Philip Fibiger

Why I will never use Outlook as my personal email client. Ever:

Last night I was at dinner with Andre, Andy, and Leonard. We were talking about content aggregators. Andy is using Syndirella to collect weblog posts and quickly read them, while Andre is using Newsgator to do the same.

Newsgator plugs into Outlook, and treats posts like emails, filtering them into folders. It’s certainly convenient, particularly for someone who uses Outlook all day at work. We joked around about how insecure Outlook is, and wondered when someone would write the first weblog-borne virus. It was decided that it was all plain-text, and that Newsgator would strip out any offending code.

Today I played around a little bit with Newsgator, and decided to see what was possible in the RSS feed. I was able to write a little VBScript app/worm that emails from Outlook, can read your address book, etc. It wasn’t very hard, it didn’t take very long. All it takes is VBScript in the <description> tags of the RSS feed. While there isn’t the same possibility for self-replication (since there’s no way to script outlook to publish the same code to someone else’s RSS feed), this is pretty dangerous because newsgator traffic won’t be checked by corporate virus scanning software before it reaches Outlook like incoming email would.

Best…Birthday…Ever…

I had my 24th birthday last week, and it was a geek heaven. As an engagement / birthday present, Emily got me a 20 GB ipod, an adaptec firewire card, and a copy of XPlay. She did a lot of research about the differences between a Mac IPod on windows using XPlay vs. the Windows IPod, and it turns out that XPlay is really superior to MusicMatch, which comes with the Windows player, and now I have a player that’ll work with a Mac, if I ever get one. Over 1500 songs loaded onto the device, and it still has 13 out of 18.5 gigabytes free. My IPod ranks right up there with my Tivo as the greatest piece of consumer electronics ever created.

Continuing the computer/electronics geek thread, I went out and got a T-mobile Sidekick (also known as a Danger Hiptop. I ditched a $35/month cell plan and replaced it with a $40/month plan. I went from 300 anytime minutes to only 200, which is fine because I didn’t use the phone that much during the week, and I added unlimited data transfer. The hiptop is a cellphone, pops down email (and has its own email address), browses the web, uses aol instant messenger. It isn’t a perfect convergence device by any means, but it is certainly a huge step in the right direction. Leonard has already gone into way more detail about his hiptop than I can handle, and we have a lot of the same observations/complaints about the device, so go there, or something.

It was also a happy birthday for my motorcycle. I got a magnetic tank pad so that the zipper on my leather jacket won’t scratch the tank. I got a tank bag that’s both great for commuting and weekend rides. Now I don’t have to worry about loading my pockets with my cell, digital camera, etc..I can just toss everything into the bag and go.

Finally, my parents bought me a Craftsman 250 piece mechanics tool set. It’s got enough metric and standard sockets to do almost any maintenance my motorcycle will require. The problem with owning a tool set like this is really, it doesn’t like to live in an apartment. In a lot of ways, it’s like having a dog..sure, you an raise one in an apartment, but they want a big yard to run around in. Similarly, this tool set is huge, and needs a big garage of its own to inhabit. Some day…

Just as it’s refreshing when you hear a musician or someone in the record industry who gets mp3s, It’s wonderful to hear a television exec who doesn’t have a knee jerk reaction to Tivo and other digital video recorders. Bob Wright, CEO of NBC has a Tivo, uses it, and doesn’t think it’s going to destroy network television.

I got an 8 bit nintendo in 1986 for christmas. I just bought my next gaming system, a playstation 2. At this rate, my next game console, which I will purchase in 2018, will be implanted in my brain.