not that i want to turn this into all rss all the time, but it looks like Automatic Discovery of RSS feeds means that using the link tag to find rss feeds is officially - finally - gathering momentum:

"By adding a line like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="http://rss.benhammersley.com/index.rss" />
a site would be providing metadata as to the location of its feed - and this would allow newsreaders, browsers and search engines to automatically locate the feed."

i think i'll add it to all my pages this weekend.

coincidence or not? a mere days after i revive the using-link-tags-to-find-rss-files meme, i see that it's been mentioned in two more blogs. strange. especially since i can say with some confidence that it was likely a case of spontaneous, coincidental meme generation. hopefully it means the idea is picking up a head of steam, since it's been kicking around for quiet awhile.

thanks to some prompting from mike "mozblog" lee , i've changed the mimetype of the syndication feed from text/plain to text/xml. i also changed the character encoding. the validator is happy, but that doesn't mean someone, somewhere isn't wondering why i had to go a changing things. if you're having any syndication problems, just let me know.

speaking of syndication, it looks like morbus is getting geared up for a new amphetadesk release with a 0.93 Alpha download .

i'll bet you thought i stopped training to become an accidental marathonist, just because i haven't updated the site in awhile. well - oh yea of little faith - i'll have you know that i've progressed from nearly blowing out a lung after running for 5 minutes to running nearly 3 miles. 4 days a week.

while it's still difficult to imagine running in the chicago marathon, the Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer, is turning out to be a great little manual for gradually increasing the distance i can run.

i know, i know. i turn 30 and the posting slows down. never fear - i'll be back in full force, soon. i'm just getting back into the swing of things, after eating far, far too many clams and having a few too many pints of bell's oberon brew. a good time was had by all, and many, many thanks to everyone who stopped by bearing food, spirits and smiles.

goodbye 29 and heeeeellllooooooooo 30!

and what is the best way that a former true "downeastah" from machias, maine - now exiled in the midwest - can spend the first day of his 30th year?

staring at a 4 pound box of dug-out-of-the-ground-yesterday-shipped-overnight fresh steamah clams! that's right, oh yea envious masses, thanks to the maine lobster company and a little ambition on my wife's part, i'll get to enjoy that little bit o' heaven known as steamed clams.

i've been following with interest some of the latest thinking about rss , mainly via ben hammersley's excellent xml and rss blog .

coincidentally, jenny brings up one of the things i've been thinking about regarding my own feed with a compliment of sorts:

"Those of you that think my posts run on the "too long" side in your aggregator will thank me for simply pointing you to tonight's collection of links over at Eric Snowdeal's Conflux. The topic is high-speed, wireless networks (3G and WLAN), and every article is a good read, especially for getting up to speed on these subjects."

specifically, with regards to her comments about the length of the post, i've been thinking about ways to give further choice to readers who might not enjoy some of my more monolithic posts clogging up their aggregators, while still respecting those who enjoy reading the whole post. back in the day , when i threw together the quick syndication hack , i decided on a quick "truncation" compromise, which could be considered the worst of both worlds, since neither group of readers is completely happy [incidently, the "chomped" truncation style is an artifact resulting from my poor grammer and punctuation collides with Lingua::EN::Sentence ]. in any case, i'm now leaning towards, but haven't fully decided on, offering the choice of abridged and unabridged feeds.

i have a couple of problems with the "multiple feeds" solution. many might think it's silly, but i don't want to start cluttering up the page with syndication icons. it's bad enough enough to have a big orange icon hogging-up acreage that only the tech-savvy are going to what to do with. i mean, how user-friendly is a big orange xml icon? not very. what do i do? make two big xml icons? do i color code them? how many people are going to know what to do with the one that's not described in the instructions of their favorite aggregator software? sometimes choice isn't A Good Thing.

also - and i realize this might sound like a wee bit of over-intellectualization - i don't necessarily want to offer substantially abridged posts - at least for conflux-style posts. despite the superficial appearances, conflux , and to a lesser degree {bio,medical}informatics , are not a mere "newsfeeds" of titles and links. i've usually spent a bit of time to weave and juxtapose facets of a topic, contextualized by quotations from the original articles. this nuance gets completely lost by truncating things down to barely more than a title. then again, maybe that's just my own bit of insansity, and i don't necessarily need to be forcing my elaborate excercises in out-of-context quotations on the unsuspecting masses.

