Business Adventures https://www.amazon.com/Busines... The New New Thing https://www.amazon.com/New-Thi... and probably Microserfs: https://www.amazon.com/Microse...

We've had good experience with Mailroute.net - actually replaced hardware Barracuda 300s with this, never looked back. Mailroute doesn't archive messages, just filters and forwards, so it won't help you if a you / a user deleted a message and you'd like to get a copy back from the 'backup'. But for basic filtering - really good, quite inexpensive. And for us the cost was really more about the $$ necessary to keep a Barracuda alive in a data center plus the yearly spam update subscriptions. It worked out to something like $2K / year for one Barracuda 300, and Mailroute is a fraction of that. YMMV / FWIW

Read http://www.amazon.com/The-Gift... The Gift of Fear. Really insightful, talks about many issues with stalking, violence, etc.

The main part relevant to this problem: responding to many stalkers even with negative / threatening behavior is a form of positive encouragement, and they'll keep at it. The only solution is to filter YOUR experience (delete / don't listen to VM, don't read emails etc) rather than trying to get the unwanted inputs to stop.

That way there's no feedback to the jerks on the sending side, they get bored or angry at someone else, and go away.

One subtlety is: don't turn off your phone, or leave a outbound message saying 'I will not be checking this voicemail because of the jerks". That's encouragement. Change nothing. Get a 2nd phone as needed, use that.

Likewise, don't setup an autoresponder saying "I don't read this email because of the jerks" - same logic as above. GoF is a very worthwhile read, for everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... Classic problem with companies and industries being able to influence their regulators.

/reporting from shadow-Earth.

Some posters seem to miss the (huge) advantage that electric vehicles have vs gas, hydrogen etc. powered vehicles- they are decoupled from a specific energy source. Solar, nuclear, coal, wind ALL work as electric car fuel. Hydrogen requires a vast infrastructure that doesn't exist yet, but you can charge an e-car Right Now with whatever electrical supply you happen to have. Charge from solar/wind at home, charge from evil coal at work, whatever. The electric car is an omnivore. Bio-diesel is interesting because you can make your own, but the electric car democratizes the energy input for transport to a much higher degree. PLUS it breaks the tight linkage between car maker and fuel supplier that exists now, and would also likely exit for hydrogen-based cars.

We used to host our own databases and mail / web server in the Boston area. Not in a huge office complex, just in a small suite of offices. It sucked.

Every couple of weeks, someone would dig up a cable in the street (causing an outage), or the power would go off for a long time (and our UPS would die, and that would cause an outage), or someone would trip over something (causing an outage).

Grrr. We eventually moved our stack of mac minis (cheap! and low hassle) to a specialist colocation place in Las Vegas that basically is a sub-tennant of the gigantic Switch datacenter.

Here was the surprise bonus - in addition to way better uptime, the quality of the connection we got was SO good it was crazy. Doing a 500Mb system update takes like, a minute to download. And because we didn't need the fancy Symmetric DSL connection back home, we could save money by downgrading to a regular ADSL connection. And, we got a 'naked' / all ports open connection to the net without hassles.

This was a seriously Good Move for us - think about moving your box somewhere offsite. It's cool.

If you happen to be using Macs, we used http://macminicolo.com/ (we're just a customer, but a pretty stoked one).

And FF threw a JS unresponsive error on load. ...the purpose of doing this was what? Out-trending who? Was ANY usability testing done? Anyone think of skimming "Don't Make Me Think"? [ link ] Yuck.

So, a band I'm in signed up for "Tweet For A Track" - basically, a service that gives away a free song to folks to Twitter about the record. Mildly-bribed social networking. There are pros/cons to this approach, but we thought we'd try it. Of course, our twitter feed is linked to FB (tweets become FB Wall posts automatically). One day it dawns on us that Tweet for A Track had been sending the same, repeated, now-getting-quite-spammy promotional tweets every couple of weeks - and thus creating a host of boring, spammy FB Wall posts. Yikes! We had to go kill the TFaT / Twitter connection and then hand-delete all the FB posts. Not good. So, the moral of the story is be very very careful about any 'services' you sign up for that have the power to post stuff, directly or indirectly, to your FB Wall. You can automate the process of alienating your friends very easily via these handy-dandy services.