About six months ago I started receiving spam emails from kbs(at)kennethbsmith.com that I most certainly did not send. They appeared to originate in China because they were promoting an ecommerce site that had a lot of Chinese letters in the headlines and captions. Since then I have been receiving more and more emails from kbs(at)kennethbsmith.com. I am not using the “@” symbol because I believe that they (the bad guys) can get my email address from anyplace that has it listed publicly, like this blog post. A bot can harvest it, put it on a list and then that list is sold to whomever. You have probably noticed that many netizens disguise their email address in this way. This has also resulted in me relying more on Yahoo! and gmail for my email correspondence. So many email accounts. So little time.

Sadly, spam is part of internet life. And is seems to be getting worse. I recently read that 75-85% of all email is spam. (Net-Security Org spam stats) Geesh! Googling, I see there is even a Spam-o-meter! Curretly 88.5%

Yesterday I received an email from a client who had just received spam from herself. (I looked and I had also received spam promoting 1001 Postcards From: kbs(at)kennethbsmith.com.) She wanted to know what she could do.
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In early January, I received an email from Dalton Conley announcing that he would be at a Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village reading from his latest book “Elsewhere, USA.” I have known Dalton for thirty years. He was twelve years old when his father and I became friends while working together. In 2002, I got to know Dalton even better when he asked me to design a website for him that organized the books and papers he had authored.  It was then that I read his memoir “Honkey.” Dalton was beginning his professorship in the sociology department at  New York University. Currently he is the acting dean.

As an artist, books about zeitgeist like Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” and David Brooks’  “Bobos in Paridise” have always inspired me. I don’t know if Dalton’s book will meet that standard but listening to him talk provoked me beyond my expectations. I went to his reading out of curiosity and support but given how much my work and thoughts this past year have been about computers, the internet, websites and blogs, I was fascinated to hear Dalton, the sociologist, address these issues from a historical and cultural perspective. Continue reading →

This is exciting. Thanks to Michael Martin I believe I have finally found a Sideblog plugin solution  for adding posts to Steve Brodner’s sideblogs. I have been looking months for this. There is also this post about PHP coding not using the Sideblog plugin.

Instead of dummy copy, I will write here that we are now in the Eliot Spitzer downfall news cycle. So much buzz. Yesterday was the zenith. Or at least I assume it was. Today I want to know more about the high priced hooker. To me, this is all playing out like something from Law and Order.

What will be the tag line for the Spitzer Downfall? It needs a title or a Seinfeld catagory, because this has strangers talking to each other in Manhattan. Each year there are only one or two events that reach that level of buzz. Today I was in the hardware store looking for some halogen bulbs when I heard the manager answer the phone, “Eliot Spitzer’s office, he can’t come to the phone right now.” All three customers started laughing and shared their opinions as they checked out. It was the manager’s opinion that since his mother-in-law had forgiven him, he didn’t need to resign. I agreed.