When were org charts first used to depict a business’ management structure? Anyone have any leads? All I could find on the Net was a link to a book by Stafford Beers that costs $115. While I wait for my local library to locate it, does anyone have any other sources/links?

Thank you.

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I’ve been happily using PopFile to filter my spam in a Bayesian way. But it’s inconvenient to train it because it’s not integrated into my mail client (Outlook, ulp). I tried Outclass, but it was over-featured and under-explained. So, I’m trying out SpamBayes, another free Bayesian filter with seemingly good integration into Outlook. It doesn’t filter into all the buckets that PopFile does, but it’s easy to batch-train it against your existing junk and inbox folders.

I was motivated to try new filters by the elegant way Thunderbird integrates spam filtering into the client…much as the Mac client does. I’m using Thunderbird on the road, and find much to like about it, not least that it’s not Outlook.

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Smoking gun: Time reports on a Pentagon email (from Douglas “Chicken Hawk” Feith) that says that Dick Cheney’s office “coordinated” the awarding of a multi-billion dollar contract in Iraq for the company he formerly headed, Halliburton. (Reuters)

Holstered gun: The Boston Globe’s Wayne Washington reports that Bush no longer mentions the prescription drug bill he rammed through Congress:

A Globe survey of Bush’s and Vice President Dick Cheney’s remarks indicate 22 mentions in December and January, four in February, five in March, one in April, and three in May.

The reason seems clear: The Medicare expansion, once viewed as a crucial link between Bush and seniors, is now a subject of intense scorn among many seniors.

Then there’s the gun that may be turning out to be smaller calibre than expected: Scott Kirsner reports evidence that the adoption of RFID tags is going more slowly than many anticipated. He says they are still too expensive, suffer from poor quality assurance, don’t work with all goods, are not yet standardized, and are frequently used in demanding environments. Worse, he says, companies haven’t thought through how they’ll handle the massive amounts of data RFIDs will generate. Scott expects RFIDs to be adopted widely, but not for the next few years.

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The most comprehensive interspecies dictionary available…

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The Boston Globe writes up the local band Jim’s Big Ego because it encourages people to share the band’s files. In September, they released an album under a Creative Commons license and it’s been their biggest seller. In fact, Creative Commons and the band are holding a contest to find the most creative remix of their paean to mixing, “Mix Tape.” One of the band members, Jim Infantino, talks about “community-based art patronage”: “When you as a band act in good faith, you invite your fans to act in good faith.”

I love all this, but I so don’t believe that patronage — a fancy name for a tip jar — is going to be the way we keep our artists alive. There will be some successes that way, but I think we need a more structured way of paying, such as the EFF’s suggestion that online music adopt an ASCAP/BMI model. But I ain’t no stinking economist so, thankfully, I don’t have to pretend to have a real opinion about this.

(BTW, the group’s site let’s you stream all of their music. The first item on the playlist when I tuned in was a track that archly raises the musical question: “After all, isn’t God an angry white guy?”)

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At 3pm, I bought my daughter a Samsung-Napster MP3 player. Deciding among the indiscernibles, the Napster’s ability to broadcast to an FM channel for wireless car connectivity sold me.

At 7:30pm, I returned the Napster and got a Rio Karma.

I had a bad feeling about the Napster from the moment I started installing the software. It kept adding layers and layers of cruft, forcing me to upgrade my Windows Media Player, bundling in a CD burner, forcing me to register at Napster.com…window after window of incomprehensible files and DLLs until I wanted to scream that it ought to take its over-educated, over-engineered supercilious ass to the mountains and take up goat herding. And, sure enough, although Windows recognized the Napster device, the Napster software didn’t. After four hours of trying, I gave up.

The Rio is a thing of beauty. Baddaboom, it installed. Baddabing, it let me download MP3s into it. Now that’s the way software should work!

(Yes, we looked at the Ipod, and it was elegant and supercool, but also super-expensive, especially since the 15G version would have required us to buy a Firewire-USB converter.)

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Halley interviews Andre Durand of Ping ID over at Wortwhile.

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A growing percentage of the 2,000+ spams I’m receiving every day come to false names at my domain, evident.com. Here’s a VBA script for Outlook that searches the selected entries in a folder and moves bogus ones sent to that domain into a folder of your choice. To use it, create a folder to receive the putative spam; I’m calling it YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER in the script, but you should change it to whatver yours is called. Also, replace “domain.com” with the domain of your mail, and be sure to specify the addresses to domain.com that you want to accept. (And watch out for bad wraps in the code below.)

