This afternoon, another first; the email address for this blog was spammed by a 419 spam (you know, “I’m from Nigeria and want to give you 16 Bazillion dollars?”).

I’m not certain, but I think I know how. In the XML file is the email address of the author post…now in this file the email address is “escaped,” that is, looks like:

cfs_blog@lofcom.com

After some experimentation, I discovered that some aggrigators, when using “Add to Blog,” will actually unescape the escaped characters…so although it would be difficult to harvest from the XML file directly, any reposting of the information in the file would display the address in-the-clear, allowing any harvester software to pluck the address with no-muss-no-fuss.

I’m not yet prepared to change that address (although I will if I continue to receive spam through it), but I am going to be rewriting the XML file to no longer send the author’s email address in the syndicated feed. So far as I can tell, it isn’t required so there’s no reason to send it out routinely.

Craig Kilborn: Hard to believe he’s celebrating his fifth anniversary as the host of “The Late Late Show.” All that does is makes my missing Tom Snyder all that much more deep…Snyder had the last of the “talk shows,” since nowadays they are all more “comedy” (Leno, Letterman: comedy. Kilborn: mind-numbingly simplistic, about as funny as throwing up at a frat party) than talk.

When Annie was sick (maybe I’ll talk about 1998 sometime; if you don’t know about it, she was diagnosed with cancer while pregnant with our only child - was an ugly year), we routinely watched and enjoyed Tom, who opened every show with a rambling monolog that had nothing to do with anything other than maybe his day. Many evenings in Hershey’s hospital, we spent a little while forgetting about the chemotherepy running into her veins watching his show.

He had guests on who generally weren’t promoting anything, and he’d talk to each guest or a good 15-20 minutes. What made him really good was his ability to listen to his guests.
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