Month: March 2002 Page 1 of 3

Today I've started 3 Usenet posts, 1 live journal entry, and an email and deleted them all.

Bleh.

My brain hurts. What there is left of it, anyway.

… websites with black backgrounds and red text. Oh and those that change your cursor. Blech.

That's all.

Any ideas as to how I can help Mai-Lyn get over the loss of her buddy? I'm trying to give her as much attention as she wants.

She's more vocal than usual (that's a lot for a Siamese), she's more clingy. She's also been slightly more tolerant of Pandora, which is good. I hope that maybe they'll become friends now.

Can't really get a kitten right now for her – and I'm not sure how she'd take it, anyway.

At 12 she's as active and playfull as a 3 year old.

When you have a website that you care about, and update fairly often, you like to know where you get visitors from. At least, I do. It's amusing to see the search phrases that result in hits. (Scary sometimes, too) I don't advertise my site much at all, just a link on usenet and email sigs, and of course from my journal page.

So I'm browsing through my counter stats, actually looking to see if a post that Rob made had gotten any attention, when I notice that I'm getting a lot of hits to Kamir's page from various livejournal users friends pages. They didn't happen to be on my friends list, so I took a quick look, and I couldn't find on any of those pages a link to Kamir's page. Hmm. A puzzlement, I thought.

Then I notice the one thing, or rather, the one person that each of those friends lists had in common. Ah hah! sez I. It must be a friends only post.

So now I'm more puzzled. He knew Kamir, and liked him, I thought. I remember a post he made about being surprised at how smart they seemed. So what was it? A post about how he was sad to hear that a friend's cat had died? Wouldn't a note (email or livejournal) have sufficed? Perhaps he's making fun of the somewhat maudlin rainbow page. I could give a reason for that page that isn't entirely due to the loss of an 11 year companion, but I won't. That would explain the friends only part. Perhaps he's making his whole journal friends only and this has nothing to do with me. (Oh, but *everything* has to do with me, of course! You people are all just figments of my imagination! :) ) But a friends only journal hasn't really been his style.

Oh well. Just like car wrecks, government, and news stories – I'll never know the whole story.

My beloved husband () has been playing around with creating graphics, a thing called “photoshopping”. Not that you need Photoshop to do it, of course. He's using Gimp. Anyhow, he made the rainbow bridge picture of Kamir for me, and now he's done it again. Due to an amusing thread on a usenet newsgroup, he's crucified Ronald McDonald. Some things just aren't right. <grin>

I have to put my baby to sleep today. It's time – he's in too much pain and I have to do it. :( He's been with me for 11 years – through many moves and several boyfriends. He went through a man-hating period, but fell in love with my husband. Perhaps the furry mouse Rob brought to our first date helped. This sucks.

And why do I use the british spelling for behaviour and colour?

The following is posted for my husband, , 'cause he says no one reads his journal. Well, I say, no one POSTS in that journal, either, now, hmm??

Well, the straw the broke the camel's back came today. I got another newsletter from Barnes & Noble that was web bugged. Plain and simple, I'm not going to take it from companies that think they can gather information on me without my explicit permission.

The following is my letter to them, to the newsletter comments, investor relations, E-mail according to Yahoo! finance, and a guess at the President's address

Due to the sleazy marketing tactics used by Barnes&Noble, you have lost a
customer, both online & offline. Since I know I can not trust the online
company, I have no reason to believe I can trust the offline one either.



What do you do? Simple. Your newsletters are web bugged (see
http://www.privacyfoundation.org/resources/webbug.asp). I did not and will
not consent to being profiled without my express permission, something you
are doing with these bugs. These bugs are nowhere addressed in your privacy
policy. I dislike the bugging of links, but tolerate it since it does
require my action to activate a link. Web bugs DO NOT require my permission
and such techniques I will not tolerate.



I have terminated my dealings with other companies that use web bugs, and I
am not going to make an exception for you. Please remove all information
from your systems regarding the e-mail address [my e-mail] , as
well as terminate all subscriptions to all newsletters to that address. Any
further newsletters received after one week from today will be viewed as UCE
(spam), and reported as such to the appropriate internet providers.



Robert Myers
[my address]




(*FORMERLY* frequented Barnes & Noble at [local B&N])

There’s a web bug in this post. It was sent from Barnes and Noble to my husband. We decided to poison it. If you’re as annoyed by deceptive marketing as we are, feel free to put this bug in your journal, or anywhere you’d like:

<IMG SRC=”http://email.bn.com/cgi-bin6/flosensing?y=Fgh0Cch5S0Bzi1″>

Err… what’s a web bug??

Glad you asked! See the gobbledygook in the tag? The “Fgh0Cch5S0Bzi1” part? That means that when Rob opens that email “they” (in this case Barnes and Noble) know that he read it. They could also collect other information, such as the IP address of the computer that fetched the Web bug, the URL of the page that the Web bug is located on, the URL of the Web bug image, the time the Web bug was viewed, the type of browser that fetched the Web bug image, a previously set cookie value. Anything that the browser normally passes can be collected.

Here’s a good resource on web bugs. Highly recommended reading, if you have privacy concerns.

I’m sure you’ve gotten those silly chain emails, promising money or disney trips if you forward, ’cause the email is being tracked. Well, web bugs are the real way to track email.