At the end of last week, I put up a post linking to Tim Berners-Lee post about rebooting of the HTML standards process.

I noticed, through Technorati, a couple of folks linked to my little post as part of their larger discussion of the important decision. 'Hmm,' I thought, as I went outside Saturday to blow the fir needles and the leaves off my driveway for upcoming Trick-or-Treaters, 'I've had a pretty quiet ride in the Blogosphere...' blow-blow-blow, 'I sure hope someone doesn't go and scrape my weakly encoded email address off of my web page and start sending me spam.'

Worse.

Worse than getting 100 spams a day? Someone putting out spam with your return email address + email server and you getting over 100 automated bounce / semi-accusatory spam-scan messages a day. I feel so dirty. Used.

Some dude, somewhere, decided it was worth his time to type in my new email address into the email database and then unleash a spam-bot faking my credentials.

#@%&**! spammers!

I can't wait until sending each email is semi-hard, time-intensive operation, requiring at least a second of computational power. If not more. I send out so few emails that I'd prefer some way of associating meta-data with my domain of "Hey, a hard five-second computation for email originating from ericri.com is just fine."

Hmm. I guess it would be even nicer if somehow all the computation challenges could be part of a larger grand challenge for a hard research problem. If anything - if the spammers keep spamming and sucking up the cost of the computational challenge - it would at least be rewarding to think they are contributing to solving a larger problem and doing some good in the world.

I just uploaded the first in a series of doodles over on my non-techie blog. Lately, I've started bringing a paper notebook with me to all the various meetings I attend. This is either in addition to or - most frequently - instead of my laptop.

I've forgotten how much I used to doodle during meeting dead spots. It's great to start drawing again. Now, I don't exactly doodle rainbows and teddy bears. I'm sure there's a dark, spooky story stirring around somewhere in my subconscious and I'll let the doodles put the plot together piece by piece...

• Eric Richards Typing! The Doodles - Opus and Bill Debug a Supercomputer
• Eric Richards Typing! Twisted and Skele-Knees
• Eric Richards Typing! Fuji-Leo and Demon Doodles

Tim Berners-Lee (aka, inventor of the World Wide Web while at CERN) writes about hitting the HTML reset button for planning the future of HTML.

About time.

I looked at what was going on with XHTML 2.0 and such and wondered, "Gee, anyone actually talking to us regarding if we're interested in implementing all of this wild stuff?" Did they have such hubris in their grand committee making that they'd think whatever they produced would make us rush to start adhering? Or did they see it as something that competitive browsers would naturally implement and have the entire publishing world navigate to XHTML 2.0 because of it's pure intellectual joy?

There was no common sense to it. It showed that the W3C was this shambling monster of standards still grinding out the ideas... that no one was going to implement.

Tim BL notes:

The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML together. We have strong support for this group, from many people we have talked to, including browser makers.

Imagine that.

Today's the day that the Google Toolbar finally convinced me to uninstall it.

Recently, it had gone and updated itself and adding to the startup programs a notifier program. Nothing makes me more mad than yet another program that thinks it has to run, and stay running, at startup.

Today I updated my two work computers to IE7. I have been running the Windows Live Toolbar and found its search results quite great, and decided to change my IE's default search from Google to Live Search. Hmm, not listed. So I went to the Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7 page and selected it from there.

Google Toolbar went on the offensive and tried to block, giving me a prompt as to whether I really wanted to do such a thing.

That was the last straw. Now that I'm happy with Live Search's result and now that I use Live Writer for blogging, I don't have a reason to use Google's Toolbar anymore. Time to move on and get a bit of real estate back in my IE window.

(Edit: corrected typo. And uninstalled the Google toolbar from more machines.)

Great one from bLaugh:

Says Apple:

"As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it," the company stated.

Says Microsoft:

"We encourage all third party vendors to follow best practices and help protect their users regardless of platform through careful scanning of the software they ship, so that they do not expose their customers to unnecessary risk from malicious software," the company said.

I can lose myself for hours at a time with the above ground photography in Windows Live Local and Google Maps / Google Earth.

Some find all sorts of interesting bits: Bird’s Eye Tourist

I've been looking for a good alternative to the videos I have that are not in WMV and that I'd like to watch w/out having to transencode on my PocketPC.

TCPMP seems to be just fine! The first ones I tried chocked on the codec or just plain didn't run.

I look forward to giving it the full-court push to fill in the few spare moments catching up on vids / VidCasts.