Kobayashi Maru, man. 2010

I love Merlin Mann and Jeff Veen's kickass brains.

The whole episode of Dan Benjamin's The Conversation is very worth watching, but this bit resonated deeply:

Merlin: "There's still companies today where they are feverishly trying to lock down, like not let you get to Gmail and not let you get to any of this stuff, but you've got 3G on your phone! You know? It's there's this shift that – ...we usually use this in the sense of talking about media – but the toothpaste is out of the tube with this stuff. ... It's not like it used to be like you're describing, Jeff. Like back in the day when if I wanted to do anything with email, I had to go to the office and sit down with Eudora and my Hayes modem and that was a completely different way of thinking about my work than it is today. And I think that you're describing a shift, though, that's a whole constellation, a syndrome of changes that IT in particular is probably having a pretty hard time keeping up with."

Dan: "Well, you know, just the existence – to kind of support what you're saying - just the existence of apps like Gowalla, the existence of the Gowalla/Foursquare mentality, of something like that couldn't have existed the way it does now just a few years ago, let alone a decade ago. And I think people want to be in touch and it's like would a company now, today, a new one, ever be able to do anything but encourage this kind of thing? And when is enough enough?"

Jeff: "Well, I'll tell you, there's another shift as well, and it's not just this 'IT departments trying to exert control', but it's also this notion of how you measure productivity. Right? ... In the past corporate productivity measurements were about your butt in a chair for forty hours a week. Right? You know, filing your TPS reports. So that's why you see crazy stuff, like, you know, firewall filters that won't let you go visit Facebook while you're in the office. As opposed to... be more milestone-based, set out your objectives, know what they are, get them done, have a deadline, and then leave me the hell alone. I'll get my work done and that might actually require me connecting with somebody on Facebook to answer a question, or, or whatever! Right?"

Merlin: "Yeah, it's infantilizing!"

Jeff: "It is!"

Merlin: "What's funny to me in this is again another thing from the book, but, like, to me this is a huge pattern is that what is knowledge work at the heart of it? Knowledge work is you hire somebody because they're smart and they either know how to solve a problem you don't know how to solve or they know how to solve it better and more efficiently than you. So they're a part of this value chain where, like I call it the black box career, but you don't need to know everything about MySQL to go hire the guy who's your MySQL admin. You just need to know that that person does a good job with it. ...Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Andy Hunt (one of the Pragmatic Programmer guys), he has this wonderful term, and I really recommend this book for anybody... and the phrase he uses is... that the problem at a lot of companies like you're describing, Jeff, is they're trying to herd racehorses and race sheep. And so, in that instance, you are infantilizing people whose job it is to figure out what their job is. ... You know what, just tell me the deadline and the rules. Kobayashi Maru, man. I will figure out how to do this, but, like, get out of my face and stop trying to give me unnecessary rules. In my opinion, that is a failure of management. You look at somebody like Lopp, right? Michael Lopp. You talk to Michael and he will just say 'You know what my job is as a manager? My job is to get out of the way, remove barriers, and then run defense so my people don't get interrupted.' And that is so different from 'You need to be sitting and checking email all day long so I know that you're there.'"

Jeff: "It's about trust, right?"

Merlin: "The lack of trust, absolutely, the lack of trust. And also... when you get to the big company level you end up having... more mortar than brick."

Meetings Cost A Lot 2010

I'm pleased to see that others have had the meeting cost calculator idea and done something about it.

Toby Tripp, Lydia Tripp, and Roy Kolak's Meeting Ticker has now been joined by Bring Tim.

Every tech company I've ever worked with (except those run by Clemens Pfeiffer) has needed a device like this, but some need it more than others. Yes, you with the weekly hour-plus meeting attended by the CEO and three VPs, I'm looking at you.

(Thanks for linky goodness, Boing Boing!)

Great power, great responsibility, and unsolved challenges 2010

Here I am once again pulling back in frustration and anger from my use of Facebook.

I don't want to have to do this. I want there to be an easy way for me to keep up with people I like, to promote things I like and help them succeed, and to engage in good conversations about what's happening in the world. I want the web to be smart and save me redundant effort. I want it to be easier for information and reactions to it to flow throughout multiple sites. I want people to be able to use the tools they are most comfortable with and for that choice to be independent from the content encountered through the tools.

