These are just catchy sentences floating in my head so I thought I should dump them here:

Best way to remove a threat is to make it worse.

Best way to protect a secret is to not have it.

If you don't know it, you don't have it.

Protection most appreciated is visible protection.

Invisible protection makes users more gullible.

Security is a scaaary business, Right Boo?

I am iffy about the 'best' part but they sound better than 'one of the' so there.  'Boo' is a god that looks like a hamster from the game Baldur's Gate.  Go For The Eyes Boo, Go For The Eyes!

Got up at 2pm after 14 hours of sleep to make up for 30 hours of demo preparation.  I feel rested but it's the kind of restful feeling one gets lying on the asphalt and lookup at the blue sky after getting hit by a truck.  I never been in such an accident but I was in a head-on motocycle collision when I was young and found myself in a slow-mo flying through the air scene.  I think the middle and the end part of an accident is a very tranquile place to be.  No pain, no fear, just watching things happen.  Weird.

One of the first news item I read was this Wired piece on the national missile defense system which prompted me to wonder if we'll ever have a national virus defense system along with virus tax levied against companies whose vulnerabilities are used by virus found at the 'wall'.  E-commerce tax is not popular among netizens, but I think taxing to improve the Net and to encourage better software and services might find more favorable support among netizens.

The problem with blogosphere is that it's all too personal, particularly at the ozone layer.  I like practically everyone in it but often it's difficult to post things without giving off unintended bad vibes.  When I have an opinion, I have to say it like I have to fart when I have gas.  But letting one loose can cloud up the room and you know that blogosphere is a really big room where you can't pretend it's someone else.

While some might deny it or might not even be aware of it, there are definitely cliques to which people and even companies belong to or are associated with by themselves or by others.  When I say something negative about something one of them did, I am doing so as if I would offer an advice to a friend, but it's often seen as if I am attacking the clique as a whole.  Even worse, I feel as if I did.

I have to agree with Tim Bray, Scoble's post on how to be persuasive in the information age is the best he has written so far.  Not surprisingly, it points directly at the power of blogging as a tool of persuason.

I wonder if the word persuation is derived from pursue?  If so, then Scoble is saying that being persuasive doesn't mean giving a chase, but to be a person whose words are worthy of pursuit by the listener.

Robert McLaws is working on Visual Blogger 2004, a blog editor client for Windows.

Nice, but am I the only one who think Office 2003 GUI looks crappy?  Why are smart developers mimicking madness?  Eye-candies that distracts more than enhances user experience are not eye-candies but eye-sores.  And what's with all those bright colors?  Most people don't live and work in Gap stores and the real world is definitely not Technicolor.  Are Windows GUI designers Lego fanatics?

Think of colors as emotions.  Splattering emotions carelessly is annoying to users just as talking seriously to a guy wearing a clown suit is.  Take it easy, tone it down, and think twice before you start ejaculating colors like Picasso on LSD.

I didn't do anything except work this weekend on an IE toolbar for a client.  Much of the time was spent on pushing pixels around to try this look and that effect.  Still, it's not state of art GUI because Win32 alphablending functions are not supported on all the platforms.  I won't be doing much animation either.  Just no time and no room.

Thankfully, the visuals are mostly done and I can move on to messing with IE's COM objects and events.  Lots of joy there (eyeroll).  I would rather design new technologies and lead special teams on hot projects but being a consultant means having to do what clients ask for.  I sure hope rest of you had a better weekend than me.

Elliotte Rusty Harold reports on a great looking pair of tits in Amsterdam.

I arrived in Amsterdam this morning around 8:00 A.M. local time and got to the hotel around 10:00. I had a few hours to kill before my room was ready so I wandered around to see what I could see. This being Amsterdam, there was quite a lot to see, but my absolute favorite was one pair of great tits. I even got a picture of one of them. We don't have tits like these in Brooklyn!

With only a few hours til the tax filing deadline, I was having problem with TurboTax.  It reported no errors so I proceeded to file it electronically, but it kept saying it couldn't do it because there were errors.  So I went back and found that some field in California tax return was not supposed to be a negative number and it should be greater than the number above.  Well, the number above came from the federal side and was negative.

After an hour of going back and forth which TurboTax really sucks at (why can't it be more like a browser and let me spawn new windows and navigate back and forth?), I finally started ripping out forms and wiping out deductions until the damn thing filed without complaining.  I am paying a bit more tax than I would have otherwise, but at least it's done and over with until next year.

If I could make a wish come true to make my tax time headaches more tolerable, it is the ability to dictate where my tax money goes after I file my tax return.  I want to be able to use a nice GUI application to swoop in, to see how others have allocated their tax money and where it's lacking, and divide up my tax money into areas where I think more money should be spent.

Concerned about the homeless or unemployment?  Drag and drop part of your tax money to the homeless or economic programs.  Angry about the Iraq War?  Don't spend any money on it.  Want to see more tanks?  Drill down into the army budget and spread your bucks on the armored divisions' purchasing budgets.  You want to reward or punish the job FCC has been doing?  Squeeze their budget until they do what you want.

UI-wise, you can select from a large selection of budget configuration packages from political parties or even influential individuals so you don't have to micromanage the federal budget.  So you would select one or select a few and average to start with and then make fine adjustments on the programs you feel strongly about.

If implemented, the tax I have to pay every year becomes money I have to spend every year.  Why stop there?  If one has the money, why not pre-spend tax one has to spend in the next ten years at once in public programs that I care about and needs funding?  This way, I can pitch in hundreds of thousands instead of few thousands at once, superboosting cruicial programs and increasing the chance of seeing some good results early.

Instead of voting on politicians, judges, and policies, direct budgetting allows us to vote with our tax dollars.  Whether the system will work in real life or not, the vision is definitely a satisfying one.  If successful, politicians will be on their knees begging for money for their favorite program as April 15th nears each year.  Who knows?  Maybe everyone will act responsibly.  If you like this idea, just drag-n-drop some donations to the Don Park's Daily Needs box.

Given that more spams originate from certain countries than others, I wonder what would happen if total bandwidth capacity of each country is choked by percentage of spam in outgoing e-mail.  For example, if Korea's bandwidth capacity is X and 70% of e-mail originating from Korea is spam, then Korea's bandwidth is limited to 30% of X.

My guess is that choking at the national level will encourage each country to choke at the network level which will subsequently encourage ISPs and broadband operators to choke at the connection level.  This will encourage spammers to use zombies at other countries which will in turn encourage that country to crackdown on spams.

Hopefully, spammers will eventually run out of places to spam from.