Worst. Sales. Attempt. Ever.

I was going to post the e-mail I received as an image, but didn't want to identify the sender, lest he get bombarded with hate mail. Suffice it to say that you don't attract interest from media buyers by doing the following:

• Sending a pitch e-mail to the general mailbox from our website, unsolicited
• Addressing e-mails to "Dear Media Buyer,"
• With the cut and paste brackets plainly visible
• Sending massive attachments (nine PDF files and a Word document totaling over 6 MB)
• And the Word document has grammatical errors

I was nice and simply ignored it, although I suspect my partner Eric may cyberslap the guy for sending heavy attachments without warning. Serves him right.

Muslim Condemnation?

Jeff Jarvis asks whether or not we should be seeing more condemnation of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Muslims from the mainstream Muslim community. Well, sure. And to be fair, we often do. But there are a few important things to remember:

1) There's no central Muslim authority. In other words, there's no Pope for Islam. That's one of the things that many non-Muslims seem to have a problem with - Islam tends to be decentralized.

2) Would you blame mainstream Muslims for thinking that they're less connected to these terror strikes than outsiders might believe them to be? I mean, I'm a Christian and I don't see the need to go around apologizing to non-Christians for Fred Phelps and his GodHatesFags.com website. I doubt you could say fundamentalist Islamic terror groups are "a Muslim problem" any more than you could say fundie Christians bombing abortion clinics are a Christian problem.

3) What makes you think widespread condemnation from mainstream Muslims would make any difference? The fundies are going to interpret the Koran any way they want to, and the influence of anyone who interprets it differently probably amounts to diddley squat.

It sounded to me like Jarvis was toying with the idea of painting Muslims with an awfully wide brush. But I know he's smarter than that.

Gee, That Was Helpful

Following the advice of another blogger frustrated with comment spam, I took five minutes to rename the comment submission script in Movable Type and make the necessary adjustments in the configuration script. It took the comment spam bots about 5 minutes to find out the new name of the script and begin posting crap to my site again. Gee, that worked like...not at all.

There's a hack called scode that enables requiring users to re-type a security code in order to post, but it's a pain in the ass to install. Maybe over the weekend.

London Terror Bombings - A Reaction

I'm so shaken up by the latest round of terrorist attacks, and there's so much emotion... The best counter-terrorism intelligence and operations can't keep us 100 percent safe, and I'm mindful of keeping expectations real, but for there to be an Al-Qaeda cell operating in the London area that was able to pull off such a coordinated attack - that's just scary as hell.

I'm exceptionally mad, too. Although my expectations are not of 100 percent safety, I'm somewhat angered that our administration still thinks that the war in Iraq is keeping us safe - you know, the whole "fight terrorists abroad so we don't have to fight them here" thing. If we've made so much progress against Al-Qaeda, how can there be a cell of significant size and capability operating in London? We should be re-evaluating tactics.

Mostly, though, I'm saddened by the loss of life. My prayers go out to those affected. It's just terrible, and I'm still shocked that there are people in the world willing to do this to make a political point.