A note to spammers

Attention all spammers (yes you, the ones who have sent me upwards of 4000 emails this month):

I am not interested in weight loss products, viagra, hot stock market picks or refinancing my home. Emails on these subjects are a waste of both of our time. If you'd like to effectively mass market to me via unsolicited bulk emails, I suggest you try sending emails on any of the following topics:

• spaceships
  
• the future
  
• really good french fries
  
• swords
  
• keytars
  
• key-sword-tars
  
• pirates
  
• ninjas
  

I can be reached at ivarley@spamcop.net, and I look forward to receiving your advertisements and scams on the above mentioned topics. Thanks for your consideration, and I hope you rot in jail and / or hell.

Google Cal!

So ... Google Calendar is live. What it will do is pretty rad - Ajax interface, intelligent text parsing, sharing cals (editable by multiple people, like, family members), rss / ical feeds, etc. All of this is awesome. I've been working with it for a couple hours now, and I can see that it's going to be a center point in my digital life for the forseeable future. I've been wanting this killer app for so long, and now it's here. Wo0t!

Also, I drank two glasses of DP earlier tonight, and I can't fall asleep. So that's a good time to play with it, right?

So: it's not without kinks - at least, it's not tonight. When I uploaded the file from my desktop cal (Sunbird) and Google got all the dates wrong by a couple hours. So I deleted it (an ordeal cuz of server flakiness) and entered my events by hand (which ruled because of the natural language capability ... you can just type "Dinner with Jarle on Tuesday at 8" and it interprets the parts of that phrase into fields in the calendar entry. Hasn't really gotten one wrong yet, either.

It also seems that this evening, some settings changes (creating new calendars, updating some preferences) are completed slowly, if at all. I can't get it to allow Uberjam's account to see a shared calendar of mine, for example. Hopefully it'll get ironed out by morning.

I've been thinking (while waiting for it to correct itself) about how I want to set up my calendars. Here's what I'm thinking:

First, I've got my personal cal. This holds anything that I have personally committed myself (and only myself) to going to. Or, maybe "committed" is the wrong word, since this would probably also house things I'd like to get to (like, a concert I want to see but don't absolutely have to go to).

Second, Uberjam and I need to be able to share a family calendar of events. These are events that pertain to us both, like parties we're going to, trips we're going on, etc. We can both edit it, and set reminders that go to us both.

Third, I need a calendar of events for the band, which is editable by all 3 guys in the band (adding blackout dates, entering gig information, etc.). Jill should also be able to see this calendar, as should the other "band significant others". And IDEALLY, there would also be an easy way to then publish the confirmed public dates directly from this interface to our web site. That might be asking too much for now. But it IS important to eventually offer people who use google calendar a way to subscribe to all of our dates ... and GC offers that. So, rad.

Finally, I'd love to see other projects I'm involved in create calendars that I can subscribe to (but not necessarily edit). Other bands I'm in, groups I'm part of, etc - all could publish this way so I can see them all right in this interface.

Anyway, it looks pretty rockin' here at 3:30 am, even if there are some kinks tonight. Go GOOG!

Abstraction Layers

Just read a great article about creating "abstraction layers" in organizations.

The term "abstraction layer" might not mean much to you if you're not a programmer, but in a nutshell, it's a self-imposed separation of functions into different areas. E.g. don't mix up the code that shows the boxes and buttons with the code that decides what the interest rate on the loan is going to be.

However, I think this philosophy is applicable to any part of any organization that needs to focus on doing an A+ job in a narrow area. In the article, he even makes an analogy to Dolly Parton, and the "abstraction layer" (i.e., support infrastructure) she needs to do her job.

Interesting stuff. Joel's blog is one of the best out there, when it comes to writing about computers and software.

Emmet's page

OK, I promise this blog will not turn into "all dog, all the time". But I just wanted to share that Emmet now has his own page on Dogster. Come be Emmet's friend! I mean, if you're a dog.

Personally, I was pretty amazed with how fast he picked up typing. He's a terrible speller, but you can't get it all in your first week.

Emmet Comes To Austin

So, a new friend has joined our family: Meet Emmet!



Emmet is a dog on the move.



In particular, he's moved to Austin.



He heard that was where all the fashionable dogs were going.



Emmet is nothing if not fashionable.



Em heard through the grapevine that we were looking for a standard Dachshund puppy.



Em happens to be a standard Dachshund puppy.



We thought it was a fine match.



Emmet couldn't be reached for comment at press time.



But we're pretty psyched about him.



See ya round!



You can download hi-res versions on Flickr if'n you like.

Ow! My browser!

Happy 4/04 everybody.

Speaking of which ... tonight at 3 seconds after 1:02am, the date will be: 1:02:03 04/05/06. Isn't that great? Zzzzzzz.

Oh, yeah, the sesquicentenemail is up.