Sys-Con Does it Again

I never subscribed to CFDJ under my own name. I never signed up for a thing on their site (in fact I avoid going there at all costs). To my knowledge, I have never once given anyone there my email. Yet somehow, I got this email yesterday:

Dear Rachel,

Thank you for subscribing to ColdFusion Developer's Journal, published by
SYS-CON Media. ColdFusion Developer's Journal's commitment is to keep, by
email, its subscribers current on products and services from third party
advertisers that might be of interest to them. Each email message will
be preceded by the name of the company offering the product or service,
so that you know the source and purpose of the email before opening it.

If you do not wish to receive these informative emails, please follow
this link {removed} It will not affect your customer status in any manner.

Thank you,

SYS-CON Media
577 Chestnut Ridge Road
Woodcliff Lake, NJ 07677-8409

Soooo.... not only have they falsely accused me of subscribing to CFDJ, but they're basically notifying me I've been added to their spam list. Great. Now I've got to click a link to be removed, confirming the validity of my email address for their future spam efforts.

I have no idea how they got my email... I hope for their own sake (ok, I really don't care about them all that much) they aren't harvesting emails off of community sites or other questionable sources.

Unbelievable.

I never thought I'd say this but...THANK YOU, Microsoft

Microsoft Announces that "click to activate" will be removed from IE effective April, 2008.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate/

I've only wasted countless hours over 2 years of my life bothering with this stupid patent lawsuit fallout issue, and now that the general public of mediocre web designers have finally figured out what they need to do (or upgraded Dreamweaver) to get around it, it's not a necessity any more. Bah.

Nevertheless, it's nice to see M$ making a good choice. And I found it a little humorous that the reason they cite for making this change is "As a result of recent technology licenses acquired." Haha, I can just imagine the back office conversation: "What, they want to sue us for supporting embedded objects? Hell, just buy the damn company already!"

Blog.setFocus()

Sorry about the super geek-cliche title. I just wanted to make a quick post about the fact that my blog will soon have a point! I've been wallowing about posting on random topics over the past few months, hoping that a theme would emerge. I've drafted several posts and not actually posted them, because I was trying to decide if they are relevant to the purpose my blog does not yet have. Well, now I can say that with some thinking and Adam's strong urging, I've decided that my primary focus will be on the designer-developer, something I am intimately familiar with.

Being a designer and a developer, a front-to-back website or application creator is fun and challenging. I've asked myself many times if I should focus on one more heavily than the other, but it's so hard to choose. Ultimately, I think that being able to do both can be of immense value in many situations (at least my current employer seems to think so), so I'm going to work to promote a diverse skill set and to provide resources that help designer-developers grow in both directions.

Stay tuned!