Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I’ve never been the best about IT security. Part of the reason is because in all the years I’ve been working or playing with computers (over 20 years total but about 15 years on a PC, 12 or 13 years on a Windows PC starting with Windows 3.0), I’ve seldom had any issues. I may have had a virus once, but it didn’t do any damage and was eliminated with a virus checker. But for years I ran no virus protection. Spyware is much more insidious and so I’ve run spyware checkers for a while. When it comes to passwords, I’m really lazy. I know the ideal thing to do is to have a unique username and password - or at least a unique password for every site you go to. But who wants to write all these down, let alone remember them. If you put them in a file on your computer, than you risk losing it, or someone getting access to the file. So like most people I’ve generally kept things simple and had a few variations on usernames and a few passwords, so that I can usually guess within a reasonable amount of time.

Luckily, within the last few days I heard Todd Cochrane mention something on one of his Geek News Central podcasts about a password management “bookmarklet.” I didn’t quite understand what it was, but Todd suggested it was a way to have unique passwords by just remembering one master password.

So I followed his link and found that this was indeed the answers to that kind of uneasy feeling I’ve had for a while that my way of dealing with passwords was really vulnerable. Basically, this guy Nick Wolf created a JavaScript that uses a standard encryption scheme, MD5, to generate a password by combining your own “master password” and the site’s domain name. So all you have to remember is your master password.

The “bookmarklet” is something that you link as a bookmark in your browser, possibly on a link toolbar for easy access. When you go to a given site, you click on this bookmarklet, enter your master password, at it automatically fills in your password (you need to be on the login page for it to do this of course). Of course before you get to this stage, you need to create the password. You can do this by going to the form that Nick has provided. However, while the form doesn’t save the information that you’re typing to some database, this is always a possibility, and even if you trust the site, unless it is encrypted via SSL (the URL would be https instead of http and you would see an icon of a closed lock in your browser), then there’s always the possibility that someone could intercept those bytes along the way and discover your master password. But because this is simply JavaScript, you can run it on any JavaScript compliant browser. It doesn’t need to be sitting on a web server, it can be sitting on your local PC. This way, communicating with it will not need access to the internet, and will not be sending anything outside of your PC. I’ve even tried this on my Treo 650 smartphone’s browser (Blazer) and while it took a little while to finish, it did provide me with the password needed.

There are some other people who’ve taken the script and made some changes to it that might be of value to some. For example there’s someone who changed the encoding scheme to one that allows for a potentially more random password as well as a longer one (Nick Wolfe’s is only 8 characters long). There’s another version of the script by Chris Zarate, which actually distinguishes between subdomains. This way, for example, if you had a couple of blogger accounts, bigtacos.blogspot.com, and sushicoma.blogspot.com, you could have unique passwords for both of these. Nick Wolfe’s script doesn’t distinguish between the two as their domain name (blogspot.com) are the same, only their subdomains differ.

There’s even a movie that gives you a quick demo of how it works if you’re still confused.

I think this is great and I’m starting to go through all my sites to change my passwords. But there are so many! I don’t know where to start and a lot of the sites I go to are logged in automatically via cookies, so I don’t have any recent memory of actually logging into them. I guess I’ll have to start looking through my history to jar my memory as to which sites I go to which might require passwords. As for the master password I’m using, it’s something that has a bit of meaning, but would be random enough looking to most people and included upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation. It’s not hard to think up something like this especially when you consider that this will be the only one you’ll have to remember for a while. Just don’t use one of the passwords you have been using, because you never know if the server they were on has been hacked at some point.

My only wish would be that you could use this for things other than websites - mainly stand-alone applications or even network or system passwords. But I guess those will still need to be handled by some kind of password management application if indeed you have a bunch to keep track of.

Update: Chris Zarate just informed me that I got a bit mixed up. Apparently his version of this script actually ignores the subdomain, whereas the original script accounts for it. Somehow I’ve been using his script for months without noticing, oh well! Thanks for the clarification, Chris!

