Category: Internet

All of sudden kiffingish.com was no longer available, and for the life of me I could not figure out what was wrong. It had simply vanished into thin air.

After several days of investigating this most ornery of problems, I was finally able to figure it out.

Turns out that when I upgraded to a faster subscription, my ISP decided to switch my IP address without notifying me, those jerks.

I never realized that there were so many other Kiffins out there.

Just for fun I did a search on Facebook for other people also named Kiffin, and I came up with a whole list of folks sharing my first name.

There are even a couple of girls named Kiffin. Never would have expected that but why not?

When I was a kid I always wondered if there was another Kiffin on the planet and hoped and prayed that some day I could happen to meet this person.

Something else that I didn't quite expect is that almost all of them are much younger than I, some still in high school.

I'd be very curious to find out how they got their first name and what life is like for them sharing this unusual name.

Here's a cool game and it's for free. It's called Battle of Wesnoth, and it definitely worth trying out.

I've played it for many hours now and am afraid that I am slowly but surely becoming addicted to it.

Good stuff while commuting on the train and there is nothing else worthwhile to do.

Are you getting just as worried as I am about the future of Internet radio and all those crazy rulings that the government is trying to impose in favor of the greedy and unrealistic music industry monopolies?

If your answer is YES, then perhaps you should help do something about it.

Save Internet radio now!

Finally got Internet up and running after all these boring weeks without being able to surf the web, changing service providers is no easy task that's for sure.

In the meantime, have a fun and relaxing 2007 if possible.

A network's usefulness is proportional to the square of the number of its users, meaning that its value grows exponentially as the user population increases.

One equals one, two equals four, four equals sixteen, sixteen equals two hundred and fifty six, two hundred and fifty six equals sixty five thousand five hundred and thirty six, and so on.

"As the demand for voice, data and video applications increase, delivering higher bandwidth, lower cost and value-added services to the users becomes a major challenge to Internet Service Providers. Today, a brand new type of competition is emerging: Voice over IP (VoIP) has become the killer application for ISP to challenge established telecom operators. This not only means huge saving of communication cost to users, but also helps service providers to generate new revenue, new subscribers, and even gain a stronger position in the shuffling new market..."

Got my ZyXEL P-2602H-63/63C ADSL 2+ VoIP IAD¹ over ISDN plugged in, installed and up-and-running in no time. Never thought it would be no hassle at all. Just tossed my current modem overboard, hooked in the new one, fiddled with a couple settings, and there it was.

This modem is known as a so-called Voice/Data Integrated Access Solution for Residential Users, including the following features:

• ADSL, ADSL2/2+ support
• SIP (RFC3261) Support with 2 phone ports for VoIP
• Support QoS to prioritize voice and data traffics
• Auto Provisioning for easy deployment

Telephone calling over the Internet could not be easier. So far the quality seems almost if not just as good as fixed line, even when the kids are chatting away with MSN Messenger and/or playing Battlefield 2 online.

¹ Oh yeah, IAD stands for Integrated Access Device (in case you were wondering).

So why the heck would anyone in their right mind want to choose SOAP over XML-RPC?

Well for one thing, SOAP has more capabilities and supports a document model which is less restrictive than the more typical request and response call patterns typical of XML-RPC. For example, there is no easy way in XML-RPC to return error codes of different types.

Also, SOAP conversations can be designed around multiple service nodes, splitting up and divvying out the various message parts to be taken care of by the most relevant server. Later all of the responses are collected and passed back in a unified message response, just like magic.

Finally, messages can define for themselves what encoding they want to use, e.g. the one that they know is the most appropriate for a given conversation.

Yes, but what about all the extra amount of overhead? Isn't there a big performance hit?

Actually, SOAP is nothing more than a thin additional envelope around XML-RPC. What most people do not realize is that XML-RPC is already based to a large degree on the core elements of SOAP architecture.

The truth of the matter is that XML-RPC was split off from the initial design when someone became impatient with the slow progress of moving on with the original SOAP specifications.

For those of you still awake who find this tantalizing stuff, here is another interesting reference.

One big advantage of VoIP over traditional telephony is that the call-management functions are decoupled from the voice transmission functions.

This means that when offering new services it is no longer necessary to alter the core network anymore thereby greatly speeding up time-to-market.

One disadvantage however is that some form of quality-of-service must be supported in the protocol in order to make VoIP as reliable as good old telephones are.

We become what we end up finding, and the complete randomness of this pursuit is much more powerful than we now realize.

In the good old days, this was a relatively simple process which we pretty much had under control.

Now with the advent of Internet this responsibility has been put in the hands of others.

Be careful out there.

Since I am absolutely convinced that Internet Telephony is quickly becoming the name of the game, I have decided to give it a go myself by building my very own ultimate hacker's PBX based on Asterisk.

That's why I was so happy when the doorbell rang and the smiling mailman greeted me with my latest shipment from Amazon which included the book Asterisk: The Future of Telephony.

Here is a a reference guide to all things VOIP in case you are interested.

Wish me luck with this noble pursuit (not that I am busy enough with other stuff).

The triple play to which I am referring has nothing at all to do with baseball. For the sake of clarity, here is simple recipe you can follow in order to create this interesting challenge.

Slowly but surely broadband Internet is becoming cheaper and faster. Take for instance ADSL which in Europe is becoming very popular at the moment. This is no different from other Internet technologies in that it is improving in leaps and bounds.

English  Dutch

Normally I have alot of patience, but now I am raising my hands and giving up, that's it, I've had it.

"... lose weight while you sleep, pharmacy with smart prices, hydrocodone and vicodin, software cheaper than cheap, buy viagra lowest prices, horny teen girls, save hundreds of dollars, mortgage at even lower rates, make your penis bigger and harder, you won't believe it, no pumps, weights or exercise ..."

As of today there will be no more kiffin@gish.demon.nl email address. Close it down, see you later, oh well.

