The nice thing about having your own domain you can do whatever you want with your email addresses.

Back when I first bought withak.org I was slightly paranoid about companies selling my email address out to spammers so I would assign different email addresses for each company (i.e. company name at withak dot org).

There isn’t any extra work for me, I have one email address that works as a catch-all for anything I don’t have an account setup for. Basically any non-personal email winds up in that directory.

I’ve done this for seven or eight years now and I’ve never had a problem with a company giving out my info to a third party, until now.

Recently I’ve noticed a ton of spam coming in to the email address we setup for DSW Shoes. This email address has never been broadcast publicly, so the only possible way it got into the hands of spammers is that it was given or taken by DSW.

I called their customer service line to complain about the issue and right away they informed me that their privacy policy stated they reserved the right to give people’s personal information to third parties.

We definitely should have read this and not given our information to begin with, but I’m still very upset with DSW not only for giving our information out, but passing it onto non-reputable businesses.

So, not only will they be losing our online business but business to their brick and mortar stores as well and we’ve got two growing boys, so we need a lot of shoes.

Item #238 my insurance won’t allow me to participate in.

Power Tool Drag Racing

In future years look forward to hearing about these on the news with the lead in of “Tragedy struck today…”

Alright internets, let’s talk for a minute.

Everyone likes a good list. It’s a simple and effective way to get traffic to your site, but we’ve got to put an end to this cold war style armament of list items.

Just because you can find 1037 ways to get an article on Digg doesn’t mean that you should. In fact, no, you definitely shouldn’t.

Every time I scroll past your 100+ list of ways to improve my credit I die a little bit inside.

Any “How To” list should be no more than 10 items. In reality your list only contains at most 6 good ideas, you’re just recreating them in very narrow examples.

Here, I’ll help you. Here’s a list of things to do to make a helpful list.

1. Choose a topic.
2. Write down all your ideas for said topic.
3. Consolidate similar ideas into single items.
4. Order ideas by importance.
5. Throw out all ideas except for the top 10.
6. Post the remaining 10.

See? 6 items, and even two of those are superfluous. The end!

I enjoy a good grafiti, either visually captivating or emotionally. There’s a picture here of a subway with the words “I love you” spray painted in the middle of a bunch of random graffiti that I like, and there’s a bridge in Cincinnati that simply says “Evolve” that I always enjoy.

Here’s a concept that’s new, or new to me, light graffiti.

Light grafiti is a picture taken with a long exposure in a public place using lights make an image. You’ve likely seen people spell their names out with sparklers in pictures, which is a similar concept.

I think this is a great method to artistically display commentary on a public icon that won’t be painted over the next day at taxpayer expense. Though it won’t be viewed by nearly as many people I imagine.

Photos courtesy of lichtfaktor.

See lichtfaktor’s explanation on how to do it yourself.

HOW TO DO IT.
this are the basics:
to get the best results you need a tripod. the exposure should be around 10-30 sec. or longer if needed. stay in front of the camera and do your writing.
to not overexpose set the camera to about iso100, and close your aperture as much as possible. if there is still too much light you might have to use a nd-filter.it is always nice to integrate the surrounding into your picture.

This ex-CIA agent points out how right I am that gasoline doesn’t explode.

I called it!

That’ll teach the rest of the world to not watch Mythbusters.

Something bothers me about the recent coverage of the “bomb” attacks on London.

The reports say that the “bombs” consisted of:

• gas
• nails (presumeably for shrapnel)
• an ignition device

Guess what! Gasoline doesn’t explode, it just burns. When you add gasoline, nails and fair you don’t get a bomb, you get hot nails…and a trashed car.

The only way someone would have been injured is that if they passed the car and thought; “Hey, free nails!”

I do get why they’re overstating the effectiveness of the “bombs”. The authorities want people to feel like they’re being protected and there’s something to be said for letting the terrorists think that gasoline explodes like in any Die Hard movie. I don’t have the heart to tell them otherwise.

I do find it slightly amusing that the first “bomb” was set outside a club called “Tiger Tiger”.

Tiger Tiger burning bright. In the forests of the night,. What immortal hand or eye oh shit it’s really burning! ¹

^1. William Blakes first draft when he knocked his candle over mid-verse.