amusingly, as i thought today about how i wished that aggregators supported link tags or a similar type of formalism for finding rss files, so i could have multiple feeds without cluttering the page and confusing readers, i noticed that jon udell has been doing some thinking that sounds spookily similar to my own line of thought:

"I expect that current practice -- either truncating items or not -- will continue. A few people (like me) may bother to offer a choice, in the form of parallel versions. The overhead is no big deal really, XSLT happily transforms one into the other. While aggregators could offer users the choice, within a single feed, of long or short variants of that overloaded thing we call <description> , I doubt this will matter to enough people to get off the ground."

even more spookily, he mentions my site in the same post. excuse me while i freak out in the corner to the sounds of the twilight zone theme.

today is the last day of my 29th year.

speaking of new releases - the fine folks at mozilla have unleashed release candidate 3 on to the world.

hey! jeremie miller, of jabber fame has started not one - but two - blogs. [ via stpeter ]

so, netscape has released Netscape 7 Preview Release 1 and cleverly disabled the preference to stop pop-ups and other unrequested windows.

i haven't tried it, but from the blogzilla thread comments you can still use the hidden-pref to live pop-up free.

via nat i discovered that a draft of an upcoming o'reilly tome, essential blogging , is available for download and review :

"Please download the PDFs of the tech review draft of Essential Blogging and give it a read. Is it good? Did we forget to cover something? Did we talk about something that's not really useful? Our goal isn't to be definitive and show you everything that these tools are capable of, but instead to give the beginning blogger enough to be dangerous. Did I say dangerous? I meant productive.

The book isn't aimed at people who already blog, although many such readers will find useful information such as customizing their blogging software. Picture your coworkers who haven't discovered blogging yet--they know how to work their computer, they've seen a couple of blogs and figure they want to run one themselves. You should be able to give them this book and it'll educate them about choices of software and hosting, walk them through installing and using their chosen software."

Usability and open-source software development :

"We have described the results of usability testing of the Greenstone collection-building software. When we examined the types of problems we found they are typical of ‘classic’ issues of usability (the differences between developers and users). Although Greenstone has benefited from contributions from many people these issues had never been addressed, for a variety of reasons: resources, motivation, access to non-technical users and the development model adopted.

Our experience with Greenstone suggests that open-source development methods may need to adapt if they are to produce software for the desktop of the typical user. A community of developers will not necessarily pay sufficient attention to issues of usability that they themselves do not experience. An interesting question is whether a large open-source project could address usability issues without the well-known benefits of studying real users?"

[ via mpt ]

so, i just started taking zyrtec for my allergies and i'm thinking that my doctor forgot to fill me on the list of side effects :

" Psychological side effects
- abnormal thinking
- agitation
- amnesia
- anxiety
- lowered libido
- depersonalization
- depression
- emotional lability
- euphoria
- impaired concentration
- insomnia
- nervousness
- paranoia
- sleep disorders"

while i could always use a little more euphoria in my life, i'm thinking i've got enough abnormal thinking, anxiety and paranoia. scheez. all i wanted was to be allergy free.

not that i'm trying to make light of the situation, but whenever i think of terrorism on american soil, the movie brazil comes to mind.

the publishing part of mozblog appears to be working fine. it ended up grabbing the prior posts after i published the current post.

and my interest in the syndication sidebar code? well, if you look to the right, you'll see that my "outbound" links, are getting pretty unwieldy and i spent a good chunk of today looking into blogroll and syndication services like blogrolling.com and blo.gs. while these are fine for certain requirements, they both seem to require a lot of extra up-front work, if you have a large amount and/or a frequently changing number of links. i'm not talking tens of links. i'm talking dozens and hundreds of links.

i might be an outlier of freakish proportions, but my personal bookmark file weighs in at nearly a megabyte, and i have developed a load of peculiar behaviors for managing, trimming, and maintaining the bookmarks. so this got me to thinking about taking advantage of the behaviors that i've already developed by using my bookmarks as a filter for a series of related information services. my "public" blogroll might not be the same as my "private" blogroll. my blogroll may or may not be the same as my aggregator feed. et cetera, et cetera.

