For the fourth time, I’ll be heading abroad on a Habitat for Humanity Global Village project. Only this time, I get to go with my wife!

Next May, we’re off to build homes in Madagascar, a very large island off the coast of Africa, home to many a lemur. I can’t wait.

Here’s more on Madagascar. Here’s more on Habitat for Humanity Global Village.

Adam, over at Boston Common, has started organizing his list of bloggers by T stop. Here are the other Central Square bloggers.

I’m doing something similar on Life Times Voice, but I’m only going down to the level of town. Here are the Cambridge members.

For the geeky among you: Google Suggest javascript dissected and explained.

The best way to learn how to code is to look at someone else’s code and figure out how it works, then generalize that to what you need. This javascript is way out of my league, but it’s still kinda neat to read about it.

What do you think? Should I fill out the application and see if I am selected to be on Survivor?

I spent two weeks violently ill in the-middle-of-nowhere, China; I drove 20 miles on route 128 without the benefit of brakes; I quit my job and started my own business. Survivor can’t scare me.

And, I could use a million dollars. Hmm…

Bruce Schneier, renowned computer security expert, gives advice on what average Internet users can do to ensure their security.

This is worthwhile reading, especially if you find your machine infested with spyware and viruses.

It’s hard to feel sorry for the aggrieved party when their evil spyware was automatically disabled by another company’s evil spyware.

According to the Nov. 24 complaint, DirectResponse’s software detects Internet Optimizer and then sends a command to “kill” the program, a process that deletes its files from the PC registry and from the computer altogether. Avenue Media said DirectRevenue’s tactics have caused it to lose about 1 million customers–about half its installed base–and as much as $10,000 a day in revenue.

I woke up yesterday morning to over 100 new comment spams (fake comments advertising vile items in the hope of leeching some of my Google-juice). Even using MT-Blacklist, cleaning up that much crap takes a while.

So, I took down the comments on my site, and blew away the file that creates the comments. Today, I checked my stats and found more than 500 “404″ requests to that file. That means that the evil spammers tried to add more than 500 spam comments to my site.

So, this experiment in online community failed. Another reason why you must be a validated customer to post comments on Life Times Voice.

Here is an extremely interesting article from this morning’s New York Times detailing how today’s corporate denizens have trouble writing coherent emails.

Here is one from a systems analyst to her supervisor at a high-tech corporation based in Palo Alto, Calif.: “I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information … However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to ‘C’.”

The incoherence of that message persuaded the analyst’s employers that she needed remedial training.

The article also touched on one of my biggest pet peeves: emails conveying bad news. Back when I had a staff, one of the only “rules” I enforced was “all bad news must be delivered in person.” Emails are so easy to misinterpret; the fallout from a poorly written email is often worse than the actual bad news.

(Cross-posted to The Job Blog)

I’ll be at Harvard’s Internet + Society 2004 conference next week. It looks like it will be an interesting program.

If you’re in town, give me a yell….

“We buy our ink by the TeraByte!”

I saw this here, in the midst of an off-color rant about the idiocy of Sony.

One of the joys of creating tools to help people keep in touch is that your friends can now start writing their own blogs. Here are some of my friends who’ve gotten started:

Marc Quinones
Emma Lathan
Stephanie Hagyard
Susel Gonzalez

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