An article in C-Net confirms something I saw first hand last week, the Sober worm is again in full swing. One of the biggest problems with big time proliferation on emails is that it clogs bandwidth, and can consume alotted disk space rapidly as inboxes and sent mailboxes fill. It will be interesting to see how many commercial users return from the four day Thanksgiving Holiday to email systems needing a serious dose of help due to overload. Even more of concern, perhaps, will be the rush of new emails as people return from the holiday, infect themselves and then share the fun in one big rush about mid-morning Monday when they all get back to work.

Some tips for safe email:
1. turn off html formatted email – read your email in plain text only
2. never open an attachment unless you know exactly what it is – resolve any doubt in follow-up communication with the sender before opening it
3. use Thunderbird or another alternative to Outlook or Outlook Express

I happened on to a very nice feature for WordPress that is available as a plug-in called Draftlettes. What it does is notify other users or non-users selected by you that a draft has been posted so that they can take a shot at it before it goes public. Very nice idea.

The age old issue comes up. What should I get my wife for Christmas?

Here are some ideas:
1. Get her a couple of nice hair cuts. She is a very pretty woman, but the last thing she spends money on is herself. For a couple of years she went to a high end haircut place (at the insistance of a friend) where some guy who has boyfriends primped and polished her do. The result was usually excellent, but expensive. Now she more typically uses one of the local people and it isn’t bad, but it is also not “that”. Does giving this gift say “Honey, you don’t look good?”

2. A digital thermometer? This thing looks pretty handy. I cannot tell you how many overdone burgers I have had to be sure that the thing is absolutely, positively done. Most thermometers don’t do much for thinner things like burgers.

3. A gift certificate for a massage or two? I did this a couple of years ago and she really enjoyed it. My wife works hard. She actually has troubles sitting still (and that sometimes annoys me because it then bothers her if I do — even though I might be working on this site or something actually productive.

4. Something else that I have yet to think of?

5. A digital camera. I have a Sony Mavica, but it doesn’t seem to work well with her Windows XP computer, even though I got the newest drivers. It won’t connect via the USB cable, so you have to finalize the mini-cd every time you want to put a picture on the computer. She has started selling a few extra items on Ebay, so she might find this convenient and might enjoy having a nice camera in her purse as well.

As always, if you found something on our site helpful, we welcome donations (button at the bottom of every page) and if you donate, I might actually have enough money to get her one of these things :-).

What I really want, however, is for you to leave a comment sharing your thoughts. Please let me know if you are male or female as well. I suspect that the answers by female readers should be given a little more weight in scoring, but then again, you guys may have the pearl of wisdom I am looking for.

p.s. What got me thinking like this you might wonder? Well today is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. Thanksgiving is really a great holiday in my book because you actually slow down a minute and tell people that you appreciate them. You think about what is important in your life. You assess. What the day after has become is however annoying to be honest. It is a great big shopping day when people go get deals on Christmas presents. It is the day that many people have based a personal bankruptcy on. So I almost decided to venture out to get a free computer or $199 Toshiba laptop at Circuit City. Fortunately I read the small print. Free is with a one year AOL subscription. Sorry, but that isn’t free. And of course it is $650 with $650 in rebates (tax not rebated), so if you mess up and don’t process a rebate just right … well you have probably had that experience in your life sometime along the way I imagine. Anyway, I am very thankful.

This is kind of fun for a minute. You generate a warning label that you can then print out and put on your sister’s forehead or something else you choose to label.

There has been a reported glitch in Google’s new site map statistics program. Apparently, some were able to exploit a header in a 404 page to gain verification and thus view site statistics for competitors’ and strangers’ sites. This was reported here by David Naylor and he attaches a screen shot to demonstrate his success.

For those who missed the announcement, Google recently made the sitemap statistics a free service available to the masses. It appears that a small glitch allowed external users to actually view your statistics. I might add that the glitch results apparently from your server being misconfigured to return a 200 OK header for 404 pages that should show not found in the header. This is a known condition to Google according to a post dated September 7th, 2005. Did Google update that post and not redate it, or has there been no desire up until now to take out that problem?

This is kind of fun (this was originally a link to emailblender.com but appears it has gone out of business) … for a minute anyway. Toss in some words and see what comes out the other end. The email blender allows you to send the output to your friends and see if they can unscramble it. I doubt they can.

Well this is something new and fresh in Internet news. Newsvine.com is the brainchild of several former ESPN/Disney web people including Mike of MikeIndustries.com, one of my favorite technology reads.

A couple of things make this somewhat unique:
1. it works off of a bookmarklet on your browser
2. readers rate stories to act as a super editors board
3. you will be able to comment on and chat about news stories as they go
4. you can author pages if you want and then keep any advertising revenue generated from those pages
5. it will generate pages about subjects on the fly …

It sounds intriguing. Will it work? Probably. But what will it become? Garbage in equal garbage out is the oldest saying in the book. Will they over time give higher preference to raters and authors of established credibility? If so, the quality will rise. If not, I predict the noise to content ratio will go off the charts. Time will tell.