Mark Whitcher

The nice FedEx man delivered my third iPhone this morning.

No, I am not upgrading. It’s exactly the same as my last one. My newest one, which was a warranty replacement for my original 3G, started thinking that the headphones were plugged in, even when they weren’t. So any sound that was supposed to be coming out of the speaker, was actually being sent to an imaginary set of headphones.

This would happen when you were taking a call, so that you would try to talk to the person, but you couldn’t hear any sound (it was going to the imaginary headphones).

Not good.

So I called Apple, and they sent me a new phone. I am just finishing up installing iPhone OS 3.0 now. Then I will sync it up and restore it from backup.

I did ask the stupid question to see if I could pay the difference and upgrade to the 3GS. I am sure you already know the answer.

For the last several months I have been building a plug-in architecture for net-at-hand.

The reason that I did this was to be able to add custom website functionality to client websites without having to make changes to the core functions of Net-at-hand. Originally I used a branch of the Net-at-hand code (I called it Net-at-hand Pro) that I could add functionality to. My thought was that changes I made in Net-at-hand Pro could be rolled into Net-at-hand if I decided it would provide enough benefit to the Net-at-hand users.

It turned out that Net-at-hand and Net-at-hand Pro drifted too far apart to help each other, and Net-at-hand Pro was quickly becoming a mess that I didn’t want to mess with anymore.

So the plugin architecture for Net-at-hand lets me add dynamic functions to a site without affecting anything else. Of course, if a plugin is useful, I have only to add it to other sites as necessary.

Right now, plugins for Net-at-hand are only available from me and through me. I have to build them and I have to install them. In the near future, plugins will be available for all Net-at-hand users to use and enjoy. In the distant future, I will have the plugin environment sufficiently sandboxed that third-party developers will be able to develop their own plugins for their own clients.

Dear spammers,

This is just a quick note to thank you for the overwhelming response to my request for some spam email.

You have gone above-and-beyond the call of duty in providing me so much material to use in testing my spam filter! I never dreamed that I would go from no spam at all, to over 150 per day in just ten days.

You guys are awesome! Thanks again.

In your debt,
emailtest@anideaweb.com

I have had my iphone for about 6 months, and have loved every minute of my ownership of the phone.

Until yesterday, I had called AppleCare twice to get my earbuds replaced (I had blown out one of the speakers each time). Both times they over-nighted a new pair to me.

This last weekend my iPhone started acting wonky. I would press the volume down button and it would act like I was switching the silencer switch to off. If the phone was in silent mode, the volume down button would not work at all.

Also, when the phone was in sleep mode, the screen would come on every 30 seconds as if I had pressed one of the buttons. The screen would shut off after 7 seconds (as it is supposed to) but would come back on 30 seconds later.

I had gone through and erased everything, doing a complete restore several times (without backing anything up). Even with the phone completely wiped it was still behaving the same. So I knew it wasn’t a software issue. The phone hadn’t been dropped or damaged. It just went on the fritz.

So I called AppleCare yesterday morning and explained the problem to them. Since I don’t live anywhere near an apple store, and I didn’t buy the phone at BestBuy, that was my only option.

This morning I got my brand-spankin-new phone. Everything works and I am happy. Apple had to put a hold on my credit card to cover the cost of the phone if I don’t send them the old one back (at their expense), but that wasn’t a big deal. I highly recommend Apple and their support and warranty coverage. It has been a very easy ownership experience!

I have never had trouble with getting spam for any of my email accounts. I don’t know why, I just never have. I never sign up for anything fishy online. I never publish my email address online. I guess spammers just don’t know my email address exists (I have several email addresses).

But now I am in the process of setting up spam filtering on my email server because other email accounts on the server are getting lots of spam. The problem is I have no real way of judging how effective it is because I don’t get any spam.

So I set up an email account at emailtest@anideaweb.com that I am publishing every place I can think of. I have already used emailtest@anideaweb.com to sign up for several free ipod schemes. And I am publishing emailtest@anideaweb.com here on the internet for all the spam bots in the world to see and enjoy.

Please, Mr. Spammer, send some email to emailtest@anideaweb.com. I would love to here all about all the special offers I could get. I would love to help you collect your relative’s inheritance since you are stuck in Africa and can’t come here to claim it. I’m not really interested in anything dirty, but I would sincerely appreciate your thinking of me in your offerings. Please, send email to emailtest@anideaweb.com. I am waiting for you.

UPDATE One note about this, if you try something similar, don’t give out a real phone number. I have been doing this for all of 15 minutes and I have already gotten my first call. Fortunately, I gave my google voice number so I can flag it as spam (though I guess it technically isn’t spam since I gave it to them).

UPDATE #2 (6/16/09) I got 44 spam emails yesterday (up from 24 the first day). Today isn’t even half over and I am up to 33. This is awesome! Now, if I could just get Postfix to communicate properly with amavisd-new…

My son was able to take part in a program on the navy base called Starbase Atlantis, a week-long science day camp.

We made a thank you page here.

Being a work-from-home is challanging. The hardest challenge is separating work from home, and I am not just talking about work hours from home hours. The fact is—I am always at work. Even if I am not actually doing work at the time, chances are that I am thinking about it or planning something related to it.

When I had a 9 to 5 job it was easy to separate work from home. I never really thought about work while I was at home; it stayed at the office. (Although, to be honest, the home hours of my last year and a half at my 9 to 5 job were spent working on things in preparation for going out on my own.)

In this new world though (I mean new to me), it is way too easy to get caught up in work all the time, and not switch the work brain off when I should be focusing on my family. I was reminded of that fact this morning while cleaning off my (work) desk.

Logan and I are finishing up his first full year of home-schooling today (that would be another long post for another time) and I found a note that my youngest son left for me some weeks back. To my shame, I didn’t really read it when he gave it to me, but I did today and I was smitten in my conscience. I posted the note for you below.

Just a little explanation—my wife’s work hours are going to be reduced this summer from what they are during the school year. She is planning on taking the kids to the beach as often as she can. There are five in our family.

Sniffle.