DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

One of the worst things about the Internet is that owning a domain name requires that you publish personal contact information in a public directory, where every con artist and scammer in the world can access it. Within a few days of registering a domain name, expect the flood to begin: junk mail and spam, pushing mortgage scams, diet pills, herbal viagra, porn, “easier” web hosting, and a load of other unappealing crap, delivered to every address you’ve provided, whether physical or electronic.

I recommend to everyone that they provide fake physical-address data, because there appears to be no benefit to using a real address. Domain registrars will send an email when the domain is up for renewal; if you’re certain they can email you, or if you watch the expirations yourself, then there really isn’t any reason to give a real address — so long as wrong-thinking legislators don’t make it illegal, anyway.

But, one’s email address is still exposed. Until now: Dotster, my favorite registrar, recently announced a service called Spam Shield.

Here’s how it works:

• Rather than publishing the email address you provide, they publish an address generated for you. Any mail received at this address gets forwarded to your real address…
• after it passes spam filtering.
• And then the addresses are all changed every 10 days, effectively expiring any address that has already been harvested by the spambots.

This is a service I’d pay for, but I don’t have to — at the moment, Dotster offers it for free.

Research released Monday at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association showed that in a pound-for-pound contest, people on the Atkins low-carb diet lost more weight and had better cholesterol and triglyceride counts than people on a traditional Heart Association-approved low-fat diet.

Welcome to this week’s nutrition controversy. Here’s the Chron article: Knives drawn over Atkins diet study

The Atkins Diet is truly an American phenomenon: you can lose weight by eating all the greasy meats and cheeses you can pack in your face, and you don’t have to eat any vegetables, and you don’t have to exercise. What could be better than that?

And it even works — people who stick to the plan really do lose weight.

And yet, even the doctor in charge of the latest study has reservations. “While we’re impressed with the weight loss of this diet, we still are not sure about the safety of it,” says Eric Westman, M.D., of Duke University. “More studies need to be done in order to be confident about the long-term safety of this type of diet.” (Westman is quoted in Duke Health Briefs, 7/15/02.)

Here’s an interesting quote, from nutritional expert Joanne Ikeda, MA, RN of UC Berkeley: “I think this stuff makes money for Dr. Atkins and not much more than that. If he was right, the Italians who have twice as much carbohydrates in their diet would be worse off than we are. But they have half the obesity compared to us. The epidemiological evidence is just not there.”

So, no easy answers. I wish these folks would figure out the truth, and soon. They’re making it really difficult to be immortal.

Biomorph recently bought back a truck-load of their “personal” ergonomic desks from a failed dot-com. The company is selling them (with a full warranty) for ~30% off. They’re still obscenely expensive at $895, and the only surface finish available at this price is the clearcoat, which is the least visually appealing in the catalog. But you’d still get the benefit of adjusting keyboard height and monitor height independently, and besides, the old door-across-two-file-cabinets look is so 1990s.

If you don’t like the clearcoat finish, you can still save $100 off the regular desk price by opting for a pre-owned frame. Also, I understand that some of Biomorph’s other, regular, inventory will be going on sale for the holidays.

Here’s how to justify home-office upgrades: you probably spend 50-60 hours a week there, so you ought to be comfortable. Most people think nothing of having a multi-hundred-dollar monthly car payment, even if the car sits idle in the garage 95% of the time. If it makes you feel better, you can haul your new desk out to the curb on weekends so your neighbors can admire it too.

A friend with an iBook just upgraded to Jaguar. Afterwards, at her request, I made a change to the network preferences to fix her wireless connection. Then I powered the machine down, because that’s what she usually does.

She phoned me the next day, because the laptop would not boot up. She reported that she’d pressed the power button repeatedly without any response. That’s always disconcerting.

First I thought the thing might be asleep, so I walked her through some wake-up rituals. I figured this would not help, because I was the last person to touch the machine, and I’d shut it down. But I had to suggest something, and I couldn’t think of anything else. Besides, superstition is 90% of the hardware-repair game.

Needless to say, the iBook wasn’t sleeping, so we couldn’t wake it. But it wouldn’t turn on. The battery showed a full charge. And, the unit was plugged in.

I was beginning to worry. It’s hard to maintain one’s reputation as the neighborhood Mac expert after killing someone’s new iBook. I kept a confident tone in my voice — if superstition is 90% of the game, confidence is the other 10% — but the problem was that after having dealt with all varieties of weird hardware and software problems for most of my life, I’ve developed a sense for how serious a situation is, even if I’ve never seen the particular problem before. This one smelled wrong. I was afraid there would be a warranty claim in her immediate future.

Completely out of reasonable suggestions, I still had to say something, so I segued smoothly to an unreasonable suggestion. “Unplug the laptop,” I said, “remove the battery, and wait five minutes.” I could have added, and wave your arms in the air while dancing topless around the desk and making a sound like the horn on a 1947 Chrysler. Either process would be equally effective; I was making it up as I went along. “Then put in the battery and turn the machine on. Call me back if it doesn’t work.”

I knew the phone would ring in five minutes. But I didn’t expect to hear her say what she did: “It worked!” So, I don’t know, maybe I really am a computer expert. Anyway, the lesson here has nothing to do with being confident in the face of challenge, or having courage to proceed against difficult odds. The lesson, as far as I’m concerned, is never touch a friend’s computer.

Here’s my free advice for the day: befriend a gourmet.

We were invited to the City for a birthday celebration. The hosts have a serious talent in the kitchen, which we knew, so we’d prepared for this party by starving ourselves all day. Man oh man… what a spread. I ate everything in sight. I threw off the shackles of veganism, or really non-lacto-pescatarianism, with relish (and they probably put butter in the relish).

Their recipes come from a series of wondrous books. If you like to cook, or want to give a gift to someone who does (like me, for example), you can do no better than to check out the bound volumes of Cook’s Illustrated magazines. I don’t own any of these myself (but soon! but soon!) but my understanding is that the writers test countless variations of each recipe, publishing the one that works the best. And they explain why. If my friends’ results are any indication, these recipes are exceptional.