i started thinking about the fact that mozilla already has a bookmark properties dialogue box which lets you set notification preferences, descriptions and keywords for urls. it would seem fairly easy to use a combination of keywords and descriptive text for each url to enable and external application to periodically poll weblogs.com or blo.gs, filter the results based on bookmark keywords and then plop the results in a sidebar.

well, it didn't take very much googling to figure out that mike apparently has set the foundation for this with the syndication sidebar for mozblog:

"/** * the sydnication tool works by downloading the list of updated sites.
* passing it through the filter with bookmarks
* the filter then generate an rdf source
* the html is then generated from the rdf
*/"

unforunately, i've installed the syndication sidebar and it doesn't seem to be updating.

testing, testing, testing. i haven't tested mozblog in awhile, so i'm taking it for a spin. looks like it's coming along nicely, but for some reason, it's not grabbing my recent posts. in any case, i'm getting pretty hopped-up on the syndication sidebar code . more on this after i see if it's posting correctly.

i've never been a big fan of voice interfaces and was not surprised to see the evidence in "A Visual Rather Than Verbal Future" that it's hard to speak and think at the same time:

""It turns out speaking uses auditory memory, which is in the same space as your short-term and working memory," he adds.

What that means, basically, is that it's hard to speak and think at the same time. Shneiderman says researchers in his computer science lab discovered through controlled experiments that when you tell your computer to "page down" or "italicize that word" by speaking aloud, you're gobbling up precious chunks of memory -- leaving you with little brainpower to focus on the task at hand."

so now i'm in a classic conundrum. voice interfaces do seem to help reduce the repetitive actions that have exacerbated by carpal tunnel:

"Even while I was climbing the learning curve, ViaVoice had reduced my mousing by roughly a third in e-mail, by more than half in file management and by two thirds in Web surfing. Pain no longer shot up my forearm, and my hand also felt much better. For all the flaws and immaturity of voice control, its benefits now outweigh the hassles and the cost. "

the obvious questions would be - is the decrease in productivity associated with simulaneous talking and thinking less than the decrease in productivity associated with not being able to use the computer for more than five minutes without my right hand going numb?

from the you'd-think-it-would-have-happened-sooner-department. eric raymond has a weblog, using blogspot?! you'd think he'd be using something a little more opensourcey like blosxom.

thanks to slashdot picking up rob flickenger's write-up on etherpeg one can only imagine the fun and imaginative uses it will be put towards in the near future:

"If you've never heard of EtherPEG, its a Mac hack that's been around for a while that combines all of the modern conveniences of a packet sniffer with the good old-fashioned friendliness of a graphics rendering library, to show you whatever GIFs and JPEGs are flying around on your network. It's sort of a real-time meta browser that dynamically builds a view of other people's browsers, built up as other people look around online.

The effect was staggering."

i see a bit of real-time performance art being constructed from a few directional antenna's placed in a few choice locations around cities and neighborhoods. hmmm. driftnet is available for linux.

in other wireless fun, some crazy kids in seattle have mastered 802.11 War Dialing :

"Today, we rolled our own mobile phone system. Picture this: 1 Volvo, 3 geeks, 1 omnidirectional antenna, 1 802.11b card, 1 power inverter, 1 GPS unit, 1 laptop, 1 crossover cable, 1 VoIP box, 1 crappy touchtone phone.

We plugged all this junk together and hit the road. I live in downtown Seattle, so it wasn't hard to stumble our way onto some open wireless networks. Once we found a good reliable net connection we just started dialing. I called the famed Rusty of SomaFM with my sexy San Francisco area code. The real kicker was receiving telephone calls in our car via someone else's wireless network."

so the big question is, will cameron move from "borrowing" bandwidth to monitoring his neighbor's image downloads and making free phone calls:

"The ethics here at my new place aren't so simple. The network is named default (which is better than My Network, I guess) and the street is populated with beautiful Victorian houses. With families. I'm not so sure Mr. and Mrs. PTA would be so excited to know that I'm stealing packets from them.