I have decided to remove this fine email address, because it is completely drowning under spam. I have now reached an all time high of more than 250 spam mails a day and am completely unable to swim through it and filter out the "real" messages for me.

Thanks alot all you abusive and inconsiderate jerks!

[Note: Family and friends can still contact me via my personal email of course. For those others still wanting to contact me, you can always send me a message via my email page]

Do you spend much of your time surfing around the Internet endlessly trying to keep updated and get the feeling that it must be easier?

Well then, you are certainly in luck!

That's because FeedDemon 1.0 is now available!

This is a MUST buy for anyone serious about overcoming the cumbersome never-ending pursuit of all that information out there hoping to become better some day.

For a mere $29.95 this state-of-the-art product is a true steal, so get it now.

The FeedDemon RSS Reader is now part of my Windows startup. So every morning I take my first sips of coffee perusing this wonderful world of information which has opened up for me.

So addictive though, and where does one stop?

Give it a try and you will just love it, I'm sure.

Whatever you do, you cannot miss this. Spam Radio! This web site is a very hilarious parody on all those awful unsolicited emails which have been flooding the Internet.

"Using a complex arrangement of pipes and funnels we turn the junk mail that we receive into a streaming audio broadcast that can be enjoyed from anywhere on the Internet..."

Pretty darn funny. My favorite is 13ft ejaculation.

According to the NetGenesis (SPSS) Glossary of terms:

"Churn measures how much of your customer base 'rolls over' during a given period of time. To calculate churn, divide the number of customers who attrite during the given time period by the total number of customers at the end of the time period."

You can then see how important it is to track the churn-rate and if it is becoming too great then you must do something about it or else.

Here are the most recent top searches on the Cyber-Gish web site:

• 3 switserland
• 2 bag of bones
• 2 etom
• 2 mother treaser
• 2 polls about nervousness
• 2 timeline
• 2 toilets
• 1 beau
• 1 beaucourt
• 1 bugs
• 1 comment leaders
• 1 dhtml
• 1 drinking cofee statistics
• 1 grand mere
• 1 gsus
• 1 history of the origin the yellow rose of texas
• 1 hp deskjet 720c software
• 1 karssemeijer
• 1 kathleen
• 1 medieval total war

Special thanks goes to the fine folks at Atomz from whom I receive these search reports on a regular basis.

I finally figured out that problem that has been bugging the heck out of me for many months and months now.

You see, for some reason certain hyperlinks just would not work any more within the Internet Explorer browser. Completely dead links gone and turned to extreme nothingness. You click on them with the mouse and nothing happens! Which links exactly was impossible to predict.

This just popped up one day on my Windows XP Pro desktop. Everything was working just fine and dandy until then. If I am logged into it everything works just fine (of course, because I have administrator rights), but when anyone else is logged on or if the good old guest account is being used, the links just would not work (of course, because these accounts have limited user rights). Dead links deader than a dead door nail.

This has been a real drag, because ideally our desktops in the new room are used for browsing the Internet. In a mad attempt to seek out the problem and destroy it I tried everything imaginable. I tried reinstalling the latest browser versions and Windows patches, disabling the startup programs, unchecking the running services, uninstalling various suspicious programs, but nothing helped. Not a single darn thing.

So I did yet another search via Google, which I had already done a million times without any leads. But this time around I did a search for something ever so slightly different, like "my links do not work on internet explorer for some weird reason." Lo and behold I happened upon a question by some other poor fool who had the same problem. The very same problem. can you believe it!?

And you know what the cause of this problem is? The answer: a third-party downloader piece of junk called Star Downloader! Watch out and beware, remove move it immediately. This program has an option you can check to enable the so-called Internet Explorer integration. It runs ever so quietly in the background and secretly hooks into the links. You click and it sees if the link is a download link and then if it is it pulls this download event into its own program which fires up for you. Pretty neat, huh? As long as it works. Destroy that piece of junk.

Now everything works just fine and I fell pretty relieved. Really and really relieved. Like there is still hope out there. That the world can be saved in small and integral ways, bits and pieces. At least I am still capable of being productive once in awhile.

Just returned from a wonderful 3 week vacation and thought I might want to "quickly" check out my email messages which had come while I was away.

Turns out I had 3573 messages waiting for me! Not that I am such a popular guy, because most of it was SPAM. Those idiots!

In the end it took my email client (Microsoft Outlook) more than 90 minutes to download it all, first filtering through my spam killer application, including the many errors which occurred because of the immense volume (resulting in timeouts and retries).

All in all, after filtering out all the junk I ended up with around 156 relevant messages, e.g. those meant for me and those I appreciate receiving.

Not that bad, I would think. I am still kind of a popular guy.

Now what the heck is going on with the Internet nowadays and how can I as a full-fledged though home-grown e-business consultant keep up with it all? Let me pause one second and make a guess. Web Services, that is what it is all about. At least that is what they told me all day at the Web Services seminar I attended in Rotterdam.

If you are as interested as I am in the new hype and want to jump on the band-wagon as quickly as possible, then I recommend having a look at the W3C Web Services Activity site for more information.

Microsoft is doing it, IBM is doing it, BEA is doing it, everyone else is doing it also, you can even create your very own Dynamic e-Business Application Using Web Services, so beware.

