Tonight I had to do a drive to Jersey, and I was in the mood for some driving music. Unfortunately, all of my CDs are currently sitting my office, so I had to flip through the paltry radio offerings of South Jersey. Flip, flip, flip. Billy Joel. Flip, flip, flip. Corelli on WQXR. Flip, flip, flip. Some unidentifiable “new” music on Top 40.

Then as I was getting closer to home, I finally stumbled upon an astounding set on WXPN, including an OHMYGODITROCKS track called E-pro (this is a mixed version of what I heard) from the upcoming Beck album, some piano jazz, The Sound of Settling by Death Cab for Cutie and a hithero unknown (I’m not sure if it’s new) Camper Van Beethoven song.

Man, I feel like I should be wearing dark rimmed glasses and wearing my hoodie…. oh, wait, nevermind.

Sometimes I think the blogging evangelists just get a little overhyped about how blogging is going to change the world or at least change the way that marketing works. You know, how markets are conversations.

However, I must admit that seeing referrers from major ad agencies makes me feel a little influential. Just a tad.

I had one of those “I feel like an utter loser” moments today. My daughter has been sick for the past few days with a low but persistent fever, stomach upset, her throat hurting her. I didn’t think much of it when I first discovered she was sick, but by last night I knew that I should make an appointment for her at the pediatrician’s. So, this morning, she isn’t feeling too hot, and I make the appointment.

After I make the appointment, I helped her get dressed and I see that she has a prickly heat looking like rash. What the heck?

At the pediatrician, the nurse is dutifully examining her and I mention the rash. The nurse takes one look at the rash and tells me “Yep, it sure looks like strep throat. We’ll have to take a culture, but I’m sure it’s strep.” It turns out it was strep. I had no clue. I never had it as a kid.

Update: 2/9/05: She’s better now and even went to school today.

Who dressed Terry Bradshaw? He’s got more pastels on than a bad 80s music video. And that out of control goatee. It’s called “shaving”.

Jimmy Johnson’s purple tie is just…classy.

Paul McCartney is ROCKING OUT. Good choice Fox. He looks like he’s having alot of fun onstage.

Sunday Bloody Sunday isn’t a good montage song. Sorry.

Update: 9:15pm Tied, finally.

Update 2: 9:30ish Not so tied.

Update 3:Pats 10 points ahead.

Update 4: 24-20…with over a minute and a half to go. Or, rather 24-21.

Update 5: 17 seconds to go….. damn, this is awful.

Update 6: Ah well.

AdJab is blogging Superbowl ads.

Updated: I’m just going to categorize my own.

Liked: I liked the iTunes ones and the “I work with a bunch of monkeys” one. Robbery. NFL players singing tomorrow. Soldiers coming home (tugging on the heartstrings, I still don’t like watery beer). Clouding up the car windows. Cooking the cat. Working with a bunch of monkeys II. The nuts with the fairy tale characters. Working with a bunch of monkeys III.

Tasteless: GoDaddy. Apparently, the tasteless godaddy ad was pulled from a second showing by request of the NFL. Heh.

Huh?: The muppets (my daughter didn’t get that one).

Had to live during the 80s:MC Hammer.

Oooh lala: A single Brad Pitt drinks Heineken? I didn’t know that. (I missed the Diet Pepsi walking down the street one.)

Most likely to use the product they’re advertising: I work with a bunch of monkeys (careerbuilder). iTunes/Pepsi. Napster. Prius (ok, the commercial was cool.)

Lame commercials of the night: The Cadillac in the tunnel one. The countertop one. Frozen guy in a car (all three times of it is lame). Talking Baby. Tobasco. The easy button - seen that already, lame-o. Drug for can’t getting it up syndrome - even showing a couple in two seperate bathtubs. Verizon wireless miniaturization.

Ok: Bud light jumping out of an airplane. The guys on the picture phone. Budweiser Clydesdale wanna bes. The bold and smooth one. Pepsi truck.

Didn’t make an impression on me: The movie commercials. The rest of the car commercials. mbna. Comcast.

The NY Times covers The Wing Bowl.

Ya know, if I didn’t hear multiple people talking about this (and wishing they were there) yesterday, I simply would not have believed it.

Yahoo research just released a beta of a new contextual search technology they call Y!Q. The basic idea behind it is that you, the Web reader, can click on words or phrases on a Web page and open up a contextual window with results from Yahoo. Here’s the Yahoo Search blog entry about the conception of the idea.

As a Web master, in order to get Y!Q to work, you have to embed javascript and additional non-standard tags into your Web page.

So, tell me again why I would want to include Y!Q tags, just so I can make my page size larger (with javascript at that) and then lead people off of my page with results from Yahoo?

My call on it is that it’s a technically interesting idea, the execution needs much more (like, say, standards) but I don’t see real world applications for a professional Web master. Link farms, on the other hand, will probably benefit..

Just because I know you all were looking for a link to the Eagles fight song.

I’m just amused at all of the Eagles fandom. And I’m sure this weekend it will be a sea of green everywhere.

In response to James at OTB’s post about those damn comment spammers using open proxies to harass bloggers, I just wanted to point out that current case law is unclear about using open proxies. In other words, it’s not illegal to use an open proxy, on the other hand, the issue hasn’t been decided upon in the courts.

Simply put, using an open proxy is like opening the door (connecting to a computer on the Net) to an unlocked (proxy service was up and running) house and then arguing that you could use the house (proxy service) because the door was unlocked (computer user didn’t disable the service).

Here’s the pertinent graph from The Register article…

So Sam, like other link spammers, uses the thousands of ‘open proxies’ on the net. These are machines which, by accident (read: clueless sysadmins) or design (read: clueless managers) are set up so that anyone, anywhere, can access another website through them. Usually intended for internal use, so a company only needs one machine facing the net, they’re actually hard to lock down completely.

So, people like Sam are using computers that they didn’t get explicit permission to use. Normal people tend to call that tresspass [to chattels].

Why haven’t I been able to connect to outgoing.verizon.net (verizon’s smtp server - outgoing email) during early evening hours for the past few days? Inquiring minds want to know….

I would use my mailserver on cleverhack, but, uh, Verizon blocks port 25.

Update: Someone on nanog is seeing similar behavior, I’ll post the link once it gets archived.