Check out The Subterraneans by Jane vs World at their MySpace site! Like a kind of feel-good 70s offspring of St Etienne and Ben Folds. Also reminds me of a less glossy version of one of my favourite quasi-Vancouver bands The New Pornographers. Listen to the song! I just bought the CD, and it should arrive soon. I can’t wait. Exciting new fluffy power-pop to restore balance to my recently overly post-punk and ambient world.

Even after my rant on spam, I do still get amused by the better examples of the art form. Like this one. For advertising in Minsk newspapers. All things being equal, I much prefer this to standard penis enlargement or Nigerian scam spam.

Dear Sirs,

The Byelorussian advertising agency [insert evil spammer name here] has pleasure to offer you promote your business in the Byelorussian press. You are welcome to participation in a project Japanese Business at the Byelorussian Market. The project has been carried out by the advertising agency International Club since January 2003. We are happy to offer reduced by half advertising rates.

Special prices for your advertising are now available to:
1)The newspaper Vecherny Minsk (Evening Minsk)

– the most popular newspaper of the Minsk city.—Circulation: 31235 copies—Color: b/w—Distribution area: The Republic of Belarus—Price per 1 cm2 : b/w – $1,3;—Minimal size: 10 cm2 (4,5cm x 2,2cm)—Maximal size: 2106 cm2 (39,0 cm x 54,0 cm)—Publication date: May 5, 2006.—Deadline of providing the advertising materials: April 28, 2006.

2)The newspaper Republic

– the most wide-read government newspaper, aimed at businessmen and official quarts.—Circulation: 55959 copies—Color: full-color —Distribution area: The Republic of Belarus—Price per 1 cm2 : full-color – $2,0—Minimal size: 10 cm2 (4,5 cm x 2,2 cm) )—Maximal size: 2106 cm2 (39,0 cm x 54,0 cm)—Publication date: May 13, 2006.—Deadline of providing the advertising materials: April 28, 2006.
3)The newspaper Zvyazda (Star) – the oldest newspaper of Belarus, widely read through the Byelorussian regions.—Circulation: 42103 copies—Color: full-color —Distribution area: The Republic of Belarus—Price per 1 cm2 : full-color – $2,0—Minimal size: 10 cm2 (4,5 cm x 2,2 cm) )—Maximal size: 2106 cm2 (39,0 cm x 54,0 cm)—Publication date: May 13, 2006.—Deadline of providing the advertising materials: April 28, 2006.
4)The newspaper Narodnaya GazetApril (People’s newspaper)—the authoritative republican newspaper that finds its popularity in the business circles.—Circulation: 26119 copies—Color: full-color —Distribution area: The Republic of Belarus—Price per 1 cm2 : full-color – $2,0—Minimal size: 10 cm2 (4,5 cm x 2,2 cm) )—Maximal size: 2106 cm2 (39,0 cm x 54,0 cm)—Publication date: May 13, 2006.—Deadline of providing the advertising materials: April 28, 2006.

If you have any questions concerning the special edition, please, feel free to contact our advertising agency International Club.
Tel./fax: (+375-17) 288-xx-xx, 288-xx-x
E-mail:iclub@xx.xx.by

With best regards,
xx xx
General manager
Advertising agency xx xx
xx, Republic of Belarus
Minsk, xx Ave, xx.

PS: Your e-mail address has been taken from public open sources. We beg your pardon if this message caused some inconvenience to you. You can stop receiving letters by replying this letter with the subject “delete”. If you have “indirect” e-mail addresses which forward messages to your real e-mail addresses, please inform us about it for your own convenience.

I hate spammers. They completely ruined one Christmas for me, and their continuing exploits are at least annoying, at most a waste of time. In the jurgen dot ca digital empire, I’ve pretty much taken care of the dreaded “comment spam” by including that “type this number” thing. Personal email is handled relatively well by Apple Mail.app, with its built-in Baysean spam filter. It’s been correctly sorting hundreds of spam emails every day.

But now, I have a problem.

First, for my less-technical readers, a short geek lesson. Just like in real post, the return address on a piece of email does not have to be your own. You can put anything you want in there. Your address, a mate’s address, even Bill Gates’ address. Some ISPs limit the range of addresses they will send from to ones that look like customers of theirs, but most of the time, email can look like it’s coming from anyone.

Spammers love this. They can put any email address they want to in the “From” field, and whenever the spam bounces back to them, they don’t get the bounce, but the person whose email address is in the “From” field gets the bounce.

Right now, that person is me; some mangy network terrorist scumbag is using my email address as a “From” address. I’m sure this isn’t personal: some program saw a link somewhere to my site and is using that domain name as a From address.

I’m now getting a couple hundred bounces every day from email that I haven’t sent.

Two things are happening as a result of this:

1. When someone gets a piece of spam, seemingly from jurgen.ca, they might come to the site and see my well crafted but perhaps overly grey site and think nasty things about me.
2. I’m getting way more crap email that the spam filter isn’t capable of dealing with properly. I can’t sent all bounces to the spam folder, because I need to know if genuine email has not gone through.