Although it is officially Sunday the supposed day of rest, I received no less than eighty-four spam emails. This is really getting out of hand. I use McAfee's SpamKiller which manages to filter out alot, but it doesn't get everything. For your entertainment, I have collected a random sampling of the titles:

CASH Expert - Get a CASH Advance in 24-hours! Stephanie Clemons - Hi ocrrfelurvw ecxycn 12cashmaker@yahoo.com - Att:$10,000 - $30,000 Income Per Month11162 Live Younger - Restore hair color kiffin and growth bvcasdcv@inrs.fr - re: Largest RX Inventory Available Online! All Approved Autos - Confirm Your NEW Car Loan Check these girls out - This could be someone you know Dreammates - View photos of singles in YOUR area Home Loans - Find a Mortgage or Refinance - Rates still low! Tyisha Tjia - A lean, fit and young kiffin Ester Samuels - Get larger nuts and penis Marvin Harden - 50% off Viagra! Chris - Secret Business Ideas! We show you how! Dr. Moore - H.G.H. Anti Aging Formula - ON SPECIAL!! Peter N. - Stimulate Your Love Life Belinda Thayer - In Debt? Get Help NOW Billie Carlton - increase the length and girth of your penis Adele Bynum - Improved sexual performance Francesca Snyder - Get PRESCRIPTIONN Meds to Your Door Cubism - Juan GRIS . (1887-1927) . [ADV] Newton Mays - Kiffin.gish, Get ready for the summer

I am already lean, fit and young, the length and girth of my penis is more than sufficient, and I have been ready for summer since last summer. I could do with some more money though, and those secret business ideas might be interesting.

Seriously now, this is really getting out of hand and someone should do something about it. The only answer is some kind of international legislation and air tight lock-down. These people need to be dealt with in a hard and aggressive manner.

Both hands tied behind my back, my eyes blind-folded, big iron balls shackled to my ankles, deep beneath the ground in some murky dungeon. So what's happening?

My local ISP floundered again and my good ol' Internet connection was down for most of the day, that's what.

Seems I unknowingly kicked up quite a discussion at the 802.11 Planet Forum when I started up a thread called Roaming to my neighbor's wireless network....

You see, I used to think my wireless home network was something unbelievably fantastic. Until that is my neighbor decided a couple of weeks ago that he wanted one also. Jerk.

Now I spend much of the day resetting my laptop so that it stops roaming over to his wireless network instead of mine. For some reason there is no way to prevent my laptop from switching to other networks if they are present in the area.

Alright then, what next?

Alright so I admit it, I have been a naughty boy lately. Desperate to find customers, one often resorts to conniving means, seedy methods bordering on the immoral. Oh well.

You see, I figured why pay one of those companies out there on the Internet tons of bucks for email address lists, or pay them even more to broadcast mailings all over the world when I can do that myself.

I am a pretty smart guy, sometimes. At least that is what I fool myself into believing.

So this is what I did. I wrote a subscription mailing list at GishTeq which allows potential customers to sign up for mailings and newsletters. Later, one may even modify personal settings or opt-out altogether by unsubscribing.

Now the trick is getting people to sign up. Why don't I scan the Internet, collect emails and sign them up myself? When they get the first mailings, they can always unsubscribe.

I created another Perl script which can scan certain sites and scrape off the emails. If possible, it can even log in to subscriber lists and automatically scan these web pages also.

All I do is give the script a site url, start it up and there it goes. Ten minutes later or so I've got my list formatted as CSV so that I can even import it into an Excel sheet for future reference.

You probably won't believe me either if I tell you that with this technique I have successfully harvested more than one thousand warm leads.

Here's a hint (if you know Perl). Use the use LWP::UserAgent module to get the contents of the page and then scan it. See anything interesting, scan deeper via the internal links. Poke around and see if you can find anything interesting. Is there a user id that is passed around? Try all values of that user id from say 1 to 1000 and collect the results.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w # scrape_agogo - intelligent script for scraping email addresses from website use LWP::UserAgent; use HTTP::Request; use HTTP::Response; use URI::Heuristic; use strict; my $website = "http://www.someplace.com"; my $cmd = "/cgi-bin/progname.pl?id="; for (my $id = 1; $id <= 1000; $id++) { scrape_id($id); } sub scrape_id { my $id = shift; my $url = $website . "/" . $cmd . $id; my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(); $ua->agent("Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"); my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url); my $response = $ua->request($req); my $content = $response->content(); # This you have to make yourself, or pay me alot # of money to create a tailor-made solution. do_something_smart($content); }

Sorry, I've been a bad boy. But I want to become famous also.

Here are the top searches so far for this month. In other words, the following phrases are what people who come to my homepage are looking for:

• hurni
• riding
• barefoot
• discordic colors
• effective java
• enneagrams
• eva luna
• horse
• lingo
• poems
• previous lives
• sabien
• switserland
• tao
• vous prie de vous y rendre

Thanks to the fine (free) search service provided by Atomz.

"Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines..."

For more information you might want to check out Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox which always provides a wealth of hints and tips for those folks out there who are serious about good web design.

Some more geeky stuff I pulled off today can be found at the recently modified page on my homepage. What one can accomplish when one gets one's act together never ceases to amaze me. Even if it is me trying to be the most famous CGI-programmer on the face of this planet.

Speaking of usability, in the latest issue of the Digital Web Magazine you can check up on an interesting article in the "Keep it Simple" column series called Simplicity vs. Innovation. I would say that this is a must read for those folks out there who are seriously into fine-tuning their sites with minimal though effective web design. The great thing about the definition of usability is that there is none and the concept is so vague that it is open to tons of interesting discussions that go on forever. Maybe some day I will put my ideas down on paper in an attempt to make this ethereal idea more concrete.

This is my very first state-of-the-art pretty-dang-advanced Java applet I have ever created in my whole life:

Just click anywhere within the empty white rectangle above to see what happens. Are you impressed or what? Not too bad for a middle-aged nerd who has nothing better to do at the moment than create pseudo computer art and fluff his feathers about it. Let's just say that I never cease to amaze myself. Some day they will have to lock me up in a cell full off random colors.

Sorry, but this will only work on Java-enabled browsers. Better luck next time, and in the meantime do us all a favor and upgrade your old-fashioned Internet browser please.

We are proud to present the search statistics for the Cyber-Gish Homepage. There were a grand total of 20 searches for the week ending 11/09/02.

cage sex about a boy annabeth gish body language color wheel firmenstruktur greetings high fidelity lillian gish pic pics of switserland shasta soda play speedo switserland troubleshooting zurich zurich airport name

Thanks alot Atomz for a fine service which provides me with this interesting insight into the minds of those visitors searching for gold nuggets on my homepage. Hard to imagine, but it is true. Why cage?

