While I was in line at Microcenter tonight, I witnessed just how bad at security most people are.

Microcenter cashiers pump you for information. It’s a given. They ask for as much info as you’ll give them. There was a pretty twenty-something girl in line in front of me (I was buying Half-Life 2, of course). The cashier asked her for her address, and the girl answered. The cashier then called her by her last name, and asked her for her phone number, which the girl glady gave. Finally, the girl gave out her email address.

This makes me want to do laundry.

In certain cases, some Microsoft mail clients will encode mail attachments as a MIME type of “application/ms-tnef”. These attachments show up as ‘winmail.dat’, and are invariably unusable.

TNEF’s Enough is a free app that extracts files from TNEF stream files, which is pretty handy for Mac users in Windows office environments.

My sister says this is a true story about me, when I was a little kid:

“Dad ran into a lady the other day who taught Bible School one summer. She said she would never forget you, because, at the end of the School, when they asked who would like to lead the prayer, you volunteered.

“You said, “I’m going to say the kittycat prayer: ‘Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. Amen.’”

Delicious Monster’s Delicious Library app is supposed to be released today, and I’ve been counting down the minutes. What does this app do?

What doesn’t it do?

“Delicious Library’s digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games.” It’ll scan in these items using your Apple iSight camera to read the bar code. No, really.

And of course, it has all the other good stuff you’d expect from a library-type app, including voice-activated catalog searches, iPod-synced catalog lists, user ratings, and recommendations.

I used to use Allmusic.com several times a week, for music or band lookups and such.

Today, I noticed they’ve moved to an ‘account-required’ format.

I’m sure that move made perfect sense to the bitter, disenfranchised web producers at Allmusic.com, who, after being passed over for raises for three years in a row, decided that since they couldn’t get away with stabbing their CEO in the face with a blunt spoon, they’d just convince him to render the site completely un-navigable and locked-off from the rest of the Internet. In short, Allmusic.com has inserted a Desert Eagle .50 caliber handgun into its own anus, and pulled the trigger.

NASA World Wind is a truly excellent Open Source, free 3-D world viewer, incorporating multiple layers of satellite imagery and topo data, as well as place names, boundaries, and geographic features. The mouse-driven interface lets you zoom, tilt, and pan the globe, giving the user a ‘fly-through’ effect from the 3-D-mapped ortho-rectified imagery. It’s a pretty big download at 256MB, and it does auto-download more content if you request it to, but it’s well worth it.

Once again, I am embarrassed of my home state. In addition to the Presidential election yesterday, Alabama voters were offered EIGHT more opportunities to amend what is already the longest and most-amended constitution in the world. (Alabama’s constitution has 315,000 words and over 700 amendments.)

The proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot covered such minor topics as

“promotion of economic and industrial development in Baldwin County (PA 1, which passed with 56% of the vote)”

Never buy a glass desk.

As Kayvan suggested, on Susi’s blog, “You could implement MT-Blacklist.”

MT-Blacklist did nothing to help me, during the comment-spam attack. The botnet connections occurred regardless of blacklisting. Server load was up to 110 — where 0.2 is normal — before DP stopped the Apache process. I removed my mt-comments.cgi script entirely, but the requests still came in from over 100 infected clients across the Internets.

I’ve disliked MT since the whole blogspam thing started, and I’ve hated it since 6Apart decided to screw everyone on licensing fees. It would not suprise me to see that they had a helping hand in some blogspamming, just to push people to pay the upgrade fee.