So here's the dilemma: is it better to speak up now, or just cry a lot if they find out? Approaching them might ensure me access indefinitely, but it might also freak them out. I can just picture their faces when the cops raid my place and find antennas and wires and pringles cans. "Yes ma'am, it appears you're the victim of reckless wireless larceny and network trespassing. Don't worry though, we'll toss the book at this one." Ugh."

via the wonders of the referrer log, i found mike which is nice because i then found a nice tutorial on embedding mozilla's editor widget:

" Editor is a XUL widget that allows for WYSIWYG HTML editing. This allows developers to quickly add formatted editing to a XUL application. Unfortunately how to add editor to a XUL app is not well documented. "

hmmm. so i just have to toggle this little preference thingy here to get blogger pro-enabled rss?

well, i guess so. don't link to it though, because i'm surely going to fiddle with it. nice. it lets you select abbreviated descriptions and it doesn't syndicate posts without titles, which i actually like. but this would confuse you because it looks like this post doesn' have a title, but that's just because i haven't included it in the template, silly. it's there. honest.

maybe i might have to think about ditching my homegrown syndication feeds? and now i have another excuse to rant in grumpy-old-man style, "well, when i was young we didn't have nuttin'. nope - none of this automated syndication crap. we had to build our own. that's the way it was and we liked it." uh-oh. i just noticed that it doesn't strip html from the post, but only escapes it, which will wreak havoc on aggregators. maybe the kind folks at blogger could implement a "strip html" preference?

jason's mini-interview with nick sweeney is a good read, but the distinction that's trying to be made between mefi and plastic sounds vaguely familiar:

"The editorial element is the biggest difference, of course. It's an attempt to introduce a kind of horticulture to the community's growth: to weed out the duplicates and the flames and the links to the Usual Suspects, and introduce a kind of distance to the slavish news/meme cycle which so often cripples MeFi these days."

ah yes, it's yet another attempt to defeat the relentless forces that dictate the life cycle of lists , which every list [ and community site ] seems forced to endure.

first there's yarm [ yet another referers mechanism ] and now stephen downs has come up with a javascript referrals system that looks intesting. me detects critical mass.

via christina i discovered an attempt at codifying the the visual language for blogdata. it's an interesting start but, i agree with christina's comment that the icons aren't entirely "intuitable". that said, i might consider using swiping the magnifying glass for the conflux "find related" icon. i suppose it's a bit pathetic that i've been meaning to change the icon since i first started using it.

funny - i decided to peek back in the archives to see just how long i've been hating my original "find related" icon. august 27th, 2000. criminey. hmmm. i forgot that the initial implementation would let you select a radio button to narrow your search to just the snowdeal domain. i wonder why i dropped that option, since it seems kind of handy.

so, i was persusing former feed editor-in-chief steven johnson's new piece on blogging called "use the blog, luke" where he makes an important point about the potential of the blog form:

"The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. "

steven then goes on to lament the fact that despite the promise we are once again drowning in the sea of content and linking produced by bloggers. this reminded me of the "conflux rhetoric" which is a snippet from a feed article that i posted over two years ago titled "portrait of the blogger as a young man" . i can't confirm it because the original feed link is dead, but it wouldn't surprise me if the article was written by steven. i liked it then, and now, because it struck me as being remarkably prescient in its description of the relationship between blogs and journalism and how it might take awhile for the form to crystallalize into something approximating orderliness [ and using the term "Web log" seems so anachronistic ] :

""You’re not a designer, you’re not a writer, and you’re not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you’re not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it’s true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it’s also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization. " "

amusingly, just as i was going to post a "the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same" style rant, i ran across jason kottke's reaction to the article:

"The problem is that implementing a weblog universe-wide system of tags and categories is like herding lots and lots of cats. No one will agree on which tags and categories to use. If a de facto standard set of tags does emerge, getting people to implement it will be hard."

the more things change - the more they stay the same.

since i was raised catholic, i'm always on the lookout for new reasons to feel guilty. thanks to some tireless finnish researchers, i've got one more reason for being guilt-ridden, since it appears that i've reduced my mom's life by 34 weeks :

"Mothers who have complained through the centuries that their sons will be the death of them may be right - a Finnish study analyzing family church records in earlier centuries shows having boys shortens a woman’s life span."

hey, where did mike go?

don't mind me. just testing the new blogger publishing server.

five bucks says you can't say jabberconf-blaggplug ten times real fast:

" The 'jabberconf' Blaggplug - a plugin for Blagg that pushes RSS item info to a Jabber conference room (akin to an IRC channel) as they're pulled in the aggregation process. "

i've been waiting in the wings, but me thinks i'll kick the tires and give blagg a spin around the block.