So I received an honorable mention in this week's issue of Lockergnome Webmaster Weekly. Felt really good that I could contribute some small tidbit of wisdom (and maybe even show off a little) concerning the wonderful world of web design. So what is it exactly that I said? For those of you interested, this is it:

"More accurately, the correct attribute to use is the TITLE-attribute. Internet explorer actually implements ALT like TITLE, whereas all the other browsers use TITLE as it is properly specified and might ignore ALT altogether. For the sake of browser compatibility I think it is a better idea to use TITLE instead of ALT."

Impressed or what? To think that I am referred to as a "qualified professional" from one of the finest around. Thanks alot Mike for the mention and the link to my homepage. Curious if I will suddenly get more hits.

For fun and boredom I was surfing around the Internet as usual when I came across a site where I was able to create the following truly amazing piece of modern Internet art:

10111110011011101011010001101100001100110100001110 01100111000011111111100011001010001001101111111110 10110101001011000101111101100001010011001101010110 11110110100111011010000001111110001001010110010000 01111011010011000001111101010011010110001111110111 00010111000011000100111101100110010101011110111001 11010011111000101111101100111011000011011101111101 01101111010011001010010111111011100010110011101110 01001110111111111101101101001100100010100001011110 11100100010110111100011010001011001101100000011100 01101101011010010110000010111010000011000011001011 10100100000111000010000101011111010111010110001010 01001101100100101001000110100010001110110000001101 00100101101101001101111010011100111010111000000011 11000100101110101100110001110001110111010001001110 00000001111111011110110110101011110101000010100010 10001001101110101101010110111000000000010110010100 01101000010001001111001000101100110100111001111101 00101010010110111011001111000010010010101100010111 10001001011011000110000110110001110101100011101101 01000011110110100111110011001101010010001101001011 11011011011001110100101110101010010101110100101000 00100011001001111111111110100010011000100100010111 00110100100010000101010110101000000011000101001001 01010010010101100011110011100011011011000110101100 01011010111001011000000111011110010110101111110010 01111111001001011110011011101010001101011101100010 10110001100101100001100010111001000000010001110101 11100011101001000101101101011010110110111011011010 10101011011110010000101110110010110000101010111001 11010110010101010100010000010110010100100001011101 01100010000001110011110000111100111010000110110111 11101010010111100100010100101111000101000110111011 01010001000011100111101111101000010010110000110001 10111011010000001110101001010101100000011100000110 10000100101001110110110101101110111100010110000111 11101010011101001110001101111110101100000000111010 00110000010110010001011110000011000110100110001111 01110100001101010001000010011111110000000000001110 11101000111001111111000110100000000000011011010111

Courtesy of TEXT-IMAGE.com where for free you can easily generate cool text-images from almost any picture you have on your computer. You can also select the portrait to get an even more interesting affect.

In my never-ending struggle to make my homepage the "best homepage" in the whole wide universe, I regularly review the many web pages I have collected over the years, improving certain non-perfect aspects even more. Before you realize it you have collected a multitude of hidden blemishes which must be taken care of before it is too late. Not that I seriously believe there are so many people out there who really notice these improvements in the end, but it is more for my own self-centered yearning for satisfaction. At the end of the day or weekend or week or month of sweating and improving I can give a sigh of relief and pat myself on the shoulder. There you go. As if I am approaching some esoteric form of interconnected web perfection but never arriving there. There it is, I can see it. For those of you who might be interested, the two items which have been finalized and formalized as official new-and-improved pages are Trip to America and the Official Webcam Page (now with amazing slide show which I wrote in Javascript - just click the blue start-button). I invite you to have a look. Better late than never.

One could say that being interconnected, I mean "really" being interconnected, could very well be one of the ultimate (next) goals of mankind's evolution. At least in the near future that is. Imagine this: getting any information you desire any time, connecting to anyone or anything wherever he or she or it may be at that very moment, exchanging ideas without the unnecessary obstacles caused by times and distances and cultures and ages. This is not a vision. This will happen because I have seen it. The truly wonderful thing is that each and every one of us will be a part of this immense web of awareness and expanding energy. The age of the Internet is only the beginning, but it is opening up about a thousand new doors every minute. Maybe millions or more. If only each person had equal access, then this would grow even more quickly. It is not about computers or fiber optics or communication protocols or microchips or all of that physical stuff (which are really the limiting factors at the moment). It is about much much more, and even more than that. The potential is immense, and in the end there is a whole new dimension of thought hidden in myriad crooks and crannies of mother earth, eg. in the third world countries where many thriving minds are waiting to join and be connected. If only we could reach out and help them also. Maybe this is the answer. The whole world and the whole universe, inner and outer and inside out. Unfortunately, I feel that I am more than likely too old already to witness this revolution. Bummer man. I will probably "just" miss out on the big quantum leap. An aside: as a ten year old boy, I was always convinced that by the turn of the century we would all be astronauts floating around in space, that we could fly to the planets, and that droves of robots would be serving our every whim and desire. But at least I entertain a sense of satisfaction by knowing that in my own small way I have contributed a little to this potential energy expansion, as it is bubbling up now. My children and my childrens' children and the children of others and all the rest of the (unborn) children all over the world will carry on the tradition and make it all happen. Afterall, each generation is improving, isn't it?