When Terra Server went online way back in 1996 I believe it was amazing to be able to look up satellite imagery of your old hometown or favorite vacation spots. Of course back then the images were from the early nineties or even older, so the level of detail was pretty low. Over the years I guess the U.S. government has gotten less paranoid about the stuff, even with 9/11.

When Google put out there online mapping site not too long ago, I found it to have one of the best interfaces, allowing you to seamlessly scroll around extremely easily. It didn’t have some of the bells and whistles that would have made it more powerful, and I did find that with slower computers and slower connections it wasn’t nearly as fluid, but it was still better than the alternatives.

Just the other day Google added a nice feature to Google Maps – satellite imagery. Anywhere in the US, anyway, you can switch between the regular graphical map or the actual satellite photo. The same interface is present on both, so you can click and drag around the satellite photos just as you can with the graphical version. You can view the photos from multiple zoom levels, but here is where the only limitation comes in. It appears that you can’t get nearly as close up as you can with the graphical interface, so while you can make out individual houses, distinguishing a car, for example, cars are so small as to be mere specks. Terra Server allows me to zoom in many more times so that, for example, I can distinguish car windows, even the lines on tennis and basketball courts! I hope that Google increases their resolution.

Of course this feature is mainly a kind of eye-candy thing. It’s neat to be able to look at a photo of any place in the U.S. at the push of a button, albeit one that is fairly low res. And while I think it will be great when we can distinguish license plate numbers, the real usefulness for the vast majority of people won’t come until you can pull up either a live moving image, or even a static image taken with the last minute of a given area – for example to check that your house is still there while on vacation or more realistically what kind of traffic is up ahead so that you can reroute.

Google maps still lack a lot of the flexibility that can be found in true mapping software that allow you to dynamically label individual points of interest, create your own sets of directions, etc. These things are way beyond other such online mapping tools, but at least one thing I’d like to see on Google which I don’t think would be at all hard to implement for them is just a simple legend that tells people how large the distances are at a given zoom level. It is just very convenient to eyeball how far a couple of items are on a map by such a legend rather than the much more time-consuming task of trying to plug the addresses in to get directions from one to another…

The first year or so I was writing this blog, I wrote a bunch of entries about places I’d traveled. I haven’t written about these in a while, but came accrosss this site that lets you produce a list of U.S. states you’ve gone to, lived in, etc. I’ve actually had the idea to create a color-coded map myself, but in order to program something like this I would probably need something like Flash, which I don’t really know. Maybe I will set up something similar but with more fields, like “layover in airport only,” “born in,” “driven through,” etc. For now, though, here is my list:

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now… Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

I’ve never been the most organized person in the world. I’m not the least organized either. Sometimes I think I am an anal-retentive-wannabe. I feel a vague uneasiness when things are out of order, which is most of the time. Not that “out of order” means that things need to be perfect by any stretch. For example, here’s a picture of cubicle at work, which I haven’t actually cleaned for weeks:

(trust me it looks worse in real life!)

When I do clean up around the house, I feel like I can think more clearly. In this way I’m a little schizophrenic, or maybe just stupid. I know I feel better when things are clean and orderly, but I’m just too lazy or distracted to do anything about it! Maybe it’s a chicken and egg sort of thing.

With the age of the personal computer, we have a whole new non-physical realm to deal with in terms of organization. We need to organize information, whether that’s in the way of files, email, bookmarks, whatever. In this area, which I’m admittedly sometimes more familiar with than the physical world, as disturbing as that is to contemplate, I’m not that better. Often it gets to the point where I’m getting warnings of only having 100MB of free space before I think, hmmm, I better clean things up. Certainly having done this for a couple of decades now, I may be a little better than the average person, but it is still a struggle, and one that seems increasingly challenging as my roles in the physical world becomes more substantive.

My main organizational issues right now center around two key parts of my digital life – email and bookmarks. Thankfully when it comes to RSS feeds, Bloglines has allowed me to get pretty organized, although of course I’m woefully behind at actually keeping up with all of the blog entries that I should be reading.

I first started collecting email back in ‘92 when I got my first email account in grad school. Somehow I decided that I wanted to hold onto these emails and because not a whole lot of people had email back then, my correspondence probably amounted to a hundred or so messages per year, maybe less. So every six months or a year I’d spend a half hour saving these to text files with a specific naming format including the name of the recipient, sender, and the date, plus a, b, c, d, etc. for multiple messages for a single day from/to the same person.

