I order to protect myself from a potential deluge of spam from suspicious service offerings, I wanted to use a disposable email address.

Of course Google turned up a gem, which I had heard of before, but never used called Spamgourmet

Their service is simple, but clever and best of all free! Basically, after you register a valid email address, you can then create a temporary email address, with a limited message forward limit, at any time.

John pointed me to another service called Spamex with a different approach and more features, but it’ll cost $9.95/year (albeit, not much!)

Well, in light of the fact that within a few months, sleep will likely become a scarce commodity for me and Catherine. So, I think perhaps I should investigate the “Sleep Is Now An Option” drug.

Provigil … was a drug originally developed to treat narcolepsy, the inability to stay awake. Now Cephalon, the maker of Provigil, has received a letter of approval from the FDA extending the approved uses of the drug to treatment of jet-lag and swing-shift syndrome.
In reality the drug is set to replace the caffeine in No-Doze as the all-nighter anti-sleep aid of choice. In fact, it’s much better than No-Doze - with Provigil, you can literally stay awake for days, alert and with a remarkable lack of side effects. “(via SciScoop)

It’s official, Guinness is good for you!

Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch interviews Microsoft social computing group researcher Lili Cheng, which reveals some more insight (including screen shots) into MSFT’s social-networking software code-named “Wallop“:

“We’ve been really interested in blogs, wikis, authoring and syndication around RSS, and social networking software in general,” Cheng tells Microsoft Watch. “We were imagining how these things could combine. And Wallop is our first experiment in this space.”

“A lot of these ideas (RSS, wikis) are more novel and intriguing,” she says. “They are about aggregating sites and getting more information out. It matches the way people communicate.”

I’d love to be a part of the beta. However, perhaps Lili’s work will inspire the OneNote Product team to take my advice and integrate OneNote as a Wiki (err, Wallop) front-end.

I’m truly amazed! I wish I knew Japanese to provide more details, but apparently Nobuya Chikada has created an excellent remake of the classics Pacman and Space Invaders in Microsoft Excel (Yes, I said Excel!) Do check it out. (Link via Les Orchard)

Note: you’ll need to lower your Excel macro security level to get it to run (at least that’s was what I had to do in Excel 2003), but it’s certainly worth it!

I usually don’t like to add too much extra paraphernalia to the default Windows desktop. However, after about an hour of sporadic usage, I think the Google Deskbar is on its way to becoming required gear for me.

“Google Deskbar enables you to search with Google from any application without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Installs easily in your Windows taskbar.”

Morphix is similar to Knoppix in that it’s a complete bootable Linux Distro on CD. The main difference however is that Morphix is modular — with ISO packages ranging from light-weight GUI to gamer

“Morphix is a modular distribution, with live-cd support (you burn the CD, you put it in your CD-Rom drive, you boot and it works… no harddisk-installation necessary, doesn’t touch your data). Also, installing Morphix on a harddisk is a breeze, if you want to. Just click on the icon on the desktop, or choose the installer from the morphix/babytux submenu.”

Note that many of the Morphix ISOs are still beta and should still be considered experimental.

I just read this via /. about Microsoft’s interest in other search engines:

“Microsoft had also been linked with buys of any of the remaining search players, including Ask Jeeves and Looksmart, though the company has recently dumped Looksmart after deciding its results did not match up to those of its other search partners, notably Overture.”

This seems like a smart approach: Stop spam at the SMTP-level with Whitelists and Bayesian filtering using the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP):

“The Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) Server project aims to create an open source platform-independent SMTP Proxy server which implements whitelists and Bayesian filtering to rid the planet of the blight of unsolicited email (UCE). UCE must be stopped at the SMTP server. Anti-spam tools must be adaptive to new spam and customized for each site’s mail patterns. This free, easy-to-use tool works with any mail transport and achieves these goals requiring no operator intervention after the initial setup phase.”

Quotes from an article in The Economist about Google’s ability to sustain its market-share.

“For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little—only a bright idea by another set of geeks—to lose the lead.”

“Yahoo!, in fact, will probably be the first to attack. It now … has under its own roof all the elements of the business model that made Google such a success.

“Even more frightening … Microsoft smells blood. It is currently working on its own search algorithm, which it hopes to make public early next year, around the probable time of Google’s share listing.”

I do feel that Google’s almost utilitarian design, core focus and loyal user-base certainly factor significantly in its market-share dominance, but as was mentioned in the article, Netscape had much of that as well. So at best, Google’s added advantages are short-term assets.