Public Sub CheckForBadEvidents()

Dim ToWhom As String
Dim objNS As NameSpace
Dim objInbox As MAPIFolder
Dim objSpamFolder As MAPIFolder

Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
Set objInbox = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
Set objSpamFolder = objInbox.Folders("YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER")
Dim objApp As Application
Dim objSelection As Selection
Set objApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Set objSel = objApp.ActiveExplorer.Selection
Dim objItem As Object

' check to make sure the folder is there
If objSpamFolder Is Nothing Then
MsgBox ("Folder not found")
Exit Sub
End If

x = 0 ' count the number of hits, for fun

For Each objItem In objSel
If objItem.Class = 43 Then ' if mail msg

' get the To line
ToWhom = objItem.to
' If it's to evident.com but not
' to a recognized address...
If InStr(ToWhom, "@domain.com") > 0 And _
(ToWhom <> “yourname@domain.com” And _
ToWhom <> “anothername@domain.com” And _
ToWhom <> “etc_and_whatever@domain.com”) _
Then

‘ move it
objItem.Move objSpamFolder
x = x + 1
End If
End If
Next

MsgBox “Moved to YOUR_SPAM_FOLDER ”    & x & _
” msgs with ill-formed evident.com addresses.”

end Sub

Note: I’m an amateur and you use this script at your own risk. Really. I mean it. (The code for moving a msg to a folder came from here. I’ve lost where I cribbed the other functionality from.

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At the Personal Democracy Forum on Monday, Mathew Gross told me about LJBook, a tool that turns your blog into a printable PDF book. Then Stephen Fraser of LuLu.com sent me an email recommending LJBook; Lulu publishes and sells anyone’s book. So I gave LJBook a try. It works. And it’s free.

It was designed initially for LiveJournal users, but there’s a beta that works with MovableType. You have to entrust it with your MT name and password (it says it forgets the pwd after 30 mins), but if you’re willing, you point it at your MT directory and it automagically creates a PDF file of all your posts between any set of dates. Mine was 1,200+ pages so I’m not going to print it out, but it’s nice to have it as a, well, I’m not sure why it’s nice to have it, but it is. (FWIW, the formatting of the book it created is minimal and ugly. But, then, take a look at what I gave it to work with.)

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Over at Blogcritics.org I’ve just posted my guess about how the season ends. (Don’t worry, not only am I just making stuff up, but I’m pretty much batting 0 with my previous predictions.) Hint: I hope you’re not too emotionally attached to the bear.

I think it’s been a good season. I love the ambiguity of Steve Buscemi’s character. The episode featuring Meadow’s boyfriend was difficult to watch, in the best sense, as was Adriana’s big episode. My biggest disappointment, though, has been that I don’t believe how the relationship with Carmella has developed; it feels like it’s being pushed in that direction not by the characters but by the writers. (I’m trying not to give anything away for those who haven’t caught up with their TiVo yet.) For me, The Sopranos remains the best acted and funniest show on TV, maybe ever.

I have a question that does require giving away an event in the penultimate episode. Here goes: [SPOILER ALERT]

When Tony says that his “activities” in the future will not affect their marriage, we viewers hear “In the future, I’ll wipe the lipstick off my collar.” What are we supposed to think Carmella hears?

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Giles Turnbull writes in The Guardian on how that Cluetrain stuff worked out now that it’s been five years since the site went up. Good article.

I’m always a bit awkward talking about Cluetrain. I think it was basically right about the value of the Net at a time when the media and most businesses were (IMO) insistently wrong. But, for example, the other day at a conference someone very sweetly thanked me, crediting Cluetrain as the inspiration for the company he’d founded. That’s great to hear, but it also invokes my Flight or Polite instinct. Cluetrain tried to articulate ideas that were just below the surface (and occasionally above the surface) in the Web community, but now the co-authors sometimes get credit for the ideas.

Also, I don’t like reading what I write. That explains why at the end of The Guardian article I’m quoted as saying that I don’t remember what was in the book. Of course I don’t! Do you think authors sit around rereading their books? My books terrify me because I know they contain wrong ideas and passages that read like sandpaper, yet they’re still out there for anyone to read. (And then I read someone like Steve Johnson and think I should just give up entirely. Sigh.)