This continued until the Internet Bubble of the late 90’s made the flow of email so great that the time needed to do this expanded from 30 minutes to a whole day. So, the last archive of this kind happened sometime in 2000. By that time I had also started using Outlook as my email client and while it was probably just as easy (or difficult) to archive messages than it had been with Pine or Eudora, my laziness had gotten the better of me. Then in 2001 I started dating my now wife, and since then my time for such tasks has decreased even more!

In 2002 I started using a portable device to read email while away from the computer - The Danger Sidekick. Because of T-Mobile’s nonsensical resistance to allowing users to sync their Outlook data on the device, I was at a bit of a disadvantage.

Luckily, last summer, this changed dramatically when I bought my friend’s Treo 600. Around this same time I found a company (1and1)that among other things hosts outlook data so that you can access it remotely either via “Outlook Web Access” (a web interface to Outlook), or via an actual Outlook client or via a regular IMAP email client. 1and1 had by far the cheapest plan at only $6.99 per month and so far I’ve been pretty satisfied. After doing some searching, I finally settled on an excellent IMAP client for the Treo called ChatterEmail that let me synch whatever folders I wanted to. It’s still not practical to keep thousands of full messages from years of correspondence, it isn’t impossible. But ChatterEmail doesn’t use external cards the way some others do (Snappermail comes to mind). Still, for my needs, I felt ChatterEmail’s advantages outweighed this disadvantage, especially since it’s rare that I go searching for email that’s older than a year.

So, now that everything was more or less set up, what did I do? Not much. I know many people use an extensive folder system, even directing their email into various folders when they are received. I was never that big a user of folders, although I did use them in a minor way. So, recently, this lack of using such a powerful email organizational feature was gnawing at me and I figured I needed to come up with some strategic ways of using folders. What I came up with, ironically, involves more manual work. But at least it promotes organization. Basically I let things lie in the inbox for a while – sometimes it could be for an hour, sometimes for days or even weeks – but eventually sooner or later I have to go through and “clean house” which involves just going through the last umpteen messages and deleting stuff I know I don’t want to keep and taking other stuff and putting them in the appropriate folder. Luckily, I keep most personal mail from friends and family in my inbox, so don’t need to anything with these. This folder is synched with my Treo. I keep the last 3-6 months of messages in my inbox, and archive the rest going back a year or so to a separate folder which is still accessible on my hosted exchange account (but not the Treo). Last night I went through all the messages in my inbox and this archived inbox and created three or four folders for additional subjects that I figure I might need to go back and look at some time in the future: blog-related stuff, registration information, online purchases, posts with links to various references that I eventually want to read relating to photography, the Treo, etc. Currently I’m not synching these, but I figure eventually I can download these to the Treo very easily as needed.

Aside from all this on my hosted exchange account, I have some earlier Outlook data that I didn’t transfer because I was worried about using up the 500MB that the account gave me when I signed up. Even though they increased it to 1GB, I’m still a little reticent if for no other reason then having to go through an additional three or four years worth of email in that file. I guess eventually I should go ahead and put the stuff up there…

I’m surprised that there aren’t more tools out there to help people archive old email, and even keep it around for searching purposes. There’s a lot of information contained in years of email messages that could be useful to people. Old addresses, phone numbers, names, etc. It’s very easy to look up my name on the Internet and find up-to-date information about me because I have this blog and post messages online in various places. But most of my friends don’t have this kind of net-visibility, and so if I lose track of someone and they change their contact info, it’s sometimes next to impossible to find them again sometimes, unless of course they find me from something I’ve written and send me a line, as has happened a few times in the last year or so. The ability to create an archival structured document or set of documents, like a bulletin board with threads (something maybe along the lines that Gmail does?), could be really powerful. The main challenge in my mind would be not chaining it to a single program. Maybe creating something in xml or a similar standardized protocol so that developers could create many different viewers for it.

