It’s official. The Twin Cities when smoke free today. They passed a bill that you can’t smoke inside and it effects every place. Bars, restaurants, everything. And I’m not sure how I feel about it exactly.
On the plus side -
• I don’t have to worry about second hand smoke when at a restaurant. The smoke free section isn’t always smoke free.
• I don’t have to worry about smelling like smoke when I get out of a bar or club.
I need some friends. In Yahoo 360 that is. So I’m offering up some invites to those who know me, or feel that they have something in common with me. Just email me or leave a comment in my blog and I’ll see what I can do. 
Since I’ve been working from home for a while, today I decided to go back to the office. However, the weather also decided that this would be the first spring day to rain and storm. So I decided that I’d use a garbage bag as a rain coat for my iMac G5. It even matches as they are both white. 
However, I decided at the last minute that I could beat the rain to work and wouldn’t have to worry about it. Of course, on my way to work, it started to sprinkle and then poor down upon me. I timed it just right though as it let up as I got to work and I got in without getting my iMac all wet.
So they launched Yahoo 360 today and I got my hands on an invite and have just started playing with it. You can check out my Yahoo 360 page. So far, I’m having trouble getting the short url to work, however I did write support. Not much to talk about yet as I’ve only had a short period of time to play with it.
The other night I went to my first Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) meeting and the focus of the evening was favorite websites. Anyone who wanted could discuss a favorite website of theirs and tell why. It could be their favorite due to good content, nice design, unique idea, good colors or whatever you could think up. We were shown websites that had you become your own DJ, talked about the Brawny man and even a site to find a grave. You can see the full list of websites over at the MIMA site. Oh, and if you were wondering, I didn’t share my favorites. I was just there to listen. 
I received a letter the other day from Listingcorp.com. It says that one of my domains has received some search engine listings service and I owe $35. Now, I knew that something couldn’t be right, however this looks exactly like a bill. It tells me the amounts, what they are for, my customer number, notice date and who to make out the check too. However it does say that it is not a bill if you read everything. They just made it to look like a bill to confuse the general public. Not only that, but the domain name on the bill is not for one of my sites, however it’s really close. They put .info instead of .com. At first I didn’t notice that, however they are expecting that you overlook that minor detail. I’m guessing that that is the only site I don’t have privacy protected.
Unfortunally the referrer spam plugin didn’t work, or I couldn’t get it to work correctly. So I’m now testing out referrer karma. Hopefully that works better.
Now comes the hard part. It seems that referrer karma automatically blacklists anyone who referrers people to often and aren’t on my white list. So I need to check often and edit my files so that good people don’t get blocked.
Here we go now.
Update: Now I have them both enabled.
A new Safari like Firefox theme as surfaced and it’s absolutely beautiful. Check out Aronnax’s Firefox themes and you’ll find GrApple (Brushed). Currently it’s only version 0.5 but it’s better than any other Safari type Firefox theme I’ve seen.
Now I’m not exactly sure how referrer spam works, but I don’t seem to like it. I keep getting hits from sites that aren’t linking to me legitly and are doing nothing but filling my stats with crap. Now I have a chance to defend myself. I just found a referrer bouncer plug-for WordPress and I’m hoping it works. I was also excited to see that I’m no the only one with this problem. It’ll take a few days to figure out if it’s working and I’ll have to keep updating the bad referrer list, but at least it is a start.