"God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity he would be careless; and understanding of his adversity he would be senseless." - St. Augustine (345-430)

It's been a long time waiting, but the wait has been really worth it. This is one cool piece of instant messaging software, that's for sure. If you are into communicating with the whole wide world via a universal interface, then I can highly recommend considering Trillian Pro which has just been released. This program is a generic messaging client which allows you to chat with AOL, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo via the very same program interface. Cerulean Studios has come out with a real winner. They have extended the product with all kinds of nifty doo-dads, including easy integration of plugins. So far there is a POP3 plugin (be notified when email is available on mail servers), an RSS-feed plugin (keep updated with latest news like: Slashdot, Wired News and Lockergnome), and finally there is even an Winamp plugin. This is truly amazing and I love the new toy of mine. To make things even better, I received the pro version absolutely free. Yes, you heard it right: free! This is because in the past I had once donated money to this upstart group of techies which at the time I believed in. So in thanks, I automatically get a complimentary version from them. Good stuff. I feel that the Internet was originally meant to offer an ideal medium for this kind of stuff.

This evening I received a truly amazing email from someone I just happened to come across perusing my way through the web someplace, everywhere and/or nowhere. Truly amazing. I take the liberty now to include this email here for the readers' late night entertainment.

From:	FOREE EDWARD
Subject:	No problem, dude...

Mr. Kiffin... Lemme explain sumtin' here: As you know, or can probably realize, I, too, am a mortal sinner. And I was 15 when my girl passed-away. However, I'm like Jeremiah (Old Testament) in that I had NO IDEA what the Trinity wanted from me and I still don't. But, I'm trying to live a good life in preparation for Heaven, I go to a Roman Catholic church (almost) daily, I teach (NOT PREACH - nobody wants that) through my URL http://www.reddINK.com ( <--- that's a URL if you don't know: Universal? Resource Locator), and try to find my Way home in this Finite Existence, walking along the narrow path to Utopia. Life, as you very well know, is quite finite. And we're put here to see if we follow God. God's very, very, very forgiving: The Trinity wants us ALL in Heaven, but Satan only wants us puny mortals to worship him, thus, he puts roadblocks in our Way home to lead us down. But, if we say NO, Satan, "I DON'T WANT NONENA YOU, ya sacka dung" and repent, as I did today, whoa... dude, you've made it. And if you shall fall again? No problem-o. Just repent B4 a priest again. Why? Age old question: Why am I a mortal? And why do I sin? Mr. Kryptonite, that's the mystery of God: If you stay true to God your whole life, as I can't (but, I try), you'll make it to Utopia. How do you stay True? Another letter. I'll shall pray for you. Don't worry, be happy and true to God. Pax Vobiscum (Latin: Peace Be With You), friend. And I expect to see you Upstairs.

God bless you with discernment, friend.

One thing is sure. You got to check out this guys site. If you leave a message in his guestbook he will answer you within about a minute or two. Now this person could be completely crazy or he could be a total genius, or yet again he could also be a unique combination of the two. He could be sitting up there right now on the upturned palm of God's right hand. Or then again.

This afternoon I felt honored to receive the following amazing one-of-a-kind email from a fine individual:

"I am prince fobi otumfor Opokuwari the 4th son of my father, His Royal Highness late Nana Otumfor opokuwari 11 of kokofo in Ashanti confirm by oyoko clan here in Ghana. I am 23 years, I have confidence in you that made me to reveal this deal to you. Because i got your information from yahoo search on reliable gold dealers..."

This email goes on for another few paragraphs, but I will spare you the nausea of having to read the rest.

Is this for real? Does the originator of this fine email actually believe I will read this and take him seriously? Are there actual takers somewhere out there that make sending these types of emails worthwhile? Who could be sucker enough to fall for this nonsense? Makes me wonder. To be honest, I do not know why I am even taking the time to dedicate a whole blog entry to this.

I receive about fifty plus spam emails like this every day. I find this aggravating, an invasion of privacy, and I think these folks should be put away for good.

Be patient and the meek shall inherit the Internet, I hope.

I cannot believe it. Just happened to be playing around on the Internet when I discovered that the hit-counter on my homepage has passed the ten thousand mark. Ten thousand visitors and counting. Actually right now 10,116 to be exact. Wait, it just went up a notch when I wasn't looking. Time to celebrate you might say.

Howabout signing my new-and-improved guestbook? Finally got around to ironing out the last wrinkles. With a little extra time left over this week as a so-called poor soul on the dole, I finally decided to crank out my own homepage guestbook powered by good-old fashioned CGI scripting and all that stuff. Might as well spend my late evening hours in a productive manner. Take the stuff I have been reading (Programming Perl and CGI Programming with Perl) more seriously, practice what you preach. So I did it, I think. I based my new-and-improved guestbook on the Guestbook25 scripts which I downloaded a while ago. Wasn't quite pleased with its somewhat limited functionalities, not quite at least. So why not tweak it like any brave Perl programmer in his right mind would do? That is what I have been doing, and you are welcome to judge the almost final product for yourself.

Perhaps it would be better to spend the rest of my life as a pseudo-web-designer. Hard to believe. What do you think?

Take a risk, check it out and sign my guestbook if you dare.

This evening after work there was no one home. They had all gone to watch Lennart play baseball. Checking through the zillions of emails I came across no less that two emails which were identical. This is what they had to say:

These are real proven techniques for enlarging your penis.
You won't believe the results!!
All Natural Penis Enlargement, Add 1-4 Inches to your penis now!
Size Does Matter, 100% Natural Penis Enlargement Program
Do you have a small penis? We can help!
Penis Enlargement IS Possible...Using simple exercises & Techniques!

Why do I keep receiving these kind of wonderful offers? Don't the senders of these kinds of junk email realize the breach of privacy they are causing? Something has to be done about this. Per day I receive around twenty spam emails and it is rising quickly. Please excuse the pun.

To make matters worse, there is a small note at the end of the aforementioned email which states "Note: this is not SPAM." Who are they kidding and how can they get away with this?!

It is bad enough that I am getting buried with these unsolicited emails, but when my kids receive such emails I can get really really mad. Especially when they come to me and ask what is a "porn star" or what does "Viagra" do.

I found this great site called Cross-Browser.com which provides a nifty library for DHTML effects beyond your wildest dreams. It is called CBE v4.10 and the best part is that it is absolutely free.

