More Junkmail from Bob!

Monday, June 19, 2000

Important Stuff.

There are now more than 500 recipients of Junkmail! I thought I'd mention that since misery loves company.

Dot-com press release of the week:

"WASHINGTON, June 14 /PRNewswire/ -- All of the directors and officers of U.S. Digital Communications, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: USDI) have resigned, effective immediately. Presently the company has no employees, officers, or directors. The corporation has no assets, no revenues, and no money to continue in business. In addition, the corporation does not have the capability to transact business in the future."

Yes, it's real!

Here's the Carina Nebula, or Keyhole Nebula, in infrared. Here's another view, not infrared. This is important because I used to drive a Toyota Carina.

In 1980 the labor union for the air traffic controllers supported Ronald Reagan for President. Not long afterward he fired 11,000 of them for going on strike. Now they've decided to support Al Gore for President. I wonder why they changed parties?

Dennis Tito used to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Then he got into the stock market, and started the Wilshire 5000 index fund. Now he's taking a summer vacation, in space. He's headed to the Russian Space Station Mir.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_792000/792292.stm

I'd really like to do that, but I'll have to wait for the super-saver fares. $20,000,000 is a bit steep for me.

Register.com is a company that registers internet domain names. There are several companies that do this. Register.com is the second largest. Register.com finally admitted they have a security problem. They accidentally allowed people to access domain administration data and "hijack" a domain name. For example, if Amazon.com was registered there, I could redirect everybody who tried to go to amazon.com to xpda.com/junkmail. I guess I should check that out.

http://usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/cti111.htm

I saw this headline this morning somewhere: "Experts Warn of New Virus." I figured it was more hype on a slow news day, and it pretty much was. It's another email "virus," but it does have something kind of interesting. Its attachment has the file extension .txt.shs which shows up as .txt in a directory listing, even if you have your windows setting set to show all file extensions.

I tried it in Outlook, but it shows the .shs file type. When I saved it, explorer shows the extension .txt, but it says it's a "scrap object" instead of a text file. Doing a directory listing from DOS shows the .shs extension. Here are the details:

        http://vil.mcafee.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=98668&

Here's a Microsoft security update to Outlook 98:

        http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/downloadDetails/Out98sec.htm

and an update to Outlook 2000:

        http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/2000/downloadDetails/Out2ksec.htm

AOL had a problem with an email attachment program. Someone sent it to a bunch of their employees. Some of them were nice enough to double click on it, and it gave some outsiders access to a few hundred AOL accounts. Whoops!

DVD's, like CD's, are digital. A DVD player outputs an analog signal, though, and that's not as high quality as a digital signal. So a company in Britain is selling DVD players modified to output a pure digital signal. The Movie Industry Folks, worried that their lawyers might starve, are suing. You would think they would like it if their movies looked better, but they say that they can be copied if the quality is that good. (As if they can't be copied now.)

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,37059,00.html

And now, one mess of pictures!

I'll put this on the web site in a day or so in case you want to see a thumbnail image before you download the whole picture.

I went to Newport, Rhode Island last weekend because I couldn't find a room in New Bedford. There's an old fort there called Fort Adams.

Here's the inside:

They started building this fort before the revolutionary war, and they've rebuilt it a couple of times since then.

It was a little foggy out on the ocean.

I was wandering around and a lady came up to me and asked if I knew where the ship was coming in from. She was a TV reporter. I told her it would probably be coming from the ocean. I think she was impressed with my nautical savvy. But a tall ship came in a few minutes later, and it DID come in from the ocean.

It was there celebrating a sailboat race, or a yacht race as they called it. I guess these sailboats were really sailing yachts.

I think I like this one better, though:

South of Newport on someone's point (I don't remember whose) there was an old deserted house

with some good trees

and a nice rock wall.

The next day flew to Block Island because it looked like a neat place on the map. I saw dozens of specs in the water. They were sailboats (or yachts), and they were racing. They were moving pretty fast because it was windy. I went down and circled to take a look.

They were (and still are) going from Newport to Bermuda. Here's the race info, complete with current standings:

http://www2.bermudarace.com/racecrse.html

Here are some pictures of Block Island. There was some funny wind on approach to the 2500' runway.

....and the picture of today is a flower from Block Island:

(&) 1942, All rights concurred. Any unauthorized, unapproved, unsolicited, or uncontrollable copying of this fine piece of questionable information will be heartily laughed at, with an occasional guffaw.

If you'd like to add yourself, someone you know, or someone you don't know to the Junklist, you can do it here:

http://xpda.com/junkmail

You can find other Junkmails here too. If you would like to stop receiving Junkmail, please read the file "stages_of_life.txt.shs" at your earliest opportunity or go to http://register.com and hijack the domain name xpda.com.

Feel free to email any comments, questions, recommendations, solicitations, or subpoenas to me at bob@xpda.com