2001-07-20

10:19:03 AM

• O.Henry where are you now?. TBTF Irregular Gary Stock forwarded this story, which Ananova picked up from a Norwegian news agency. It seems that a Chinese man and woman had flirted and courted for a month in a Net chat room. When they finally arranged to meet f2f, each discovered that her/his ideal other was the person to whom s/he was already married. Sparks flew.

  They each agreed to carry a certain newspaper to identify themselves, but were shocked when they came face-to-face and started fighting in the street.

2001-07-18

8:29:30 AM

• Make A Shorter Link. A Web tips newsletter I read, The Internet Tourbus, ordinarily is scrupulous about providing rifle-shot links to the online services under discussion. Recently when reviewing the "Help for Problem PCs" resource provided by Consumer Reports, Patrick Douglas Crispen apologized for linking only to CR's top page.

  I'd love to give you the Web address for this report so that you can access it directly, but Consumer Reports' Web addresses are just a little under 27,000 characters long.

  I visited the brand-new and dead-simple Make A Shorter Link site, fed it

  
  http://www.consumerreports.org/main/detail.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=84767&FOLDER
  %3C%3Efolder_id=84747&bmUID=995292624737&WebLogicSession=O1L1nwYbZDJ6sszLShCyn7
  I67fBybhhL11976wFJAze2dXzu3felhsBjIOTkMfBLX9JVFiChHpE3|-4302279081402481581/169
  937912/5/7005/7005/7002/7002/-1|6838799378646455085/169937909/5/7005/7005/7002/
  7002/-1|-4302279081402473960
  	

  and got back Updated 2001-07-21, 8:38 am:

  http://makeashorterlink.com/?W3CA2110

  which redirects to the proper Consumer Reports page. Simple. Quick. A one-off service as indispensible as Mailexpire. Even simpler, this page contains a bookmarklet that automatically generates a shorter link for the current page.

  Make A Shorter Link is a production of the Pants Colletive; Giles Turnbull clued me in. (He is credited there as responsible for sneezes, flouncing off on foreign travel, and nagging. He also pens many of the essays on WriteTheWeb.)