow a beard. Now it is gone. The End.

Play Memo

Denial of Service :(

A lot of you have written to me about problems with Blogger and Blog*Spot over the past 24 hours, it appears that we are experiencing a 'Denial of Service' attack. Please stay tuned to Status.Blogger.com for updates on this situation.

update: though I was able to post this with Blogger so things are looking up already.