Flying Cheapskates

A few weeks back I wrote in WSJ.com about Bezurk.com, a great travel website that’s on a par, if not better, than Kayak, Sidestep, Zuji and Yahoo! FareChase. Here’s what I wrote: What I like about Bezurk’s site is that it follows what I think are the best unwritten rules of Web 2.0, the new,… Read More »

Vista – Upgrading Without Dignity

  Calvin & Hobbes, © Universal Press Syndicate. Original work by Bill Watterson. Found via Transmogrifier.org I’ve often wondered about Windows Vista, and I’m still wondering. Admittedly, I was slow to adopt Windows 3.0, 95, 98 and XP — I think I’ve had too many wasted days upgrading, and am deeply skeptical of the whole… Read More »

A Tip off the Old Block

Chris “Long Tail” Anderson fires off at PR with both barrels, blocking unsolicited press releases and naming-and-shaming those who sent them: Everything else gets banned on first abuse. The following is just the last month’s list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me… Read More »

Strip CAPTCHA Spam

Whatever useful stuff the good guys come up with, the bad guys ain’t far behind. A few months back I wrote about researchers at Carnegie Mellon coming up with a way to use CAPTCHA tools to help decipher words in text by the Internet Archive. The basic idea is that the effort to prevent spammers… Read More »