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The Passion of the Present is out to raise awareness of the Sudan:

In Darfur, a region in southern Sudan approximately the size of Texas, over a million people are threatened with torture and death at the hands of marauding militia and a complicit government. Imagine a militia that forces parents to choose whether their children will be burned alive or shot to death. Imagine that in the very same month the world remembers the genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda, the unfolding news of another in Sudan is barely heard and largely ignored.

It includes a useful list of background info on the Sudan.

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The amount of spam I’m receiving seems to have stepped up significantly over the past few days, going from about 1,200 per day to about 2,000. I’m not seeing any particular pattern to the increase - they’re not all coming from the same address, they’re not all advertising remote control cars or Nigerian. beefsteak mines, nor has my address shown up on some high-traffic site, to the best of my knowledge. (Ironically, after Doc and I published World of Ends, my spam rate got a boost.)

Is it just me?

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Harvard’s Berkman Center submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the case of Capital Records, et al. v. Noor Alaujan:

The amici parties in the brief are individual members at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, acting not in the interest of any of the parties in the case but in the interest of helping the Court balance the competing claims of the Plaintiffs and Defendants.

This case requires balancing rights of copyright holders, who allege harms caused by the distribution of their songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, with protections for individual consumers accused of copying and distributing these songs on such networks. The briefing outlines some of the factual matters in the case, such as possible errors in the methods by which these users are identified, as well as more substantive legal issues such as potential fair use defenses and the question of whether merely storing files in shared folders violates Plaintiffs’ rights of public distribution.

In this brief, amici parties urge the Courts to exercise caution in granting uniform remedies, given the diversity of possible factual and legal defenses that might be raised by individual users.

Makes me proud to be a Berkperson.

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I’ve been a happy but puzzled Vonage user. I thought I understood pretty well how VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls make it from my telephone onto the Internet, but I couldn’t figure out how they snake their way back into the phone system to ring a non-VOIP phone in, say, Malaysia (or Roxbury, for that matter). So, I called Vonage and asked them.

When you subscribe to Vonage, you get a modem that plugs into your cable/DSL modem. You plug a plain old phone into the Vonage modem so it can convert the phone’s analog signal into digital, package it into the sorts of packets the Internet expects, pat them on the tush and send them on their way. As Louis Holder, Vonage’s Executive Vice President of Product Development, explained, Vonage has done deals with phone companies in each of the cities where you can get Vonage service. The phone companies sell phone numbers to Vonage that Vonage then offers its subscribers. When a call comes in for a Vonage subscriber, the phone company sends it to a Vonage gateway co-located at the site, treating Vonage as one of its customers. The gateway then sends the call to the appropriate subscriber’s telephone.

But how about when a Vonage customer calls someone who isn’t a Vonage customer? Suppose I want to call someone in Malaysia? Vonage has done deals with companies such as Qwest and GlobalCrossing around the world, installing gateways that turn digital signals back into analog for local delivery. With the Internet, not only is all politics local, but so are all phone calls.

When I asked Louis how Vonage is doing as the telephone companies begin to roll out their own VOIP plans, he said that things are going great. “We’re able to pick the best rates for each market,” he said, explaining why it’s $0.02/minute to Hong Kong but $0.04 to Copenhagen. About the Big Boy competitors now offering the service, he added: “Their first year will be spend fixing bugs.”

By the way, I asked how they pronounce “VOIP” inside Vonage. It’s “voip” as in “void,” although they spell it out for newbies and customers. Now if we can only decide how we want to pronounce “GIF”…

[I am 100% certain I have gotten something wrong here. I'm sure you will tell me what.]

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David Batstone at Worthwhile (where I also blog) expresses skepticism that is not only appropriate but inevitable when it comes to corporations issuing reports about how well they’re upholding their self-defined social responsibilities. Some of the reports may be honest but they suffer from Electronic Ballot syndrome: By their nature, they engender disbelief.

I’d be more impressed if corporations enabled an independent, third-party group to investigate them and issue reports. Is there any such group that gets full cooperation and support from the corporations it researches?

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I’m in Somewhere Pretty, MD, doing a keynote for the I-Media conference, getting to yell at them about why marketing alienates customers. I’ll be on the road most of the day and probably won’t be able to blog anything except, well, this…

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Ralph Reed (here and here) was the creator of the Christian Coalition and is currently the SE Regional Chairman for Bush-Cheney ‘04.