But I don't want my or my friends' demographic information and details of our activity to be continually and pervasively leveraged for corporate marketing purposes. I want it to be possible to share and participate without providing a neatly packaged commodity that can be used to alter our perception of the online world.

What Facebook's new Instant Personalization feature reminds me of is that manipulation of our online reality. Certainly the list of wants I gave above would be a change to my online reality of great power, but such a change demands great responsibility. It demands transparency – what is being changed, by whom, and what other ways might it be presented to someone else? – and it demands control – opt in, not opt out. Facebook is not demonstrating that responsibility, nor does its history or the statements of its CEO suggest it is likely to.

In many specifics this is a design problem. My experience with the feature so far is that it's very hard to see what is happening or why. I want to give permission before a site can use my data or my friends'; that's something I should decide, not Facebook's business partnerships team. I want a way to lift the hood and see just what's being done underneath. I want a way to have a certain thing not done – and I want that way to be very obvious and easy.

Think about the difference between visiting an Instant Personalization site (e.g. the surprise of seeing my contacts from Facebook's list of articles they commented on when I visit a site I didn't even know they were reading and then trying to figure out how to stop that sharing of data with this site) vs. visiting a site and having Firefox ask if I want to allow this site to open pop-up windows. The former is confusing and opaque, the latter clear and easily controlled. I don't want to have to fumble around trying to figure out how to prohibit the undesired action after the fact, I want to be asked first and be given the option to set a policy for this site henceforth.

Why does this matter? I am very confident that Facebook's marketing and business growth aims do not map exactly to a map of my trust. Just because they might think a particular company should be allowed to receive a package of social data (me, my demographics, who my friends are, and all their demographics, for instance) doesn't mean I would ever choose to package up all that info for the site myself.

"But it's public information!" you might say. Perhaps – though my confidence over what will and won't be shared is shaky given Facebook's company culture  – but the information wasn't shared by me (or my friends) for this purpose or context. It wasn't packaged by us for use across the web. There's a difference between me saying to Facebook "my friends can know when my birthday is" and Facebook saying to an online store "this user falls into this demographic group by age, gender, and location" so that they can adjust their pricing based on market research of what that particular group is willing to pay for their products. That's a hypothetical example off the top of my head, but it certainly seems to fit within the existing capabilities of the feature.

What compounds all these concerns is the fact that Facebook friends can share your data. User A can go to Site X and by not blocking the feature tell them all kinds of things about his friend User B. Maybe User B never goes to Site X because she does not trust them with her information, but it's passed out of her control now.

In the course of removing all my "friends" on Facebook (and letting each know we're still friends in non-Facebook contexts), I was chatting about these concerns with my friend Glenda Bautista and she brought up a great analogy:

When you add a friend on Facebook or allow someone to add you as a friend, you end up being responsible for each other in your actions. As she said, it's messed up logic to have to treat a tool like this as an STD, but that's just what it is: socially transmitted.

Play safe, gang.

Facebook questions on day one (updated) 2010

(a.k.a. "Oh gawd, I hate you, Facebook; why doesn't anything make sense? At least the Devil gives you a deal when you sell your soul!")

((Update: a.k.a. "Yay! The Discardians are gathering! And, omigawd, I haven't connected with this person in years. This is really cool!"))

I've been online almost more than sleeping for the past 11 years... this should not be so hard and it shouldn't take hours and hours.

I had to create a personal profile in order to create what I wanted, a Page for Discardia where fans can congregate & have discussions, etc. Fine. That part was fairly easy (credit where credit is due), but I've spent the last three hours banging on integration problems.

1) Why don't I see a big ol' link to my Page (Discardia) from my Profile (Dinah Sanders)?
Can't even figure out how to add one. The little blurb box under my picture doesn't accept HTML. Currently only able to get to the Discardia page by going back in my wall to when I became a fan of Discardia and clicking on it. (After I have 25 fans I'll be able to apply for a nice short URL, but only halfway there.)

((Update: Apparently because the integration of Pages with Profiles is still pretty weak. Ya can't do that without custom FBML effort.))

Only thing I've been able to do so far is add the Favorite Pages app which adds a new tab that lists them in reverse chronological order, so Discardia – the one I thought of adding first because it's most important – is under all the others. Why is this even an app instead of part of Facebook's own functionality? Surely there must be a better option.

