Subject: Hi Jeremy Buy Heroin, cocaine and other shit from timothystuff
I am very sorry for you Jeremy, is a pity that this is how your life is
going to end as soon as you don’t comply. As you can see there is no need
of introducing myself to you because I don’t have any business with you,
my duty as I am mailing you now is just to KILL you and I have to do it
as I have already been paid for that. But I give you a chance. Call my neighbor 315-678-2789 and say password “there is time to save my skin” and if that would sound convincing, I will forget about you.
Tell him this password for Timothy Sinclair (be sure it is not my real name).

WARNING: DO NOT THINK OF CONTACTING THE POLICE OR EVEN TELLING ANYONE
BECAUSE I WILL KNOW.

Well, if I end up dead, its been a good life.

Browse the site, get a feel for the type of stories that appear on this blog and send your submissions to

“admin @ jemmille.com”

• Approximately 300 posts
• Over 100,000 visits
• Digg Front Page Article (which accounts for half of the above number)
• Lots of friends made (even met a few of them)
• Interviews with some of the top bloggers

Future plans:

• Ramp up the posting schedule, I’ve been slacking lately
• New design (possibly)
• More “5 Questions With” interviews

Thanks for reading and I hope you keep coming back!

I went to the Slashdot 10th Anniversary party in Ann Arbor, MI, which happens to be home of the founder, CmdrTaco. The turnout was excellent! At least 200 geeks of various shapes, sizes and colors were there. I met Hemos, who gave me the shirt, as well as CmdrTaco. They had name tags printed out for everyone who had RSVP’d with their username and member number on them. The lower the number, the cooler you seemed to be. My number is 102,267 (out of over 1,100,000 registered users) which I got almost 8 years ago. I never though my Slashdot member number would be good for anything, guess I was wrong!

It was a good time. I got my ass kicked in foosball but did manage to set the high score for Mrs. Pac-Man (geeze, I am a geek). The party was still going on when I left and I’m sure it still is. The Leopold Bros. Pub in Ann Arbor is making a killing tonight I’m sure. Thanks for the free shirt Slashdot!

The e-mail was legitimate – depending on how you look at it.

I went to the site, signed up, and decided to import my contacts from G-Mail. It works the same way MySpace or Facebook does, it checks to see if any of your contacts are already members and then links you with them automatically. Unfortunately I didn’t read the fine print – neither did Hugh. When I entered my info for G-Mail, Quechup decided to send and invite to EVERYONE of my G-Mail contacts. In G-Mail, every person you have ever sent an e-mail to is in your list. I’m guessing many hundreds of people had a Quechup invite in their Inbox from me. I didn’t know until it was WAY too late. The following day I awoke to several e-mails from people asking who I was and why I sent them an invite. I also had e-mails from friends saying they had signed up. It’s been two days since I spammed everyone and I am still trying to clear up the entire mess.

If any of you reading this got an invite, please disregard it. I didn’t mean to send it to all of you.

Beware of Quechup. They received an extremely disgruntled e-mail from me that contained more than one four-letter word. Quechup may be a fine social networking site but their underhanded tactics to gain new members is unethical. I’ll never know because I will never be going back to the site.

Mashable covered the story on the 2nd of this month.  Too bad I didn’t check my RSS reader that day.

One of my favorite features of Wordpress is the “advanced” version of the text editor used to write posts. For some reason this option isn’t enabled by default nor is there a box in any of the options to make it appear. You have to know the “code”.

So what is the code? Ctrl + Alt + V Just press that key combination when you are in the “Write” section of your wordpress blog. It should look like this:

It makes it very easy to write the word green in green, red in red; insert special characters like © or ™ or even ®. You can also paste text from a word formatted document, change the heading type (H1, H2, paragraph, etc.), clean up messy code, undo, and underline.

