Business tip for today: when you have a world-famous, instantly-recognizeable brand name, change it.

I mean really, you can’t have people buying your products. That might actually make money, and jeez, what would you do with that?

Instead of the simple, four-letter “Palm”, the insipid twits in Palm’s management spent two years in business meetings to come up with their new company name, “<a href=http://palmone.com/">PalmOne. Brilliant. And the lower-case L is the numeral 1. On purpose.

This is the perfect social hack for Monday.

Tired of piles of junk mail clogging your mailbox?

“A little-known Federal law allows individuals to send a Prohibitory Order against companies that are sending unsolicited sexually provocative or erotically arousing mail. The Supreme Court went one step further, allowing individuals to decide what constitutes “erotically arousing” mail. The law makes it illegal for a company to send mail to an individual within thirty days of receiving the Order.”

It’s probably normal to think that “flash mobs” are a form of violence against those jerks who make Flash-only websites.

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy Tactics, which is my favorite of all the Final Fantasy games, and I think is one of the best RPG/Tactics game ever. Here’s the job FAQ I’ve been using.

I can’t find the controllers for my poor old PSX, so I’m using an excellent PSX emulator called EPSXE.

The emulation is remarkably fast, and excepting a few odd glitches, the game is very playable. Movie music doesn’t seem to play, but the in-game MIDI tracks seem to play just fine, although they do slow down if the machine starts running too many tasks. EPSXE handles input from my old Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad very well, even though the gamepad is missing many of the buttons of the original PSX controller.

It looks like it’s possible [but not easy] to install Linux on my old 6100/33 Power Mac.

Though I’m not really sure why I’d want to.

Parenthetically, isn’t it great being a slob AND being forgetful at the same time? It’s always a pleasant surprise when you look down and find some spare food. “Hey look! A piece of pepperoni I missed! And since it’s on my man-teat and not the floor, it’s perfectly edible!!”

Jimi has written a nice brief tutorial on installing and configuring Spamassassin on a Redhat Linux system.

Spamassassin has been a godsend for me: last week it caught 436 chunks of spam, with 8 false-negatives and zero false-positives.

This site has a freely-downloadable e-book on Solaris 9. I’ve glanced over it and it seems to be pretty decent so far.

It’s always lovely to be interrupted from one’s afternoon net-browsing by the sounds of tornadic wind and the cracking of tree-trunks.

Once the wind had died down, I went outside to find one of my ancient oaks broken off a few feet up its trunk, sprawled across a good portion of my back yard. It’s a good thing that shed was there to break the fall.

A week later, and I’ve got insurance checks in hand, and am waiting for the Scary Tree Cutting Guy™ and the Confederate Rebel Contractor Guy™ to show up and start removing tree and shed bits.

Mom told me today that every time my stepdad has acted like a jerk during the day, at supper my brother pours tea for him into a pink glass.

That’s so perfectly passive-aggressive. I’m very proud.