Thursday, October 19, 2006

Identity Crisis

Tomorrow, many of you who get your Internet through Comcast will suddenly and against your will find yourselves customers of Time-Warner Cable. For some of you, this means that your most precious form of identity — your e-mail address — will be changing. And if you live where I live, it'll be déjà vu all over again because your address will change back to what it used to be a few years ago before evildoers changed it. My first Internet connection (a Paleolithic Era dial-up) gave me an e-mail @netcom.ix.something. Then I had an aol.com address and one with r.r.com, which was Road Runner, and then it was something else and then it was comcast.net and I'm sure I'm leaving out a couple but anyway, now it's back to Road Runner, which is the brand name of Time-Warner and...

Enough already. Let me tell you what to do.

Stop sending out "change of e-mail address notices" like so many of my friends are doing this week. Get yourself a permanent e-mail address...one that will never change, one that will follow you for the rest of your life. There are two ways to do this.

One way — the best way, the way I did it — is to get a domain. I own evanier.com and povonline.com and newsfromme.com and a few others. As long as I maintain ownership of the domain, an e-mail address there can only be changed by me.

So how it works is that let's say I'm stuck with Muckenfuss Cable for broadband in my area and they give me an e-mail address of mark3569@muckenfuss.com. I connect to the Internet through them and I get my e-mail by logging into that account...but I don't give that address out to anyone. That address can be changed on me without my consent. What I do instead is to give out my permanent address — the one at my domain — and then I set the address at my domain to forward to the address at muckenfuss.com. This is pretty easy to do.

Next year, Muckenfuss Cable may be bought by Shmidlap Communications and they may change my e-mail address to mark9936@shmidlap.net. No big deal. It'll take about thirty seconds for me to change the forwarding information for my permanent address and have it go to the new address, instead. Half a minute's work and I'm current. I don't have to send out change notices to all my friends and worry about e-mail being sent to the old address when it becomes inactive and not getting to me. I can even change Internet Service Providers voluntarily. I don't lose the e-mail address via which all my friends contact me if I leave Muckenfuss and get my Internet some other way.

If you don't have a domain or don't want one, there's another method. Get an account with a service such as gmail.com and set that account to forward to your current I.S.P. e-mail address. This is so easy to set up that a child of three could do it...and you should be able to find a child of three. Then you give the gmail address out to everyone. It may not last forever but it'll probably come close.

But this whole thing of your e-mail address changing when one company buys another is ridiculous...and there'll be probably be a lot of it before, as is inevitable, Time-Warner owns every inch of the Internet. Protect yourself from this. Get a permanent address.

• Posted at 11:16 PM · LINK

Weird World

Nice profile of "Weird" Al Yankovic. Hard to believe it's been twenty-seven years since I first heard his parody of The Knack's "My Sharona" on the Dr. Demento radio festival. Al's was "My Bologna" and it was very funny. The guy's had a darn good career since then.

• Posted at 8:54 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

This column by Jonah Goldberg is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that he's a leading Conservative pundit who's been solidly behind the War in Iraq, almost to the point of touting the doctrine of Bush-Cheney infallibility in the War on Terror...and here he is, now saying thay the whole thing was a mistake. Another is that he's (understandably) trying to spin this to do the least possible damage to his side. So his argument kind of comes down to, "We were wrong but we can't let the folks who were right get away with looking like they were right."

Ergo, his section on what to do with Iraq seems to amount to something on the order of, "We shouldn't be there but I don't want to side with those who say we should leave because they're my political opponents and we can't have them be right. So let's have the Iraqis vote on whether or not we should leave and make that our reason." That, I suppose, would be better than departing because John Murtha and John Kerry and other prominent Democrats (and even, lately, some Republicans) said we should. For one thing, it would make all those insults of the character and patriotism of those who want to "cut and run" seem rather hollow.

