Breaking out of email jail
Howdy, friends. I took some time off recently, but now I'm back.
I spent some time unplugged from the virtual universe, which includes the Twitterverse. Truth be told, it felt good to be disconnected for awhile. It made me realize there are a lot of things that I think I need, but really don't -- such as an iPhone 3GS.
Mind you, I happen to now own the 3GS, but I don't need it and what it represents, which is total connectivity every waking and sleeping moment of my day.
Another one of the awesome things about taking time off is that my email inbox here at The Baltimore Sun fills up rather quickly and gets clogged with spam and bacon (bacon, as you may know, isn't just another tasty pork product; it can be stuff like email subscriptions that you sign up for, but hardly ever read, aka a milder form of spam.)
So, in addition to catching up on voicemails and weeding out spammers on this blog, some of us here can spend an hour or two just clearning out our emails, just so we can get our accounts active again.
Stay with me here. Hit the jump.
* One of my favorite emails came from reader BryaninTimonium, informing me that this blog had been hacked. Here's the email:
Gus-
I think your blog has been hacked.
Bryan
Short, sweet, to the point. Thanks, Bryan! In actuality, some malicious spam bots had somehow redirected my blog to some type of unformatted calendar page. It was odd. But I think it's fixed now, unless you can't see this post right now. If you can't read this blog post, let me know. Hehe.
* A video of speaker from the last Ignite Baltimore event was featured on Ignite's main website via O'Reilly Media. (Good to see Baltimore folks getting recognized on the national Ignite stage, wouldn't you say?)
* BMore Media launched last week. Another spot online for local news and features. The more, the merrier. The consumer/reader wins!
* Here's a funny "Best of Craigslist" posting brought to my attention by a PR firm that does marketing for Craigslist: Someone from Baltimore was looking for a "personal texting assistant" back in June. Anybody see this ad before?
* TedxMidAtlantic is coming to Baltimore in November, and it's gonna be held at Falvey Hall at MICA. Mark your calendars. I'm stoked about it.
* This wasn't an email, but rather, a book left on my desk by a mystery gifter. The book is "The World According to Twitter," by David Pogue, NYTimes tech columnist, and his 500,000 followers. Talk about crowdsourcing -- the book compiles tweet responses to Pogue's various and wacky questions, and sells for $12.95.
Or here's a DIY tip: you could grow your own followers on Twitter, pose your own wacky questions to them, and do your own little social media experiment. Save the 13 bucks for your cellphone's texting plan. :-)
This is an archived version of the technology blog. For updated coverage, see the current baltTech location: baltimoresun.com/balttech
Comments
Gus,
Welcome back! Looking forward to more Baltimore-related tech goodness.
I should mention the little glitch your reader noticed where the page was being forwarded to an unsightly calendar page, as it originated at our site, Localist.
If your readers aren't aware, the "Baltimore Tech events" block on the right side of this blog is a widget pulling content from Localist.
The issue was: early versions of Internet Explorer were misinterpreting a specific element in the JavaScript call to the widget, causing it to redirect to our widget output page after a few seconds.
For you JS nerds out there, it was the defer="defer" reference. It's supposed to tell the page "Load this content last, so it doesn't slow down the rest of the page."
Unfortunately, IE gets angry at that suggestion.
The offending code has been removed and all is well again.
Sorry about the confusion. It won't happen again!
Mykel Nahorniak
Awesome. Thanks for clarifying this, Myke!! -gs
Posted by: Mykel | August 17, 2009 12:32 PM
Gus, welcome back! A sabbatical like that is good for the soul, helps you remember the world doesn't revolve around our communications with each other!
Sounds like you need an OtherInbox account to escape from all that bacn! :-)
Posted by: Mike Subelsky | August 18, 2009 10:45 AM