Yes, it's nice to be able to receive images from people who are actually your friends, not spammers, and who don't overdo sending annoyingly cutesy images (e.g. that cousin who forwards stuff to everybody.)

But being an old guy doesn't just mean that I want you to send text email and stay off my lawn, it also means I want to set the font I use to read email with so it's easy for me to read, instead of having you pick a font that you think looks great to you on your screen, because I need a font that's big enough and dark enough to read easily, and if I'm reading mail on a phone instead of a full-sized screen, I *really* want to have my choice of font size, not yours, and while maybe you think Comic Sans is cute or <BLINK>want to send your Halloween party announcement in a blood-red font that's bleeding down the page</BLINK>, I'd much rather be able to read what you wrote.

And because I'm an old cranky security guy, I really really don't want my email client trying to run your Javascript on my machine, thank you very much, even if all you think you're doing is trying to center the text neatly in ways that might look good on a 24" monitor but utterly fail when I'm reading in an SSH session or on my phone.

<href="https://nsa.gov\/web-bug.js\">Not the Web Bug You're Looking For</a>

I maintain a small announcement list for about 200 mostly highly tech-savvy people. We've been around for 25+ years on a range of different platforms, and are currently using a hosting platform with Linux and mailman (as opposed to the previous home Linux box and majordomo), but we still occasionally get spamblocked. It's text-format mail, no automated verification, and it's possible that some mailbox services are blocking us silently instead of bouncing, but most of the bouncegrams I get these days claim that the recipient's mailbox is full (maybe true, sometimes not), or the usual things you get when somebody moves and their forwarding breaks. Occasionally I get a burst of greymail-grams. The site that seems to do the most silent drops is pobox.com, which is annoying because it's where I do my own mail, so I have to have a couple of duplicate subscriptions of my own just in case it's cranky again.

If the sender uses an image in the email to bug the recipient, then it's a web bug. If the sender doesn't keep track of who opens the image, then it's not a web bug.

If the image is 1x1 in the same color as the background, it's pretty much guaranteed that the sender is using it as a web bug, because about the only other thing you can do with images like that is try to tweak kerning or fill in a table entry that gets misaligned if you don't, or something like that.

Twitter's web page constantly tells me it thinks I'm not receiving its emails correctly, and offers to send me more test emails, because they're using web bugs, and I use an email client that shows me email as text, not as HTML, and they so thoroughly assume that everybody uses buggable web mail that they don't even include a URL link saying "Please click this in a browser to confirm we got your email correct." And the banner on their web page that offers to send me a test email doesn't have a choice for "Yes, I'm receiving it just fine, stop whining." Idiots.

If you were paying attention back when the TSA started telling people to take their shoes off, it wasn't because of the Shoe Bomber incident, which hadn't happened yet. It was because a lot of mens' shoes have metal shanks in them and were setting off the metal detectors, and they didn't want the lines getting held up sending people back to run their shoes through the X-Ray machine.

At first it was a "Please take off your shoes" request, but if you knew you had non-metallic shoes they didn't force you to take them off (I tended to wear Teva sandals, and lots of people in Hawaii wear flipflops, especially inter-island.) Or sometimes they'd yell at you for not doing it, and they really dislike being challenged by anyone, such as being told "If it were actually a TSA rule, it'd be on the sign", which often got me an honest response of "we can take you in the back room and search through all your stuff long enough that you'll miss your flight, so obey orders or we'll do that."

Then a few airports started saying "Everybody must take your shoes off, it's ALWAYS been the rule", because it's easier to have the grunts think it's always been the rule than have them actually have to think or do different things for different people (and realistically, a lot of travellers don't realize they have metal in their shoes, and sometimes there's just a bit of metal like shoelace hole reinforcers in sneakers, so it only sets it off if the metal detectors are turned up high and not if they're set lower.)

Then the shoe-bomber idiot did his thing, and after that the TSA started making everybody take off their shoes, and then they started making videos for people to watch when they're stuck in unreasonably long lines, which dishonestly tell people that the shoe rule was made for our safety.

If you were paying attention back when the TSA started telling people to take their shoes off, it wasn't because of the Shoe Bomber incident, which hadn't happened yet. It was because a lot of mens' shoes have metal shanks in them and were setting off the metal detectors, and they didn't want the lines getting held up sending people back to run their shoes through the X-Ray machine.