[ via jon udell ]

if the number of referrers is any indication, then there is a gaggle of people feeling the need to search google for "gene simmons terri gross". i'm guessing that reading about me getting old is not exactly what they had in mind.

and all you people who are searching for "gigantic phat asses". well, i'm just not sure what to say. better luck next time.

you can't fool me aventis. despite all the marketing, i'm pretty sure allegra is just a sugar-filled pill that's doing a whole lot of nothing.

don norman: toilet paper algorithms:

"We discovered that although we now had two rolls instead of one, the problem was not solved. Both rolls ran out at the same time. Sure, it took twice as long before the rolls emptied, but we were still stuck with the same problem: no more paper. We had discovered that the switch to two rolls meant we had to use more sophisticated behavior: the algorithm for tearing of paper mattered."

[ via webword ]

it's getting blogged all over the place, but i'm still going to link to adam curry's [ yes, that adam curry ] excellent post on the murder of pim fortuyn:

" It was stunning to read the New York Fucking Times report "Fortuyn's rise mirrored a right-wing resurgence in several European countries, lately highlighted by the anti-immigrant Jean Marie Le Pen's surprise showing in the first round of French presidential elections."

Was the Times talking about the same Pim that the dutch endeared as he would appear on every talk show, always dressed to the nice with his sharp wit at hand. Was this the same Pim the country had d enjoyed for y10 years as a writer of many political books and cweekly columns always aimed squarely at exposing the underbelly of ducth politics, wich is mostly played out behind closed doors in the Hague. All dutch know it, but Pim wasn't afraid to say it. "

as dave points out, it's important to remember that adam is not unbiased, but nonetheless i think adam's write-up will prove to be a another milestone in how a well written weblog can add depth to breaking news.

hi. my name is eric snowdeal and i'm an accidental marathonist.

matt haughey provides an apt analogy for what the klez virus is like:

" For someone that has never fell for a virus message or been infected, this is the equivalent of trying to buy a car and hearing that the credit check showed you were attempting to pass bad checks in Long Beach under your name, or that your name was on a credit card used to buy jewels in Kuala Lumpur (both things have actually happened to my wife and I). The only problem with this virus is there is no way to verify that someone sent a message, or for someone to look up my track record of being virus free and knowing this message was a fake."

not that i was under any delusions that walmart was the most upstanding corporate citizen, but i still found myself surprised by many of the details in "How Wal-Mart is Remaking our World" :

"Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they’re held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart "full time" is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year.

Health-care benefits? Only if you’ve been there two years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it—only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered. "

it looks like jenny, jim mcgee and rick klau are contemplating getting together chicago-area bloggers. although i just moved from the chicago-area to grand rapids, michigan, i still technically work in chicago [ well, o.k. motorola is technically in schaumburg, but you can stop nit-picking ], so maybe they'll bend the rules a bit and count me in.

via techdirt, i discovered an interesting paper on what makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial:

"Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial, as differentiated from managerial or strategic, because they think effectually; they believe in a yet-to-be-made future that can substantially be shaped by human action; and they realize that to the extent that this human action can control the future, they need not expend energies trying to predict it."

as is pointed on by the good folks at techdirt, it's not clear if there were any control groups, so the analysis should be taken with the appropriate grain of salt, but hey, that never stopped me from quoting at cocktail parties in the past.

my carpal tunnel is particularly bad tonight and i'm quickly losing feeling in my right hand, but that's not going to stop me from thanking jenny "the shifted librarian" levine for taking the time to say some nice things about the site. when i started the site over two years ago, i thought that maybe three people would find it worthwhile. it's rewarding to see that number grow beyond my wildest dreams to eight or nine regular visitors :-)

jenny also alludes to a cross-blog conversation we've been meaning to start ever since she wrote about wifi in libraries awhile back. at the time i was thinking about wireless community networks in general and the prospects for using wifi as a technology enabler for libraries looking to expand their role as "community information provisioners" in particular. certainly, while there appears be a growing interest in wireless libraries , i was questioning whether there was any way to subsidize the build-out and operations of networks. as a commentor to her original post rightly poins out, putting together a sustainable network is more difficult that just installing an access point:

