General

I’ve received at least 10 spams advertising software to stop spam.

This thing really works.
Do you find yourself consistantly adding your email address to ton’s of spammers “remove me” lists?
I know I did. I tried out this software (the ad and link which I have included at the bottom of this email) and I haven’t gotten an unwanted email in weeks. This program worked wonders for me. If you hate Spam like I do, you owe it to your self to try this program, and forward this email to all of your friends which also hate Spam or as many people possible.

Interesting thread at SlashDot reminiscing about first computers. Mine was a Quest Super Elf (more about it here). This was based on RCA’s COSMAC 1802 processor, using a hex keypad & LED display. It came standard with 256k of RAM, but I had a whopping 4K on the expansion card, which also included an S-100 adapter. I never did get the S-100 video card or TTY keyboard working, so I wasn’t able to run Tiny Basic on it.

I was very surprised to discover that MSN has a COSMAC 1802 group.

The 1802 had 16 general purpose registers with a very simple & elegant instruction set. It was very easy to write machine code by hand, since the first 4 bits represented the opcode with the other 4 bits specifying a register.

I’m NOT interested in a bigger you-know-what and neither are the other people who read my weblog. I’ve banned your IP address and added all of your URL variations to my mt-blacklist. You’re NOT welcome here after spamming me twice today. Go bother someone else now, asshole.

This applies to other spammers as well. If you’re planning to comment spam, think again.

The last two nights the neighbors in my building had cookouts. Tonight was even bigger, with 7 of us from buildings 4 & 5. Most of us did our decorating this weekend and I also did some new planting. A few of us planted poinsettias, which will actually grow here.

Geek-Hosting has been having intermittent outages at one of the routers, so MacMegasite has been going up & down since yesterday.

[mike: ~]$ cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.* |grep “11/24”
11/24 Andrey Zakhvatov born in Chelyabinsk, Russian Federation, 1974
11/24 Lee Harvey Oswald killed by Jack Ruby, 1963
11/24 Anniversary of the New Regime in Zaire
11/24 Mike Cohen born in NYC, 1958
11/24 Scott Joplin born, 1868

There’s still a lot of talk about Jonathan Brandis at wilwheaton.net.

I had mostly forgotten about him after Seaquest DSV, yet hearing about his sudden, unexpected death hit me hard. The other two recent deaths that hit me very hard were John Ritter & Joe Strummer, because they were so sudden & unexpected.

Evidently Jon committed suicide, and it seems that he may have suffered from depression.

I also suffer from depression. I’ve never tried to kill myself, although I have thought about it many times. I’ve been on several different medications at various times. I was taking Wellbutrin for a long time and it seemed to help, but I stopped when I changed medical plans and the new one wouldn’t pay for it. I’ve been taking St. John’s Wort since then. I don’t know if it actually works, but I’ve had a few episodes since I’ve been taking it.

This news really hit me hard. I liked SeaQuest DSV. Another good guy died too young.

Several people have written in with the news of Jonathan Brandis’s apparent suicide at age 27.

I guess many TV watchers put him and me in a category together, because we both played “The Kid” on a SF show, and I’ve heard him called “The Wesley of SeaQuest” more than once. Jesus, I bet that sucked for him. [WIL WHEATON DOT NET: Where is my mind?]

A great PETA ad …for me to poop on! Amusing recent campaign featuring Triumph the Insult Dog to promote spaying/neutering that is catching heat for a subtle Clay Aiken jab. [metafilter.com]

According to the Rolling Stone interview, Clay killed a kitten once. He should be in jail for that.

Though the barb was Triumph’s own, PETA went along thanks in part to comments that Aiken made in a recent Rolling Stonearticle. “I think cats are Satan,” Aiken said. “There’s nothing worse to me than a house cat. When I was about sixteen, I had a kitten and ran over it. Seeing that cat die, I actually think that its spirit has haunted me. I wasn’t afraid of cats before. But now they scare me to death.”