As a result of the new technology, we are turning to the politics of an earlier time — face to face, neighbor to neighbor. The stakes are high and the ideological divide is more even than since the 1880s. Also, we’ve lost confidence in the dominant media.

Howard Greenstein: What do you mean by grassroots? You seem to talk about grassroots and what receives messages from the center.

Reed: MoveOn.org tried doing bottom up and ended up with an ad on their site. As you empower people, you also have to maintain message discipline. ["Message discipline"...I'm oddly aroused.]

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Little known fact: I elected Senator Wyden. Perhaps an overstatement, but aroune 1979, my wife and I lived in Portland OR for a year. Wyden was running for Congress for the first time. My wife called his office with a question about one of his stands, and dang if Wyden himself didn’t call back and talk with my wife for 20 minutes. So, she and I went door to door for him, and have been Wyden fans ever since.

Joe Trippi says that we shouldn’t be calling it the “information age.” It’s really the age of transparency and empowerment. The Dean Campaign was just a blink, one of the first glimpses of how the changes are going to happen. WRT to TV, Joe says that in 1956 when Nixon gave his Checkers speech, “Bullshit had a medium.”

Wyden: The challenge is to make sure that the decentralization is accompanied by as much accoutantabilility as is possible in the public interest.

Trippi: Authentication on the Net is very tricky. About two weeks before Iowa, an email went out from DeanForAmericas.com asking for volunteers but not if you were gay. (Note the plural in the domain name.)

Wyden: I helped kill Poindexter’s TIA. (Isenberg from the audience: “It’s back as the Matrix.”)

Trippi talks about how the FEC rules work against grassroots organizing. For example, you have 15 days after the quarter ends to file a report on all contributions. That’s fine when you have a few thousand large donors, but when you have 240,000 donors, you end up wheeling in 20′ of reports.

Trippi: The Kerry campaign, like every campaign, is about “Look at me, I’m amazing!” The thing the Dean campaign got right was that he said, “Look at you, you’re amazing.” Kerry ought to say, “I cannot catch this guy by myself. But you can.” Two million Americans would put in $100 and we would take our country back.

Jerry Michalski: What do we do after the campaign?

Trippi: If people were asked to engage and contribute in the campaign, Kerry could govern the same way: “I’m not going to get this health care plan passed. You will.” If we had a leader who believed that people were there to catch them before they hit the sidewalk, he’d do amazing things.

Q: Will the Republicans figure this out?

Trippi: Absolutely. They already have.

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BuzzMachine has a list of bloggers blogging the conference. Also try Bloglines.

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Andrew Rasiej is interviewing ex-Senator Bob Kerrey. How does he use the Net? Kerrey says he uses it for everything, including decentralizing control at The New School. He stresses that the Internet brings about a loosening of control. If he were running Kerry’s campaign, he’d use the Net for raising money and communicating out, but also for enabling people to connect, “But to do that, you have to allow communities of interest to develop on their own and then keep those communities organized in a political fashion,” i.e., it has to lead to people voting.

“What I see happening with the Net is truly a dispersal of power. In the old days, if there were a national security crisis…70 or 80% of the president’s information would come from classified information. Now 70% of national security information is open source…Today, anybody with a notebook computer can be an analyst…It can be very threatening if you’re trying to control it.”

“We may get through this whole campaign” and each candidate has spent $150M on television ads, “and people say all of a sudden that those 30 second ads aren’t important.” “People are making judgements independent of the campaigns and they’re doing it out on the Net.”

[I like this guy! I'm happy to hear any politician recognize that it's not just about fund-raising and campaign-spam.]

Andrew: Is blogging journalism? How does it fit into the mix?

“It’s not something you can control. Blogging is like gravity: It is. The question is what are you going to do with it?…Any individual out there can put together is own newspaper.”

Andrew: When will we have elections over the Internet?

A: Not until companies like Diebold make their source code open. We don’t need a paper trail. We need open software so it can self-correct. [Bzzzt! Wrong answer!]

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I’m at the PDF in NYC today along with about 150 other people for a day of non-partisan discussion of how politics may be changing, particularly because of the new global connectedness. The conference organizer is Andrew Rasiej, who I almost met when he was with the Dean campaign.

I’m in the Bloggers’ Corner, the front left of the auditorium where the power strip is. To my right is Jeff Jarvis. To my left is David Jacobs. Behind me, Anil Dash. In front of me, David Isenberg.

The chat and blogs can be found here. Also try Kinja.

