Just a friendly word of advice. Like planets aligning in a prophecy of mayhem and destruction, the SF Giants, Oakland A's, SF 49ers, Stanford Cardinals and California Bears all have home games this afternoon.

The Stanford game isn't until 7pm, which means it should match up with the crowds leaving the Niners and Giants games.

I'm going to the Bears game today but, lucky for me, I only live about 300 yards from the stadium so the only traffic I have to worry about is on foot!

So I came home last Sunday or so and had so many things to talk about that I made a list of bolg entries I needed to make... Then I got busy... I'll see what I can do to make it up...

So I'm getting my hair (mostly) bleached and dyed tomorrow. First time for everything, eh? Part of me is convinced I'll hate it, because if I've learned one thing, it's that nothing ever goes exactly as you expect, and not having precise control over something as image-shaping as dying part of your hair is frightening.

Then again, perhaps, like bungee jumping or skydiving, maybe voluntarily relinquishing control is the point of the exercise. True, this is a relinquishment of more than a few seconds or minutes as in the above examples, but then again, the worst that could happen is that I dye.

Two quick corrections to previous stories. I'll also add the corrections as ammendums to the stories themselves.

Regarding Flash 5 what-you-print-is-not-what-you-see banners, it's been relayed to me that you specifically have to initiate the print process from the banner to get the supplimentary content (such as by clicking a 'print spec sheet' link or somesuch. This wasn't obvious from the feature page ontheir site, but it makes more sense, and is much nicer.

Similarly, to clarify my comment about Adobe's Photoshop 5.5 site, I didn't mean that Adobe used Macromedia products to create their content, just that they rely on the proliferation of the Flash plug-in to view the site. Sure Adobe may have a 'flash-like' plug in, but they know that the fast majority of visitors will have the macromedia plug in and not theirs. Thus, the irony still holds.

Ammy, the fourth camera to come back from the August drop, arrived last Saturday and was immediately sent in for developing and scanning! It came back from the developer today, and I'm very excited to put the pictures up, along with those from Emily and Rick, which came back earlier.

Part of the reason I had been holding back the last week is that the heavy traffic from AOLiza press was taxing the servers, and that's all small text stuff. Putting up quality JPEG pictures would quickly max out the bandwidth I have available.

The good news was that traffic was starting to die down to the point where I could put this content up. The bad news (or other good news) is that AOLiza will be getting another major press boot some time next week.

So what does this all mean? Well, I have another server, one without traffic limits (at least in the short term) and with an ethernet connection ot a T-3 backbone, which should provide all the connectivity I need at present, and I'm setting it up with content, so hopefully I can put the cameo pictures up.

As before, if you're not a frequent visitor to the site and you'd like an email sent when the camera's pictures go up, enter your email address in the form on the Cameo Home Page and I'll let you know when it's done.

Finally, the fifth camera (out of ten sent out!) came back on Wednesday. Josh went in for developing and scanning yesterday, and I expect to have the photos back around Tuesday or Wednesday next week. I'm actually surprised to have gotten half of the cameras back, especially since it's completely possible that more are on the way! This is all very cool.

So I couldn't go this year but, surprisingly, there are some fantastic pictures from the event in the SF Gate's Photo Gallery. I especially like this one, that one and the other one.

All I can say is wow...

One savvy individual executed a very convincing play on AOLiza this morning. I so wanted the chat log to be real, that I had to chat the guy later under a pseudonym just to see if the story checked out. Unfortunately it didn't hold up, and it was just someone playing with AOLiza, hoping to spoof his way on the the chat logs, but it was such a vliant attempt, it's spurring me on to create a "deviants" section on AOLiza, for all the chaff chats that for one reason or another can't make their way on to the 'legit' site.

Other chats I'm planning on including on the deviant list are chats AOLiza has had with other 'chatterbots' (and the neologism goes) including Bizzarokiehl.

If you know of other chatterbots hooked into AOL, please let me know. I'd love to have them match wits (or is that bits (argh.. Not... blonde.. yet...)) and post the results.

There's little, very little, mind you, that I hate more on the net than emails that start off saying "THIS IS NOT SPAM!"

I want a bat that has "THIS IS NOT A BAT" engraved along the shaft.

There could be a whole line of products like this. Think of it as the natural reaction to Ralph's '80s "Plain Wrap" line, or what I call Lucky's "Yellow and Helvetica Bold" product line.

THIS IS NOT A POST.

I wrote a two-page log entry just now on John Searle, Turing Tests, and the Chinese Room problem, before Netscape quit and ate it. Hopefully I'll feel like rewriting it tomorrow afternoon. Sorry about that.

As a follow-up to my entry on Corporate Pride, I've been hearing a bit about this book, "You're Too Kind : A Brief History of Flattery"

Find out how to pay someone a compliment, be aware when someone's paying you one, and when they're just trying to steer you by their nose. See how in the experienced hands flattery can be just another weapon in a business arsenal (pun incidental, but retained anyhow).