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Some recent bizarre-but-true spam subjects:

Dinky $ch001girl$ of the universe

Obviously trying to avoid keyword filters (not that it helped), but come on—“dinky?” When was the last time you saw that applied to a person? And what exactly is a “schoolgirl of the universe?” It sounds like a new anime series or something, with schoolgirls and jet packs, roaming the galaxy to defeat evildoers.

trill boxing

It’s the fight of the 24th Century! In this corner: Curzon Dax! In this corner: Odan! Who will win? All I know is it won’t be my free time; when I looked up the names, I found Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki with waaay too much info. And there’s all kinds of stuff that’s happened since I stopped watching in the mid-1990s.

It lets a woman ride you like you’ve never been ridden before!

Sent to a spamtrap with a woman’s first name. Sure, you’ll reach a few who might be interested, but statistically speaking you’re better off targeting men. Or, if you take it literally instead of figuratively, horses. Last I looked, though, there weren’t too many horses with email. Unless you count pwnies, I suppose.

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There’s a lot of misinformation out there about various web browsers. Opera can/can’t do this. Firefox can/can’t do that. There’s only so much you can do to promote one product when you only know rumors or outdated facts about another.

Opera users: If someone told you that Firefox was better than Opera because it doesn’t have ads, you wouldn’t take them seriously. You’d know the ads have been gone since last year, and you’d wonder what else they have wrong.

Firefox users: If someone told you Opera was better than Firefox because Firefox won’t let you reorder tabs, you wouldn’t take them seriously. You’d know that Firefox 1.5 did just that, and you’d wonder what else they have wrong.

And neither of you will convince an IE fan that Opera is better because of tabs and a built-in search box because they’ll tell you that IE7 has both.

When you’re trying to convince someone that X is better than Y, and they know Y very well, you’d better know Y well enough not to make statements that the other person knows are false. When you do, you’ll lose credibility, and the rest of your argument — the part you do know well — will suffer for it. (I suspect a lot of software flame wars get started this way!)

So here’s my suggestion: If you want to promote Opera, go and download Firefox 1.5. If you want to promote Firefox, go and download the Opera 9 beta. Either way, try out the IE7 beta (if your Windows version will run it) or fire up Safari (if you’re on a Mac). Mess around with them enough that you’re familiar with how they work, what you can do with them, and how they handle your favorite web pages. That way the next time you face an IE fan (to the extent that IE has fans), or a Firefox fan, or an Opera fan, or a Safari fan, you’ll be armed with accurate information.

As for the post title — I don’t think it’s necessary for the major browsers to be enemies. I think there’s plenty of room for cordial competition rather than a cutthroat struggle. But “Know Your Enemy” is a better attention-getter than “Familiarize yourself with the competition.” 😉

*This post originally appeared in two slightly different forms on my blog Confessions of a Web Developer at the My Opera community and on my Spread Firefox blog.

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A few days ago I was remarking on the signs by the side of the 405 indicating where to find the Cal State Fullerton El Toro Campus. This is odd for several reasons, namely:

  • The signs went up years after the city of El Toro changed its name to Lake Forest.
  • Having the two cities in the name makes it sound like “University of California, Colorado Campus.”
  • From what I could tell, it wasn’t even in El Toro/Lake Forest—it was in Irvine.

Today I noticed that the signs have been changed to read “Cal State Fullerton, Irvine Campus.” That takes care of 2 out of 3, and the remaining one is at least logical, even if it sounds a bit odd. I mean, it’s a satellite campus, what else are you going to call it aside from the school name plus the location?

As for why they started out calling it the El Toro campus: it turns out it’s on the grounds of the former El Toro Marine Base.

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The recent controversy over Star 98.7’s decision to drop their morning talk show (since reversed) and try out a new format brings up one of those great mysteries of the ages: Why do so many radio stations play the same small list of songs over and over?