CBE is a cross-browser DHTML Javascript library or API. You download CBE to your own computer and use it to develop dynamic web applications (DHTML). You then upload your application and the CBE files to your own site.

CBE is a partial implementation of some of the W3C DOM2 Core and Event interfaces. That is, programming with CBE is similar to programming in a DOM2-compliant environment.

So go have a look. I did and now my next goal in life will be to polish up my homepage and blog with some fancy stuff I hope.

In case any of you folks out there might be interested, I spent many hours yesterday revamping my future-famous homepage (again). Mostly minute and trivial changes which had been bugging me now for many weeks, stuff that the average visitor probably doesn't notice. But I am a perfectionist so in then end, I felt that I had been pretty productive. Closer and closer to perfection. The following new web pages have been added:

• Martine's place - some pictures and text about my youngest sister.
• A+ hosting - general information about the kind folks who have been hosting my domain for the last year.
• SWiSH - describes my use of the fine Flash-like utility for multi-media stuff.
• i-mode - everything you want to know about the new-fangled wireless technology and more.
• Javascript - fun and games using javascript to improve my homepage even more.

Just in case you may have been wondering if I ever do anything to my personal homepage called Cyber-Gish. Have a look.

I have fallen head-over-heels in love and my head is still spinning.

After more than three weeks of working hard in the evenings and sweating away into the wee hours of the morning, I did it. I have finally done it. My homepage has been completely converted into the purest form possible, thanks to the latest technology of CSS. That stands for Cascading Style Sheets, in case you were wondering. All of those awkward tables I had hacked into the pages to take care of the placement of margins, headers, pictures etc. have been replaced by div-tags and other layering techniques.

What a job, but it looks pretty good. At least now when I have to change something in the presentation like colors, borders, spacing or whatever I can do that easily and swiftly.

Check it out yourself here.

No I am not trying to brag. So you think I am some kind of computer nerd, do you? Well, then I have the following to say: you are absolutely right! But now for yet another funny story which follows.

"The ironic part of this whole story is the following. I was actually all ready for the big CSS kick-off yesterday, but I blew it. And I blew it real bad. You see, I had two separate development directories on my PC. One consisted of the original pages, and the second directory consisted of the newer CSS-enabled pages that had taken me so long to update from the originals. So there I was ready to upload these to my domain server. I was really excited and could not wait. Trembling a little like a small boy drooling in front of the candy store."

"Stop, be careful, think and proceed with caution, extreme caution. How often in the past had I messed things up terribly in my haste and excitement. Okay, first we have to make a copy of what is on the server, just in case something goes wrong during the process of uploading. STEP 1. I copy all these remote files to my PC. No problem. Now I have to transport my newer files to the original directory. But first, let's make up a backup of the original files. Just in case, it never hurts to be doubly sure. STEP 2. Made a backup, fine. STEP 3. Now I copy the new-and-improved CSS-enabled pages to the original directory. Okay, next step. Be careful and think. Simple, just upload these newer files to the remote machine. I have made a backup of these, and a backup of a backup. Perfect. STEP 4. I then copy the newer files to the remote server. Chug-a-lug-a-lug, and after around five minutes it has completed without a single hitch. I cannot wait to look at it. So I hit the refresh button on my favorite browser and... and... and... Nothing happens. It looks exactly the same as it used to be, nothing has changed! How is that possible? Okay do NOT panic! #$@!!&%$#!!!"

Now, what had happened, you may ask? Something terrible, something terribly terrible. Awful. More terrible than terrible. The Mummy was nothing compared to the plague I had let loose on my environment. The pages I had so lovingly worked on had completely disappeared from the face of the Earth. I had lost a family, forty-seven lovely children."

Here is what had happened. Remember STEP 1? Well that is where I blew it all up. I had in my extreme and exaggerated caution carefully and unknowingly copied the original remote files OVER the newer files, thus completely and unforgivingly deleted them from the face of the Earth. Pretty stupid, huh?

I had broken all of the furniture, stamped up and down on the floor, pounded my fist against the wall until it broke (the wall that is), cussed out the world around me, and then had a good sobbing fit for an hour. I had hung up the rope nicely from the light fixture and was ready to place my head through the noose when a spark caught me somewhere inside of my head. Yes? Yes. YES! Y-E-S ! YESSSSSSSSSSS!

Saved by the spark, again. I remembered having read somewhere in the user's guide of Homesite (my HTML-editor) that it automatically kept copies of the edited files somewhere. Yes, I am one of those fools who always reads the documentation to figure things out first before trying and getting lost like most other people do. This time it came to my rescue. I checked the directory called AutoBackup and yes, there they all were! And in perfect shape. I could not believe it. I was saved. Dear Lord forgive me for my sins.

When my wife walked inside the room, she asked me what that piece of rope was doing there dangling from the ceiling. Oh, just part of the game. An experiment in reality. A change of mind. She understood and left with a slightly confused and concerned expression on her face.

So that's another page in the long and interesting autobiography of yet another down-to-earth kind of guy looking for trouble AND always finding it. Life continues. Falling in love with CSS was almost not worth it.

Ever wondered how people end up finding you on the Internet? No, well I do. I mean what kind of searches they are doing which result in them some way or the other landing on your web site, generating yet another hit? Every blogger worth his or her weight in salt secretly yearns for more hits. More hits, more, more! Afterall, isn't that what the purpose of blogging is anyway? Besided passing your time pseudo-worthwhile, that is.

