The CannibalRabbit bites back
Things that don’t have a home anywhere else
Albert Einstein said:
The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
Which is a reminder of the instruction by Leviticus (19:16) in the Old Testament:
Do not stand idly by when your neighbor’s life is threatened.
It is worth remembering that we should follow the Golden Rule, and treat others the way we would want to be treated. We cannot stand idly by while another is being mistreated.
I think that I have found something to go on my Christmas Present list for next year – a fake British Phone Box [^]. Now given the £1,500 price tag without shipping from the UK, I don’t think it will be coming anytime soon. But there’s no harm in dreaming is there.
Now surely I’m not the only person in Melbourne / Australia that could find a space for one of these in their garden, am I? Also I notice that Phoney Box offer a hire-service what a great way of stirring up interest at a convention, one of these beauties covered in your brand’s vinyl coating. Now that would be a major talking point! And somewhere where you could make a phone call and stand still be heard.
Have I just identified two new business opportunities for CannibalRabbit Enterprises?
Occasionally Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), our default browser at work, just will not display a page because of some mysterious “Error on Page”. When you go to a service like Web2PDF [^] which converts web pages to PDF the page will still display. Which is a little bit annoying.
Web2PDF even let you email a web address to them and they email you the PDF. This means copying the address that Internet Explorer choked on into the Subject line, and entering the email address – simple! But it could be even easier, it is a pain in the backside if you need to do a few of these.
This set me thinking; I have a Google Reader Subscribe button (bookmarklet) and a Delicious type bookmarklet, both of which “paste” a web address into a new page – so why can’t I have an Email version?
Well it turns out these buttons are just snippets of javascript code. And, they are easily altered to do just what I wanted. Fairly quickly I got to:
javascript:location.href='mailto:submit@web2pdfconvert.com?Subject='+encodeURIComponent('%3C'+location.href+'%3E')
The last piece of the puzzle was wrapping the address in “< >” brackets (the %3C and %3E) so that complex addresses get treated properly.
Now with this as a new shortcut in by IE Favorites Bar all I have to do is hit the button, and press send in my email client – Too Easy!
Roger Ebert has a touching piece on the nature of death – “I remember you” [^]:
We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were.
Nigerian Scams Revisited
Tales of scams seem to be a recurring theme around here. Way back in the early days of this blog, 2006, I had a post about a group of people that were going out of their way to scam the Nigerian Scammers [^]. At the time I said that I wasn’t sure how this would sit with the Golden Rule [^]; which is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch has posted a story about the lives and motivations of the Nigerian scammers [^], and the environment that they live in. After reading that it seems that my initial reaction was the right one. This isn’t something that they do gratuitously or for kicks. These people are doing this to survive, to feed their families, and to try to get ahead.
The interesting thing is that despite legal and technical crackdowns the scams continue, but they’ve evolved: “It’s not the glamorous, quick-money world it used to be. Today being a scammer takes smarts and stamina.” Gone is the quick hit replaced by long cons around online dating.