argus

iNumber (http://www.inumbr.com/) offers a free service where you can create a temporary phone number — customizable to your area code, even — and forward it to your real number. As if this capability alone isn’t cool enough, there are several options available for how it works:

• Don’t accept calls from blocked Caller IDs
• Don’t accept calls from suspected telemarketers
• Forward all calls directly to voicemail
• Do not disturb from 9PM to 8AM
• Turn off call screening
• Activate voicemail for missed calls
• Email my incoming call history

While not exactly a new service (they apparently launched in 2006), it seems that it’s finally bubbled around long enough to reach critical mass.

First application I thought of: yet another trick-o-the-trade for eligible club-goers. Cook up a number before the weekend’s outings and give it out to your would-be pursuers. You can still actually receive phone calls (albeit with screening if you so desire), and at the end of the expiration period, the number goes dark for good (prior to which you should have passed on your actual digits to any callers that you, ah, wish to remain in contact with).

…under any circumstances. “Desktop Tower Defense” is inexplicably, painfully, extremely addictive :)

And, because I care about you dear reader, I’ve thoughtfully provided the game for you here, now, for your own productivity-destroying pleasure.

(more…)

The News Buckit takes up InstaPunks challenge:

Well, I propose an exercise to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months’ worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin’s infamous “7 Dirty Words.”

I am absolutely certain that the left will far exceed the right in the number of usages of all these words, which will go a long way toward proving that it’s the right which is still concerned with ideas while it’s the left that’s obsessed with the lowest kind of hateful invective.

Anyone care to take up the challenge?

The results are interesting, to put it …diplomatically.

The company’s name is Steorn — website here: www.steorn.net. From their site,

Steorn is a word translating as ‘to guide, direct and manage’.

In maybe as little as a few months time, they will become

1. not-very-widely known as hoaxers;
2. not-very-widely known as unfortunate engineers (and equally-unfortunate or just astonishingly poor selectors of peers to review their shizzle);

or

3. known all over the world, on the front page of everything everywhere, as the little company that changed the course of human history.