As I mentioned above, bookmarks (or “favorites” in MS parlance) are my next target area for organization. Again, I used to be better about these when there didn’t seem to be as much useful stuff to link to. I still have the remnants of a decent system bookmarks categorized into folders. However, I’m sure many of these are outdated – either long gone or simply out of date or not of interest to me anymore.

For a while now, I’ve been using My Yahoo! as a way to have an online store of bookmarks that I could access from wherever I am, and also to synch my bookmarks from home to work. It also got around what had become a separation of different bookmarking systems between MS and Netscape, although luckily these systems never got incompatible enough to really hamper the transfer of data from one system to the other.

Since becoming more involved with RSS feeds and using Bloglines as a way to manage the feeds I read, I have been yearning for a similar system for bookmark management. I have lots of feeds where there is some article that has so much detail that I either want to keep it for later reference, or simply to read it at a later date (because it’s too long for my slow reading speed, making it necessary to set aside a good chunk of time to read it). Bloglines allows you to clip individual entries and put them into hierarchical folders. This is great for managing such stuff, but unfortunately its interface is not all that friendly to mobile devices (even though it has a specifically mobile version of its site, some functionality is missing and they haven’t made any improvements for at least 6 months, despite clamoring from many users), and besides, you can’t insert your own links. For example, there may be a great entry by a blogger that links to something of interest, but also contains many other links. In Bloglines you can only save that entire entry, not just the link of interest.

I have played a bit with sites like del.icio.us, and furl, but it seems to me that they are either just inelegant compared to Bloglines and/or your browser’s bookmark system, or their interface is more about “social bookmarking” (sharing links with others), than it is about managing your own. There does seem to be some developers using the del.icio.us API to allow one to import and export your bookmarks, so I will need to look into this. It does seem a little odd that this isn’t a feature of del.icio.us to begin with, but whatever. I think this is just one of those areas thats just going to be a constant work in progress.

But then again, isn’t organization constant work? You can set systems up so that future work is minimized, but there’s always some work to do, and due to all the new kinds of information out there, people will always need to do the work to figure out what the best ways to organize things will be. For example, in the last five years or so, people have been able to rip their music to MP3, and this requires organization both within the ID3 tags and possibly also within a folder structure. But MP3’s are just the beginning. Photo collections are yet another big organizational task now that digital cameras have become affordable to most. Now that digital video has become more accessible to the masses with the proliferation of processors and hard drives that can handle the much more demanding content, this stuff will need to be organized as well. The next jump up to high-definition digital video will be even more demanding but eventually will be available to anyone with $500 to spare.

I think all of this begs a separate but related question: do we continue to manage all this ourselves on our local systems? Obviously the push has been more and more towards storing these things online, at least as an important option. This is being done not only so that one can share the content and information, but simply to access it no matter where you are, as long as you can connect to the Internet – a feat that is becoming almost ubiquitously easy, although you might need some hard currency to do it in third world countries. Having all your data online is of concern to privacy advocates and to simply to those who are paranoid about losing that data. Privacy is a valid concern for many, especially considering recent events around the T-Mobile Hacker’s breaking in to the Danger servers and getting access to Paris Hilton’s personal info on her Sidekick. And as always, it’s important to make copies of your data for local archiving in case of connections or servers going down, as they will do from time to time. It may be wise for such companies as hosting companies and the like to establish not only their own backup systems but backups that allow their own customers to maintain an up-to-date copy of what’s on the server. Perhaps offering this as special software would actually decrease their backup storage resources required, although it would at the same time increase their bandwidth usage costs.

Right now we are still at the beginning of the information age when it comes to information management. Those who are tech-savvy can manage their information with a good deal of effort and planning. Those who aren’t tech-savvy have much more of a challenge. Companies have by and large not seized the opportunity to cater to both sets of users to provide them with a much more seamless way to manage all this stuff both locally and online. Certainly we are moving in this direction, but I think we still have a long way to go before the average non-techy can simply have all their data organized and managed, backed up, and synched to whatever computer (or portable device) they happen to want to use, view, share, change, etc. at any given time.