If you are still need more control over your posts, take it to the next level. Supercharge your text editor by downloading the Advanced TinyMCE Editor. The installation procedure is only slightly more complex than a normal plug-in but the end result is this:

Now you can do it all with 60+ options including: superscript, subscript, emoticons, media (Flash, Shockwave), tables and SO much more. Tip: Be sure to read the readme.txt in the extracted folder.

Go crazy and get the upgrade to the ultimate Wordpress text editor.

vs.

One of the most popular bloggers on the internet, John Chow, has a copy-cat…err, copy cow.

JohnCow.com is an inventive parody of JohnChow.com that is making quite a name for itself! I have been keeping up with the JohnCow.com since its inception and have on more than one occasion found myself laughing out loud (and at the same time wishing I had thought of the idea first.) The site blends parody posts and serious posts seamlessly.

John Chow himself has endorsed the effort and has even helped them a bit along the way.

I recommend you give the site a read. It has been up for just over a month and is averaging 4000+ page views per day. (With a little help from 2, count ‘em, 2 Digg.com front page articles).

Moo knows… I might even try and write for them.

Here we go (in no particular order):

Good friends can be made – I have talked to countless people since I started this site; some just starting in the blogging world, some established and well-known. All have been great to converse with and a few have become personal friends. Just last week I met up with Paul, from BlogPaul.com, while I was in Florida to discuss some new projects and let our cute kids hang out. I also have plans to visit Chicago before the summer is over to meet another fellow blogger.

Unexpected things can happen in an instant – This site receives a respectable number of hits per day but a few weeks ago things went a little wild. In a 48 hour period jemmille.com received 55,000 hits. When I first noticed the spike in traffic hits were around 10,000 – I was ecstatic but confused. I quickly learned that a post I had written the day before found its way onto the front page of Digg.com. For a while I couldn’t even log into my server. I had to strip down the front page to a bare minimum so the server didn’t overload. The traffic trickled back to normal after about 4 days.

Some posts take on a life of their own – I have written a couple of posts that get about 50 – 100 hits per day via traffic from search engines. They are posts that were written some time ago but the topics seem to be related to popular search terms. Two of the posts focus on the LG Chocolate phone and one is on the popular children’s toy Webkinz. Seeing what posts remain popular over time is very helpful in finding a focus for your blog. To steal (and alter) a line from a great movie, “If you write it, they will come.”

The Law of Diminishing Returns – You would expect that the more effort you put into a project the more returns/progress/rewards you would see. I found this to be false. I was spending so much time and energy on this site and related blogging exploits that I was making myself physically and mentally defunct. I have found that patience and persistence bring a far greater return than spitting out 2-3 mediocre posts per day. I now focus more on picking a topic, researching it fully and then reporting. I find myself at times spending hours – and a couple of times, weeks – on one post. Now I am shooting more for quality (as well as my sanity).

Expect the unexpected – New sites, new ideas and new opportunities for business ventures can all be gained by participating in the Blogsphere. I now run two sites, co-author another and have amassed a small collection of domain names that I might someday develop. I started a company, which is still very small, that incorporates just about everything I have ever wanted to do in my life in terms of computers and computing. I hope in a year or two I can focus all of my energies on the business and be my own boss 100% of the time.

Here are the choices: (you will get them all eventually)

1. Ubiquitous computing – A detailed look at new technologies that will bring the computer into our lives in ways that will make everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – interactive. Even your walls will respond to your moods, etc.

2. Multi-processor computing – Dual-core, quad-core, computers with 2048 processors. This post will be a “How does it work and how does it improve your computing experience” type of article.

3. The next installment of “What I Have Learned About Blogging“. This would be installment two.

4. A new “5-Questions With” post. I have been slacking on interviews as of late. I have a couple in the queue or I could do one of your choosing. Give me an idea of who you would like to hear from. Outside of Bill Gates, I can probably get it done.

Comment away! Let me know what you want next.

“Vargas” is Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News.

Vargas: How crucial is the next 100 years to the survival of the human race?

