Sunday, August 18, 2002, 1:36 p.m.

Stop the Beijing Express!

Here is a short and worthwhile discussion regarding

(compatible;+MSIE+5.0;+Windows+NT;+DigExt;+DTS+Agent

which I'm getting an abundance of in the weblogs from an almost equal abundance of different IP's. I successfully resisted the urge to list the 20 or 30 IP's that have hit my main index page in the last three days with this particular agent. However, I'm sure if any of them got my e-mail address they wouldn't hesitate in publishing it.

According to the discussion, that agent is known as the "Beijing Express E-mail Address Extractor." While the name is pretty much self-explanatory, check out the description, in part from agentland.com:

Beijing Express E-mail Address Extractor 2.0 ... With it, you will be able to use targeted searches to crawl the world wide web, extracting thousands of clean, fresh E-mail addresses.

Geesh!

Do a Google search on either "compatible;+MSIE+5.0;+Windows+NT;+DigExt;+DTS+Agent" or just "DigExt;+DTS+Agent" or an advanced search for "Beijing Express E-mail Address Extractor" for more information, including the purchase price of $128.00.

Okay. Here's the thing. This is a spam bot. And spam is illegal. Which begs the question, what people are actually buying this software? Does anyone else have the image of some person frantically shelling out $128.00 in the high hopes (desperation) that they're going to earn a living by selling their product to people they don't know via e-mail? Do people even read spam e-mails?

8:57 p.m.

In a truly gutsy move on my part, I restored some of my archived journal entries to the web site. The only change I made was to remove my e-mail address from certain pages wherein it was contained. In case anyone has any ideas of reading all of them, all I would ask is that you don't read them all in one setting so as to save on bandwidth on this end. Thank you.

Also, under the "cools" section on the right, I added a link to the 217 Skate Shop. Before anyone thinks I'm a skater chick, I'm not really. Although I have done more than my fair share of skateboarding, that was a different era. I just have a lot of admiration for these kids and wanted to do a little bit to promote their web site.

The Firefighters Postal Club was burned to the ground this past Friday. The fire was part of planned demolition. The firefighter members of the club held a training day for several local fire departments. My brother attended the burn in two capacities. One, as a member of the club. And, two, as an employee of the Forensics Department of Illinois State Police. While he's not a firefighter, he was able to get two arson investigators from the State Police invited to the burn. This photo, taken by a co-worker of my brother's, is him getting to be firefighter for a moment in full firefighter regalia. Cool, eh? I think so, too.