2) Why isn't Twitter integration doing what I keep telling it to do: show Discardia tweets on the Discardia Page Wall and not on the Dinah Sanders Profile Wall?
I did realize that to avoid redundancy - a very undiscardian trait - I should syndicate Tumblr only to Twitter and then Twitter to Facebook, but that last piece of the puzzle isn't falling into place.
(Tumblr, big kisses to you; your syndication process to Twitter was easy and worked quickly.)

((Update: Apparently because the official integration doesn't include it. Facebook, come on; I thought you were out to crush MySpace.))

3) Why am I not getting email notifications of new fans of Discardia?
Can't even find controls for this from the Page. (The whole Page vs. Profile thing is a rough road indeed.)

((Update: Apparently there's a weekly email. That'd be a great thing for Facebook to send the owners of newly created pages after they get their first fan. "Not much info for you this time, but here's what your weekly update will include..."))

Mail changes shouldn't but may result in communication turbulence 2009

I'm changing domain servers and mail hosts soon moving away from some current frustrations causing me to miss email messages. In theory, all communication should switch over without problems, but you know how it goes.

You can still reach me as my nom du web @gmail.com or through my work contact info over at my business site (fortunately so far unaffected) DinahSanders.com

My apologies for any inconvenience!

On the bright side, I'm racking up frequent flier miles like crazy 2008

Sorry for the quiet spell around here. Work has been intensely busy for both Joe & I which leads us to more business trips, more dining out instead of cooking at home, more passively watching videos and less attention to creative projects.

This is not to say nothing has been happening on that front; we've launched Bibulo.us, our cocktail website, and I've been Flickring, Twittering, and Plurking. Thank goodness for microblogging as a way to stay in touch with everyone!

When things get busy, just pick & choose and don't feel you have to do everything.

Sound familiar? Well, Discardia does start next Friday. ;)

What are you going to let go of worrying about?

Many issues to choose from 2008

I like this post from Jinx of I am only one... so much that I'm reproducing the whole thing here:

In tackling the problems facing our world right now, there's plenty of work to go around, and the efforts are not harmed by some specialization.  If I am talking about gender issues and you are focussed on racial bias --- or if I am talking about education and you are talking about environment --- we are not enemies.  There are enough of us to work on many fronts at once; there are enough fronts to keep all of us busy.  We can cooperate; we can each work on the issue that most stirs our energy at the moment; we can still understand that we are allies in making things better.

If we begin to fight each other over which is the single most important problem, we are wasting energy that could be used to address various problems.  We are also helping those who don't want to acknowledge the problems and don't want to see them solved.

Two very common arguments that serve the purpose of not solving problems are these:

(1)  If the person trying to address the issue is a member of the community (or nation) where the problem exists, the line is "How can you be so disloyal as to attack and criticize your own people."  If the person trying to help is not from the same community/nation, the line is "You are an outsider, you don't belong here, what business is it of yours, why don't you go work on what's wrong in your own home."

(2)  Regardless of whether the problem-solvers are local or not, the line is "How can you even talk about [this problem] when you haven't said anything about [some other problem]." 

Variations of these two arguments show up repeatedly.  They are virtually always distractions from the attempt to solve the problem, though often those who use them aren't consciously aware of that intention.   A good answer may be to describe the solution we're trying to achieve and ask, "Can you agree that it would be better if we achieved this change?  if it would be better, why fight over who helps to make it better?  why say that some other unrelated problem has to be solved before we can work on this one?"

(The original is here if you want to comment).

 

Note for springtime movers 2007

Be very sure if you are moving in early April and have not gotten your act together sooner that you do not put your W-2 and other tax filing materials "in one of these boxes somewhere".

Hindsight is 20/20.

Warning: TypePad now case sensitive for login names 2006

I really hope this will revert because I think it is a bad change, but TypePad now requires you to enter your user name in a case sensitive way.

This meant that all the tabs in my browser which were set up with posts in draft form, list views, etc., today switched over to logging me in not to the account I've had since TypePad was in beta (or was it alpha?), but to some test account with none of my hard work in it; metagrrrl instead of MetaGrrrl.

It still knew that it was me - "Welcome, Dinah!" - but it said I had no weblogs. Since I have more than a wee bit of content accumulated, that was unnerving to say the least.

