As you folks get drowned by spam, consider Messagefire, which filters/kills this stuff on its server.

Good article on Voice over IP. Unfortunately, when your cable connection sucks — as mine does right now — the future doesn’t look that bright.

Some magazines are getting shredded in newstand sales, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Did the pixel buzzsaw finally pulverize paper?

Sales up or down for the first six months of the year versus same period in 2002:
Better Homes and Gardens -15.5%
Cosmopolitan -9.0%
Entertainment Weekly -5.5%
Fast Company -55%
Fortune -12.5%
Martha Stewart Living -18.1%
Money -28.9%
O, The Oprah Magazine 37.5%
Reader’s Digest -19.7%
Real Simple 10.1%
Rolling Stone 4%
Sports Illustrated 3.5%
Weight Watchers 11.1%

Blogads gets a first (brief) mention in the Economist, one of my favorite publications. Look in the side-bar.

Amy Langfield has outstanding blackout reportage. Here’s some banter from the subway car where she spent two hours. “One guy realizes the cop is taking out the pregnant women to exit first and the guy says: ‘I’m pregnant!’ ‘Me too,’ another guy says. ‘Me too,’ says a woman. ‘It just happened. Just now.'” Read the whole thing.

An investment banker friend points out that the CEO of the Internet phone company I use — Jeffrey A. Citron of Vonage — paid $22.5 million to the SEC in January of this year for participating in “an extensive fraudulent scheme” in the nineties. Hmm.

Wonder why this doesn’t get mentioned when magazines like US News & World Report write about Vonage.

Amy Langfield digs into NY and NoCal animosity to Southern California. Steve Locke digs up summer memories.

The country’s first and last waterbed-only shop is run by a guy named Roland — wait for it — Formica, reports the NYT. After waterbeds were invented in 1967, sales peaked around $2 billion in the mid-1980s and now have plunged to $456 million. Creatures of fashion, people have foresaken an improving product. “The modern water bed is soft-sided and looks exactly like a conventional mattress. A virtually leak-proof water-filled bladder is held in a foam case, instead of wood, and a thick pad of ticking is zipped over it. The mattress can be placed on any standard platform bed or on top of a box spring, is nearly waveless, uses standard sheets and, once emptied, is far easier to move than a coil-filled mattress.”

My favorite Formica sales line: “You may just wake up in exactly the same position in which you fell asleep, never moving once all night.”

I just got a nice note from a girl who, nearly a decade ago, interned at the paper I then edited. She did translations and wrote some shorts and artful opinion pieces for us. She’s grown up and still writes nice essays like this one about cooking with Grandma and this one about “stuff.” Great to hear from you Zsofia.

Having just moved, I’m also pondering the meaning of stuff. In fact, I am appalled and astounded by the volume of detritus that gets pulled along in our wake. Once-worn shirts, notebooks with just a few words scribbled within, half balls of twine. We’re like garbage scows that can’t unload.

Expecting that her parents would find wonderful artifacts in the mysterious office of her now dead grandfather, Zsofi’s disappointed. “I wasn’t there when my parents cleaned out his room after his death. But I often wondered about what they would uncover, the family mementos, silly souvenirs from trips, or secret diaries. I was hoping for some stuff that represents who my grandfather was and wasn’t. When my parents were done, the picture was sobering: My grandfather left behind 20 bags of trash and about $900 in a bank account.”

Yep, I sometimes long to be a monk who travels through life with nothing but his toothbrush and boots. I guess this side of me was first articulated by Colin Fletcher’s Complete Walker, which I read like a bible when I was 14. I remember being enchanted with the idea that drilling holes in your toothbrush handle could trim hundreds of pounds from your total hike. OK, perhaps this afternoon I’ll throw out some of those boxes of computer wires and notebooks. Perhaps.

Triangle weblogs. And more. And answers to the infernal NC driver’s license test.