The Grand Rapids Catholic Secondary Schools holds an annual Benefactors’ Raffle in an effort to provide tuition assistance to needing families who attend their system. They always try to get a unique prize for the drawing. This year they decided to sell 500 tickets on-line for their raffle. The grand price winner gets to choose between a 2006 Solstice from Gavin Pontiac, or $20,000 cash. Tickets are $125, and I am seriously considering buying one. Should I?

I did knock together a quick site, borrowing some elements from here and there for them to get the site up and running. Thank you to Reese over at emTwo for helping me to get going on the project.

Customer Care seems to be the newest buzzword out there. Microsoft is on board today as they revamp the framework on which they deliver customer care to do many things, including … to help you help yourself. The last “customer care” experience I had at Best Buy led me to conclude that they left out the word “don’t” from the phrase. They took my complaint and said they were sorry. They were then happy and satisfied, but I was not. I hope that Microsoft’s move to streamline customer care is successful and that the cost savings they hope to generate will translate to more affordable products and not just better share returns to investors.

In Eastern Michigan, Daniel Lin pled guilty to three felony charges arising from 2004 federal anti-spam law violations. His brother and two other defendants were dismissed from similiar charges as a result of the plea. I sometimes wonder if the change say from erectile dysfunction in my spam box to say mortages is driven by a switch in who is advertising, or who is no longer distributing spam.

Spam continues to waste tremendous resources. The only positive effect is that I now see far less junk mail, and unlike junk mail that I would have to dispose of, this can simply be deleted.

I look forward to a day when my spam filter is 100%, but I get so much mail, that it just cannot be that accurate. In fact, I have had recent difficulties lately with one of my accounts where the ISP is suddenly using a RBL driven spam filter and it is rejecting legitmate mail that I should be receiving. There is certainly much more to be done on that front.

CNN.com reports on a thirty-three person sting involving child porn. The arrests apparently involve people who used credit cards to buy some ugly stuff. We have previously written about how to report child pornography. The reality is that there is no way to effectively combat the problem because of the worldwide scope of the issue, limited budgets and understanding by local law enforcement, and the difficulty of tracking down the culprits.

Most mature adults would agree I think that child pornography is discusting business and like to see more enforcement. I hope this is the first of many steps in that direction. For cases involving immediate risk to a child, follow the suggestions on the CyberTipLine page.

In a huge project pictures have been taken at street level of every public street in the Netherlands and you can then look at a satellite picture from Google Maps and the corresponding images at street level as highlighted in this article in CNET.

I decided to check my stylesheets for validation something I had not done for a while, to find to my surprise that ones that validated before (and had not been altered) had some new warnings.

They were all about needing the background-color attribute along with the color attribute in most areas, that was in my case anyway. Have been busy correcting this, all are now done, but have had to go through my pages to see if the render as I want them. The validating url is at :-

If you have some time to spare, check it out!

I came onto this site today that promises a different look at the news. It says things are published on Swoogle, a semantics search engine. Only thing is that they appear to have borrowed their look color and design features from elsewhere and Swoogle has a familiar ring to it as well.

Who knows what they mean? I don’t when they say really key stuff like:

The extracted meaning from the RSS descriptions of the news articles are then converted into Semantic Web representation such as RDF. This is also stored in a Redland Triple store and lets users perform semantic queries over the documents. This enables them to search for information that would otherwise not be easy to find using simple keyword based search. It also makes available important and live new related automatically extracted meta-data and semantics to agents by publishing it in RDF.

Trust me as soon as I figure out, I’ll let you know.