For all you mapping fans out there, Google has unveiled their own map application called Google Maps that’s similar to Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, MSN Maps, etc. My initial impression is that it’s very good, but still needs a bit of work. Then again, like most of these new Google sites, it is in “beta” and will probably remain there for at least a couple of years!

Pros:

• Excellent, large display. This is a larger overall display than any other of the map applications on the web that I’ve seen. This means that you can get a huge amount of viewable map detail on the screen at one time. You can always make the map smaller by just resizing your browser window, or make it even bigger by telling your browser to display full-screen.
• Nice clear vector graphics. I’m not sure if this is flash or what, but the effect is very slick. No jagged lines, so everything is smooth.
• Great navigation. Not only can you click on the navigational buttons to move the map position, soom in or out, etc, but you can also do this via the keyboard. Besides, that, you can even drag the map around with your mouse, a feature I’ve only seen before on map applications like Delorme’s Street Atlas USA.
• Searching for points of interest, stores, or addresses. Very fast and puts very clear thumbtack-like graphics that you can click on to get a balloon popup that gives you more info.
• Speed. I suppose this may have to do with your computer and/or browser, but I found it incredibly fast. Part of this is in that it doesn’t have to reload the entire screen, just the part that shows the map – or even just a part of the map that may change. This speed ads a suprising amount to the interface. Speed always makes things easier to use, but it’s not until you actually experience it in such a away that it hits you by how much!

Cons:

• While this may be an advantage in some eyes, the simplicity of the interface for an advanced users may be limiting for some.
• No distance legend. Not the biggest inconvenience, but it sure would be helpful to be able to estimate how far it might be from one place to another without having to actually plug in directions from exact points.
• It’s a bit more intuitive to zoom by clicking on a point, but this doesn’t work in Google maps.
• No way to capture an image of a map. This may have to do with the vector graphics and having to convert that to a bitmap image, but it would be nice to be able to grab an image to post on one’s site without having to do a manual screen capture.
• Freaking out. There’s a weird problem I discovered when trying to zoom in too far in a spot on Nova Scotia where I guess there aren’t maps that go down far enough. The screen kind of freaks out. You can immediately zoom back up and be fine, but the effect is a bit buggy. I’m sure this will be fixed in due course.
• No memory. It would be awfully nice to have Google Maps remember specific places. On Yahoo! Yellow Pages (and Yahoo Maps), you can set specific places, so for example, I can set my home address and work address and when looking something up, I can very quickly specify directions from one of these memorized places. In Google maps, you have to keep typing in the same address without it memorizing it.
• NavTeq data. Not sure if this is really a valid con, because all the web map apps use the data from this company. While most of the data is probably fine, I have a pet peave because they actually get the addresses on my block wrong, putting our house a block east of where it should be. I alerted them to this back last summer and they said it would be changed by their next update, but it’s now been at least six months, and with the way development happens today, six months with no update seems a bit long…

All in all, I would still say that Google Maps will probably satisfy most people’s need for maps and directions. The interface is great, and I’m certain will only improve as time goes on. While there’s a lot of advanced directional functionality (like waypoints, etc.) that are still only available on stand-alone retail software packages, it’s definitely the best of the current crop of major mapping sites I’ve seen in terms of its usability.

This is a regular reminder that I still have Gmail invitations to give away. For those who don’t know what this is, it’s Google’s web-based email (like Hotmail) service. Accounts include 1GB of storage, which is a whole lot, and have some additional features that others don’t, like threading, RSS features, etc. If you don’t have one, I still have a few left, so either email me or post a comment under this entry with your email address.

Update: As John commented below, and as I’ve seen elsewhere, a lot of people seem to be getting large numbers of Gmail invites. I just looked and I now have 50 myself! My guess is that Google must be getting ready to open it up, because if all of their current members have 50 invites, I’m guessing that’s gotta be the equivelent of at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of invites! At that point why wouldn’t you just make it public??

Update (12/7/06): As of a couple of days ago, Gmail is now open to the public. You do NOT need an invite anymore to get an account. Now go get one!