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I’ve known Harvey Bingham since the mid-80s when he was an SGML standards guy at Interleaf, so I don’t believe his claim that he’s growing old. Nevertheless, he’s just updated his guide to staying young. It mixes practical advice with quotable quotes, including this from Einstein: “If a cluttered desk is an indication of a cluttered mind, what is indicated by an empty desk?”

(The Yuri the page refers to is Yuri Rubinsky who didn’t get to grow old. All who knew him still miss him.)

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What are we going to do about RageBoy?

Chris is down to $1.20. Anyone need some gonzo writing done? Any foundations around willing to give Chris the freedom to write what he needs to write? Anyone with a spare room near Boulder?

Joi has six free days in Europe and has posted a wiki where we can suggest ways he can constructively use his time.

A cleverer person than I could probably figure out huge amounts about Joi, his social network and his standing just by reading this page. It’s the sort of rich artifact the Web creates unintentionally and frequently…

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Thomas Barnett, the author of The Pentagon’s New Map, a book I’m hearing good things about, has a rollicking good blog. (It was the Feedster Site o’ the Day earlier this week.) He’s been writing rather wickedly about dealing with the media interest in his book recently.

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My scam printer — aka fax machine — continues to spew almost nothing but spam and scam. Today I got yet another legal-looking notice, formatted to lo like you’re being served with papers, from the Domain Notification Center. It “warns” me that unless I contact them, someone else might register the .us version of a .com name I own. Heavens forfend!

At least now that I’m back to running an internal fax/modem card I’m not paying for the ink to spray this crap onto paper.

By the way, DomainNotificationCenterSucks.us is available.

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From the May 2004 Bandwidth Report:

US broadband penetration grew by 1.9 points in April, with 47.87% of active Internet users enjoying a high-speed connection at home. This jump of nearly 2 points is 2.5 times the average rate of broadband growth. 52.13% of US home users dial into the Internet with “narrowband” connections of 56Kbps or less.* Meanwhile, broadband growth in other countries suggests a limit of 75% saturation…

As of April 2004, most users in the US connect to the Internet using dial-up modems of 56Kbps or less. 42.74% use 56Kbps modems, 6.99% use 28/33.3Kbps, and 2.4% use 14.4Kbps modems. In total. 52.13% of home users in the US connect to the Internet at 56Kbps or less.

…As of April of 2004, of those connected to the Internet, 79% of US users at work enjoy a high-speed connection, up from 78.8% in March. 21% connect from work at 56Kbps or less

The report also wonders whether 75% is a saturation point for broadband.

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Search at Google Images for “left arrow.” Check the 21st image, which with my configuration is the first one on the second page. You’ll be able to tell that you have the right one because it is the only one pointing right.

Now notice what page the image comes from. So maybe it does run in the family.

[Thanks to Hanan Cohen for the find.]

Ralph in the comments notes that the image is at #18 and rising because of the increased linkage.

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Here’s a transcript of a speech by Justice Michael Kirby of the Australian High (= Supreme) Court on his Christianity and homosexuality. (Thanks to Vergil for the link.) Excerpt:

So how did my relationship with God survive this experience of self-discovery?

First, I never doubted for an instant the surrounding love of my parents, my brothers and sister. I knew, in my heart, that they would always love me as I was. For years we did not confront the subject verbally. We did not really need to do so. When we did, it was exactly as I expected. No big deal. Not everyone is so lucky.

Secondly, I was greatly blessed by having many loving friends and companions, homosexual and heterosexual. Especially in finding a loving partner, Johan. He is not here tonight. He has very little time for religion and churches. He has often said to me: “I don’t understand how such an intelligent person can take seriously religions that all oppress women, people of colour and gays”. He prefers to be out there helping his Ankali. He volunteers to clean and cook and scrub the toilet-bowl for a patient living with HIV. That is his “religion”…

AKMA blogged this speech a couple of weeks ago (d’oh!) and wrote”

As I read the Justice’s words, it seemed increasingly likely that the present stresses over sexuality in the church will not be resolved by new arguments, or even by new attention to arguments that presently have been relegated to the sidelines of the public strutting contest. Rather, I think that it will settle out based on people’s sense of with whom they would want to align themselves. Most of the facile arguments have already been drilled into our heads; most of the subtle arguments fail to command the kind of traction that could make someone change the direction of their thinking; but sooner or later, people will begin to say, “Aw, they can’t be that bad,” or “I just have to stick with this group no matter what.”"

