Pipi In a Corporate Setting

So I'm in the middle of this meeting, and the vendor asks me how I keep abreast of things technology-wise, since although we share a great deal of contacts and have actually swapped a couple of e-mails on public mailing-lists, I happen to know things he should, even though he's thousands of miles nearer the action. And I tell him I have this humungous amount of RSS feeds. Then it turns out he actually knows what a weblog is and keeps one himself (link withheld).

Then he asks me what the hell a 'pipi' is (he actually rummaged through the newspaper when he arrived last weekend, since he can read Portuguese fairly well).

So I explained it to him (in the most candid way possible, since I assumed he had already mastered the required vocabulary), and was left wondering if this was:

• The only way you could actually become popular in Portugal (or at least of scatological interest, since no matter what the actual literary content might be, it still reads like adolescent crap written by someone with Tourette Syndrome)
• The sort of popular national weblog you should present as a reference to your foreign peers (which might seem irrelevant to most people anyway, but not to me)

But hey, enough of the soapbox. Let's get back to the real issues here.

Yes, You Can Spam Your Customers, says Congress

In what is yet another utterly clueless (and characteristically American) take on the entire underpinnings of the Internet, the U.S. Congress is considering an opt-out approach to commercial e-mail, which essentially means everyone gets to Spam you at least once, until you click on the "Unsubscribe me" link and/or enter your e-mail address to confirm it actually exists (which is something that should be prevented by means of Pavlovian conditioning using electrical shocks).

Add to that the recent trend of SMS-based Spam and the recent swamping of the U.S. National Do Not Call List registry, and you get a pretty clueless government where it regards to high-tech.

Let the marketplace deal with it? Yeah sure.

Another stop on the quest for better workspace management:

...and a new take on the text editor:

More Panther

Info and screenshots over at ThinkSecret and The Foo Blog.