Version 0.8 of Mozilla’s standalone browser, formerly known as Phoenix and Firebird and now known as Firefox, is finally out. Mozilla’s site seems to be overloaded today because of it, but the download mirrors in California and Britain seem to be surviving all the hits…

Edited 12:00pm to add: There’s also a new release of the Thunderbird mail client. Again, here are the mirrors in California and Britain. Also, I changed the second mirror from one in Spain to one in Britain because the latter site seems somewhat faster.

I know, I know, I’ve been posting a lot about junk mail lately. Hey, it’s not as if much has been going on in my life that’s worthy of note, so I figure I might rant about the mess that clogs my inbox every morning. Admittedly, the spam problem is made even worse by that stupid MyDoom virus. Although I have a server-side filter on my zone38.net mail accounts set up to block the virus based on certain strings found therein (see this F-Secure virus profile for the regular expressions to use), I still have addresses at other providers that are getting hit by it several times a day, and in addition I have to deal with the delivery failure notifications that are getting sent back to an innocent third party who happened to be in someone else’s address book.

Anyway, I found a couple of amusing spam-related weblogs while I was searching for posts about MyDoom-related annoyances. Because these involve subject lines found in actual spam, there are bound to be occasional entries that are in somewhat questionable taste, but in all honesty, I’ve seen far worse spam subjects in my own inbox than are mentioned on either of these sites…

First off is Kristin Thomas’ Spam Poetry, a reasonably successful attempt to assemble random quotations from the subject lines of junk e-mail into somewhat coherent verse. A bizarre idea, to be sure, but the results are actually quite interesting to read.

If poetry isn’t quite your thing, you might enjoy Good Things from Spam, an attempt to make sense of– and snarky comments about– the often incoherent and occasionally nonsensical non-sequiturs that are frequently found in the subjects of spam. Many of the comments on this site literally had me laughing out loud; if your sense of humor is anything like mine, you’ll probably find it hilarious as well.

Oh, in other news, my site’s made the blog rounds again; this time, it was the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame that got linked on J-Walk, Canada.com’s Web Junkie and Bloggerheads, along with a fairly good number of lower-profile sites…

If I get any more of these stupid e-mail viruses of the month– Beagle, Novarg, and all of their clones– in my mailbox, I’m going to scream.

You’re just needlessly taking up bandwidth, people. And at 30-odd kilobytes per message, it really adds up.

And a special bonus gripe goes out to all of the e-mail servers which return undeliverable mail to the “sender” with all attachments intact. That practically doubles the number of copies of these blasted things that I get…

Oww. I just realized how directionally impaired I am.

I’ve ridden with friends from campus to the local Wal-Mart to pick up random things that I needed far too many times over the past couple of years. So you’d think that by now, I’d be able to remember how to get there from here, right?

If only that were the case!

Granted, part of it is because I’ve never consciously driven there, instead sitting in the back seat and watching; when it comes to learning directions, I tend to be more of a kinesthetic learner.

But even that’s not the whole story. Many times, I’ve made the wrong turn entirely going somewhere I’ve actually driven multiple times… as in, I was sitting behind the wheel when I went there.

THAT is how directionally impaired I am.

People wonder why I prefer to catch rides from others rather than driving myself. I’ve already mentioned the stress that driving always seems to cause me (too many stimuli to keep track of!), but there’s another reason as well: having someone else along helps to guarantee that I’ll end up back where I started, as opposed to, say, another city or state entirely.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve a horrible memory for the names of streets and tend to navigate instead using landmarks. Tell me to turn left on Oglethorpe and I’ll stare at you as if you were speaking Hungarian; but tell me to turn toward the Busy Corner liquor store and I’ll know exactly what you’re referring to.

Yes, yes, I know, I’m in a ranting mood today… mainly coming from utter frustration in trying to get to my bank to deposit cash into my account when there are no branches of the bank in question in walking distance.

The State of the Union address will be televised tomorrow at 9:00 pm. Guess what that means? Yep, it’s time for yet another round of the State of the Union Drinking Game!

(And it should be noted that, although I’m 21 and therefore legal, I’ll still probably be drinking cola instead. Yes, I know this means I’ll be setting myself up for a night of utter insomnia, but hey…)

One of the funniest student projects I’ve seen and heard in a while: “Generic Rap Song” by P-Unit, a great parody of the awful mess that is popular rap music. (found via Blogdex)

A George W. Bush quote from October 27, 2003, recently unearthed by DubyaSpeak (with audio!):

It’s in the interest of — uhh — uhh, long-term peace in the world that we — uhh — work for a free and secure and peaceful Iraq. A peeance, freeance secure Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have enormous historical impact.

Peeance? Freeance? What the…?

Sure, I often get my words garbled when I’m speaking, but I try to correct myself when I slip up this badly.

(If it weren’t for my horse, if it weren’t for my horse, if it weren’t for my horse…)

Oh, the irony. I rarely post quotes from AIM conversations, but this one was too good to pass up. I had been having some trouble accessing web sites, and wanted to see if one of my friends on campus was having the same problem. So I asked:

codeman38: is it just me, or is Mercer’s network being incredibly annoying right now?
*** You have been disconnected. Tue Jan 13 16:19:25 2004.

Guess that answers that particular question!

I know, I know, I’m way too easily amused…

To whom it may concern at America Online:

Apparently, you have recently begun testing video ads, with accompanying audio, in the AIM client. It would have been nice to have a place where we users could offer feedback on these ads, however, because I have quite a bit of it… and most of it isn’t positive.

First, let me mention that I’m not against advertising in general in AIM, unlike some people seem to be. Indeed, I’ve seen a few clever or interesting banner ads that actually interested me and that caused me to follow through to the advertiser’s site. The ads needn’t even be simple and static; I’ve seen a few interactive ads that were incredibly clever.

However, forcing full-motion video with accompanying audio upon a user, especially in a program that normally tends to be relatively quiet, is a bit on the intrusive side. Many AIM users use the product at work, in a computer lab, or in some other environment where such audio messages may be unwanted. In addition, some people can be rather sensitive when it comes to unexpected audio playing for no apparent reason; I don’t know how many times I’ve recoiled because some website somewhere on my desktop decided to start playing music unexpectedly.

Indeed, I didn’t even realize at first that these ads were coming from AIM. Several times lately I had heard an ad for CareerBuilder playing through my computer’s speakers– usually on top of the MP3 I was listening to at the time!– but I was unable to actually track down the source of the ad until this week, when I happened to notice a video clip synchronized with the ad in my AIM buddy list. I was quite disappointed when I discovered that AIM was the application that was drowning out my music with these audio ads; I would have expected that AOL would know better than this.

But their intrusiveness isn’t the worst part. Even on my two-and-a-half-year-old machine, these video ads seem to use up an excessive amount of system resources for something as simple as an instant messaging client, causing the system to become a bit sluggish. And if that wasn’t bad enough, these rich-media ads have also had the rather unfortunate side effect of crashing certain people’s computers!

I’m clearly not the only one upset by this decision, judging from commentary at WebSpiffy and Doug’s Random Thoughts, among other sites.

Please, AOL. If you’re going to foist video and audio ads into our buddy list, at least give us an option to choose a more “lightweight” form of advertising instead.