Well put! Here in Massachusetts we have two years before the vote on an amendment to ban same-sex marriage. That’s two years for residents of the Commonwealth to decide that they’d rather align themselves with the loving gay couples in their neighborhood. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.

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NOTE: I updated this script on June 2 so that it now pulls out all (?) of the URLs embedded in the selected spams. The code listed below is updated, but not my comment about it not doing what I just updated it to do. So to speak. (The version without the wordwrap issues has also been updated. But what you really want is this pure text version, suitable for copying and pasting.)

I just received 200 comment spams. They each listed a different URL and came from a different IP address,which means the invaluable MT-Blacklist (thank you, Jay Allen) has to be told to delete each one, one at a time.

Instead, I cobbled together an Outlook script — yes, I use OL on my desktop machine, although I’ve been happy with Thunderbird on my laptop — that looks through the messages you have highlighted in your inbox and builds a list of the URLs that people listed in the URL field of the comment. You then paste these into the text box in MT-Blacklist’s “Add” tab. (It also shows a list of the IP addresses, although I don’t know why I bothered.)

Here are just some of the caveats you need to take very seriously: I am fumbling around in the dark when it comes to VBA for Outlook. And, there’s almost no (= NO) error checking in this little program, so you could end up banning your mother; you must carefully inspect each of the URLs to make sure you really want to delete the comment that contains it. Further, I don’t really understand how MT-Blacklist works. And there are probably some bad line wraps in the code below which will totally break it. Finally, this does NOT find any of the URLs in the body of the message because that’s too hard. Well, finding the beginning of the urls isn’t hard, but figuring out when they end is.

So with that warning (WARNING: read the warning!), here’s the script:

Sub FindURLStoBAN()

‘ walks through selected

‘files to find bad urls

Dim objApp As Application

Dim objSelection As Selection

Dim objItem As Object

Dim ipstr As String

Dim urlstr As String

Dim ips As String

Dim  us As String

Set objApp = CreateObject(”Outlook.Application”)

‘ get the selected msgs
Set objSel = objApp.ActiveExplorer.Selection
x = 0

For Each objItem In objSel

If objItem.Class = 43 Then ‘ 43=mailitem

msgtxt = objItem.Body ‘ get msg text

‘ Is this msg from mt-blacklist?

p = InStr(msgtxt, “MT-Blacklist”)

If p > 0 Then ‘ yes it is

‘ get the ip to ban

p1 = InStr(msgtxt, “IP Address:”)

p1 = p1 + 12

p2 = InStr(p1, msgtxt, vbCr)

ips = Mid(msgtxt, p1, p2 - p1)

ipstr = ipstr & vbCr & vbLf & ips

‘ get the url listed for the name

p1 = InStr(msgtxt, “URL: “) + 5

p2 = InStr(p1, msgtxt, vbCr)

us = Mid(msgtxt, p1, p2 - p1)

urlstr = urlstr & vbCr & vbLf & us
‘ —-’Get urls in the text

udone = False: prevp = 1

‘u ppercase it because I’m lazy

msgtxt = UCase(msgtxt)

While Not udone

u = “”

‘ get next a href

p1 = InStr(prevp, msgtxt, “<A HREF=”)

‘ get end of href

p3 = InStr(p1 + 1, msgtxt, “”>”)

‘ find end of href

If p1 > 0 And p3 > 0 Then

‘ get /a

p2 = InStr(p1 + 1, msgtxt, “</A”>”)

‘ if it has an end /a

If p2 > 0 Then

‘ extract the string

u = Mid(msgtxt, p1 + 9, (p3 - (p1 + 11)))

‘ note where it ended for next loop

prevp = p2

‘ is it already in the string?

If InStr(1, urlstr, u) = 0 Then

urlstr = urlstr & vbCr & vbLf & u

End If

End If

End If

‘ are we out of links?

if p1 = 0 Then udone = True

Wend
End If ‘ if p > 0 msg from mtblacklist

x = x + 1
End If
Next
‘ Fill the two textboxes
mtblacklistfrm.iptxt.Text = ipstr

mtblacklistfrm.urltxt.Text = urlstr

mtblacklistfrm.Show

Set objItem = Nothing
End Sub 

(Here’s a version that shouldn’t have word-wrap problems.)

To make this work, you have to create a form called mtblacklistfrm and stick into it a text box that you name iptxt and one that you name urltxt. Set the text boxes’ scroll bars to on and make sure that they’re set to multiline.