Well, I was "really" bored today, and I had absolutely nothing new and interesting to add to my already impression blog. Panick, what to do? Did not want to disappoint my thousands of fans. So I took all of the search strings referred from Google, and I listed them alphabetically. Just for a new kind of insight. And here they are:

"1957 buick pic, Alfred Nakatsuma, aplushosting ratings, arlington cemetery webcam, beards look old, buried beach sand album, by F.G. Rockwell, Clown PICTURE GALLERY, cuffin williams art, Cyberspace definition, deepak chopra, definition supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, diploma in life and business coaching ireland, do something with your life, dragonballz wallpapers for windows explorer toolbar, eyeball chat, Famous thoughts, Father's birthday, folding the flag honor guard, four piper destroyers, france map, gouda summer camp, Greg Gish, growing a beard, Growing a beard, growing beard, ice inside car windows, itch beard, James Jones BOOK THe thin red line summary, javascript webcam picture refresh time, kabalarian philosophy, Kabalarian Philosophy name, kiffin, life webcam, Lockergnome is Coming to Town, logitech webcam pic, Marlies Maarten, moveable type, my father's birthday, my yellow rose of texas, number eleven in numerology, Orion constellation information, quotations scrolling, Ramana Maharshi video clips, random thoughts, Random thoughts, random thoughts of computer people, retainer containers, ronsard, secretly watch webcam, shadow waxwing slain, speedy und tricycle, Stanford university webcam, stoney point target turrets, summary of the Rainmaker (book), supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious definition, thoughts+sad+famous, valras plage, valras-plage, web cam hardcore visitor free, webcam, webcam refresh javascript, yellow rose +pic, yellow rose of texas..." and more.

Strange. What complete coincidences lead one person to the other over the Internet. I was especially amazed by the strings: "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", "secretly watch webcam" and "thoughts+sad+famous", can you believe that?!

Isn't that what life is all about anyway? Connecting and improving, connecting and doing more, connecting and going on and on. Yet another productive Sunday afternoon. And I thought I was really bored.

I happened to come across this quotation and liked it so much that I felt it would be good inspiration for my blog. Says alot about the future of the Internet and how we can all influence it's development in a positive way.

Restless in 2002
"Our memories of being world-changing pioneers are now littered with messy debris from the punctured Internet bubble, and the Web seems to have settled into a few set types of sites. Commercial interests now define most of the Web's activity, and we're just waiting to see whether Microsoft manages to take over as we humbly accept our positions in the status quo, building Web services or whatever Gartner's going on about lately."

"Resist such notions. Those who built the Web should never have to settle. Though its scale brings new challenges, this is still a uniquely fertile medium for gainful chaos. The Web grew as it did not by careful forethought, but because people put it to uses for which it was never intended. However 2002 may proceed, find chances to apply your skills creating something--a design, an interface, an application, a purpose--that no one has anticipated. Your spark of imagination just might once again set the Web on fire." - Paul Anderson, technical editor at CNET Builder.com

I believe we can do it, each individual in his/her own small way and the collective effort pushing us all as a group into new heights.

Hey, look what I discovered at Lockergnome in the GnomeREPORT 01.02.2002:

And that Gnomie person he is referring to is me! Wow, what an honor and a priviledge to have been able to correspond to such a so-called famous person. Neat, this Internet and blogging stuff. In the past we had to write nice letters and wait many days for a response. Now life is faster and response is immediate. Future-famous people all over the place.

The server is unreachable. Correction, I should say it "was" unreachable. Finally, after nearly three days in the complete dark, I can get back in touch with my blog. Whew, what a relief. A mad hop out there on the Internet going amiss, eaten up by the Globix link causing me and my web site to suffer the annoying yet non-fatal disease called server-unreachable-itis. Panic city! Life without your blog is no fun, and I would certainly not recommend it to any of my loved ones nor my friendly fellow bloggers. Beware and do not let it happen to you if you can avoid it. And of course, everyone blames everyone else. Isn't that totally normal? Wasn't the server. No, wasn't my ISP either. No, not the Internet, of course not. Try this, try that, if that doesn't work then try that again but first do this and do not touch that. I grew up with all my wise computer science teachers telling me so convincingly that the Internet was specifically designed with unpredictable network connections and media in mind. Lots of keep-alives going back and forth and rerouting over redundant connections to make sure that point A is "always" reachable from point B, no matter what. Even if there was a major earthquake or nuclear war. Uh-huh sure, so what went wrong then? Well, I will never know. Magically, as if out of the blue, the problem disappeared as quickly as it came. I'm free again! So here I am happy enough to be still alive with my good ol' blog. Blog, blog, blog. And then it was time to make amends and forgive the rest of the world. Being unreachable is okay, I guess. As long as it is temporary. Next.

Wow, there sure is a lot of H-Y-P-E going around and fear being propagated on and around the Internet! The fear of fraud is one, hackers everywhere, evil forms ready to jump on your back when you are not looking. I believe in the freedom of speech, the right to express oneself without the fear of persecution. Isn't that the basis of the US constitution and what America is all about? Is this being threatened? I am sure that the Internet has opened this up and made journalistic freedom available to everyone worldwide. Sharing and exchanging ideas with each other, trying our best to make this world a better place in which to live, the best of all possible worlds. When new things appear, new technologies, quantum leaps in understanding and art forms etc, there are always going to be some evil forms of oppression taking advantage of us poor naive fools in some way or another. Another. I as well as the others are not going to succumb to some undefined threat like this. It will not survive in the end. The Internet community is for the average-everyday-joe person like myself. We will continue to prosper. About this I am one hundred percent positive. Want to place a bet on this?

If in the end I decide to publish anything then it will be limited to those simple surfers who are interested in (valuable) historical information and probably will not have that much to do with sensitive information anyway. Besides, who reads my homepage anyway?! Who gets past the front page? For anyone wanting to commit fraud, there are a million other more efficient ways on the Internet to make money illegally than reading some boring personal page like mine! Too bad there are so many so-called "weird" people in America and the rest of the world. If this is all true, and often I see it as a xenophobic hype to get everyone riled up and patriotic, then this is indeed very sad for Americans and the rest of the world. A sign that the American Dream is not that great after all?