Hawking: We face a number of threats to our survival, from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, genetically engineered viruses, and the number is likely to increase in the future, with the development of new technologies, and new ways things can go wrong.

Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years. By that time, we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth, would not mean the end of the human race.

However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next 100 years, so we have to be very careful in this period.

Vargas: What do you think is the biggest threat to humanity?

Hawking: Nuclear war is still probably the greatest threat to humanity, at the present time. Even after the end of the Cold War, there are still enough nuclear weapons stockpiled to kill us all several times over, and new nuclear nations will add to the instability. With time, the nuclear threat may decrease, but other threats will develop, so we must remain on our guard.

Vargas: Do you think it is possible that the human race will go extinct in the near future?

Hawking: There is a possibility that the human race could go extinct, but it is not inevitable. This is not a prophesy of doom, but a wake-up call.

Vargas: Conversely, do you ultimately believe that the human race will act in time and make the necessary changes in order to survive? If so, what are the necessary changes?

Hawking: Most of the threats we face come from the progress we have made in science and technology. We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we have to recognize the dangers and control them. I’m an optimist, and I believe we can.

Vargas: The universe is a vast and powerful place with forces that we are only now beginning to understand. Some of them, such as black holes and gamma ray bursts, though extremely unlikely, are capable of destroying our planet. What do these type of phenomena tell us about humanity’s place in the universe?

Hawking: Events like a nearby cosmic ray burst, or a collision with a black hole, would be devastating to life on Earth, but they are extremely unlikely. They haven’t happened in the 4½-billion-year history of the Earth so far, so the chance of them occurring in the near future is very low. The Earth is in much more danger from human action than from natural disasters.

Vargas: Asteroids provide a paradoxical example of our relationship with the universe. These near-Earth objects may have cleared the way for our evolution, yet could ultimately destroy our very way of life. What do asteroids tell us about the randomness and fragility of human existence?

Hawking: Up to now, aggression has been an attribute with definite survival advantages. So it has been hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, it may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war, if we cannot control our instinct by our reason. But our aggression is responsible for only some of the dangers we face. Others, like climate change, arise from instabilities in the increasingly complex structure of our way of life. We need to be quicker to identify such threats, and act before they get out of control.

Vargas: Many scientists in the field of artificial intelligence believe that it is only a matter of time before computers will be autonomous, thinking beings that will surpass humans. Do you think this is possible?

Hawking: I think there’s no qualitative difference between the brain of an earthworm and a computer. I also believe that evolution implies there can be no qualitative difference between the brain of an earthworm and that of a human. It therefore follows that computers can, in principle, emulate human intelligence, or even surpass it.

Up to now, computers have obeyed Moore’s Law, which says that computers double their speed and memory capacity every two years. Human intelligence may also increase because of genetic engineering, but not so fast. The result is that computers are likely to overtake humans in intelligence, at some point in the next 100 years. When that happens, we will need to ensure that the computers serve us, and not themselves.

Vargas: A majority of scientists now believe that mankind is changing the Earth’s climate to an unmistakable and potentially catastrophic degree. Do you think it possible for us to stop global warming from getting worse?

Hawking: The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.

The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.

Vargas: Natural phenomenon like supervolcanos seem to prove the point that man is still at the mercy of the natural world. Will we ever be able to tame nature?

Hawking: Life on Earth has survived volcanos for 4 billion years. It is not natural forces that are the great threat, but ourselves.

Hawking: It seems to be 70 million years since the last mass extinction of species caused by collision with an asteroid. This is probably longer than the average period between major asteroid collisions, and this allowed the human race to develop. One might regard this as pure luck, but there is another way to look at it.

There must be many Earth-like planets in the universe, but only those with long periods between asteroid collisions develop intelligent life, which can then ask the question, “Why were we so lucky?”

The answer is, if we hadn’t been lucky enough to have a long period between asteroid collisions, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.

Vargas: The separate threats of nuclear war and bioterrorism make an effective argument that we as humans have tremendous difficulty controlling what we create. What does this say about the human species?