The rock group Rush has released their anticipated Rush in Rio live concert on DVD and CD. The two disc DVD and three disc CD sets cover the last concert of the Vapor Trails tour, to a very enthusiastic first-time Brazilian audience. The DVD is in Dolby Digital sound, with a second disc of extras including a behind-the-scenes tour documentary, extra multi-angle concert footage and two hidden easter eggs. (See entry comments below on how to find the two Rush in Rio DVD easter eggs.)

Today Amazon.com launched a feature that lets you Search Inside the Pages of Books via keyword. That's searching all of the text inside of the actual book, mind you. They claim to have this feature enabled for over 120,000 books. Along with Google, Amazon certainly knows how to innovate, reguardless of how one may feel about their business practices.

As I posted a year ago hotlinks are not welcomed here. Now that I run several websites, bandwidth has become even more of an important issue. For some reason, all the LiveJournal (also known as "HotLinkJournal") weblog kids can't seem to grasp the concept of hotlinking and bandwidth theft and why it's universally despised. Unfortunately, the .htaccess rewrites to stop hotlinking lock out some legitimate traffic. So I created a webpage about hotlinking, explaining what it is and why they should stop doing it. Now I'll have a web page to direct all the bandwidth thieves to who just love to hotlink the Spice Girls. (And why they should expect a "switcheroo" if they don't stop.)

This has been a bad week for my email. Earlier this week, one of my domain names was "Joe Jobbed" (my domain name used as a fake return address) by a spammer selling Viagra. Countless bounced emails from ISPs saying "User Unknown" flooded my inbox. I can only imagine how many uninformed spam recipients simply blocked my domain altogether, rather than properly reporting the spam and it's REAL sender to services like SpamCop.net.

My email woes do not end there. Yesterday I sent an email to a friend with a Yahoo.com email address. To my surprise it was bounced back saying my mail server was blocked. (In other words, the IP block of my ISP was being listed in a so-called "black hole" listing of spam-friendly open relay servers.) The problem, my ISP is... you guessed it... SBC Yahoo. Let me make this perfectly clear:

Granted, it's through SBC Yahoo, but it's still the same company. (All of my ISP email is handled via Yahoo, not SBC, etc.) Not surprisingly, email to Yahoo has yielded no help. As it stands now, I could not even send email to myself, as my outgoing mail server would be blocked by my incoming mail server.

Many have asked: Is Email Doomed?

My answer: Yes.