Bad Spam

Checking my email this morning, I had four messages in the Spam folder advertising child porn.

Most spam I just delete without concern. But in this case I wasn't going to just dump the junk. Gmail doesn't have a one-click reporting feature, so I did an online search and found that the Cyber Tipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children http://www.cybertipline.com/ has an online reporting form. (It includes options for reporting incidents in or from the UK, Australia, and Canada as well.)

I'm pretty liberal about live and let live, but the exploitation of children is something that no one should be okay with.

NaNoWriMo 2008

It’s almost November! You know what that means ...

Nah, not the elections. More important than that, it’s National Novel Writing Month.

NaNoWriMo calls to us all to connect with the writer within and write 50,000 words.

Had an idea lurking forever that cries out to be shared with the world? Now’s your chance to get it out and let it shine. Can’t string a sentence together? No problem! The goal is just to write – good, bad or indifferent – and celebrate the wonders of the written word.

And there’s no need to go it alone. Sign up for free (free is great!) at the official National Novel Writing Month website, www.nanowrimo.org^. Connect with other writers – professional, amateur, and hopeful – in your area and around the world.

See you there!

Help yourself to a copy of the NanoRhino image!

Sunday Rewind

Well. It's been an interesting month to say the least. :)

I've hit 150 posts and 3,000 visitors. Not bad.

I've got my dot-com going with products from Zazzle and Cafe Press, as well as helping to promote the collection "An Essential Jinx" by C.A. Broz.

Who knows what this week will bring ...

Mood:

Productive

An Essential Jinx

The short-story collection introducing the Quasiverse, following Jinx.
From the internationally recognized rising star of occult fiction, C.A. Broz.

---

Mood:

Impressed

Grr!

Trying to do cover art for a book and I have no inspiration whatsoever! It doesn't have to be fancy, the author says plain text on solid background is fine, but I want to do something at least a little more evocative than that.

Mood:

Frustrated

Internet-Taming Tools

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the Internet is a mess. It's full of stuff!

As I'm trying to regain some control over my virtual life, I've found some useful tools for doing so I wanted to share.

Flock is a "social web browser" - that is, you can log into your Faceook or MySpace account and have your friends available in the sidebar. But that's only the beginning: web-mail, bookmarking sites, bloghosts like LiveJournal and Blogger, and media sites like Photobucket and YouTube also "plug in" to Flock.

Twitter^ is great for those bits not long enough for a blog post. If you also use Facebook, you can add the Twitter application and have Twitter update your Facebook status.

Digsby^ is a multi-platform chat client for Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, ICQ, Facebook, MySpace, GoogleTalk, Jabber ... You can also create a chat widget for blogs or websites right from the application (you don't have to go to the Digsby site).

Last but not least is Netvibes^ to bring it all together. I have Netvibes set as my Flock homepage, and the Twitter widget on the start page. There are plenty of premade modules one can add for newsfeeds, games, and more, or you can add your own content with handy HTML modules. And because it's saved online, you can access your start page from any computer with Internet access. You can see what I've done with mine at www.wildaspie.com^ and www.wildaspie.net^.

Mood:

Determined

Rough Week

It's been quite a week ... But on the up side, I have gotten some organization in my online doings.

1. Twitter: I added a Twitter feed widget to the right sidebar here. You can follow me^ (caliedo) on Twitter.


2. Digsby: I added a Digsby chat client widget to the left sidebar. You can use it to chat with me right from this blog.


3. I redirected wildaspie.net^ to my Netvibes "universe." I have a Digsby widget and Twitter feed there too.


4. I redirected wildaspie.com^ to Netvibes as well: check out my Zazzle and Cafe Press shops.


5. I added a Digsby widget to my LJ^ - and although I hadn't been posting there much lately, I will be again, so interested parties are encouraged to comment there to be added to my "friends" list, as most of the entries are filtered (not public).


6. I made some new mood icons.

Mood:

Reeling

(insert catchy subject line here)

A kaleidoscope, once shaken, cannot recreate the pattern that was lost.

Being shaken does not, however, change the fundamental nature of the kaleidoscope. It remains overall as it was, and part of its fundamental nature is its purpose: change.

More at my LJ^.

Mood:

Shock