In what must have absolutely spooked out a ton of last minute tax filers, Intuit shut down its computer systems briefly this evening. While they claim that this was "preventative maintenance" in order to "prepare for the heavier volume of electronic tax filing expected later in the evening," that seems hard to believe.

Techdirt: Intuit Freaks Out Last Minute Tax Filers By Rebooting Machines

What if there were a database of commercial email senders which published a score (like a credit score) that was based on how well they complied with best practices?

Return Path launched just that last week and its called the Sender Score Reputation Monitor. It's a reputation service for commercial mailers. Return Path is collecting over 60 data points on over 50 million mailboxes. Data points include unsubscribe compliance, complaint rates, unkown user rates, security practices, and identity stability.

A VC: Sender Score

"They said, 'Oh, we're just calling it that to get people to watch the show, we're doing it for ratings, there's no meaning behind it,' " Wobrak said. "I was very gullible. My husband could see through things, but I saw it was a chance to be on TV. Red flags should have come up, but I thought, TLC, that's a good station, what could go wrong? They gave us a bunch of bull to get us on the show. It's not about helping the kids, it's helping TLC or whoever the producers of the show are."

The moral of the story? Agree to participate in a reality show at your own (and your children's) risk.

"Honey, We're Killing The Kids" had potential, but went way over the top. This is a nice followup of the local participants -- sounds like pretty poor treatment.

Tuned In: Families on TLC diet makeover show report bitter aftertaste

SolidDB is going open source. What’s interesting to me about this is that this is a company that has had strong success with their proprietary channel, having 3 million implementations of any product is pretty damn impressive.

Venture Chronicles

"IN the summer of 1983, the United States was just starting to come out of a brutal recession and the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent, twice what it is now in a recovery that has gone on for more than four years.

But men in the prime of their working lives — 35 to 64 — were more likely to have jobs in the summer of 1983 than their successors in that age group are to have jobs now.

The Big Picture: Unemployment: Then versus Now

I am now officially launching TimeCert which is a trusted third party service for proving the existence of a file, object or document at a certain time.
Applications

Lets say your application managed confidential documents or emails. You could use TimeCert for maintaining a proof that a document or email existed at a certain time. As this timestamp is generated outside your own server, it is evidence that you did not manipulate say a contract after the timestamp.

Launch of TimeCert a public timestamping service

Easter has risen high in the candy hierarchy over the years. It is now the second top-selling candy holiday, just barely behind the glorious ode to sugar that is Halloween. Of the estimated 8 billion pounds of candy consumed in the United States each year, Easter makes up a very large portion of the pie.

Easter BunnyAmericans spend an average $1.9 billion on Easter candy every year, just behind Halloween which consists of $2 billion worth of candy spending. Christmas and Valentine’s Day bring up the rear with $1.4 billion and $1 billion respectively. So how has it come to be that so much money is spent on sugary colored marshmallows?

A Glimpse into the History of Easter Candy

You may never have been inside a server farm (aka: “data center” or “colo” for co-location facility). If you don’t have responsibility for maintaining a website or work as an industrial electrician, cable stringer, HVAC professional or NSA stenographer, you don’t have much reason to ever step inside one of these cavernous worlds of computers, cables and cages.

Imagine an enormous, extremely well-kept zoo, with chain link walls draped from floor to ceiling creating lines of large fenced boxes vanishing somewhere in the far, dark reaches of the Matrix. Inside each cage is a mammoth case (or several mammoth cases) constructed of stylish black metal and glass, crouched on a raised white tile floor into which cables dive and resurface like dolphins. Sometimes glowing green and red lights flicker as disks whir and whistle. Often the machines operate silently as frigid air pours out of exposed ceiling vents and splashes against shiny surfaces and around hard edges.

The overwhelming impression, as Dr. Jim led us past cage after cage of cooled processing power, was of fetishistic efficiency. Clean, pristine and smoothly sculpted, these were more than machines, they were totems of the Internet economy. Here was eBay. Here Yahoo. Here Inktomi. Welcome to Stonehenge for the Information Age. The common design element seemed to be a machine monolith centered in each cage, surrounded by ample space to set up a desk and a few chairs, with enough room left over for a small party of proto-humans to dance about beating their chests and throwing their slide rules into the air.

Xooglers: Let’s talk about U and me

First, GM’s invitation to the world to “make your own” Chevy Tahoe commercial spawned a slew of Chevy-bashing spoof ads with copy such as “Our planet’s oil is almost gone. You don’t need G.P.S. to see where this road leads.”

Then several prominent publications profiled the campaign as an unintended disaster.

But, finally, the consensus at many of the leading tech weblogs was, brilliant move, GM.

Metrics, successes, & flaming disasters in online marketing

Yay, monkeys. This is not autobiographical, but I did indeed used to have a job writing software. VB! MS SQL! I affectionately referred to myself and my co-developers as code monkeys, especially when a client asked me a question that I didn’t want to answer (”What do I know? I’m just a code monkey.”).

Neat premise, neat song. Musician posts a new track each week, for free or for pay. This one is about being a code monkey.

Jonathan Coulton | Thing a Week 29 - Code Monkey