Unfortunately, the "Create your first weblog" page that was displaying for anything I clicked around to didn't have a logout button to allow me to get out of metagrrrl and into MetaGrrrl.

Finally by chopping off the end of URLs randomly I was able to get to a page that did have a logout. That was a relief since I need to write tomorrow's Discardian post tonight.

This change makes absolutely no sense to me and was particularly annoying because there was no warning and I don't see the value in having both a MetaGrrrl and a metagrrrl as separate users on a system. That sounds like a recipe for help desk confusion and user annoyance to me. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think that a database table got a setting switched wrong and that this didn't receive the business oversight it should have had.

Anyhow, long story short, I'm back in, but cranky. Also I either have allergies or a head cold.

There's a lot of grrr in the grrrl tonight.

Lessons Were Learned 2006

By TypePad:
- If you're asking your users to change the format of something (e.g. from A Record to CNAME addressing), make certain that you know if the continued presence of the old method will prevent the new method from working.
- If it will, be very sure to tell your users to delete the old method as well as telling them to add the new one.
- If you send out alerts requiring your users to take a technical action, users will reply to those emails. Answer those replies. Route them to new support tickets if need be.

By TextDrive:
- If you change support URLs (and systems), make sure that you disable not only the ability to open new calls but also the ability to reopen calls in the old system. (This has now been done, I see).
- Also make sure that any replies to messages in the old system are forwarded to the new system or are being watched by someone.
- Also, black text on the old system's home page with a link to the new system is probably insufficient. Large red letters are more effective. Automatic redirects are better still. (And that last has indeed now been done as well).

By me:
- Vendors make mistakes sometimes or provide incomplete information. Doublecheck the details.
- Even if you don't quite know what they are or how they work, now you know that an A Record trumps CNAME addressing.

Abstracted lesson:
- All kinds of crappy stuff can happen to not only the path to your data, but to the data itself. Do backups. Now. Today. Really. No shit. Now.

======

Update July 13, 2009: other lessons FINALLY learned.

How to annoy your current customers by making them jump through a hoop 2005

If you, like me, were an early adopter of PacBell DSL and rode the bumpy ride for years, put up with service which was once atrocious and is now, under SBC, tolerable to good, and you now pay something on the order of $49.95 a month for your connection, you too might have seen advertising promoting the service for much less for new customers. Which hardly seems fair since they never offered it to an existing customer like me at a new rate.

Turns out all you have to do is call and say "Hey there SBC PacBell, I pay $49.95 and that's waaay more than you charge new customers. Please start charging me $19.95 a month since that's the going rate."

And they'll just do it. I mean, great, suddenly I'm saving $360 for the next twelve months, but jeez, why should I have to call them?

They could have said "Hey, existing customers, we're about to change our pricing. It'll be $24.95  but for you and your friends, we'll offer it at $19.95. Your bill will change next month and you can tell your friends just to mention the 'SBC is on the cluetrain' promotion and they'll get the special price too!" and I would have been really happy and said nice things about them and recommended them to friends.

Instead I'm pissed at them because who knows how long ago I could have gotten this price. I'm sitting here thinking "Gee. That's a really great sushi dinner or a pair of hightops or a bottle of single malt or the donation to the Carter Center I've been wanting to do every month or two. SBC PacBell, you've been ripping me off! Jerks!"

*sigh* Can we have open source internet and phone service soon please, universe?

Still working on that "Silicon Valley" concept 2005

I got a postcard from my graduate school alma mater, San Jose State University, asking me to call and confirm my listing in their alumni directory. I called, but when I asked to just be listed with my online information and no physical address or phone number, I was told they can't do that and my only choice would be not to be listed.

Come on, guys, it's 2005. Get a clue. If the directory is really for alumni to stay in touch, this should be an option. If, as I now strongly suspect, it's an opportunity to sell a bunch of addresses to advertisers, quit trying to pretend you're serving a community.

Good thing my former classmates know how to Google.

Wikiverse is not an accurate mirror of Wikipedia 2005

Wikiverse which claims to be "an up-to-date high speed static mirror of Wikipedia, a worldwide community of volunteers building an open-content encyclopedia", but it has clearly not been updated in the last six months. I am aware of a specific example of a quote from this site presented in an article there so out of context as to imply my opinion is the exact opposite (and failing to link to the original context so a reader could reach an appropriate conclusion). That quote was called to my attention last August and I corrected it in Wikipedia, but the change has not populated over to Wikiverse.

