Today, I was weeding my blog garden! I have used Xenu Link Sleuth to find all the dead outgoing links from my old blog entries and tried to fix them to point to the new locations, the Wayback Machine or to just mark them dead.
It was sad to see how many of those links no longer point anywhere. Promising companies gone, people’s personal domains expiring and going off-line with all their valuable content, newspaper articles disappearing into the paid archives.
Account cancelation is a great pain in the rear. A PCWorld article (via BoingBoing) tests multiple services and discoveres that most of them go to great troubles to keep people subscribed, willingly or not.
Something has to be done about it. I propose a new business that will cater specifically to the people calling support numbers (e.g. to unsubscribe) and expecting trouble. Let’s name this service: Calling for trouble.
It will work by recording people’s communications with the support centers and will provide easy tools to manage those records, publish them on the web and maybe even establish transient communities between multiple people calling the provider at the same time.
Most of the comments to this blog are - unfortunately - spam. WordPress’s Akismet filters them out and I periodically review and delete them all. I don’t know why I bother, but once I had a real comment black-listed, so I keep making the effort. It is also semi-interesting to see how the spam attacks changed over time from automatic to semi-manual looking efforts.
Today’s collection had a comment that gave me a double take.
A new Borders bookshop opened near me. Just for fun, I decided to look at their Russian books section (in original Russian). I expected to find none. The result was much stranger.
There were two books on the shelf. One was something non-memorable. The other one, however, was Nobokov’s translation of Alice in Wonderland. So, what’s the problem? Nabokov is well known and Alice in Wonderland is always a great read in any language.
I don’t normally go very far uptown in Central Park, but this time I did. So, I discovered the Strawberry Fields Memorial to John Lennon. Aparently, it often has flowers and candles. This time (July 16th), it also had muffins.