xearth is among my favorite toys. I set it to look down from the Moon; right now the Earth is completely black, which means the Moon is full.

In the past eight days I’ve received nine spams from CustomOffers, identical in form but varying in content. I have relayed each to its provider Exodus, but got no response (other than from the bot); perhaps everyone there is too busy being acquired by CW. I therefore resolve never to do business with either of them.

It especially honks me off when spammers use bugs, of the form <img height=”1″ width=”1″ src=”http://shameless.parasite.com/whitepixel.gif?email=target.address”>. This shows up as a dot, but its real purpose is to appear in the sender’s web-traffic log as a sign that your address is valid.

Oh well. This came to my JPS address (rather than through Pobox), and I mean to find another dialup provider anyway.

In 1999 Earthlink acquired Mindspring, which had previously acquired Netcom. Netcom’s list-servers were transferred to Earthlink, but a couple of blunders were made, with the result that the next time a message went through the dormant list digital-anarchy@netcom.com all subscribers got a recursive cascade of thousands of bounces — and I could not unsub. (The list owner was a ghost.) After a couple of days of non-response from support@earthlink, I redirected my mail to that address. A few months later I no longer needed a shell account anyway, so I became an ex-customer.

My other (PPP) provider, JPS, was also eventually swallowed by Earthlink, which proceeded to lose my website. Again, no help, so I sought a new and better webhost (serve-you.net), but kept my dialup account for the time being since it was prepaid for several months. Now that has run out, and I notice that Earthlink’s rate ($21.95) is rather high, particularly for a feed that sometimes crashes every few minutes.

If you’re in Alameda County and happy with your dialup provider, please let me know. I don’t need mail or webspace.

I went looking for snub tilings and found a number of dummy pages generated by blackflag: “CGI script that generates self-referencing web pages full of fake email addresses, used to thwart email-extracting web bots”

I’ve begun to learn to use Ken Brakke’s Surface Evolver. Haven’t yet found whether it has the one feature that would make it ideal for my exploration of nonspherical ‘dome’ forms: ability to constrain the edges to equal length.

The documentation says non-orientable surfaces are allowed, but so far Evolver has not allowed me to make a Klein bottle.