I think the idea of having the Iraqis vote us off the island, as it were, sounds silly...but hey, if it gets us out, I'm all for it. We'd just better hope they do vote for us to leave since folks like Goldberg seem to have no idea what we should do to make things better if we stay. Maybe part of the plan is that we'll send Diebold machines over for the balloting, thereby ensuring that it comes out the way Bush wants.

Senator Kerry famously asked his question about being the last man to die for the mistakes of Vietnam. I think we're going to get very tired of hearing new permutations of that quote. But it's still a good question.

• Posted at 2:09 PM · LINK

Good Morning!

Back to work on the script...

• Posted at 10:34 AM · LINK

Nighty Night!

As the posting times indicate, I haven't been to bed yet. I've been up working on a script and I think I've hit the stage where everything I think of sounds acceptable. So maybe it's time to pack it in for the night.

I want to thank everyone for their suggestions of video poker machines I can buy for my mother. One person not only suggested one on eBay, he sent me a donation equal to the purchase price. I'll report back if it turns out to be a good choice. (I can report, in answer to a good many queries, that I seem to have found a terrific electric shaver. It's the Panasonic Model ES8077S and I dunno if it'll work on your face but it sure works on mine.)

Okay, time to hit the sack. Good night, Blogosphere!

• Posted at 6:39 AM · LINK

Today's Bonus Video Link

This is Keith Olbermann's latest "Special Comment." The topic is the new Military Commissions Act that Bush just signed, which gives him powers that no Chief Executive in the United States should ever have. I don't know why he focuses so much of his outrage on George W. Bush and directs none of it to the legislators who voted for the bill...but I think he's right that we have now lost something very precious and very American. We have given more power — unchecked power, no less — to an administration that has proven itself unworthy to wield the power it already has. Here's the video...

• Posted at 5:19 AM · LINK

See Sergio

Sergio Aragonés will be a guest at the November 5 Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention down at the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. He will be joining his fellow Mad cartoonist, master caricaturist Tom Richmond, who'll be doing caricatures of folks there all day for a modest fee. I think I'm going to be there too, and David Carradine is also a featured guest. More details over at this here website.

• Posted at 4:59 AM · LINK

DnD on DVD

Time to order the Dungeons & Dragons DVD set...that is, if you remember the popular Saturday morning series that ran on CBS from 1983 to 1985. As explained over here, I developed the show for television and then others took over and built it into a pretty decent fantasy series. It still has a pretty rabid following and I would imagine this set will sell quite well.

The five disc set contains all 27 episodes plus a mess of bonus features, including commentary tracks and interviews and even a radio-play style dramatization of a script written by my pal Michael Reaves that was never produced but which would have been the final, wrap-up episode. The set will be out December 5 but you can order it now by clicking here.

• Posted at 2:34 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

What was the first cartoon produced for television? There are a couple of contenders for that honor...shows that told stories via drawings that were not exactly animated. But the first one with at least a little animation (and as you'll see, I do mean little) was Crusader Rabbit. In 1948, Jay Ward teamed with animator Alex Anderson and just a few other people to produce a show for NBC. The show was done in black-and-white and there were ten storylines broken up into 195 four minute cartoons.

In 1957, following some ugly custody battles over the property, another series was done. This one was in color and involved neither Anderson nor Ward. Slightly more cash was spent on the animation of 200 cartoons that formed 13 storylines. (This material was also edited into thirteen longform episodes that nobody but me seems to ever have seen on TV.) If you have any memory at all of Crusader Rabbit, you probably remember the color episodes, and you probably remember them as looking better than they actually did.

Both batches of episodes were probably more entertaining than they should have been, given their budgets. But the writing was strong and the voice work was good, and the artists produced drawings that were nice, even if they didn't move much. Here's the first episode of the first series. That's Lucille Bliss supplying the voice of Crusader, Vern Louden as Ragland T. Tiger, and Roy Whaley as the narrator.

• Posted at 12:54 AM · LINK