I can’t really solve the first one, and that’s fine. I’m sure it won’t be the first time people have thought bad things about me, and it doesn’t bother me that much. However, problem number two is more of a concern. I suppose I could work up some filters to catch most of the reverse-spam (“maps”?), but it doesn’t really solve the problem, and seems like a bit of a hack. Any geeks out there with suggestions?

The BBC, bless them, has given bloggers around the world the perfect excuse for making lots of bad Uranus jokes.

I read an interesting article a few weeks ago, speculating on the possibility of an Apple iPhone. I wish I could remember the link, because it made a comparison of the number of iPods shipped vs the number of Sony Ericsson phones shipped and revealed that there are more iPods than Sony Ericsson phones. I was surprised to hear that.

It’s no secret that Apple is working on a phone. A little birdy tells me that these phones that Apple is working on will not only connect to traditional GSM networks, but are able to do SIP over WiMax. (SIP is a popular voice over IP protocol, WiMax is a “next generation” network, similar to 802.11b/g “Wifi”). Intel is a major supplier of WiMax chipsets. I’ll repeat that: Intel is a major supplier of WiMax chipsets. Everything’s starting to come together really nicely. The same little birdy reckons they’ll be ready worldwide for Christmas (I’ve got my money on MacWorld in January).

The normally insightful John Gruber of Daring Fireball is letting is Mac fanboyism run away with him. In his most recent posting he looks at Apple’s inevitable Boot Camp software and compares it to running Classic in MacOS X: “running apps through Classic was viewed from the get-go as something to be done while holding one’s nose, so too will Windows be viewed in the post-Boot Camp world.”

But John! There’s one important difference. Apple was very clear that Classic was going to go away soon. “Move to OS X!” was the message, “Classic will stop working someday!”. As much as you and I would like to dream, Windows isn’t going away soon. Mac developers had to move to OS X whether they liked it or not, because if they kept developing for Classic, their audience will shrivel to nothing in a few years.

The fear that Windows-on-Mac-hardware implies the eventual death or marginalization of Mac OS X is baseless. Sure, third party developers could start using “Just boot into Windows” as their answer to questions regarding Mac support, but this is no more likely to be popular or successful than it was for developers whose OS X strategy was “Just use Classic”.

So let’s say that I’m a development company that just spend a million dollars developing some kind of program for Windows (90-something percent of the market). This program will also work on Macs (under 10 percent of the market). Why would I spend a bunch more money to develop something for the Mac? They can just run it in Windows. So it’ll look like shit. What do I care? I’m a Windows developer. I’m used to things looking like shit. The Mac people won’t like it, but if they want to use my program, they’ll put up with it.

There are lots of developers that are only grudgingly supporting the Mac. You can tell which ones they are: they’re already making crappy Mac programs that look and act like Windows (like this one, which I played with recently and was very unimpressed). I’d guess that most of them will stop supporting the Mac and tell people “just run Windows”.

User: Can I buy a Mac version of your software?
Company: No, we don’t support the Mac.
User: But I need to use your software!
Company: Your Mac can run Windows, just run our software in Windows.
User: I don’t like Windows.
Company: Boo frikkin hoo.

This is quite a gamble. Steve’s betting that virtualising Windows will increase market share (and mind share) faster than developers jump ship. I’m not sure this will happen.

Windows is not Classic. Everyone knew Classic’s days were numbered. Windows will be sticking around for quite a while.

This was sent to me as one of those eternal uncredited Internet forwards…

There’s a song by Tom Cochrane that I call my “homesick song”. It’s called The Secret is to Know When to Stop but the full line is “The secret is to know when to stop remembering”. It talks about shared memories, and even though the lyrics don’t explicitly suggest it, I get a sense of melancholy from the song, as if he’s longing for ”..the night / That we ran out / Out on English Bay” or when “we drove through a rainbow up on Rogers Pass …”. Tom sings about places I know, and I know how he feels. A bit like Douglas Coupland, I suppose.

There’s another song. I’m pretty sure that if it’s about a specific place, it’s about nowhere I’ve ever been. It’s also a bit melancholy, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s someone else’s “homesick song”. It’s close to being mine. You’ve got to break your neck to see the stars in this town.

The Old Years [official site]
bq. (My Friend the Chocolate Cake: David Bridie)

Watch the round bright moon rise
Over the pale blue bay
And maybe I’ll return to here
When I’m old and grey

But perhaps I’ll just be stupid
And not all calm and wise
Perhaps I won’t be satisfied
Just a little weary in my eyes

You got to break your neck to see
A star shine in this yard
You got to break your neck to see
A star shine in this yard

I’d like to have a good friend
To laugh away the years
Remember how we buggered up
And how we broke down

You got to break your neck to see
A star shine in this yard
You got to break your neck to see
A star shine in this yard

And if we wasted this adventure
And if we stay still for too long

You got to break your neck to see
A star shine in this yard
You got to break your neck to see
A star shine in this yard

I’m planning to see them this Sunday and I sure hope they play this one. Somehow, it makes me less homesick.

This is too good to pass up. Thanks to The Register, that posted a story about a hilarious eBay auction. Be sure to read the Q&A in the screen shot. Priceless.