I believe in freedom of speech, the right to express oneself without fear of persecution. Isn't that the basis of the US constitution and what America is all about? Is this being threatened over there? I am sure that the Internet has opened this up and made journalistic freedom available to everyone worldwide. Sharing and exchanging ideas with each other, trying our best to make this world a better place in which to live. When new things appear, new technologies etc, there are always going to be evil forms of oppression taking advantage in some way or other. I as well as the others, we are not going to succumb to some undefined threat. The Internet community is for the average everyday person like myself and we will continue to prosper. About this I am positive.

Wow, it finally works. A scrolling marquee with random quotations. All of it programmed by yours truly using a CGI-script. Impressed? I am.

Each time you view this blog or hit refresh on the browser, a new random the quote should appear. Sorry, you must have Internet Explorer or a newer version of Netscape in order to view this.

Cyber-Gish webcam?

Okay, so I think I am getting really good at this game called web design. So what? I was able to implement a fancy little Webcam Console which appears on the upper lefthand part of the screen. Pretty neat, I have to admit. This Internet stuff is getting exciting, once you start figuring how things work. I am still not too old to be a geek. If you want to see what I am talking about, click on the picture to the right.

The Cyber-Gish homepage keeps getting better and better, or so I hope. This project is taking up more and more of my time, and currently I am running the risk of getting completely engulfed in this amazing technology. I do not want to become fixated on making things better, but never good enough. My family is complaining even more that I sit behind the computer too much. The more I learn about the possibilities, the more about new and different technologies, scripts, protocols, ad infinitum in which I come in contact, the more accelerated this weird process becomes. In one way it borders on insanity, addiction, mental escape, or whatever you want to name it. The hard part is that I get so much satisfaction out of the Internet and everything related to it that I can better relate to the world around me. Or at least that is what I make myself believe. One still has to think about those around you, family members, the rest of society. Striving to follow the middle path is probably the best methodology to follow now. Or so I will try.

Discovered another interesting website called Collected Thoughts, a Website For Curious Minds. The site is an extensive and impressive showcase of great ideas from thinkers of our past, and a forum for the free discussion of those ideas. Much discussion, papers and many quotations which make one think. A typical such quotation is the following. "Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to be able to live and not know. Some people say, 'How can you live without knowing?' I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know." - Richard Feynman. All done by a young buck psuedo-philosopher only twenty-six years old. I can highly recommend this site, so check it out.

Wandering aimlessly across the Internet, as usual in search for even more meaning in life, I just happened to come across the following trivial information on the Kabalarian Philosophy home page, under the male section for baby names. The Kabalarian Philosophy teaches "constructive living based on principles of right thinking, right breathing, and right eating. These principles provide the key to understanding how to control life to bring into reality the happiness, mental freedom, and personal success that everyone seeks." Hmmm. Believe it or not, my name was actually present. I have taken the liberty to quote the full desciption below. Or you can jump directly to this page by clicking here. Alot of the items agree amazingly well with my personality, but there are others which are questionable. Can you find the differences? Read it carefully and hopefully I can provide a short analysis at the end for your entertainment.

"Your name of Kiffin has given you an idealistic nature with a desire to help others. Your initiative often causes you to be the first to act when you see a need. Since you are impressionable and receptive, you feel the misfortunes of others very keenly. However, this name makes it awkward for you to express your deeper thoughts and feelings with finesse and diplomacy to the extent that your candid, sometimes blunt, manner of speaking creates misunderstandings with others. Being somewhat self-centred, you learn through your own experiences, as you rarely take advice from others. Yet, you are sensitive and very easily hurt and offended. You long for praise and appreciation for your efforts, but others find it difficult to understand you. You dislike monotony and system and enjoy being creative in an inventive way whether it be in interior decorating, music, art, crafts, or other endeavours that require versatility and skill. You are imaginative and visionary, somewhat of a perfectionist, yet the results of your efforts often fall short of your high expectations. A leadership position appeals to you because you would enjoy directing others rather than being directed. Your feelings are strong and you tend to react intensely to situations. Because of your sensitive nervous system, over-stress and extreme tiredness could cause nervous disorders, seizures, fainting, or dizziness. You could also experience head tension such as headaches, weak eyes, or throat problems."

There is no time for analysis now, so I will leave that over to the kind reader who probably can make a more objective judgement concerning the description above. Good luck. Interested in other names? Click on any of the following links to jump directly to the Kabalarian Philosophy analysis: Rex, Colette, Jeanine, Kiffin, Kathleen, Martine, Clint, Lennart, Marlies, Sabien, Maarten. Of course, if you want to go directly to the search page and look up your own name, just click here.

Oh yes, I forgot. I finally (finally) got my hit counter to work like it should! For your late night entertainment have a look at the bottom of my homepage hitcounter or go to my earlier blog entry at [9/5/2001 9:36:22 PM | Kiffin Gish]. Aren't you impressed?

You know, I felt like I was getting pretty good at this web design stuff. Things were improving nicely, slowly but surely, but I was making pretty good progress -- I thought. However, the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get a darned hit-counter installed on my site by using a CGI-script. Really trivial for most folks, but for me it just refuses to work! What am I doing wrong?! If it ever starts working (you see them all over the place) then it will indicate how many visitors have made it to my page, looking something like the following:

I hope I can figure it out within the not so distant future or else I will drive myself crazy. Stop fixating myself on useless goals in life, but I cannot resist a challenging puzzle!

"Thou art to me a delicious torment" - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
If you like lots and lots of quotations elegantly mixed with beautiful pieces of art from throughout history, often spiritual, then I can highly recommend the following site: www.eirelass.com. Actually, I "met" Julie in person once over the Internet while chatting on a video session using Eyeball Chat. Nice person, so visit her site.

I don't know how I did it, but after struggling for many days I was able to figure out how to put a form with a listbox in a table cell and prevent the height of the cell extending beyond the bottom of the listbox. What a hassle.

B A N J A - Online Gaming
You have got to check this site out. Amazing!