Frankly, a bad mirror is worse than no mirror. If they aren't going to keep it up to date, the owners of the domain should take it down and ask Google to remove it from the their index.

Please stand by, normal service will resume shortly. 2005

The domain name migration from Hurricane Electric's servers to TextDrive's seems to have worked fine for the site, but my mail is having glitches at the moment. Might just be waiting for the news to spread to other name servers.

Sorting it out. Email metagrrrl at good ol' gmail for now.

+++

Fixed (within 15 minutes). If you sent me mail in the last 15 hours you may wish to resend it.

Offline by mood 2005

Yeah, I'm not answering mail much right now, not spending much time in chat, not posting much. Partly busy at work, partly just not feeling very social, partly doing offline things. Don't take it personally.

5 Unsuitable Morning Serenades for Solo Instrument in Echoing Transit Station 2004

(In tribute to Merlin's 5ives)

1. Caribbean Steel Drum*
2. Chinese Flute*
3. Ocarina
4. Musical Saw
5. Cymbals

*regularly found in San Francisco's Civic Center BART station.

I'm back and I have some questions 2004

My mail was bouncing for 48 hours or so. It's working again. Some small amount has re-sent and reached me.

I got a courteous letter from someone at Multiply. We, I think, agree to disagree. They are apparently approaching social networking as more of an application than a community. My expectations of personal voice and moral compass (as opposed to the less emotional counterparts: terms of service and business professionalism) don't quite fit. Think more phonebook, less yenta. Still not for me.

So, I think about my concern for privacy and then I think about the stuff I do: the weblog, Orkut, Flickr, XFN, Amazon wishlist. Is it all just pollyanna-ism thinking that it's safe to share anything in a searchable environment? Can the organizational benefits of meeting other like-minded people (MoveOn.org, MeetUp) to work for political change offset the dangers of centralized information?

And if it doesn't, should people who value freedom and privacy (and all those other nice things the EFF and organizations like that fight for) give up the Web? Or just post everything with disguised authorship? What if MetaGrrrl was a shadowy figure with who "she" talks to and hangs out with couched in the vaguest terms? Never mentioning where exactly "she" lives or what "she" does. With no one ever standing up in person and saying "that's my site". Is that better? If social networking software and Googlebots (empowering the results of that mighty search engine) are inherently a blow against freedom and privacy, what kind of web are we envisioning? What's the goal here, folks? Is the bottom line "give up the tech toys"? Or is there some way to have the fun and prevent corporate and governmental abuse of privacy?

Mild Turbulence 2004

So I was feeling a little surprised & neglected by the universe yesterday when I didn't seem to be getting any mail. Not the usual waves of spam even. I wasn't paying a lot of attention so it wasn't until today that I noticed I was getting NO new mail at all, just the same last ones downloading repeatedly.

*sigh*

On the bright side, even in the evening a real human being at Hurricane Electric is available to help. Sadly, despite his best efforts, Dean (hi, Dean!) has to consult with the mail guru tomorrow over this one. In the meantime, he changed the mail rules to forward everything over to my gmail account. Hadn't planned to do that and fully expect to route the river back afterwards - just don't feel cozy yet about ALL my data flowing through the big G - but it's handy for now. Maybe after 9pm or so the change will go through and maybe that will unclog something and I'll get the day and a half of mail I think I've missed out on. Maybe not.

If you wrote to me since yesterday morning, ya might want to send it to me (as "metagrrrl") over there at gmail.com.

If you didn't write me, maybe you should, just to help offset this loss of stimulation.

Shoveling under the back of the horse 2004

Well, it just keeps on coming. 1-3 comment spams per minute since last night at 11:18pm, it appears, all promoting the sites mentioned in my prior post. These sites are all registered through this site:

REGISTRAR: GODADDY.COM

Registrant:
Go Daddy Software, Inc.
14455 N. Hayden Road
Suite 226
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States

I'm giving them a call.

(602) 824-1300

No answer. Darn. I guess I'll just call their local Better Business Bureau.

Which gave me the website URL http://www.arizona.bbb.org/ where I was able to look up a report on the company, get another number, and call and leave a message for the president of Go Daddy Software.