At first it was a "Please take off your shoes" request, but if you knew you had non-metallic shoes they didn't force you to take them off (I tended to wear Teva sandals, and lots of people in Hawaii wear flipflops, especially inter-island.)

Then a few airports started saying "Everybody must take your shoes off, it's ALWAYS been the rule", because it's easier to have the grunts think it's always been the rule than have them actually have to think or do different things for different people (and realistically, a lot of travellers don't realize they have metal in their shoes, and sometimes there's just a bit of metal like shoelace hole reinforcers in sneakers, so it only sets it off if the metal detectors are turned up high and not if they're set lower.)

Then the shoe-bomber idiot did his thing, and after that the TSA started making everybody take off their shoes, and then they started making videos for people to watch when they're stuck in unreasonably long lines, which dishonestly tell people that the shoe rule was made for our safety.

Yes, I've met a few decent people working for the TSA, but the vast majority have been bullies. Whether they started out as bullies who couldn't find better jobs, or who consider the SHOUTING to be one of the benefits, or whether they started out as average people put into confrontational jobs with bullies for supervisors and start bullying people habitually, they're still bullies.

On the other hand, watching TV directly at abc.com has annoying commercial breaks :-)

Daylight Savings vs. Real Time?

I got a call from a coworker once and told him I couldn't talk long because I was underwater - literally. It was one of those tourist submarines in Hawaii, and they hadn't closed the hatch door yet. (I'd rather scuba dive, but it was a way to get my mom and some of the younger nieces and nephews to be able to see all the fish and coral.)

And yeah, go Snowden!

Most of the time I'm physically located in PST8PDT, though during the time I've had this job I've also had a business trip to EST5EDT and a vacation trip to Hawaii where one thing I did was visit a coworker who lives out there, spent a couple of weeks helping my mom after she had knee surgery and worked from there, and that doesn't count checking email at airports in mountain and central time zones (with various values of Daylight Savings Trickiness.) So physically it's probably 5 zones.

But where my body's sitting isn't necessarily where I'm working. There's the troubleshooting gig last week in Singapore, talking the technician there through updating the OS on the box that was ordered incorrectly, along with a couple of coworkers in other parts of the US, or other projects with the technician in UK or NL or Slovakia. There's the development project that has meetings at 5:30am my time, because that's 8:30 on the east coast and some tolerable time of day in Israel (though fortunately I don't usually have to be on those.) There are the videoconferences where the company president might be in Texas or Colorado or New Jersey or California and we get to email questions to the moderator. So add at least 4 more time zones, maybe more depending on whether some people are in other parts of Asia or Australia.

If it's a for-profit propaganda organization masquerading as a non-profit education, then it's a lot like the original....

I'm a Libertarian, but characterizing the Greens as a one-issue party is quite inaccurate. They care about a whole lot of things besides the environment, and are generally aligned with Progressives on most issues.

The corporations and right-wing think-tanks who originally funded the Tea Party talked about the debt and deficit a lot (though they waited until Bush was about to be out of office to do it), but they've tried very hard to attract the right-wing crazy people as well, using them to attack the Democrats while providing deniability for the Republicans who can pretend that all that Birther racism has nothing to do with them.

If I'm being extra-cynical, I'd say that keeping the deficit hawks and the crazy people off on the right margin instead of having a centrist anti-deficit group was deliberate.

Some genetic test results are interesting but aren't something you can do much about; others are things you should pay attention to. 23&me says I've got a higher-than-average risk of Type 1 Diabetes (dodged that) and a lower risk of Type 2 (which tends to develop in middle age and is strongly influenced by diet.) If it were the other way around, I'd hopefully be a lot more serious about diet and exercise than I am currently. (Like most American adults, I need to lose weight, but at least I don't need to be taking insulin or the various things they give you before that to keep my blood sugars in line.)

On the other hand, I'm apparently also at risk for male pattern baldness (who'd have guessed?) Not much I can do about that besides wear hats.

I know some people whose DNA testing results said they were more or less sensitive to commonly-used medicines, which says that if they end up taking them they should let their doctors know so they can adjust dosages or choose alternative drugs.