Hmmm, these free gadget referral sites are a bit addictive. After signing up for a Mac Mini, I thought of the one other gadget that I would a) love to have, and b) is a bit pricier than I can justify just buying it because it looks cool – really just being able to justify spending hundreds of bucks on something that doesn’t have a huge practical benefit. There are gadgets of course that I plan to be getting in the next six months, but a lot of others that I would love to have but just can’t consider because I don’t have that kind of disposable income anymore.

So, in any case, that one product category for me is a Personal Media Player. I’ve talked about these a lot here before and have been keeping my eyes open to see which ones look like they are good bets. The problem is that most of these are in the $400-600 price range and there are just so damn many of them these days. I looked on the web for some free offers and found another site called PVPs4Free, which specializes in Personal Media Players (or I guess as they have termed them “Personal Video Players”). They only offer a few of these, but doing a bit of searching, I found a round up on Cnet which steered me towards one of these, the Archos AV420.

PVPs4Free works basically the way the FreeMacMinis site works. You sign up yourself, complete one offer, than refer 10 friends. Luckily, this site included a decent number more offers than does FreeMacMinis, and a lot of them are different offers as well. While again many look a bit scammy, plenty are for legitimate subscriptions to newspapers, services like Blockbuster, AOL, etc. They even have a link to sign up for Vonage VOIP, so if you were considering doing this anyway, here’s a way to have it count potentially for something else. Sirius Satellite Radio is also here, as is Dish Satellite TV, and a bunch more. It just so happens that my mom needed internet access so I was able to sign her up for a cheapo account at NetZero. The one downside to this site over the FreMacMinis is that it takes up to a week to be credited for this offer. But since I don’t expect to get the Archos for months, it’s no big deal.

So, again, here’s my referral code and others are free to post a comment with their own:

http://www.pvps4free.com/default.aspx?r=179762

Well, I finally did it. I signed up for one of those free[fill-in-the-blanks].com offers. For a long time I thought this was a very obvious scam, but it apparently really isn’t. For some reason most of these offers - or actually all of them that I’ve heard of - are offers for free gadgets - iPods, iPod Mini’s, digital cameras, etc. But then I heard a spokesman (or maybe it was the CEO) of the company (Gratis Networks) interviewed I think on The Screen Savers a while back, and it did sound a bit more legitimate. Engadget also did a piece about this. There are also reports I’ve seen on the internet of people who’ve gotten

Apple recently announced a new Mac that I thought was just about my size, called the Mac mini. I say my size not really about it’s size, which is truly small - smaller than a laptop but a lot thicker than one. The nicest thing as far as I’m concerned is the price, which starts at only $500. Macs have always come at a premium compared to their PC counterparts and it’s no wonder because you have only one company making them, whereas there are probably thousands of different manufacturers making PC’s and/or the individual components within them.

I’ve been thinking about getting an older low-end Mac to play with for a while. I’ve been a PC guy since 1990 (before then I was all about Atari computers), but Mac is undoubtedly a platform that a lot of influential people use. There are a bunch of programs which are really only available on the Mac. The Mac is of course better designed, but that I could really care less about. Really what would be nice about having a Mac at my disposal is the ability to have the same experience with my websites or other technologies that Mac users (albeit a somewhat small group compared to PC users) do. Lots of people also rave about the latest Mac OS X variants that are built on *nix (maybe even Linux? I can’t recall). So, in affect this is also an opportunity to get into UNIX. I know I could install this on the PC and do a duel boot, and I’ve had a copy of Red Hat Linux for probably a good three or four years, but obviously I’m too lazy to try this out!

So, I’m not expecting this to arrive anytime soon, and heck, I’m not even expecting it to arrive at all, but I figure the relatively painless process of signing up is worth what seems like a relatively decent chance of actually getting this in the next 6 months. While $500 is pretty cheap, the one that they are offering through this site is a little more beefed up, and while I’d love to just go out and buy one of these today, it’s hard for me to justify the purchase when there’s a lot of other gadget stuff I’m hoping to purchase in the coming months which are much more defendable!

