...But I was revived. I had a cardiac arrest on July 1st almost exactly 6 days after 'returning' to /.

I'm doing fine now, thanks to the first responders, police, and paramedics who were doing CPR in minutes and got my heart started again with an AED. I avoided brain damage, which wasn't apparent when I first woke up days later with the memory of a goldfish. "Oh look, a castle!" (for those who know that joke.) I now have an ICD, making me a legit cyborg.

So how's your Summer going?

I'm glad there's still /. around, even if I don't check it very often.

I was hoping that the new radio station in my city was an independent or local venture. No such luck. Astral media, who owns it, has 82 other stations across Canada. Good luck getting local music played on those airwaves.

Do any of my computer savvy readers know of an online tool that can scan links on a website to see if they still work? Even better, something that scans to see if links have changed into a splog (or spam blog)?

I got the idea for this tool when I noticed that in my archives I had a link to iamnotafraid.ca which was a short lived political action group, and it has been co-opted by a spammer looking to benefit from the Google Page Rank that comes from many blogs linking to it.

Here's significant media coverage following up on the progression of the lawsuit that is taking on Google, Yahoo!, bloggers, and essentially the Internet. Here's the background to this story as covered by Slashdot.

Many bloggers like Michael Geist are standing up to those who would bully political (and other) bloggers. Mark is one being sued.

S.B. kindly demonstrates how a clueless commenter can unleash a can of worms if there is a libel-chiller in the pack reading (with a lawyer on speed-dial).

If you've EVER left a comment about a Canadian on your blog, you could be sued. Scary stuff, eh? Now please leave a comment about how stupid the law is right now in Canada.

Last week Microsoft notified people that their animated cursors contain a serious flaw that can be exploited simply by getting a victim to view a malicious webpage or email on their Windows computer.

On Saturday a serious virus that exploits this hole in Windows was discovered in the wild. Symantec, Grisoft, Trisf-Lirpa Software, and McAfee, don't yet have detection for this serious virus threat. There are of course as many names for the virus as there are antivirus vendors, but the most common name you'll hear is the Blog Dump Virus.

The Blog Dump Virus has a two part payload. The first part hacks your website through keystroke detection, and then deletes blog content on both Blogger and WordPress. If you're using WordPress.com it will steal your password and delete your account name which makes it very hard to get your name back! WordPress.com has a policy where it doesn't undelete a blog account which has had its name used, in order to combat spam and fraud.

The second part of the virus payload affects the Windows image mapping process, by changing the orientation of random photos you load in your web browser.

I've developed a browser based test for the virus, and will provide the patch soon if Microsoft doesn't get to it today.

If I heard a kid singing "I am special, I am special, look at me, look at me," I'd give the parent a glare. There's a difference between boosting a child's self esteem, and giving them a warped sense of reality.

I couldn't get enough votes for my ugly fridge, even though it was advertised on Canada's top Conservative blog smalldeadanimals.com .

I did create a new eBay auction though for the Male Sterilization Kit that my girlfriend invented, and fortunately has no intention of ever using.

I'm using YouTube to market my campaign to get my Ugly Fridge "Cold Yeller" the most votes in a contest.
Help me out please and watch the YouTube video, send it to your friends, and vote for my fridge soon.

The last two days I've opened what I thought were duped articles, but they were Backslash articles by Timothy rehashing what was talked about yesterday on Slashdot. Slashdot is so short of stories that they talk about yesterday's stories knowingly now. I'm so short of journal news, that I'll write about Slashdot, who's writing about Slashdot.

One of us. One of us. A new Slashdottie.

I was seconds away from a first post, but even though I started out at +2, and expected to get up to maybe +3 interesting, I ended up down at -1 Troll. I've never had 29 comments posted on one single post of mine before, it's astonishing it's while I've spent some time at a low reading threshold value too then.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177585&cid=14729494

I think recently there are a few moderators hanging around that don't care for my "speak up" attitude, which is backed up by the higher number of AC trolls telling me to "shut up" in various ways, including slipping in Overrated moderations after the story is a day old. I think I may have struck a nerve too the other day with my remark that some Slashdotters place too little emphasis on building families and are short sighted to think that money is the cure to all ills later in life.

I got tired of not having a working PVR when I have an ATI AIW card, so I reinstalled Windows XP on my computer in free space. Now I am reinstalling my favourite software slowly, trying not to break the TV or hibernation features.

My cousin Brex has been adding some pretty funny stuff to his blog at www.lifeofbrex.blogspot.com too.

Submitted to Slashdot: Employees at Hewlett-Packard and Canada's Department of National Defence (DND) were charged stemming from a 2 1/2 year probe by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into shady billing and work done by HP at the DND in Canada's nation capital Ottawa.
"[An employee] Mr. Champagne was fired by DND in 2003 over alleged billing irregularities involving supplier Compaq Canada, which was later acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

The company repaid the government $145 million and launched a $107-million lawsuit against Mr. Champagne, accusing him of theft and fraud. None of the allegations have been proved in court. The civil action is still before the courts, the RCMP said."