I understand the desire to play popular songs frequently, since it should improve ratings. I know record labels still pay radio stations to make sure their songs get played, even though it’s technically illegal. (They use intermediaries these days, but I don’t think anyone’s fooled.) But it seems to me that there must be a limit to the effectiveness of playing the same song over and over.

Heck, even Star, masters of the binge-and-purge playlist, got pissed off at Ryan Seacrest once when he played the same song 5 or 6 times in a row. This was probably 3 or 4 years ago, and I caught a few minutes of him saying that he didn’t understand what management was so upset about. “They’re always telling us to support the music,” he said.

Is that what it takes? Playing the same songs 10 times a day is OK, as long as no one song gets played 10 times in a row? Even though it takes up time that could be used to play more songs that might, radical as this might sound, get listeners interested in a new artist or album? That they might actually go out and buy?

In the late 1990s there were several LA-area radio stations that would play deep cuts off an album—songs that hadn’t been released as singles—or the album versions of songs that had. All gone. A few years ago, there was a station that had a policy of no repeats between 9am and 5pm. Gone.

Is it just the push toward the lowest common denominator, spurred on by the rise of giant radio conglomerates? (Clear Channel owns a huge chunk of LA radio.) Maybe. There’s a lot more room on satellite radio, and whenever I’ve been in a store or restaurant that plays satellite radio, I start hearing those album cuts and songs other than the Top 40 of a genre.

Of course, the way cable TV has gone—with former niche networks branching out for that lowest common denominator, giving rise to the lament of 500 channels and nothing on—this may be only a temporary renaissance. The same cycle of homogenization seems to hit all media, turning vitality into banality over and over.

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Sports bar and grill advertising 'Cinco de Drinko'

Now there’s someone who has their priorities lined up. You can tell they’ve got a deep understanding of the true meaning of the holiday. Forget all that Mexican military victory stuff—it’s all about getting drunk on tequila and cervezas.

Actually, now that I think about it, that probably is more or less how most Americans celebrate May 5. The northeast has St. Patrick’s Day. The southwest has Cinco de Mayo. Suddenly, the similarities between the Irish and Mexican flags have taken on an entirely new significance.

As for this event, I think I would’ve gone with “Drinko de Mayo.” It fits the original phrasing better. But as Katie pointed out, that sounds too much like drinking mayonnaise—not something that’s going to bring in too many customers.

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Remember how LiveJournal, TypePad, and related sites were down the other day? The official line was that “Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack.”

It turns out that the DDOS wasn’t aimed at 6A, LJ, or any other part of their network. It was aimed at Blue Security, an anti-spam company, who decided to re-route their web traffic to their blog—a blog hosted on TypePad. So instead of their own site going down, it took out Six Apart’s entire network of millions of bloggers.

Classy move, guys.

I do admire Six Apart’s restraint in not pointing fingers themselves. If it had been my site (though in a way, I suppose it was, since I’ve got an LJ blog, even if I don’t update it very often), I would have been royally pissed off.

Sure, Blue Security didn’t launch the attack—but they did choose where to redirect it. Maybe they thought Six Apart would be able to handle it. Maybe they thought the attackers were targeting them by IP and not domain name. Maybe they were panicked and didn’t think. Maybe they thought things through, but 6A got bitten by the now-all-too-familiar law of unintended consequences. They could easily have pointed their domain name at empty IP space, or to localhost. Redirecting it to a third party was less like deflecting a punch and more like the “Do it to Julia!” moment in 1984, or the classic joke, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.”

(via Spamroll)

Update: Additional articles at Computer Business Review and at Netcraft, and a Slashdot story.

Update 2: According to Blue Security, the DDoS was not targeting their website by name, and the DDoS didn’t attack their blog until after they had already redirected the website. So it looks like it was less a case of them redirecting the attack and more a case of the attackers chasing them.

*Sigh* Must remember to collect all facts before engaging in righteous anger.

Update 3 (May 9): Apparently “all the facts” as reported by Blue Security don’t add up… (via JMason)