So how does it work and are there any catches? Well, basically, there seem to be three steps:

1) You sign up with your email address and a few other pieces of info like your contact info.
2) You sign up for one of these “offers” from various companies. Some are credit cards, some are services like eFax, and others are a bit scammier sounding. I picked one that sounds not very useful, but not at all scammy called Buyers Advantage - which deals with warranty and return insurance type stuff - but also not expensive and you can always call and cancel it within 30 days.
3) The final step is that you need to refer people to sign up under you. I guess that sounds a bit scammy itself, kind of like a pyramid scheme, but I don’t think it is because it’s only two levels. You don’t, I don’t think, get any credit when people sign up under one of your referrals.

So, this is where you, my little blog readers come in. You too, can experience this new and silly phenomenon and help out this blogger in the process without really spending any money! And you too may or may not get one of these cute boxes yourself in coming months. Here is my own referral link, and if you’ve already signed up for this offer or for the various other Free[fill-in-the-blanks].com, feel free to comment and include those. This was the first one I’ve attempted since it was really the first thing that was of that much interest, so I have no qualms with others piggybacking on this entry and adding their own referral links - the more the merrier!

http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=14260603

I had this idea, kind of random. A lot of people post their wish lists (mostly Amazon.com wish lists) on their blogs or websites as a reference for family and friends. I’ve always thought how cool it might be to get a random item from my wish list sent by someone I know, or even someone I don’t. Actually, whenever I receive a birthday present from someone I never expect to, it’s always a pleasant surprise. It doesn’t matter the size of the gift, just the fact that the person took the time to send something – heck, even a card – was something.

I’m not always the best gift giver or even card sender. We have such a huge circle of friends now, it’s also very hard to think about who we should buy for, and most of the time I lame-out and just let my wife figure it out. Of course this doesn’t work when I need to get her a present! Being someone who’s easily distracted and who has a myriad little projects and other occupiers of my time and attention, being organized enough to be able to send cards out to anyone aside for some close family’s birthdays is somewhat of a pipe dream.

With that in mind, I thought it would be a kind of cool “project” to take the whole sense of obligation and expectation out of the gift-giving process. The idea was to look up a friend or family member’s wish list, if you know someone who has one, and send them something from it. Anything. It doesn’t have to be for any occasion, and ideally it wouldn’t be for any. That way it would be completely unexpected. If you don’t know of anyone personally, perhaps you know a blogger or someone else with a website who has a wish list online? I’m not suggesting myself, I swear! Googling for “amazon wishlist blog” gives a whole bunch of random bloggers who publish their wish list.

Some might say this idea is a bit self indulgent – or at least publishing your wish list is self-indulgent. Maybe this is true, who knows, but in defense of the idea think about those people you know who are really hard to figure out a gift for. If they had their wish list online, you would at least get a sense of what they would like, even if you don’t buy something specifically on the list. Likewise, when posting a link to my wish list, I would never expect someone to just buy something for me for no reason. Family members know where to look for my wish list and have used it often to buy me stuff, because apparently I am one of those people for whom it’s tough to buy presents. (I think it’s because I generally lust after gadgets that are in the $100’s of dollars or more, but can never think of anything smaller and more practical that I need). But I do think that like other things you might share with your readers, a wish list is just another way for them to learn a little more about you, your tastes, etc. Often I just use my wish list as a kind of bookmark holder for things I’ve heard about that sound interesting, or to note down a piece of equipment that I think should be in contention when I consider buying that type of product, but a lot of my wish list is filled with books and music that I think probably says something about me – what I don’t know!

So, that’s my suggestion, anyway. I’m planning on doing this, but I haven’t figured out who to yet. Hopefully whoever it is won’t think I’m some weird internet stalker, or that I’m sending it as a late Christmas present! If you think this is an interesting idea and plan to do this yourself – or have already done this sort of thing – I’d love to hear your comments.

I’ve been holding onto these 6 Gmail invites for quite a while now, offering them to friends every once in a while, but no one has seemed really interested, so I thought I would just offer them up as freebies here on the blog. Click on the link to email me in the upper right corner of my blog and I’ll send one your way. I’ll update this post when they’re all gone.
Updat: One of those who emailed me alerted me to the fact that I had an invalid email link, sorry about that! It’s been fixed.