Here’s a strange publicity stunt: Taco Bell is going to give a free taco to everyone in the United States if a hunk of Mir hits a 40 foot by 40 foot Taco Bell logo that they’ve placed in the South Pacific. Considering the fact that the projected splashdown area is thousands of square kilometers in area, I’d say it’s likely that they won’t have to cough up the tacos.

Salon is soon to launch Salon Premium. You pay them $30 a year, and in return you don’t have to look at ads and you get to see some yet to be announced premium content. I hope they don’t carve off existing content and put it behind the wall, because it will make my linking difficult. I’ll be kicking in the $30, not because I care about the ads but rather because I care about the future survival of Salon. It’s a bit disconcerting that all the ads I view at Salon every year don’t add up to $30 in revenue for them. No wonder all the content sites are dying.

Declan McCullagh has an interview with David Touretzky, the guy with the amazing gallery of CSS Descramblers, for Wired News. It’s pretty interesting, and the fact that Declan feels compelled to point out that Touretzky is a libertarian offers added amusement. I had figured that Touretzky was a computer scientist, but it turns out he studies rodent brains. That’s probably why he understands so well how to tweak the MPAA.

I read the other day that Philip Greenspun parted ways with ArsDigita, the consulting company that he founded, but didn’t write about it, mainly because I didn’t know what to write. Philip’s personal site was a huge inspiration to me, as I’m sure it was to many people who are into personal publishing on the Web. So, when he started a company, and documented just about everything about it on the Web, I thought that was pretty cool too (even though I didn’t agree with him on a lot of things). So now I’m kind of sad to see that his company has outgrown him. Anyway, Joel’s eulogy for ArsDigita (or at least what it was) is a good read, and says many of the things I was thinking.

The veil has been lifted from Microsoft’s Hailstorm project. It, like the .NET framework, is heavily tied in with Microsoft’s Passport service, which I want no part of.

This weekend I signed up at dyndns.org to get a static domain name for my home computer. It was easy as pie to get set up, and I’m using yiPost to keep my record up to date. DynDNS is a free service, supported by user donations.

I got a couple of email messages from very smart people on the Jon Gilmore vs. Verio controversy. They both said that Gilmore is wrong, and I agree with them. There are plenty of ways for Gilmore to provide the ability to relay mail for his friends without opening up his mail server to the entire world. He’s not being a very responsible Internet citizen, and while I know he’s trying to make some point about personal liberty, I think that Verio has as much a right to block his relay as he has to keep it wide open.

Here’s BountyQuest’s writeup of the final results of their search for prior art on the one-click patent.

Last night I also got around to checking out Noah Grey’s weblogging tool, Grey Matter. It won’t be replacing my home brewed Web logging system, mainly because it uses flat files for data storage and I like the flexibility of putting stuff in a relational database. Even so, it’s a very impressive piece of work and a great source of inspiration. I’m most impressed by the overall polish of Grey Matter, it’s extremely well thought out, and it doesn’t look like Noah cut any corners on error handling in the UI.

If you really want to muck around with the look and feel of Windows, check out Virtual Plastic. It’s a huge compendium of tips and pointers to programs that will let you get on the fast track to registry corruption and eventual reinstallation.