Since they have a satisfactory rating with the BBB at present, I'm guessing that comment spam attacks are against their terms of service and once I send along copies of the hundreds of comment announcement emails I've received in the last 13 hours, that registrar will proceed to discontinue the accounts of the offending three domains. If they do not, I will, of course, file a complaint with their local Better Business Bureau.

By the way, those domains are now blocked from commenting, but prior to that being put in place I received a total of 1460 spam comments. I've taken a vacation day to deal with this and will be investigating the possibility of small claims court for recouping my costs.

***

Update as of 2pm: Go Daddy Software is eager to hear of this sort of violation of their terms of service. Just send it to abuse at their domain.

Honey Pot 2004

I had another comment spam attack this evening - might still be going on, actually - and some patterns are immediately obvious. One thing about getting so many is the patterns become clear.

The domains you want to ban are:
antydialer dot com
antydialer dot net
sexylaski dot com

These two appear with many different subdomains (e.g. erotic-stories-xxx dot antydialer dot com).

They come from many domains. I'll post a full list when I'm done banning them myself. (Yes, I know they're probably hacked servers, but I guess that's a new rule around here. If you are trying to post from a poorly secured server and get denied, better tell your ISP to get their security act together.)

More comment spam 2004

Slept in this morning and so only caught the tail end of today's assault on my comments. Same pattern as yesterday - a bunch of Alexander Morozov/3FN.net sites - only this time on the theme of incest rather than beastiality. I deleted the 350 or so comments and hope that they were gone before Google's indexing 'bots came through. Then again, though, since this pattern has been going on for a while and is such a blatant attempt to jack search engine results, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the search engine sites have or are considering blocking these sites from appearing in results at all.

The only way to cure comment spamming and fake portals and bad keywording and all those other techniques is for them not to work in driving visitors to the promoted URLs. The responsibility for that lies with the search engine makers, though the rest of us can help by deleting the stupid content when it's under our control.

Blocking by IP won't work, I'm fairly well convinced. In the attacks on this site the originating IP changes every 10 or so comments and I'd not be surprised to find they belong to insecure servers the spammers are illegally using as origins, much as they would for mailing spam. (Thus the other thing we can do to protect the Web from these abuses is to keep any servers under our control very secure).

Hammered with comment spam 2004

Oo, look how much attention I'm getting today.

You might want to block the following IP addresses from commenting on your websites:
163.17.64.123
202.28.27.2
163.17.64.123
210.3.7.150
207.28.34.234
212.21.228.26
213.88.162.236
217.218.233.74

I received many comment spams (mostly beastiality related) from each.

I'll delete the rest after we finish going over the evidence to see if we can trace the source.

If you've suffered a similar attack, please let me know. I'd like to put together some information for Google so they are aware of the probable search-result-jacking attempt.

***

Update: spam still rolling in. TypePad support working on the issue. Appears, based on the hosting of a commonly promoted domain, to be a certain much-loathed Russian spammer.

Given the rotating IP's, it's probably not worth adding them to your block lists. I'm hoping for a higher level door to slam closed against this crap.

***

Hmm, on the bright side, I'm accumulating a bit of interesting data of how these comment spammers work. I hope it will be helpful for blog software creators (most of whom are friends of mine) and the fine folks at Google and other search engines.

Joe-jobbed again 2004

My email has been a bit worse than usual this week, and "usual" had already gotten pretty bad. Because I've been using this domain name for so long now, several addresses on it have made the spammers' lists including, unfortunately, my first name. This means I now get about 30-40 pieces of junk mail for each real piece of mail. The spammer's subject lines are growing more deceptive as well, so if you aren't in my address book and you sent a message I never responded to, chances are it got lost in the noise. Try again with a more distinctive subject line than "Hi".

It's been especially bad this week, though, because junk mail was sent out as though it was from one of my addresses and so I get all the bounced email messages. Spammers really are lower than pond scum. I wonder if there are some solid legal grounds on which I could sue them? They are misrepresenting me and using my personal information without permission. They are certainly wasting my time and resources. If any of the messages are for something of dubious legality, there might even be grounds for libel.

Short of legal action, alas, all I can do is hope they acquire a mysterious debilitating disease that causes their genitalia to turn puce and fall off.

[posted at lunchtime because I got busy the moment I walked in the door at work this morning and forgot to proof the post I wrote coming across the bridge on the bus]