"Don’t get me wrong the intention is admirable, just not stable. In the long run it often costs just as much per “usable” uptime minute, as a professionally installed system. Do the pros know more than the local nerds? Maybe yes, maybe no, but that is entirely beside the point. What will pay off in the long run are consistent designs, standardized equipment, and a comprehensive understanding of why each piece is setup the way that it is. I have yet to see this work well over the long term. Worse yet, many systems are built by a parade of three-hour philanthropists building next to, and not on a foundation."

but alas, in her most recent post, jenny points out that might i be getting ahead of myself. as with most things, it looks like education is going to have to be the first step:

" How do we get public libraries to recognize the benefits of public access Wi-Fi and then help them achieve it? Personally, I think the first step is an education campaign. The overwhelming majority of library administrations don't have the slightest clue what Wi-Fi is and why they might want it."

"We need a one-page who, what, where, when, how, and why for dummies."

i'm all for that. where do i sign up? how can i help? i'd be willing to bet that i'm not the only person with a laptop and wireless card who would frequent the library a little more often if there were wireless services available. i'd even be willing to pay for it.

you asked for it and now you've got it. the snowdeal schwag emporium is finally open for business. look stylish and feel good knowing you're helping to get me hooked up with a new titanium powerbook g4 .

many thanks go to my good friend matt "playing with fire" moroz for all the design work. b.t.w. if you haven't noticed, matt has started updating parallax every now and again, so meander on over and take a look see.

just in case you missed it - bestbuy quickly fixed their open networks rather quickly. it turns out that they were using a wireless point-of-sale system from symbol :

" “There are security mechanisms in place, but whether or not (the stores) use them is a different story,” Ferrone said. “If the security is not turned on, then the traffic would be open.”"

don't mind me. i'm just tossing this quote that i found from matt jones about karl popper into the annotated bookmark bin:

"He criticised what came to be called solutioneering: the jumping to solutions - reorganisations, replanning - without spelling out what the problem was, or if there was one. At the back of this lay "holism", the belief that problems must be tackled "as a whole". He showed that the holistic method turns out to be impossible. The greater the changes attempted, the greater their unintended and unexpected repercussions, forcing upon the holistic engineer the expedient of piecemeal improvisation - the "notorious phenomenon of unplanned planning". "

i've been looking for the recipe for a crappy week and finally happened upon it. in case you're wondering, it calls for:

• 1 car crash with a dash of whiplash and back tweakage
• 12 ibuprofin and a side of stomach fu
• 1 case of hardcore carpal tunnel syndrome
• 12 more ibuprofin
• 1 visit to the dentist for crown work
• 8 more ibuprofin
• add stomach fu judiciously

if you are driving and your wife mentions the phrase "when we get in a car accident" in casual conversation, and then 5 minutes later you get into an actual car accident - does she get bonus cosmic coincidence points? if so, kris just scored big.

we're fine. luckily i learned my lessons about seatbelts a long time ago. a guy tried to pull out and turn left when he couldn't see around a utility truck. somehow, i managed to swerve just enough to avoid slamming straight into his driver's side door. i banged-up my knee a little, kris tweaked her back slightly and the trusty camry, while not totaled, is going to be spending some quality time at a body shop and mechanic. luckily, nobody was hurt.

so, it looks like bestbuy have left their wlans wide open:

"Well after sorting out my logs I noticed what looked to be like SQL queries and table headers in my logs ... things such as CUSTOMER_ROUTEID, BANKNAME, REGISTER_ID and things of that nature... luckily no where in that data did I find my own credit card. Non the less I decided to run to the store next to BestBuy while I left me PC on grabbing packets. Well yesterday I sorted through the data collected and this time I did indeed find a RAW clear text credit card number....not mine ... but definately a credit card number.

... I checked out a few of the other best buy stores for "beacon packets" and everyone I drove by was sending them out...so I assume all BestBuy's are wlan enabled."

that popping sound you hear is the sound of pringles cans being opened.