If you don’t know how to stick a script like this into OL, then you shouldn’t. If you do, then you could have done this better yourself.

Warning: Do not trust this script! It undoubtedly is embarrassingly wrong and dangerous. Have pity on me. I’m a humanities major.

Thank you.

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I did a 4 minute interview this afternoon on WBUR’s Here and Now show. The topic was spyware. [SPOILER:] I’m against it.

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TigerDirect is advertising Seagate 120GB drives for $59.99 after the rebate. Applying my unique math skills (i.e., I’ve never done a calculation correctly), I think that works out to $511.91 for a terabyte of storage. Why, that’d be enough to store an entire blog, with room left over to download Tetris!

Peter van Dijck tracks storage prices over the years. At this rate, you’ll be able to get 15 petabytes for $120 in the year 2020.

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This issue has had me on the verge of tears for days. And sometimes I’ve gone over the verge. Why?

The feeling is immediate. I don’t have to think myself into it by imaginging that I’d been prevented from marrying my wife for 25 years. The feeling isn’t connected to any particular friends who are getting married. Yet it’s got a direct line to my heart.

The best I can figure, it’s about hope. Here is something I never thought would happen in my lifetime. And it isn’t just an issue like legalizing marijuana. This is about a deep cultural prejudice (IMO) against one of the forms love takes. With the bang of a gavel, it’s done. A set of people have been embraced by the law and will, I believe, be embraced by our neighborhoods as well.

All that I hope for is finding expression in this one moment of liberation. If gays can marry, who knows what else is possible? What other freedoms might we grant? What other ways might we find to accept love?

I think that’s why today I’m crying at the weddings of strangers.

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               in just

     in Just-
spring      when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman

whistles       far       and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles

far       and       wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

        the

                goat-footed

baloonMan     whistles
far
and
wee

— ee cummings

[Thanks to Zephyr Teachout for pointing out how apropos this poem is.]

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A flautist and violinist played Baroque duets (”Music courtesy of the Brookline Music School”) in the front corner of the lobby of the Brookline Town Hall. “Let me get rid of that for you,” said a woman wearing an orange GLAD t-shirt, taking an orange rind from the tiny hand of a four year old on the shoulder of one of his fathers. GLAD was there to hand out roses, serve pastries, and applaud. There were no crowds of anonymous well-wishers, unlike last night’s festival in Cambridge, just clusters of couples with their family and best friends.

Terry, the mother of one of my son’s best friends, was there with a corsage pinned to her. She was invited by the parents of a boy a year ahead of ours in our local school. They were chatting with a small group of friends and relatives, waiting for the clerk to call their number. The clerk, a man in his 70s, stood outside the inner office, called out the couples’ numbers, and warmly congratulated each couple on the way out. By 9:30 this morning, fifty couples in this town of 50,000 had been granted marriage licenses.

When I left, I saw a media person videotaping a meter maid ticketing a motorcycle with a sidecar — B-roll for the “life goes on” message the news will use to frame today’s events. Yes, of course life goes on. But so far in Brookline, a hundred neighbors have had their love a acknowledged in a way that they probably thought would never happen in their lifetimes. So, life goes on, but as of May 17, 2004 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, life is better for all of us.

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“We’re giving them the street.” So the police officer said as my daughter and I arrived at Central Square in Cambridge at 11:30 this evening. The police pulled back the restraining fences and the crowd packed Massachusetts Ave. solid where we watched couples enter the Town Hall — the first same-sex couples in America to be issued marriage licenses fully legal according to state law. (Oh, stop your quibbling! We’re the first state to do it right and I’m going to enjoy that.)

WOOHOO!

The crowd was enormous. We were crammed together from the street all the way up the long steps to the very entrance of the building. The protestors across the street (”God hates fags” read one particularly charming sign) were outnumbered and totally ignored; by midnight, they’d left.

Songs rippled through the crowd: “Going to the Chapel,” and “America the Beautiful” and “This Land Is Your Land.” Every couple that went up the stairs was cheered and applauded by all of us. “It’s Woodstock,” I said to my daughter. (”It’s the Summer of Love,” I thought.)

Then, at midnight, people threw rice, clapped, shouted, cheered. At least one of us laughed and cried at the same time. A chant began further up the hill and I couldn’t tell if it was “We are equal” or “We are legal,” but, well, that’s the point, isn’t it?

I’m proud of my state and I’m happy tonight.

I’ve posted my photos here.

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