i’ll admit it. i’ve

countergoogled

in the past:

“Pay attention, marketers: remember Roger &
Peppers, evangelizing 1:1 customer relationships back in 1997?
Well, just when you finally have your company’s customer databases
and filtering tools all worked out, and you actually identified
that Lego-loving dentist in Taipei and emailed him a personalized
offer for a family holiday in Denmark, Google changes the name of
the game with a vengeance.”

although i agree with matt that it,

“…could actually be something that gets built into new business
processes…”

, i usually find that i need to go to unusual lengths to prevent
the recipient from feeling like i’m a wierd blogstalking corporate
tool. up to this point, i’ve reserved my countergoogling powers for
rather benign purposes; i specifically restrict the activity to
people who have mentioned
facefive

in a blog. i, of course, see this as simply starting a friendly
conversation and happily it has all worked out for the better so
far, but i think it definately needs to be used with caution. [ via ev ]

i just noticed that garret p. vreeland’s blog is sporting a snazzy redesign. clean and crisp, although i think the logo should be a little bigger.

Instant logging: Harness the power of log4j with Jabber:

“Not only is logging an important element in
development and testing cycles — providing crucial debugging
information — it is also useful for detecting bugs once a system
has been deployed in a production environment, providing precise
context information to fix them. In this article, Ruth Zamorano and
Rafael Luque, cofounders of Orange Soft, a Spain-based software
company specializing in object-oriented technologies, server-side
Java platform, and Web content accessibility, explain how to use
the extension ability of log4j to enable your distributed Java
applications to be monitored by instant messaging
(IM).”

just the thing for a lazy afternoon in the dog days of summer. Perl 5.6.1 for Mac OS X.

i think the schwarzenegger campaign has broken through some kind of fourth wall by getting rob lowe on board. i’m sure they will figure out something for him to do soon, but right now it appears he’s functioning perfectly as a way to get even free press despite the fact that it seems he doesn’t have …any official title with the campaign and his future role seems to be still evolving.”.

i suspect that jesus jones is doing much better financially by playing corporate gigs than, say, rerun is doing by personally greeting fans on the phone. maybe not though. i almost bought a little of reruns time to call kris today on her birthday.

holy crap. big, big, big power outtages all over the place. nyc and detroit are reportedly without power. apparently not terrorism. i’m in west michigan and the power is still on here, but the outtages are as close as lansing.

pssst. hey! yeah, you news.google. entire cities are without power. you might want to update your home page, people are reporting it. update: o.k. at 5:20 eastern it’s up on the front page. so it only took at least 45 minutes for it to make it the front page.

update:michigan public radio reported that apparently the niagara mohawk power grid is overloaded; i can’t verify who reported this because the radio station went off the air again.